“Okay. Stop at the next checkpoint. Remember there might be folks out taking a stroll.”
“Roger that, Cap’n.” Chavez took off at once. The rest started moving two minutes later.
Ding moved more slowly now. The probability of contact increased with every step he took toward HOTEL. The druggies couldn’t be all that dumb, he warned himself. They had to have a little brains, and the people they used would be locals, people who’d grown up in this valley and knew its ways. And lots of them would have weapons. He was surprised how different it felt from the last time, but then he’d watched and evaluated his targets over a period of days. He didn’t even have a proper count on them, didn’t know how they were armed, didn’t know how good they were.
Christ, this is real combat. We don’t know shit.
But that’s what Ninja are for! he told himself, taking small comfort in his bravado.
Time started doing strange things. Each single step seemed to take forever, but when he got to the final rally point, it hadn’t been all that long at all, had it? He could see the glow of the objective now, a vague green semicircle on the goggle display, but still there was no movement to be seen or heard in the woods. When he got to the last checkpoint, Chavez picked a tree and stood beside it, keeping his head up, swiveling left and right to gather as much information as possible. He thought he could hear things now. It came and went, but occasionally there was an odd, not natural sound from the direction of the objective. It worried him that he didn’t really see anything as yet. Just that glow, but nothing else.
“Anything?” Captain Ramirez asked in a whisper.
“Listen.”
“Yeah,” the captain said after a moment.
The squad members dropped off their rucksacks and divided according to plan. Chavez, Vega, and Ingeles would advance directly toward HOTEL while the rest circled around to the left. Ingeles, the communications sergeant, had an M-203 grenade launcher slung under his rifle, Vega had the machine gun, and Chavez still had his silenced MP-5. Their job was overwatch. They would get in as close as possible to provide fire support for the actual assault. If anyone was in the way, it was Chavez’s job to drop him quietly. Ding led his group off first, while Captain Ramirez moved off a minute later. In the case of both groups, the interval between the men was tightened up to five meters. Another real danger now was confusion. If any of the soldiers lost contact with his comrades, or if an enemy sentry somehow got mixed up with their group, the results could be lethal to the mission and the men.
The last five hundred meters took over half an hour. Ding’s overwatch position was clear on the map, but not so clear in the woods at night. Things always looked different at night, and even with the low-light goggles, things were just… different. In a distant sort of way, Chavez knew that he was having an attack of the jitters. It wasn’t so much that he was afraid, just that he felt much less certain now. He told himself every two or three minutes that he knew exactly what he was doing, and each time it worked – but only for a few minutes before the uncertainty hit him again. Logic told him that he was having what the manuals called a normal anxiety reaction. Chavez didn’t like it, but found that he could live with it. Just like the manuals said.
He saw movement and froze. His left hand swung around his back, palm perpendicular to warn the two behind him to stop also. Again he kept his head up, trusting to his training. The human eye sees only movement at night, the manuals and his experience told him. Unless the opposition had goggles…
And this one didn’t. The man-shape was almost a hundred meters away, moving slowly and casually through the trees between Chavez and the place where Chavez wanted to be. So simple a thing as that gave the man an early death sentence. Ding waved for Ingeles and Vega to stay put while he moved right, opposite his target’s current path to get behind him. Perversely, he moved quickly now. He had to be in place in another fifteen minutes. Using his goggles to select clear places, he set his feet as lightly as he could, moving almost at a normal walking speed. Pride surged past the anxiety now that he could see what he had to do. He made no sound at all, moving alone, crouched down, swiveling his head from his path to his target and back again. Within a minute he was in a good place. There was a worn path there. This was a path for the guard. The idiot stuck to a path, Chavez recognized. You didn’t do things like that and expect to live.
He was coming back now, moving with slow, almost childish steps, his legs snapping out from the knees – but he moved quietly enough by walking on the worn path, Ding noticed belatedly. Maybe he wasn’t a total fool. His head was looking uphill. But his rifle was slung over his shoulder. Chavez let him approach, taking off his goggles when the man was looking away. The sudden loss of the display made him lose his target for a few seconds, and the edges of panic appeared in his consciousness, but Ding commanded them to be still. The man would reappear presently as he walked back to the south.
He did, first as a spectral outline, then as a black mass walking down the worn corridor in the jungle. Ding crouched at the base of a tree, his weapon aimed at the man’s head, and let him come closer. Better to wait and get a sure kill. His selector switch was on the single-shot position. The man was ten meters away. Chavez wasn’t even breathing now. He aimed for the center of the man’s head and squeezed off a single round.
The metallic sound of the H&K’s action cycling back and forth seemed incredibly loud, but the target dropped at once, just a muted clack from his own rifle as it hit the ground alongside the body. Chavez leaped forward, his submachine gun fixed on the target, but the man – it had been a man, after all – didn’t move. With his goggles back on, he could see the single hole right in the center of the nose, and the bullet had angled upward, ripping through the bottom of the brain for an instant, noiseless kill.
Ninja! his mind exulted.
He stood beside the body and looked uphill, holding his weapon high. All clear. A moment later the shapes of Vega and Ingeles appeared on the green image display, heading downhill. He turned, found a spot from which to observe the objective, and waited for them.
There it was, seventy meters away. The glow from the gasoline lanterns blazed on his goggles, and he realized that he could take them off once and for all. There were more voices now. He could even catch the odd word. It was the bored, day-to-day talk of people doing a job. There was a splashing sound, almost like… what? Ding didn’t know, and it didn’t matter for the present. Their fire-support position was in view. There was just one little problem.
It was oriented the wrong way. The trees that should have provided cover to their right flank instead prevented them from covering the objective. They’d planned the overwatch position in the wrong place, he decided. Chavez grimaced and made other plans, knowing that the captain would do the same. They found a spot almost as good fifteen meters away and oriented in the proper direction. He checked his watch. Nearly time. It was time to make his final, vital inspection of the objective.
He counted twelve men. The center of the site was… what looked like a portable bathtub. Two men were walking in it, crushing or stirring up or doing something to the curious-looking soup of coca leaves and… what was it they told us? he asked himself. Water and sulfuric acid? Something like that. Christ, he thought. Walking in fucking acid! The men doing that distasteful task took turns. He watched one change, and those who got out poured fresh water over their feet and calves. It must have hurt or burned or something, Ding realized. But their banter was good-natured enough, thirty meters away. One was talking about his girlfriend in rather crude terms, – boasting of what she did for him and what he did to her.
There were six men with rifles, all AKs. Christ, the whole world carries those goddamned things. They stood at the perimeter of the site, watching inward, however, rather than outward. One was smoking. There was a backpack by the lantern. One of the walkers said something to one of the gunmen and pulled a beer bottle out of it for himself, and another for the one who’d given him permission.