Team KNIFE, of course, was completely – if not blissfully – unaware of what had transpired the previous day. The jungle had no news service, and their radio was for official use only. That made the new message all the more surprising. Chavez and Vega were again on duty at the observation post, enduring the muggy heat that followed a violent thunderstorm. There had been two inches of rain in the previous hour, and their observation point was now a shallow puddle, and there would be more rain in the afternoon before things cleared off.
Captain Ramirez appeared, without much in the way of warning this time, even to Chavez, whose woodcraft skills were a matter of considerable pride. He rationalized to himself that the captain had learned from watching him.
“Hey, Cap’n,” Vega greeted their officer.
“Anything going on?” Ramirez asked.
Chavez answered from behind his binoculars. “Well, our two friends are enjoying their morning siesta.” There would be another in the afternoon, of course. He was pulled away from the lenses by the captain’s next statement.
“I hope they like it. It’s their last one.”
“Say again, Cap’n?” Vega asked.
“The chopper’s coming in to pick us up tonight. That’s the LZ right there, troops.” Ramirez pointed to the airstrip. “We waste this place before we leave.”
Chavez evaluated that statement briefly. He’d never liked druggies. Having to sit here and watch the lazy bastards go about their business as matter-of-factly as a man on a golf course hadn’t mitigated his feelings a dot.
Ding nodded. “Okay, Cap’n. How we gonna do it, sir?”
“Soon as it’s dark, you and me circle around the north side. Rest of the squad forms up in two fire teams to provide fire support in case we need it. Vega, you and your SAW stay here. The other one goes down about four hundred meters. After we do the two guards, we booby-trap the fuel drums in the shack, just as a farewell present. The chopper’ll pick us up at the far end at twenty-three hundred. We bring the bodies out with us, probably dump ’em at sea.”
Well, how about that, Chavez thought. “We’ll need like thirty-forty minutes to get around to them, just to play it safe and all, but the way those two fuckers been actin’, no sweat, sir.” The sergeant knew that the killing would be his job. He had the silenced weapon.
“You’re supposed to ask me if this is for-real,” Captain Ramirez pointed out. He had done just that over the satellite radio.
“Sir, you say do it, I figure it’s for-real. It don’t bother me none,” Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez assured his commander.
“Okay – we’ll move out as soon as it’s dark.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain patted both men on the shoulder and withdrew to the rally point. Chavez watched him leave, then pulled out his canteen. He unscrewed the plastic top and took a long pull before looking over at Vega.
“Fuck!” the machine-gunner observed quietly.
“Whoever’s runnin’ this party musta grown a pair o’ balls,” Ding agreed.
“Be nice to get back to a place with showers and air conditioning,” Vega said next. That two people would have to die to make that possible was, once it was decided, a matter of small consequence. It bemused both men somewhat that after years of uniformed service they were finally being told to do the very thing for which they’d trained endlessly. The moral issue never occurred to them. They were soldiers of their country. Their country had decided that those two dozing men a few hundred meters away were enemies worthy of death. That was that, though both men wondered what it would actually be like to do it.
“Let’s plan this one out,” Chavez said, getting back to his binoculars. “I want you to be careful with that SAW, Oso.”
Vega considered the situation. “I won’t fire to the left of the shack unless you call in.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll come in from the direction of that big-ass tree. Shouldn’t be no big deal,” he thought aloud.
“Nah, shouldn’t be.”
Except that this time it was all real. Chavez stayed on the glasses, examining the men whom he would kill in a few hours.
Colonel Johns got his stand-to order at roughly the same time as all of the field teams, along with a whole new set of tactical maps that were for further study. He and Captain Willis went over the plan for this night in the privacy of their room. There was a snatch-and-grab tonight. The troops they’d inserted were coming back out far earlier than scheduled. PJ suspected that he knew why. Part of it, anyway.
“Right on the airfields?” the captain wondered.
“Yeah, well, either all four were dry holes, or our friends are going to have to secure them before we land for the snatch-and-grab.”
“Oh.” Captain Willis understood after a moment’s thought.
“Get ahold of Buck and have him check the miniguns out again. He’ll get the message from that. I want to take a look at the weather for tonight.”
“Pickup order reverse from the drop-off?”
“Yeah – we’ll tank fifty miles off the beach and then again after we make the pickup.”
“Right.” Willis walked out to find Sergeant Zimmer. PJ went in the opposite direction, heading for the base meteorological office. The weather for tonight was disappointing: light winds, clear skies, and a crescent moon. Perfect flying weather for everyone else, it was not what special-ops people hoped for. Well, there wasn’t much you could do about that.
They checked out of The Hideaway at noon. Cortez thanked whatever fortune smiled down on him that it had been her idea to cut the weekend short, claiming that she had to get back to her children, though he suspected that she had made a conscious decision to go easy on her weary lover. No woman had ever felt the need to take pity on him before, and the insult of it was balanced against his need to find out what the hell was going on. They drove up Interstate 81, in silence as usual. He’d rented a car with an ordinary bench seat, and she sat in the center, leaning against him with his right arm wrapped warmly around her shoulder. Like teenagers, almost, except for the silence, and again he found himself appreciating her for it. But it wasn’t for the quiet passion now. His mind was racing far faster than the car, which he kept exactly at the posted limit. He could have turned on the car radio, but that would have been out of character. He couldn’t risk that, could he? If his employer had only exercised intelligence – and he had plenty of that, Cortez compelled himself to admit – then he still had his arm draped over a supremely valuable source of strategic intelligence. Escobedo took an appropriately long view of his business operations. He understood – but Cortez remembered the man’s arrogance, too. How easily he took offense – it wasn’t enough for him to win, Escobedo also felt the need to humiliate, crush, utterly destroy those who offended him in the slightest way. He had power, and the sort of money normally associated only with governments, but he lacked perspective. For all his intelligence, he was a man ruled by childish emotions, and that thought merely grew in Cortez’s mind as he turned onto 1-66, heading east now, for Washington. It was so strange, he mused with a thin, bitter smile, that in a world replete with information, he was forced to speculate like a child when he could have all he needed merely from the twist of a radio knob, but he commanded himself to do without.
They reached the airport parking lot right on time. He pulled up to Moira’s car and got out to unload her bags.
“Juan…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t feel badly about last night. It was my fault,” she said quietly.
He managed a grin. “I already told you that I am no longer a young man. I have proved it true. I will rest for the next time so that I will do better.”
“When -”
“I don’t know. I will call you.” He kissed her gently. She drove off a minute later, and he stood there in the parking lot watching her leave, as she would have expected. Then he got into his car. It was nearly four o’clock, and he flipped on the radio to get the hourly news broadcast. Two minutes after that he’d driven the car to the return lot, taken out his bags, and walked into the terminal, looking for the first plane anywhere. A United flight to Atlanta was the next available, and he knew that he could make the necessary connections at that busy terminal. He barely squeezed aboard at the last call.
Moira Wolfe drove home with a smile tinged with guilt. What had happened to Juan the previous night was one of the most humiliating things a man could experience, and it was all her fault. She’d demanded too much of him and he was, as he’d said himself, no longer young. She’d let her enthusiasm take charge of her own judgment, and hurt a man whom she – loved. She was certain now. Moira had thought she’d never know the emotion again, but there it was, with all the carefree splendor of her youth, and if Juan lacked the vigor of those years, he more than compensated with his patience and fantastic skill. She reached down and turned on her radio to an oldies FM channel, and for the remainder of her drive basked in the glow of the most pleasant of emotions, her memories of youthful happiness brought further to the fore by the sounds of the teenage ballads to which she’d danced thirty years before.