by Vince Flynn
“Stop rolling!” he heard Mason shout over his earpiece. “Stop fucking rolling, Mitch!”
Free of the line, he changed his focus to trying to follow his pilot’s advice. Most of the rocks he grabbed were too small or loose to have much of an effect, but he eventually managed to aim for one that looked solid. And it was. He slammed into it shoulder first, coming to an abrupt halt three feet from the drop-off.
“Mitch! You all right? Say something!”
“Son of a bitch…” he managed to get out, blood drooling from his mouth as he spoke.
“Oh, man!” Mason said. “I’d have bet my life savings on that not working! Am I good or what?”
Rapp just lay there as the chopper disappeared over the mountain. Nothing felt broken or torn. Nothing important, anyway.
He finally struggled to his feet and stumbled toward the tangle of foliage that Chism had built to camouflage the cave entrance. By the time he passed through, his mind was more or less clear.
“Jeez… That was crazy. Are you okay?”
By way of response, Rapp slapped Chism in the side of the head hard enough to almost drop him.
“Ow! That hurt!” he said, stumbling back. An Asian woman watched from the rear of the cave, where she was hovering over a man lying in a bed of fronds.
Rapp pointed. “Is he still breathing?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m a fucking doctor, man.”
Rapp stepped forward and slapped him in the side of the head again.
“Ow! Stop it! I couldn’t risk that you’d just leave them. They wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for me.”
“And that’s the only reason I didn’t just collect my paycheck and go home,” Rapp said, walking back toward the cave entrance. The dull hum of helicopters was audible outside, punctuated by the occasional burst of automatic fire.
“Fred,” he said into his throat mike. “I’m going to need the stretcher. Can you get it in here?”
“Apparently, I can do anything!”
“Focus.”
“Sorry, Mitch. Yeah. Basically, the same drill. But you’re going to have to catch it.”
“Understood. ETA?”
“Two minutes.”
“Roger that. Two minutes out.”
He turned and pointed to Matteo Ricci. “Drag him out. We don’t have a lot of time.”
They broke into the sunlight just as Mason came overhead. The litter was already dangling beneath the aircraft as he banked and bore down on them. When he pulled up, the fiberglass stretcher came at Rapp like a projectile. In this instance, Mason’s aim was a little too good—forcing Rapp to dive to one side. It skidded past and smashed into the rock wall, resting there for a moment as Mason’s copilot let the cable reel spin free. Then the weight of the line started dragging it back. Rapp grabbed hold as it slid by but didn’t have enough body weight to arrest its momentum. His bike-racing diet was going to get him pulled over a cliff.
He was about to let go when David Chism dove onto the other side. The added weight was enough to stop the slide and they managed to anchor it behind a boulder. Not a long-term solution, but it didn’t have to be. The Asian woman whose name Rapp couldn’t remember was already dragging Ricci downslope toward them.
Dust and pebbles from the rotor wash hammered him as he put the Italian inside. The first strap was barely cinched over Ricci’s chest when automatic fire erupted from the jungle below.
“Bad news,” Mason said over the comm. “Those guys are shooting at us. They’re still a little out of range but I can see them coming up the slope.”
“Shit,” Rapp muttered as Mason’s copilot began firing controlled bursts from the chopper’s open door. This was going to turn into a complete clusterfuck if he didn’t get them out of there fast.
“We’re inbound,” he heard Bruno McGraw say. “Approximately one minute out.”
“Not sure we have that long,” Mason said. “We’re a stationary target here.”
“Everybody in,” Rapp said.
“What?” Chism was a little wide-eyed.
“You heard me. Get in on top of him.”
“Will this thing even hold three people’s weight?”
“We’re about to find out,” Rapp said, shoving him down on top of Ricci. The Asian woman was both more cooperative and quite a bit smaller. She settled in with her face between Ricci’s feet and her knees in Chism’s side while Rapp threw the rest of the straps over them.
Another burst of automatic fire became audible, this time accompanied by the sound of rounds finding their target. As expected, Mason kept his hover steady. He didn’t seem happy about it when he came back on the comm, though.
“We just took a couple, Mitch. Did you stop for a drink down there?”
Rapp finished with the last buckle and dragged the litter out from behind the boulder. “They’re all in! Go!”
Mason didn’t need to be told twice. The overfilled litter slid toward the cliff and then went over it, swinging wildly as its occupants screamed in terror. The chopper had gained maybe fifty feet of altitude when a contrail appeared from the jungle.
“Rocket!” Rapp shouted reflexively as Mason took evasive action. The projectile missed by a good fifty yards and the aircraft continued to climb as another helicopter—this one containing Bruno McGraw—came into view. They’d retrofitted his rig with a minigun, and he began firing from the open door, hosing down the area where the rocket had originated. Accuracy wasn’t great, but it was hard to blame the marksman. The chopper wasn’t designed for the recoil and it was getting pushed all over the place.
