I lay there in the mud for an instant or two, trying to catch some of the wind that had been rudely knocked clean out of me. I reached up and around my face—I was currently as twisted as a pretzel—and picked a trio of nasty splinters out of my much-maligned snout. Then I rolled over onto my back, caught my breath, breathed deeply, and ran my hands over myself bow to stern to make sure nothing had gotten broken.
God, how I love pain. And it is a good thing that I do, because pain and I have (as you know) a unique, even existential relationship. Oh, I was going to be one sore sphincter in the morning. But that would be then, and this was now, and dings or no, it was Show Time. So, I pulled myself to my feet, patted myself down to make sure none of my equipment had come loose. Guess what? I discovered that it was generally in better condition than I.
2040. Gator, Nod, and Duck Foot set up perimeter security. Boomerang and I vaulted the electric wire and made our way across 150 meters of squishy, cow pie–filled pasture to the four-foot-high chain-link fence surrounding the pump house.
Except that, just as I trained my minilight on the door and its locking mechanisms, I was interrupted by Rodent, squeaking urgently in my ear. “Belay, belay, belay. We got company Skipper—three cars coming up on my position—now. They’re moving goddamn fast.”
“Roger—” Two kliks is just over a mile—less than a minute the way most Krauts drive. No time to waste. I hit the transmit button again. “Baby Huey, get off the road into cover—now! And stay with the fucking car.”
The “tsk-tsk” in my earpiece told me either that he’d heard, or he’d made visual contact. Either way, he was complying.
I hit the transmit button again. “Snatch group—move across the road and regroup. We got company coming.”
I looked at Boomerang. It was five hundred long feet back to the electric fence—and if we ran, we’d leave the kinds of deep footprints that even city dwellers can make out in soft, muddy pasture at night.
The editor has just interrupted my train of thought. He says I’m anticipating a problem when I may not need to.
Good point. Did I know that the cars coming were unfriendlies? No, I did not. Did I believe that the occupants would stop and examine the pasture for tracks? No, I did not. But given the situation, I wasn’t about to assume that they wouldn’t. Contingency planning is a big part of SpecWar—but visitors were a contingency I hadn’t planned on.
Gator, Duck Foot, and Nod were already hidden. They’d gone across the road and disappeared into the thick tree line that began roughly ten yards off the shoulder of the road. And I knew what they would be doing: they would be setting themselves up in an ambush position.
I looked up the road. Fuck: I could make the headlights out already. It was time to move.
But not toward the road. I hooked my thumb in the opposite direction. “Let’s get going.”
Boomerang nodded. “Gotcha, Boss Dude—” He slung his bag of break-and-enter goodies over his shoulder, I did the same, and we started off, keeping the pump house between us and the road. We made our way as carefully as any Mohican in a James Fenimore Cooper novel, walking stealthily so as not to leave telltale tracks. I could make out a slight rise in the pasture, ahead and to my right. We zigged and zagged across the open field until we reached it. I stopped long enough to get some sense of where we were. Off to my left, my night vision could make out the squared-off shapes of cattle, standing quietly perhaps a hundred yards from where we hunkered.
And then, the rude glare of halogen headlights cut through the blackness. Boomerang and I both dropped flat. I waited for a couple of seconds, then stretched out and peered over the crest of the rise that sheltered us.
The fucking cars were slowing down. The fucking cars were stopping. They pulled onto the shoulder of the road directly opposite the pump house. In the ambient glare of headlights and taillights, I could tell they were a pair of big Mercedes sedans.
I pulled my monocular from my breast pocket, raised it, and twisted the focusing reticle. I knew who these assholes were—you probably can guess, too. But I couldn’t resist checking anyway. I focused the monocular on the rear door of the first car, where you and I both knew I’d see an ornate, hand-painted coat of arms.
Except I didn’t. The door was unadorned. And then, all the vehicles’ lights went out, and I lost the image.
