Idiots! Ding told himself. The radio earpiece made three rasping dashes of static. Ramirez was in place and asking if Ding was ready. He keyed his radio two times in reply, then looked left and right. Vega had his SAW up on the bipod, and the canvas ammo pouch unzipped. Two hundred rounds were all ready, and a second pouch lay next to the first.
Chavez again nestled himself as close to a thick tree as he could and selected the farthest target. He figured the range to him at about eighty meters, a touch long for his weapon, too long for a head shot, he decided. He thumbed the selector to the burst setting, tucked the weapon in tight, and took careful aim through the diopter sight.
Three rounds were ejected from the side of his weapon. The man’s face was surprised when two of them struck his chest. His breath came out in a rasping scream that caused heads to turn in his direction. Chavez shifted aim to another rifleman, whose gun was already coming off his shoulder. This one also took two or three hits, but that didn’t stop him from trying to get his weapon around.
As soon as it appeared that fire might be returned, Vega opened up, transfixing that man with tracers from his machine gun, then shifting fire to two more armed men. One of them got a couple of rounds off, but they went high. The other, unarmed men reacted more slowly than the guards. Two started to run but were cut down by Vega’s stream of fire. The others fell to the ground and crawled. Two more armed men appeared – or their weapons did. The flaming signatures of automatic weapons appeared in the trees on the far side of the site, aimed up at the fire-support team. Exactly as planned.
The assault element, led by Captain Ramirez, opened up from their right flank. The distinctive chatter of M-16 fire tore through the trees as Chavez, Vega, and Ingeles continued to pour fire into the objective and away from the incoming assault element. One of the people firing from the trees must have been hit. The muzzle flash from his weapon changed direction, blazing straight up. But two others turned and fired into the assault element before they went down. The soldiers were shooting at anything that moved now. One of the men who’d been walking in the tub tried to pick up a discarded rifle and didn’t make it. One stood and might have been trying to surrender, but his hands never got high enough before the squad’s other SAW lanced a line of tracers through his chest.
Chavez and his team ceased fire to allow the assault element to enter the objective safely. Two of them finished off people who were still moving despite their wounds. Then everything stopped for a moment. The lantern still hissed and illuminated the area, but there was no other sound but the echoes of the shooting and the calls of outraged birds.
Four soldiers checked out the dead. The rest of the assault element would now have formed a perimeter around the objective. Chavez, Vega, and Ingeles safed their weapons, collected their things, and moved in.
What Chavez saw was thoroughly horrible. Two of the enemy were still alive, but wouldn’t be for long. One had fallen victim to Vega’s machine gun, and his abdomen was torn open. Both of the other’s legs had been nearly shot off and were bleeding rapidly onto the beaten dirt. The squad medic looked on without pity. Both died within a minute. The squad’s orders were a little vague on the issue of prisoners. No one could lawfully order American soldiers not to take prisoners, and the circumlocutions had been a problem for Captain Ramirez, but the message had gotten through. It was too fucking bad. But these people were involved in killing American kids with drugs, and that wasn’t exactly under the Rules of Land Warfare either, was it? It was too fucking bad. Besides, there were other things to worry about.
Chavez had barely gotten into the site when he heard something. Everyone did. Someone was running away, straight downhill. Ramirez pointed to Ding, who immediately ran after him.
He reached for his goggles and tried to hold them in his hand as he ran, then realized that running was probably a stupid thing to do. He stopped, held the goggles to his eyes, and spotted both a path and the running man. There were times for caution, and times for boldness. Instinct told him that this was one of the latter. Chavez raced down the path, trusting to his skills to keep his footing and rapidly catching up with the sound that was trying to get away. Inside three minutes he could hear the man’s thrashing and falling through the cover. Ding stopped and used his goggles again. Only a hundred meters ahead. He started running again, the blood hot in his veins. Fifty meters now. The man fell again. Ding slowed his approach. More attention to noise now, he told himself. This guy wasn’t going to get away. He left the path, moving at a tangent to his left, his movements looking like an elaborate dance step as he picked his way as quickly as he could. Every fifty yards he stopped and used his night scope. Whoever the man was, he’d tired and was moving more slowly. Chavez got ahead of him, curving back to his right and waiting on the path.
Ding had nearly miscalculated. He’d just gotten his weapon up when the shape appeared, and the sergeant fired on instinct from a range often feet into his chest. The man fell against Chavez with a despairing groan. Ding threw the body off and fired another burst into his chest. There was no other sound.
“Jesus,” the sergeant said. He knelt to catch his breath. Whom had he killed? He put the scope back on his head and looked down.
The man was barefoot. He wore the simple cotton shirt and pants of… Chavez had just killed a peasant, one of those poor dumb bastards who danced in the coca soup. Wasn’t that something to be proud of?
The exhilaration that often follows a successful combat operation left him like the air released from a toy balloon. Some poor bastard – didn’t even have shoes on. The druggies hired ’em to hump their shit up the hills, paid ’em half of nothing to do the dirty, nasty work of pre-refining the leaves.
His belt was unbuckled. He’d been off in the bushes taking a dump when the shooting started, and only wanted to get away, but his half-mast pants had made it a futile effort. He was about Ding’s age, smaller and more lightly built, but puffy around the face from the starchy diet of the local peasant farmers. An ordinary face, it still bore the signs of the fear and panic and pain with which his death had come. He hadn’t been armed. He’d been part of the casual labor. He’d died because he’d been in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
It was not something for Chavez to be proud of. He keyed his radio.
“Six, this is Point. I got him. Just one.”
“Need help?”
“Negative. I can handle it.” Chavez hoisted the body on his shoulder for the climb back to the objective. It took ten exhausting minutes, but that was part of the job. Ding felt the man’s blood oozing from the six holes in his chest, staining the back of his khaki shirt. Maybe staining more than that.
By the time he got back, the bodies had all been laid side by side and searched. There were many sacks of coca leaves, several additional jars of acid, and a total of fourteen dead men when Chavez dumped his at the end of the line.
“You look a little punked out,” Vega observed.
“Ain’t as big as you, Oso,” Ding gasped out in reply.
There were two small radios, and various other personal things to catalog, but nothing of real military value. A few men cast eyes on the pack full of beers, but no one made the expected “Miller Time!” joke. If there had been radio codes, they were in the head of whoever had been the boss here. There was no way of telling who he might have been; in death all men look alike. The bodies were all dressed more or less the same, except for the webbed pistol belts of the armed men. All in all, it was rather a sad thing to see. Some people who had been alive half an hour earlier were no longer so. Beyond that, there wasn’t much to be said about the mission.
Most importantly, there were no casualties to the squad, though Sergeant Guerra had gotten a scare from a close burst. Ramirez completed his inspection of the site, then got his men ready to leave. Chavez again took the lead.