booming at half-second intervals. Away from the vegetation, one could see the
white pulsations on the fringe of the horizon. But after thirty seconds, it
seemed evident that there was no activity in the immediate vicinity.
“You know what the mortar fire makes me think of sometimes?” Hard-away asked.
“The choir clapping in my church. Like it’s religious, some kind of way.”
“Extreme unction, Maguire would tell you,” Janson replied softly. He had always
been fond of Hardaway, but this evening his friend seemed unusually distracted.
“Hey, they don’t call it the Holiness Church for no reason. You come to
Jacksonville, I’ll take you one Sunday.” Hardaway bobbed and clapped to a rhythm
in his head. ” ‘Sanctify my lord, sanctify my lord.’ ”
“Hardaway,” Janson warned, putting a hand on his gear belt.
The crack of a rifle told them that the enemy had learned of their presence.
They would have to dive to the ground, to take immediate evasive action.
For Hardaway, however, it was too late. A small geyser of blood erupted from his
neck. He staggered forward several yards, like a sprinter who had crossed the
finish line. Then he collapsed to the ground.
As Maguire’s machine gun began to fire bullets over their heads, Janson
scrambled over to Hardaway. He had been struck in the lower outside part of his
neck, near his right shoulder; Janson cradled his head, applying pressure with
both hands to the pulsing wound on the front of his neck, desperately trying to
staunch the flow.
“Sanctify my lord,” Hardaway said weakly.
The pressure was not working. Janson felt his shirt becoming warm and wet, and
he realized what was wrong. There was an exit wound, at the back of Hardaway’s
neck, perilously near his spine, from which bright arterial blood was gouting.
In a sudden display of strength, he wrenched Janson’s hands from his neck.
“Leave me, Janson.” He was trying to shout, but it came out as a low rasp.
“Leave me!” He crawled away a few feet, then used his arms to raise himself, his
head swiveling around the tree line as he tried to make out the shapes of his
assailants.
Immediately, a blast hit his midriff, slamming him to the ground. His abdomen
had been torn apart, Janson saw. Recovery was out of the question. One man down.
How many more?
Janson rolled behind a thornbush.
It was a goddamn ambush!
The VC had been lying in wait for them.
Dialing his scope furiously, zooming through the marsh grasses and palms, Janson
saw three VCs running down a jungle path directly toward him.
A direct assault? No, he decided: it was more likely that the raking overhead
fire from the M60 had caused them to change their position. A few seconds later,
he heard the sharp thwack of bullets hitting the ground near him.
Dammit! There was no way the fire could be this heavy and well targeted unless
Charlie had received advance word of the infiltration. But how?
He shifted his rifle scope rapidly to different directions and focal points.
There: a hooch on stilts. And just behind it, a VC aiming a Chicom AK-47 in his
direction. A small, skilled man who must have been responsible for the last
blast that had hit Hardaway.
In the moonlight, he saw the man’s eyes, and just underneath, the bore hole of
the AK-47. Each, he knew, had spotted the other, and what AK-47 fire lacked in
precision it made up for in volume. Now he saw the VC brace the butt on his
shoulder and prepare to squeeze off a fusillade just as Janson located the man’s
torso in his crosshairs. Within seconds, one of them would be dead.
Janson’s universe constricted to the three elements: finger, trigger,
crosshairs. At that instant, they were all he knew, all he needed to know.
A double tap—two carefully aimed shots—and the little man with the submachine
gun pitched forward.
Yet how many more were out there?
“Get us the fuck out of here!” Janson radioed back to base. “We need backup now!
Send a Mike boat. Send whatever the hell you’ve got. Just do it now!”
“Just one moment,” the radio operator said. Then Janson heard the voice of his
commanding officer coming on the line: “You holding up OK, son?” Demarest asked.
“Sir, they were expecting us!” Janson said.
After a pause, Demarest’s voice crackled on the radio headphones. “Of course
they were.”
