by Tom Clancy
“Run!” It was Captain Ramirez’s voice, shouting in Spanish. Again they disengaged by pairs. Or tried to. Two squad members had been hit in this exchange. Chavez tripped on one, who was trying to crawl away. He lifted the man on his shoulders and ran up the hill while he tried to ignore the pain in his legs. The man—it was Ingeles—died at the rally point. There was no time for grief; his unused magazines were passed out among the other riflemen. While Captain Ramirez tried to get things organized again, all of them heard the mixed notes of gunfire down the hill, more shouts, more curses. Only one more man made it to the rally point. Team KNIFE now had two more dead and one seriously wounded. Olivero took charge of that, leading the injured man up the hill to the casualty collection point near the LZ. It had taken fifteen minutes to inflict a further twenty casualties on the enemy, at the cost of 30 percent of their strength. If Captain Ramirez had had time to think, he would have realized that for all his cleverness he was in a losing game. But there wasn’t time for thinking.
The BANNER men discouraged another group of the enemy with a few bursts of fire, but lost one of their number withdrawing up the hill. The next defense line was four hundred meters away. Tighter than the second, it was disagreeably close to their final defensive position. It was time to play their last card.
The enemy again closed in on empty terrain, and still didn’t know what casualties they had inflicted on the evil spirits that appeared and killed and disappeared like something from a nightmare. Two of the men who occupied something akin to leadership positions were gone, one dead, the other gravely wounded, and now they stopped to regroup while the surviving leaders conferred.
For the soldiers, the situation was much the same. As soon as the casualties were identified, Ramirez rearranged his deployment to compensate, distantly thankful that he didn’t have time to mourn his dead, that his training really did force him to focus on the problem at hand. The helicopter wasn’t going to come in time. Or was it? Or did it matter? What did matter?
What he had to do was further reduce the enemy numbers so that an escape attempt had a decent chance at success. They had to run away, but they had to do some more killing first. Ramirez had been keeping his explosives in reserve. None of his men had yet fired or thrown a grenade, and this position was the one protected by their remaining claymore mines, each of them set to protect a rifleman’s hole.
“Why are you waiting, eh?” Ramirez called downhill. “Come on, we are not finished with you yet! First we kill you, then we fuck your women!”
“They don’t have women,” Vega shouted. “They do it to each other. Come, fairies, it is time to die!”
And so they came. Like a puncher remorselessly closing on a boxer, cutting off the ring, still driven by anger, scarcely noting their losses, drawn to the voices and cursing them as they did so. But more carefully now, the enemy troops had learned. Moving from tree to tree, covering one another as they did so. Firing ahead to keep heads down.
“Something’s happening down to the south, there. See the flashes?” Larson said. “Over at two o’clock on the mountainside.”
“I see it.” They’d spent over an hour trying to raise BANNER by flying and transmitting over all three exfiltration sites, and gotten nothing. Clark didn’t like leaving the area, but had little choice. If that was what it might be, they had to get closer. Even with a clear line of sight, these little radios were good for less than ten miles.
“Buster, ” he told the pilot. Get there as fast as you can.
Larson retracted his flaps and pushed the throttles forward.
It was called a fire-sack, a term borrowed from the Soviet Army, and perfectly descriptive of its function. The squad was spread out in a wide arc, every man in his hole, though four of the holes were occupied by one instead of two, and another was not occupied at all. In front of each hole were one or two claymores, faced convex side toward the enemy. The position was just inside a stand of trees and faced down across what must have been a rockfall or small landslide, an open space perhaps seventy meters wide, looking down on some fallen trees, and a few new ones. The noise and muzzle flashes of the enemy approached that line and stopped moving, though the firing did not abate at all.
“Okay, people,” Ramirez said. “On command we get the hell out of here, back to the LZ, and from there down X-route two. But we gotta thin them down some more first.”
The other side was talking, too, and finally doing so intelligently. They used names instead of places, just enough encoding to mask what they wanted to do, though they had again allowed themselves to follow terrain features instead of crossing them. Certainly they had courage, Ramirez thought; whatever sort of men they were, they didn’t shrink from danger. If they’d had just a little training and one or two competent leaders, the fight would already have been over.
Chavez had other things on his mind. His weapon was flash-less in addition to being noiseless, and the Ninja was using his goggles to pick out individual targets and then dropping them without a shred of remorse. He got one possible leader. It was almost too easy. The rattle of fire from the enemy line masked the sound of his own weapon. But he checked his ammo bag and realized that he had only two magazines and sixty rounds beyond what were in his weapon already. Captain Ramirez was playing it smart, but he was also playing it close.
Another head appeared from behind a tree, then an arm gesturing to someone else. Ding tracked in on it and loosed a single round. It caught the man in the throat, but didn’t prevent a gurgling scream. Though Chavez didn’t know it, that was the main leader of the enemy, and his scream galvanized them to action. All across the treeline fire lanced out at the light-fighters, and with a shout, the enemy attacked.
Ramirez let them get halfway across, then fired a grenade from his launcher. It was a phosphorus round, which created an intense, spidery white fountain of light. Instantly, every man triggered his claymore mines.
