What the hell, Mosby thought, it’s been a great ride, and I already made it a lot further than I ever thought I would. Some things were just worth fighting for, even if most people wouldn’t agree.
They were still on the blacktop road, but the driver was assisted in his navigation through the night by a GPS unit mounted under the dash in the center. The GPS display had a multi-colored glowing night screen, its antenna was a white plastic mushroom sitting at the front of the dashboard next to the windshield. The Bedfords were bootleggers from a bygone era, who were using a twenty-first-century satellite mapping system.
Mosby tapped Santander on the knee and pointed to the GPS display, and Santander gave him a thumbs-up sign back. Each time they turned, a little blinking triangle in the middle of the glowing screen turned; the little triangle represented the Buick wagon. The precise current distance and compass direction to building B-1 was displayed across the bottom of the map in bright numbers and letters. Mosby knew that just as GPS had been a boon to law enforcement, it had also been a great help to some classes of criminals. Smugglers could now arrange drop-offs, and rendezvous in remote unmarked wilderness areas, or far out at sea, sure of a perfect linkup thanks to their shared GPS coordinates.
Finally, Carson’s tail lights brightened ahead of them. He braked and turned off the pavement to the right. The station wagon slowed in turn and followed the truck onto gravel, and then dirt, bouncing as they passed between trees and thick brush. The wagon’s headlights illuminated the reflectors on the back of Carson’s truck, and then they stopped and their headlights were extinguished. The inside of the wagon was illuminated by the soft glow from the GPS screen. Archie’s truck pulled up behind them and stopped. Carson pulled his truck in a tight three point turn and parked it under low tree branches off the side of the dirt road, facing back toward South River Road.
They opened their doors quietly and stepped out into the cool drizzle and gathered behind the station wagon. The rear window slid up into the roof; the tailgate retracted down under the floor in the back, and Ranya climbed out.
Archie and Edith got out of their truck. She had a dry towel and a roll of duct tape, and as planned she began to methodically cover all of the reflectors and lights on the dark blue pickup, blotting them out one at a time. Their Dodge truck would be directly across the tarmac from the hangars. Even with its headlights off, they couldn’t risk inadvertently showing any brake lights, or even returning a shine off a reflector.
The four of them who were going into the two buildings used the truck’s front parking lights to see by while they put on their black kevlar vests, which had been carried on the floor in the back of the wagon beneath Ranya’s feet. These were bulky adjustable models similar to military flak jackets, meant to be worn on the outside of their clothing.
Edith finished taping over her truck’s front parking lights. As they went dark each of the group pulled out the green plastic chemical light sticks that they had been given back at the Wagon Wheel. These brightly glowing sticks were kept in pockets where they could be put away or taken out as needed for illumination, or to help them rally together if they were separated in the darkness.
Mosby was only a little amazed to see that one of the two Bedford brothers (they were indistinguishable in the darkness) was wearing what looked like a black ice hockey helmet with a pair of night vision goggles attached to the front. The idea that night vision devices were the exclusive domain of the military and law enforcement was rapidly evaporating.
Carson spoke to them quietly. “All right, we’re three quarters of a mile from the target. We’re going lights-out and weapons-ready from here. My truck is the emergency escape vehicle; we’ll switch over to it if the station wagon’s too damaged to run on the highway. If things really go to hell and you can’t make it to the station wagon, or if the wagon won’t run, try to make it back here to my truck. The keys are under the visor just like we briefed it before. Edith, let’s do another radio check.”
She climbed inside the cab on the passenger side. In a moment Carson’s walkie-talkie made three clicks, then the word “test” came out of it. He held down the transmit button on his cell phone sized FSR radio and replied “loud and clear.” They were keeping voice communications to an absolute minimum, out of respect for the probable radio scanning and direction finding capabilities of their enemy.
“Archie, you have your cheat-sheet with the click signals and the brevity codes?”
“Got it.”