“But how, sir?”
“Just consider it a test, son. A test that will show which of my men have what
it takes.” Janson thought he heard choral music in the background. “You’re not
going to complain to me about the VCs, are you? They’re just a bunch of
overgrown kids in pajamas.”
Despite the oppressive tropical heat, Janson felt a chill. “How did they know,
sir?”
“If you wanted to find out how good you were at shooting paper targets, you
could have stayed at camp in Little Creek, Virginia.”
“But Hardaway—”
Demarest cut him off. “He was weak. He failed the test.”
He was weak: Alan Demarest’s voice. But Janson would not be. Now he opened his
eyes with a shudder as the plane touched down on the macadamized landing strip.
Katchall had for years been declared a restricted, no-entry location by India’s
navy, part of a security zone that included most of the Nicobar Islands. Once it
was rezoned, it became nothing less than a trading post. Mangoes, papaya,
durian, PRO 101s, and C-130s all made their way to and from the sun-scorched
oval of land. It was, Janson knew, one of the few places where nobody would
blink at the sudden arrival of military transport vehicles and munitions.
Nor was it a place where the niceties of sovereign border control were observed.
A jeep took him directly from the plane to the compound along the western shore.
His team would already be assembling in the olive drab Quonset hut, a structure
of ribbed aluminum over a frame of arched steel ribs. The floor and foundation
were concrete, the interior pressed wood. A small prefab warehouse adjoined it.
The Liberty Foundation had a low-profile regional office in Rangoon, and so was
able to move advance men in place to ensure that the rendezvous sites were in
order.
Little had changed since Janson had last used it as a base of operations. The
Quonset hut he would borrow was one of many on the island, originally erected by
the Indian military and now abandoned or commandeered for commercial interests.
Theo Katsaris had already arrived when Janson pulled up, and the two men
embraced warmly. Katsaris, a Greek national, had been a protégé of Janson’s and
was probably the most skilled operative he had ever worked with. The only thing
that disturbed Janson about him, in fact, was his tolerance—indeed, appetite—for
risk. Janson had known plenty of daredevils from his SEAL days and knew the
profile: they typically came from depressed Rust Belt towns, where their friends
and parents had led deadend lives. They were up for anything that saved them
from punching the clock at the rivet factory—including another tour of duty in
VCcontrolled territories. But Katsaris had everything to live for, including a
stunningly beautiful wife. Impossible to dislike, he had a charmed life, and yet
set little store by it. His very presence would raise morale; people enjoyed
being around him: he had the sunny aura of a man to whom nothing bad would ever
happen.
Manuel Honwana had been in the nearby hangar but made his way back when he
learned of Janson’s arrival. He was a former colonel in the Mozambican air
force, Russian-trained and unequaled at ground-hugging flight over hilly
tropical terrain. Cheerfully apolitical, he had extensive experience with
combating dug-in, entrenched guerrillas. And it was very much a point in his
favor that he had flown numerous sorties in the fixed-wing rattletraps that were
all his poor country could get its hands on. Most American flyboys were
PlayStation graduates, used to being surrounded by millions of dollars in
digital avionics. Instinct tended to atrophy as a result: they were mere
custodians of the machine, less pilots than information-system technicians. But
this job would require a pilot. Honwana could reassemble a MiG engine with a
Swiss Army knife and his bare hands, because he’d had to. If he had instruments,
so much the better; if he did not, he was unfazed. And if an emergency
nonstandard landing was required, Honwana would be right at home: on the
missions he’d both flown and directed, a proper airstrip was the exception, not
the rule.
Finally, there was Finn Andressen, a Norwegian and a former officer in his
country’s armed forces, who had degrees in geology and had a well-honed instinct
for terrain assessment. He had designed security arrangements for mining
companies around the world. He arrived within the hour, followed in short order
by Sean Hennessy, the remarkably versatile and unflappable Irish airman. The