Boomerang and I lay there for some seconds until we got our night vision back. You use a different part of your eye to see at night than you do during daylight. In daylight, light is picked up by sections of the retina in the center of the eye. These are called cones. At night, the retina uses rods, which are grouped around the cones, to pick up light sources. And so, at night, you use a lot more of your peripheral vision than you do in the daytime. In fact, if you stare directly at something at night, you may not see it. But if you look off to the side, you’ll usually pick out what you’re looking for.
That’s what I did here—I let my vision play with the darkness, find its own areas on which to concentrate. And within a few seconds, I was able to make out the shadows buried in the shadows, and see what these assholes were up to.
I counted ten figures. Some had spread out in a defensive perimeter around the cars. The others were unloading equipment from the Mercedes’ trunks. They’d obligingly left the trunk lights on. They were removing the normal assortment of break-in tools: suppressed, automatic weapons, pry bars, and a number of what I call burglar’s bags, no doubt filled with the various sorts of miscellaneous goods you need to get inside your target. Then the trunks were slammed shut, and everything plunged back into darkness.
It was time to get some more eyes on the problem. I flicked the transmit button. “Nod—”
Immediately, my ear buzzed with an affirmative response. “Tsk-tsk.”
“How many?”
There was a pause. Then a whispered, “Ten.”
We were five, unless Half Pint and Rodent were coming back on foot. Well, it didn’t matter—we’d take down however many we had to. We’d—Nod’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “Ivans, Ivans, Ivans. They’re talking Russkie, Skipper.”
Now that was unexpected. I mean, here was Franz, a former GSG-9 shooter, who’d retired under a cloud, who now worked in Düsseldorf for BeckIndustrie, and whose name I’d heard secondhand from der winzig Heinz Hochheizer, the deceased Stasi agent and bomb salesman. So, I’d have expected that Franz would see me nosing around, and then come back himself to see what I’d been snooping for.
But now, here were a bunch of Ivans doing the snooping instead.
I lifted the monocle and peered through it. I couldn’t make much out at all. But they were working. Then, I saw four of ’em vault the electric fence. Three moved straight toward the pump house across the dark pasture. The other lifted his leg up and tried to shake his foot off. I knew what he’d stepped into.
Time to check on the troops. I whispered “count off” into my lip mike. There was a half-second delay. Then a series of one-two-three-four-five-six-seven tsk-tsks came through my earpiece. At least we all could hear one another.
I told my guys what I wanted them to do, and received affirmatives from everybody. There’s not a lot of time to explain it right now, but the bottom line was that Gator, Nod, and Duck Foot would deal with the six Ivans on the road. Half Pint and Rodent would provide perimeter security, Boomerang and I would take on the quartet of ADM-snatchers headed for the pump house—and Baby Huey would stay with the Mercedes, so we’d be able to extract at a moment’s notice if it became necessary.
Yes, I realized that we were outnumbered here this evening. But it was we, not they, who maintained all the advantage. You see, we knew we had company. The Ivans obviously didn’t. They were smoking, and they were talking, and they were violating so many basic OPSEC37 procedures that I knew they weren’t military types.
So, who were they? Believe me—I planned to find out.
2043. The quartet of Russkie raiders pressed on through the pasture. They’d gone ove
r the chain-link fence with all the demure grace of heffalumps in heat, clambered across the muddy pasture, and finally come around to the side facing away from the road, where the door was located.
I watched as they began work. They weren’t more than sixty yards from us now. But making out what they were doing was hard because they were working in total blackness. Well, maybe I couldn’t see, but I could still hear them. Sure I could. They thought they were alone, and so they nattered at one another in Ivan as they began work on the door lock. Then all of a sudden the bright beam of a halogen flashlight almost fucking blinded me though the monocle. One of the Ivans stood back and shone the light on the door, so they could begin work.
That was my cue. I slid the monocle into my pocket and nudged Boomerang. He watched as I crept over the crest and moved away from it so as not to silhouette myself against the sky, crawling slowly but deliberately toward the pump house.