“You’re comfortable with the night scope?”
“No problem. We’re only going to be moving at walking speed. I can drive with one hand and hold the scope with the other. Edith is going to keep us on track with our GPS; we’ve got the route programmed into waypoints.” Archie and Edith were boaters, so using their handheld GPS unit to solve navigational problems was second nature to them.
“And Archie, no matter what, we can’t have an accidental discharge. Don’t rack the bolt…”
“I won’t, don’t worry. Observe and film, that’s our job. Shooting is the last resort. Don’t worry, we won’t screw it up.”
“All right everybody, lock and load here. Keep them on safe, and keep your fingers off the triggers.” A chorus of metallic scraping and snapping and slamming was heard. “And I don’t need to tell you to watch your muzzles.”
Jasper Mosby was extremely nervous. They all were. They were a thrown-together group, unknown to each other, which could be a recipe for disaster. Special teams for such missions trained together for months, until they knew each others’ capabilities and habits by heart. Going with this pick-up team on a real world operation violated more tactical rules than Mosby could think of. But there was no alternative; they didn’t have the luxury of time.
Carson said, “All right, let’s check our gun lights. Cover them up, and try ‘em out.”
Mosby and Santander both carried 9mm MP-5SD submachine guns with fat integral suppressors shrouding the barrels; they had white gun lights mounted under them. They cradled their weapons and covered the lights with one hand while pushing the rubber pressure switches with the other. The lights were so intense that their tightly closed fingers were momentarily lit like red beacons. A light turned on at the wrong time could be almost as damaging as a premature gunshot, causing them to lose their crucial element of surprise. It was important to know by feel exactly how to switch on the light at the correct instant, and avoid accidentally switching it on at any other time.
Carson tested his light next; he was carrying a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun with a straight stick magazine inserted. Mosby could only shake his head in wonder when he had seen the old Tommy gun, which was so many decades older than the MP-5 he was carrying. Before the gun control act of 1934 had been passed anyone could purchase a Thompson as easily as a pair of shoes, and evidently some of them had never been registered with the ATF during the last eighty years. The Thompson had been invented in the Model-T era, but Carson’s had a modern red-dot electronic aiming device mounted on top. His model had the Army-style straight wooden fore end, instead of the forward pistol grip of the pre-war era, so Mosby suspected that this particular submachine gun had come home in a soldier’s duffel bag.
A homemade suppressor the size of a can of tennis balls was fitted to the end of the Thompson’s barrel, and a borrowed Suffolk PD Sure-Flash light was duct-taped beneath it. The juxtaposition of the serial-numbered police department tactical light mounted under the illegal silencer on an illegal submachine gun made Mosby cringe; how many felonies that would be worth, he could only imagine.
Carson had lent Ranya a Colt Woodsman .22 caliber pistol, with a suppressor the size of a paper towel tube mounted over the entire barrel. It had a smaller white tactical light taped under it, which she tested against her left palm. Mosby understood the logic: Ranya was there primarily to video tape the rescue, and the silent pistol was a secondary consideration. If a real gunfight broke out, and if in spite of their best efforts it suddenly g
ot loud, she would switch from the diminutive .22 rimfire to the .45 caliber pistol which she was also carrying.
Ordinarily, Mosby would scoff at the idea of someone carrying a .22 pistol on a raid, but he knew from years of observing her that Ranya could rapid-fire the tiny bullets into coin-sized targets at fifty feet. Fired squarely through a cranium by an expert shot, the .22 could be an effective killing tool.
The Bedford brothers carried matching carbine versions of the AR-15, with collapsible stocks and short barrels. Their normal flash hiders had been unscrewed and replaced with homemade sound suppressors the size of fruit-juice cans. They didn’t appear to Mosby to be true sound suppressors; they were probably just adapted from chainsaw or lawn mower mufflers. Even so, they would cut the decibels down enough so that any shooting wouldn’t be heard more than a mile away.