—“Oh, shit, there’s KNIFE. Willie Pete and claymores.” Clark shoved his antenna out the aircraft’s window.
“KNIFE, this is VARIABLE; KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. Come in, over!” His attempt at help could not have come at a worse moment.
Thirty more men fell dead, and ten wounded under the scything fragments from the mines. Next, grenades were launched into the treeline, including all of the WP rounds, to start fires. Far enough away to avoid instant death, but too close to be untouched by the showering bits of burning phosphorus, some men caught fire, adding their screams to the cacophony of the night. Hand-thrown grenades were added to the field, killing yet more of the attackers. Then Ramirez keyed his radio again.
“Move out, move out now!” But he’d done the right thing once too often.
When the KNIFE team moved out from their positions, they were swept with automatic-weapons fire from men shooting on reflex. Those soldiers who had them tossed smoke and CS tear-gas grenades to conceal their departure, but the sparkling of the pyrotechnics merely gave the other side a point of aim, and each drew the fire from a dozen weapons. Two were killed, and another two wounded as a direct result of doing what they’d been taught to do. Ramirez had done a stellar job of maintaining control of his unit to this point, but it was here that he lost it. The radio earpiece started crackling with an unfamiliar voice.
“This is KNIFE,” he said, standing erect. “VARIABLE, where the hell are you?”
“Overhead, we are overhead. What is your situation, over?”
“We’re in deep shit, falling back to the LZ now, get down here, get down here right now!” Ramirez shouted for his men. “Get to the LZ, they’re coming to get us!”
“Negative, negative. KNIFE, we cannot come in now. You must get clear, you must get clear. Acknowledge!” Clark told the radio. No reply. He repeated the instructions and again there was nothing.
And now there were only eight left of what had once been twenty-two men. Ramirez was carrying a wounded man, and his earpiece had fallen out as he ran for the LZ, two hundred meters up the hill, th
rough one last stand of trees into the clearing where the helicopter would come.
But it didn’t. Ramirez set his burden down, looking up at the sky with his eyes, then with his goggles, but there was no helicopter, no flash of strobe lights, no heat from turboshaft engines to light up the night sky. The captain yanked the earpiece out of the radio and screamed into it.
“VARIABLE, where the hell are you?”
“KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. We are orbiting your position in a fixed-wing aircraft. We cannot execute a pickup until tomorrow night. You must get clear, you must get clear. Acknowledge!”
“There’s only eight of us left, there’s only—” Ramirez stopped, and his humanity returned one last, lethal time. “Oh, my God.” He hesitated, realizing that most of his men were gone, and he had been their commander, and he was responsible. That he wasn’t, really, was something he would never learn.
The enemy was approaching now, approaching from three sides. There was only one way to escape. It was a preplanned route, but Ramirez looked down at the man he’d carried to the LZ and watched him die. He looked up again, looked round at his men, and didn’t know what to do next. There wasn’t time for training to work. A hundred meters away, the first of the enemy force emerged from the last line of trees and fired. His men returned it, but there were too many and the infantrymen were down to their last magazines.
Chavez saw it happening. He’d linked back up with Vega and León, to help a man whose leg was badly wounded. As he watched, a line of men swept across the LZ. He saw Ramirez drop prone, firing his weapon at the oncoming enemy, but there was nothing Ding and his friends could do, and they headed west, down the escape route. They didn’t look back. They didn’t need to. The sound told them enough. The chattering of the M-16s was answered by the louder fire of the AKs. A few more grenades went off. Men screamed and cursed, all of them in Spanish. And then all the fire was from AKs. The battle for this hill had ended.
“Does that mean what I think it means?” Larson asked.
“It means that some stateside REMF is going to die,” Clark said quietly. There were tears in his eyes. He’d seen this happen once before, when his helicopter had gotten off in time and the other hadn’t, and he’d been ashamed at the time and long thereafter that he had survived while others had not. “Shit!” He shook his head and got control of himself.
“KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. Do you read me, over? Reply by name. Say again, reply by name.”
“Wait a minute,” Chavez said. “This is Chavez. Who’s on this net?”
“Listen fast, kid, ’cause your net is compromised. This is Clark. We met awhile back. Head in the same direction you did on the practice night. Do you remember that?”
“Roger. I remember the way we headed then. We can do that.”
“I’ll be back for you tomorrow. Hang in there, kid. It ain’t over yet. Repeat: I will be back for you. Now haul your ass out of there. Out.”
“What was that all about?” Vega asked.
“We loop around east, down the hill to the north, then around east.”
“And then what?” Oso demanded.
“How the fuck should I know?”
“Head back north,” Clark ordered.
“What’s an REMF?” Larson asked as he started the turn.
Clark’s reply was so low as to be inaudible. “An REMF is a rear-echelon motherfucker, one of those useless, order-generating bastards who gets us line-animals killed. And one of them is going to pay for this, Larson. Now shut up and fly.”