This was harder to do than it is to describe, believe me. First, there was the terrain—it was squishy, acres of wet pasture accented by cow pies and piss-puddles. Then there was the absolute lack of cover. In the woods, you can use foliage to camouflage your movements. In the city, there are shadowy alleys, vehicles, and buildings that can be used to help conceal your movement. Here, I was forced to proceed in the open, which left me vulnerable to all sorts of nasty possibilities. Still, I remembered the three basic tenets of concealment—shape, shine, and silhouette—and used them all to my advantage as I crawled forward. I kept my silhouette low by moving snakelike and evenly. I allowed no telltale shape to stick out and give me away. And I provided no reflective surface: I was blacked out from my face to my toes, and nothing that I carried reflected any light.
I also followed a trio of simple rules I have developed for nighttime operations, rules that have kept me alive all over the globe. Rules that would, I hoped, work again tonight here in Deutschland.
Rule One: always keep low, because your profile offers the enemy a great target.
Rule Two: avoid open spaces if possible. If avoiding open spaces is not possible, then follow rule one and keep as low as you can.
Rule Three: always move slowly and deliberately. Creep like Kramer and you’ll become dog meat. The less attention you attract, the less attention you’ll attract.
And so, I slithered, and slid, and slinked, moving mere inches at a time across the expanse of pasture. The sixty yards became fifty, then forty. I began to pick up the pace a little bit. The Ivans were intent on their work now—drilling at the locking devices, their flashlight centered on the door hinges. The light was bothersome, but I knew that by keeping one eye closed, I’d retain most of my night vision.
I slowed down momentarily and looked back under my outstretched left arm. I could make out the prow of Boomerang’s balaclava as he pulled himself, inch by painful inch, across the pasture. Yes—painful. Your muscles burn at times like this. Breathing is hard, because you don’t want to make any noise. Every movement is deliberate. Put your hand in the wrong position, and you will cause some twig to snap, or leaf to crackle, or stone to click, or something else equally nasty to happen, and then the bad guy turns around and shines his light on you, and it becomes Doom-on-Dickie time, which is never a pleasant occurrence to yours truly.
2053. I lay prone, the front of my black BDUs smeared with fragrant cow pies, stained by mud and grass and cattle piss, not eight yards from where the Ivans had broken through the first and second locking devices, and were about to defeat the third in the series. Slowly, slowly, I slid my right hand down my side, and as I did, I brought my right knee up, so as to allow my hand to grasp the pommel of the black-oxy’d K-Bar in the sheath strapped to the outside of my right calf. The pommel was strapped, and I flicked the big snap, which cracked like a knuckle.
That’s when one of the Ivans turned—abruptly—as if he’d heard something. Which, of course, he had. He took a big, healthy drag on his cigarette, exhaled with a sigh, and looked straight at me.
Now, a few graphs ago I explained about how your eyes work at night. So you already know all the shit you need to know about rods and cones. Now, let me add something to that: it is a scientific fact that if you look directly at something at night, you will not see it. At night, you see (!), it is one’s peripheral vision, not one’s direct vision, that is dominant.
Why? You’re still asking me why? Where the hell did you learn reading retention?
Because, asshole, it’s the rods of your retina that work at night, not the cones. And the rods are not at the center of the retina, but at the periphery—remember?
And so, when I caught the Ivan looking at me, I simply froze. No breathing, no nothing.
I remained where I was for what seemed like a fucking eternity but didn’t last more than fifteen seconds. But I swore that the sonofabitch could hear my heart, arteries, and veins all pounding pa-doom, pa-doom, pa-doom on Dickie. The cigarette smell was overpowering. And then, and then, and then . . . he flicked the butt into the darkness, straight at me, watched as it hit the wet ground and went out with a hiss not six inches from my nose. And then he turned on his heel and went back to work.
2102. The Ivans defeated the last of the locking devices, opened the cache door, and went inside. No—they didn’t leave anybody standing guard. Why should they? Their rear security was in place—on the road. And they simply assumed that no one would come through the back door—i.e., the pasture—and hit ’em from the back side.