Like the Suffolk SWAT-issued MP-5SDs, both of the Bedfords’ rifles had a second thirty round magazine attached next to the one which was already inserted, for a faster initial reload. Carson wore a canvas rig across his chest with vertical pouches carrying extra thirty round stick magazines. The last time Mosby had seen a set up like that, it had been on a pith-helmeted NVA soldier firing an AK-47.
With Archie’s belt-fed M-60 across the tarmac, and the Bedford boys with their rifles providing covering fire down the front and back of the hangars, the assault team would stand a fighting chance of getting in and out of the buildings and away. These three supporting weapons could hold anyone in the hangars at bay, and they gave Mosby a lot of confidence. All they were lacking was a 40mm grenade launcher, but realistically he knew that they were fortunate to have assembled the fire power that they had.
“Well, the weather sucks, which is great for us,” said Carson. Water was beginning to trickle off of their hats; the rain was light but it dripped unevenly off of the tree branches above them. The green glow of their chemlites gave their huddle a ghostly look. “Nobody’s going to be outside, and it’ll be nice and quiet in the woods. Watch your muzzles, keep on safe, and keep your fingers clear. Let’s put the chemlites away when we break from here, and let our eyes adjust as much as they can. I think we’re ready. Anybody got anything else?”
One of the Bedford’s spat, and said in a low voice, “Yeah. Let’s get some.”
“Okay, maybe we will,” replied Carson. “Let’s go. We’ll take the wagon as far as we can. Archie, you’re going to peel off after we get inside the fence, right?”
“Right,” he responded. Archie and Edith shook hands around the little huddle, and climbed into their truck.
This time, Phil Carson climbed into the middle row of the station wagon directly behind the driver, since his own truck was being left behind as their backup escape vehicle. They all held their weapons muzzles upward. Harry held both his own and his brother’s in the front seat. Ranya climbed into the back, and the tailgate rose to meet the window as it slid down out of the roof.
The well-muffled 455 cubic inch engine rumbled to life. There was no need for duct tape over any of the black station wagon’s exterior or interior lights; with the flip of a single switch all of them were disabled, including the brake lights. The driver was wearing his night vision goggle helmet. Pushing a touch-pad button, he adjusted the brightness of the GPS display down until it disappeared from the vision of the passengers, sinking the interior of the car in utter blackness. He slipped the Estate Wagon into gear and they rolled forward for the last leg of their infiltration.
40
The chain link vehicle gate, on the long-forgotten southeast access road into the base annex, proved to be an unexpectedly stubborn barrier. The padlock yielded easily to long-handled bolt cutters, but brush and saplings from both sides of the narrow asphalt track had grown through it, entwining it in a living web. Wearing his night vision goggles, Tom clipped and cut most of the larger vines and sapling branches with the bolt cutters, then tied a tow rope from beneath his front bumper to the bottom of the latching side of the gate. Finally he returned to the driver’s seat and slowly reversed, dragging the protesting gate open far enough for the wagon to fit through.
After following the station wagon inside the fence, Archie’s pickup truck turned off to the right to follow the perimeter service road to the north, and it was immediately lost from their view in the gloom.
The southeast road into the base annex had been narrow enough when it was first paved decades earlier. Now the unchecked branches of new growth trees on both sides met in the middle, scraping and swishing down both sides of the station wagon and under the bottom as it proceeded at little more than a walking speed. The five passengers could see only inky blackness beyond their rain-streaked windows, and hear only the brush sliding along the wagon as it seemingly threaded its way through the woods.
The driver said, “800 feet.” He was watching the distance to their target on his GPS screen. “Building one is 800 feet away at 330 degrees, north-northwest straight through the woods.”
“Let’s go a little further, and find a place to turn around.”
A minute later the driver said, “I can turn around here; it’s 500 feet northwest through the woods to B-1.”
“Okay, turn us around.”