For another hour they continued their futile search for Team BANNER, then they headed back to Panama. That flight took two hours and fifteen minutes, during which Clark didn’t say a word and Larson was afraid to. The pilot taxied the aircraft right into the hangar with the Pave Low, and the doors closed behind him. Ryan and Johns were waiting for them.
“Well?” Jack asked.
“We made contact with OMEN and FEATURE,” Clark said. “Come on.” He led them into an office with a table. There he spread out his map.
“What about the others?” Jack asked. Colonel Johns didn’t have to. He already knew part of it from the look on Clark’s face.
“OMEN will be right here tomorrow night. FEATURE will be here,” Clark said, indicating two places marked on the map.
“Okay, we can handle that,” Johns said.
“Goddammit!” Ryan growled. “What about the others?”
“We never made contact with BANNER. We watched the bad guys overrun KNIFE. Most of it,” Clark corrected himself. “At least one man got away. I’m going in after him, on the ground.” Clark turned to the pilot. “Larson, you’d better get a few hours. I need you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in six hours.”
“What about the weather?” he asked PJ.
“That fucking storm’s jinking around like a Weasel on a SAM hunt. Nobody knows where the hell it’s going, but it ain’t there yet, and I’ve flown in weather before,” Colonel Johns replied.
“Okay.” The pilot walked off. There were some cots set in the next room. He landed on one and was asleep in a minute.
“Going in on the ground?” Ryan asked.
“What do you expect me to do—leave them there? Ain’t we done enough of that?” Clark looked away. His eyes were red, and only PJ knew that it wasn’t from strain and lack of sleep. “Sorry, Jack. There’s some of our people there. I have to try. They’d try for me. It’s cool, man. I know how to do it.”
“How?” PJ asked.
“Larson and I’ll fly in around noon, get a car and drive down. I told Chavez—that’s the kid I talked to—to get around them and head east, down the mountain. We’ll try to pick them up, drive ’em to the airport, and just fly them out.”
“Just like that?” Ryan asked incredulously.
“Sure. Why not?”
“There’s a difference between being brave and being an idiot,” Ryan said.
“Who gives a fuck about being brave? It’s my job.” Clark walked off to get some sleep.
“You know what you’re really afraid of?” Johns said when he’d left. “You’re afraid of remembering the times that you could have done it and didn’t. I can give you a play-by-play of every failure I’ve had in twenty-some years.” The colonel was wearing his blue shirt with command wings and all the ribbons. He had quite a few.
Jack’s eyes fixed on one, pale blue with five white stars. “But you...”
“It’s a nice thing to wear, and it’s nice to have four-stars salute me first and treat me like I’m something special. But you know what matters? Those two guys I got out. One’s a general now. The other one flies for Delta. They’re both alive. They both have families. That’s what matters, Mr. Ryan. The ones I didn’t get out, they matter, too. Some of them are still there, because I wasn’t good enough or fast enough or lucky enough. Or they weren’t. Or something. I should have gotten them out. That’s the job,” Johns said quietly. “That’s what I do.”
We sent them in there, Jack told himself. My agency sent them in there. And some of them are dead now, and we let somebody tell us not to do anything about it. And I’m supposed to be ...
“Might be dangerous going in tonight.”
“Possible. Looks that way.”
“You have three minis aboard your chopper,” Ryan said after a moment. “You only have two gunners.”
“I couldn’t whistle another one up this fast and—”
“I’m a pretty fair shot,” Jack told him.
28.
Accounting
CORTEZ SAT AT the table, doing his sums. The Americans had done marvelously well. Nearly two hundred Cartel men had gone up the mountain. Ninety-six had returned alive, sixteen of those wounded. They’d even brought a live American down with them. He was badly hurt, still bleeding from four wounds, and he hadn’t been well handled by the Colombian gunmen. The man was young and brave, biting off his screams, shaking with the effort to control himself. Such a courageous young man, this Green Beret. Cortez woul
d not insult his bravery with questions. Besides, he was incoherent, and Cortez had other things to do.
There was a medical team here to treat “friendly” casualties. Cortez walked out to it and picked up a disposable syringe, filling it with morphine. He returned and stabbed the needle into a vein on the soldier’s uninjured arm, pushing down on the plunger after it was in. The soldier relaxed at once, his pain extinguished by a wonderful, brief sensation of well-being. Then his breathing just stopped, and his life, too, was extinguished. Most unfortunate. Cortez could really have used men like this one, but they rarely worked for anything other than a flag. He walked over to his phone and called the proper number.
“Jefe, we eliminated one of the enemy forces last night.... Yes, jefe, there were ten of them as I suspected, and we got them all. We go after another team tonight.... There is one problem, jefe. The enemy fought well, and we took many casualties. I need more men for tonight’s mission. Sí, thank you, jefe. That will do nicely. Send the men to Riosucio, and have the leaders report to me this afternoon. I will brief them here. Oh? Yes, that will be excellent. We’ll be waiting for you.”
With luck, Cortez thought, the next American team would fight equally as well. With luck he could eliminate two-thirds of the Cartel’s stable of gunmen in a single week. Along with their bosses, also tonight. He was on the downslope now, Cortez thought. He’d gambled dangerously and hard, but the tricky ones were behind him.