Now it was MY turn. All knees and elbows I crawled to the doorway, rolled onto my side, pulled myself up and hunkered, my shoulder touching the rear wall of the pump house, waiting for Boomerang. It didn’t take more than thirty seconds for him to show up. We could make out hints of light from inside as the team of Ivans opened the trap door that I knew led to the weapons cache. I sheathed my K-Bar and exchanged it for the suppressed USP that sat in its thigh holster, and checked the weapon to make sure there was a round chambered. Boomerang unholstered his suppressed USP, and made ready, too.
2103. I tsk-tsk’d into the lip mike to let the rest of my guys know that we were going to work. I looked over at Boomerang, who had what can only be described as a glad-to-be-alive shit-eating grin on his long, narrow face. What can I say? Nothing, except that I love a man who loves to kill the way Boomerang loves to kill.
Boomerang gave me an upturned thumb. I returned the gesture, dropped low, and went through the doorway.
The floor was concrete. I moved cautiously, so as not to make any noise. The ambient light from below was enough so that I could make out the interior of the pump house shell. The room was square. In the front port-side quadrant, a steel trap door was propped open. From below, I could hear the Russkies talking.
We split up and crawled to opposite sides of the trap door. I rolled up alongside it and peered over. A steel ladder about sixteen feet in length and bolted to a concrete wall descended to the chamber below. I had no idea how big that chamber was, or what it held. What I did know—I could tell from the way the lights were moving down there—was that the Russkies had all moved way over to the far side, and that the only way to get down was to drop with our backs facing the Ivans.
Now, since you—along with Mister Murphy—are along for the ride tonight, let me present you with a slight tactical problem. They are down there. We are up here. Remember back at the start of the book I told you about the concept of Relative Superiority, and the AV, or Area of Vulnerability? Well, going up or down a ladder or a rope is an AV almost as big as my dick. The descent becomes an AV just as big as my dick if you have to go down with your back exposed toward the enemy. So, friends, my query to you is this: how do we solve the problem of getting down into the chamber, waxing the Russkies, and removing the ADM, without becoming vulnerable, and thereafter dead?
Right you are. The correct answer, of course, is that we do NOT go down into the chamber. We wait until the Russkies climb up. Because we already know that ladder is a hufuckingmongous AV. And the narrow trap door? W
ell, because it cuts the vision potential down to almost zero, it is what’s known in the SpecWar trade as a fatal funnel. What’s that? In Roguishly simple terms, it means it’s gonna be fatal for the Ivans to try to funnel their way up the fuckin’ ladder.
2110. I heard enough scraping and scrambling from below to know that they were on their way. I looked over at Boomerang, my eyes explaining what I wanted to do. He nodded that he understood, and we reholstered our weapons. We weren’t going to need them . . . yet.
Now here is a little insight into human behavior. Most people, when they climb ladders and ride elevators, tend to look straight ahead. And INO—Ivan Number One—was no exception. He came up at a good pace. His head and then his shoulders cleared the trap door. As they did, I came up around the starboard side of his neck with my size extra-Rogue hand, clamped down on his Adam’s apple, and choked off his air supply.
Before he could struggle any more, Boomerang had him under the arms, and had pulled him through the opening.
Ivan’s eyes were big as saucers—he really hadn’t been expecting any company.
Well, April fool, motherfucker. His surprise was my tactical advantage. I slid around behind the sonofabitch, my right elbow now a vise in which his throat was caught. It’s an old LAPD38 choke-hold, and it works. He went down much easier than you might expect. I squeezed, exerting pressure until I felt the pressure of his body slumping up against mine. Then I took his head, snapped his neck forward and wrenched until I heard the bones break. I took his jaw in one hand and put the other on his skull, then twisted his head until I knew the spinal cord and nerves were all severed. Then I rolled him off my body. Boomerang took the corpse by the shoulders and pulled it out of the way to give us an unobstructed playing field.
Option Delta Page 13