The driver made a careful three point turn between the young trees, until the wagon was facing outbound back down its track, and he switched off the motor. The only sound now was the splatter of drops on the roof. Carson said, “Okay people, sit tight and relax. Now we wait for Archie to get into position. Let’s crack the windows and get some fresh air.”
They waited like this for ten more minutes. They were sweaty and uncomfortable in their awkward kevlar raid vests; the snatches of cooler air wafting through the slightly open windows provided their only relief. The old Buick had seats as comfortable as any sofa. Ranya’s head slowly tipped back, and she nodded off as the warm interior and softly padded upholstery enticed her to drift to sleep.
****
At 9:21 PM Carson’s walkie-talkie made two crisp and distinct clicks, the signal that Archie and Edith were in position. This meant that their M-60 machine gun was aimed across the tarmac at the open hangars, with 500 rounds of linked 7.62mm ball ammunition ready to rock and roll if it came to an all-out fight.
In the station wagon all six of them stretched and yawned, then followed Carson’s lead and carefully opened the doors and climbed out into the welcome chill of the dripping pine woods. As they had rehearsed behind the Wagon Wheel restaurant, they clumsily tried to fall into their patrol order. It was so totally eyes-closed dark beneath the thick covering of young trees, under the overcast moonless sky, that it was literally impossible for them to see their hands in front of their faces. The only points of visible light seen by their wide-open straining eyes were some kind of fluorescent fungus or plants on the ground and at the bases of some of the trees, which did not help them get their bearings, but only served to disorient them further.
Jasper Mosby said softly, his disembodied voice coming from nowhere, “Phil, I’m sorry, but I can’t see shit. I suggest we take out a chemlite, at least until we get in line.”
“Okay, go ahead Jake.”
Mosby pulled his glowing plastic stick from a vest pocket; with their fully dilated pupils it cast a seemingly brilliant green light among them. The bearded man with the hockey helmet and the NVGs took his place at the front of the line; his brother fell in behind him. Next was Carson, then Ranya, followed by Mosby and the other policeman, “Fred,” who had come with him. It was obvious to all of them, but unspoken, that the last two in line were cops, judging from their MP-5SDs, their black tactical vests, and the black SAS-style tactical pistol holsters strapped to their right thighs.
Compared to the submachine guns and assault rifles carried by the men, Ranya felt distinctly under-armed with her mere pistols. In a minute, the six of them were lined up and ready, with their weapons facing outwards on alternating sides.
Like all the others, Carson’s Thompson submachine gun was supported by a tacti
cal sling, so that he could use his hands for other tasks when he needed to. He took out his own glowing chemlite, and with a long sheath knife he sliced off one end of it. Then he splashed a bit of its fluid on Ranya’s back, and anointed each one of them in turn with a little of the glowing juice, and handed the remnant to Ranya to shake out on his own back. “Okay, that should do it,” he said softly. “Once we’re out of the woods we should be able to see a little better.” Mosby put his own chemlite back into his vest pocket, extinguishing its illumination. The chemlite spatters on each of them were visible as ghostly splotches, just light enough for each person to see the one in front of them from a few feet away.
“Everybody ready?” Carson whispered. It was too dark to see each others’ hands, and besides, they had not practiced together enough to rely on hand and arm signals alone. They had to take it on faith that they were the only humans in those woods, and risk quietly speaking to one another to communicate. A combat infantry squad which had spent weeks or months training together would go for hours at a time without uttering one single word while on patrol. Certainly, a well-trained squad would never walk directly up an overgrown paved road so close to the enemy; they would slip through the bush to lessen the risk of being ambushed or tripping a booby trap’s wire. But they were only a thrown-together squad consisting of four old timers, one thirty-something cop, and Ranya. They had never trained together; they had never even stepped into the woods together before tonight, so they had to make allowances.
“Okay, let’s move out, nice and slow,” said Phil Carson.
****
Enemies Foreign And Domestic Page 58
