She was surprised to see what looked like a Bureau car parked across the street from her house, but it might just as easily have been a cheap rental or something else – except for the radio antenna, she realized. It was a Bureau car. That was odd, she thought. She parked against the curb and got out her bags, walking up the sidewalk, but when the door was opened, she saw Frank Weber, one of the Director’s security detail.
“Hi, Frank.” Special Agent Weber helped her with the bags, but his expression was serious. “Something wrong?”
There wasn’t any easy way of telling her, though Weber felt guilty for spoiling what must have been a very special weekend for her.
“Emil was killed Friday evening. We’ve been trying to reach you since then.”
“What?”
“They got him on the way to the embassy. The whole detail – everybody. Emil’s funeral’s tomorrow. The rest of em are Tuesday.”
“Oh, my God.” Moira sat on the nearest chair. “Eddie – Leo?” She thought of the young agents on Emil’s protection detail as her own kids.
“All of them,” Weber repeated.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “I haven’t seen a paper or turned on a TV in – since Friday night. Where -?”
“Your kids went out to the movies. We need you to come down to help us out with a few things. We’ll have somebody here to look after them for you.”
It was several minutes before she was able to go anywhere. The tears started as soon as the reality of Weber’s words got past her newly made storehouse of other feelings.
Captain Ramirez didn’t like the idea of accompanying Chavez. It wasn’t cowardice, of course, but a question of what his part of the job actually was. His command responsibilities were muddled in some ways. As a captain who had recently commanded a company, he had learned that “commanding” isn’t quite the same thing as “leading.” A company commander is supposed to stay a short distance back from the front line and manage – the Army doesn’t like that word – the combat action, maneuvering his units and keeping an overview of the battle underway so that he could control matters while his platoon leaders handled the actual fighting. Having learned to “lead from the front” as a lieutenant, he was supposed to apply his lessons at the next higher level, though there would be times when the captain was expected to take the lead. In this case he was commanding only a squad, and though the mission demanded circumspection and command judgment, the size of his unit demanded personal leadership. Besides, he could not very well send two men out on their first killing mission without being there himself, even though Chavez had far superior movement skills than Captain Ramirez ever expected to attain. The contradiction between his command and leadership responsibilities troubled the young officer, but he came down, as he had to, on the side of leading. He could not exercise command, after all, if his men didn’t have confidence in his ability to lead. Somehow he knew that if this one went right, he’d never have the same problem again. Maybe that’s how it always worked, he told himself.
After setting up his two fire teams, he and Chavez moved out, heading around the northern side of the airstrip with the sergeant in the lead. It went smoothly. The two targets were still lolling around, smoking their joints – or whatever they were – and talking loudly enough to be heard through a hundred meters of trees. Chavez had planned their approach carefully, drawing on previous nights’ perimeter patrolling which Captain Ramirez had ordered. There were no surprises, and after twenty minutes they curved back in and again saw where the airstrip was. Now they moved more slowly.
Chavez kept the lead. The narrow trail that the trucks followed to get in here was a convenient guide. They stayed on the north side of it, which would keep them out of the fire lanes established for the squad’s machine guns. Right on time, they sighted the shack. As planned, Chavez waited for his officer to close up from his approach interval often meters. They communicated with hand signals. Chavez would move straight in with the captain to his right front. The sergeant would do the shooting, but if anything went wrong, Ramirez would be in position to support him at once. The captain tapped out four dashes on the transmit key of his radio and got two signals back. The squad was in place on the far side of the strip, aware of what was about to happen and ready to play its part in the action if needed.
Ramirez waved Ding forward.
Chavez took a deep breath, surprised at how rapidly his heart was beating. After all, he’d done this a hundred times before. He jerked his arms around just to get loose, then adjusted the fit of his weapon’s sling. His thumb went down on the selector switch, putting the MP-5 on the three-round-burst setting. The sights were painted with small amounts of tritium, and glowed just enough to be visible in the near-total darkness of the equatorial forest. His night-vision goggles were stowed in a pocket. They’d just get in the way if he tried to use them.
He moved very slowly now, moving around trees and bushes, finding firm, uncluttered places for his feet or pushing the leaves out of his way with his toe before setting his boot down for the next step. It was all business. The obvious tension in his body disappeared, though there was something like a buzz in his ear that told him that this was not an exercise.
There.
They were standing in the open, perhaps two meters apart, twenty meters from the tree against which Chavez leaned. They were still talking, and though he could understand their words easily enough, for some reason it was as foreign to him as the barking of dogs. Ding could have gotten closer, but didn’t want to take the chance, and twenty meters was close enough – sixty-six feet. It was a clear shot past another tree to both of them.
Okay.
He brought the gun up slowly, centering the ringed forward sight in the aperture rear sight, making sure that he could see the white circle all around, and putting the center post right on the black, circular mass that represented the back of a human head that was no longer part of a human being – it was just a target, just a thing. His finger squeezed gently on the trigger.
The weapon jerked slightly in his grip, but the double-looped sling kept it firmly in place. The target dropped. He moved the gun right even as it fell. The next target was spinning around in surprise, giving him a dull white circle of reflected moonlight to aim at. Another burst. There had hardly been any noise at all. Chavez waited, moving his weapon back and forth across the two bodies, but there was no movement.
Chavez darted out of the trees. One of the bodies clutched an AK-47. He kicked it loose and pulled a penlight from his breast pocket, shining it on the targets. One had taken all three rounds in the back of the head. The other had only caught two, but both through the forehead. The second one’s face showed surprise. The first one no longer had a face. The sergeant knelt by the bodies and looked around for further movement and activity. Chavez’s only immediate emotion was one of elation. Everything he’d learned and practiced – it all worked! Not exactly easy, but it wasn’t a big deal, really.
Ninja really does own the night.
Ramirez came over a moment later. There was only one thing he could say.
“Nice work, Sergeant. Check out the shack.” He activated his radio. “This is Six. Targets down, move in.”
The squad was over to the shack in a couple of minutes. As was the usual practice with armies, they clustered around the bodies of the dead guards, getting their first sample of what war was really all about. The intelligence specialist went through their pockets while the captain got the squad spread out in a defensive perimeter.
“Nothing much here,” the intel sergeant told his boss.
“Let’s go see the shack.” Chavez had made sure that there was no additional guard whom they might have overlooked. Ramirez found four gasoline drums and a hand-crank pump. A carton of cigarettes was sitting on one of the gasoline drums, evoking a withering comment from the captain. There was some canned food on a few rough-cut shelves, and a two-roll pack of toilet paper. No books, documents, or maps. A well-thumbed deck of cards was the only other thing found.
“How you wanna booby-trap it?” the intelligence sergeant asked. He was also a former Green Beret, and an expert on setting booby traps.