Mason’s erratic climb had set the litter to spinning out of control, but it was high enough now that Rapp had to squint to make out detail. Another contrail appeared, missing by a good five hundred yards before plummeting back into the jungle and failing to detonate. If the black-market SAMs Auma’s army used had ever had guidance systems, they’d rusted away long ago.
McGraw redirected his fire on the second rocket’s launch point just as a series of rounds stitched the rock wall ten feet over Rapp’s head.
“It’s too hot for me to go down,” he said over his throat mike. “I’m gonna have to climb up and over. I’ll contact you when I get to a viable extraction point.”
15
THE sound of distant automatic fire became audible again, but Rapp ignored it. He suspected that he knew its origin and it had nothing to do with him. He had his own problems.
He’d made it over the mountain and managed to skid, climb, and occasionally roll down the other side. Now he was crouched in a particularly dense thicket a few hundred yards from the base.
A tactical knife had been sufficient to shave off his beard and he was in the process of further darkening his skin with dirt. A bit politically incorrect in the current world, but it would give him a brief edge in the unlikely event he was spotted. Combined with the ratty fatigues and even rattier Yosemite Sam T-shirt beneath, Auma’s men would likely take him for one of their own in the visual chaos created by the forest.
While he couldn’t see the sky through the canopy, the relative silence suggested it was free of choppers. Unless something had gone very wrong, Chism was safe, and Coleman was already tearing down their temporary command post. Rapp’s extraction would be the last detail in a mission that despite leaving him isolated in enemy territory had gone a hell of a lot better than expected.
* * *
At first, Rapp thought the sound was some kind of jungle creature he wasn’t familiar with. After a life spent fighting in the Middle East, though, his knowledge of jungle wildlife admittedly wasn’t particularly reliable. Based on his calculations, he should be approaching cache 3, which was the closest viable extraction point. What he didn’t need now was to run into a gorilla, a guerilla, or some sharp-toothed mammal that he’d never heard of. If things could keep going his way for a little longer, he could be back in Cape Town for a late dinner.
T
he noise took on a metallic ring, forcing him to discard the idea of an animal. It appeared that Auma’s men had managed to find the cache he was headed for and were trying to access the heavy steel case. From the sound of it, they’d resisted the urge to try to shoot the lock off and were instead beating it with a rock.
Not just surprising, but pretty impressive. There was no way anyone could just stumble upon something buried in the middle of the jungle. More likely, Auma had managed to dig up enough background on Chism to decipher the cache’s location. Uganda was right to be afraid of that freak.
Fortunately for Rapp, Auma’s competence fell short of allowing him to decipher the lock’s combination, forcing his men to announce their position for half a mile in every direction. Apparently, being God’s representative on earth wasn’t enough to get him Chism’s ATM pin.
Rapp slowed to a literal crawl, being careful to remain aware of his surroundings and not to get too focused on the sound just ahead. It was possible that they’d summoned friends with better tools and there was no telling what direction they might come from. In the end, though, he made it to what he guessed was twenty feet without incident. Close enough to hear the unintelligible conversation between what he determined were two men—probably about whose turn it was to tear their arm off hammering on the lock. As the exchange got more heated, he texted Coleman that he was in position. The extraction point that corresponded with cache 3 was only about fifteen yards from the strongbox, though, suggesting it would be necessary to deal with the men before his people arrived.
Coleman responded almost immediately.
UNDERSTOOD. CACHE 3. SIX MINUTES OUT. ISSUES?
TWO TANGOS. STAY HIGH. DON’T RETURN FIRE.
Five minutes, forty-eight seconds later, the dull sound of the chopper blades became audible. Coleman would be in the Airbus H130 they’d rented from a sightseeing company. Not exactly combat capable, but the quietest thing they could find.
Predictably, the shooting started about twenty seconds later—undisciplined bursts that melded with the growing sound of the rotors. The noise level rose to the point that Rapp could abandon stealth and move as fast as the foliage would allow. Instead of the AK, he’d opted for the Glock 19 that had served him so well over the years. There was a silencer in his pack, but he’d decided not to mess with it. If all went to plan, the two men would be dead before they heard the shots that killed them.
The flashes of their weapons became visible in the dying afternoon light, allowing him to make on-the-fly adjustments to his trajectory. When he finally got eyes on the two men, both were focused entirely upward, firing wildly toward the chopper hovering well out of their reach.
The jungle was so dense that Rapp was forced to hold his fire until he was at nearly point-blank range. The first round hit the man on the left between the shoulder blades, pitching him into a tree where his body got tangled and hung like a discarded doll. The second tango didn’t even notice. He just kept shooting skyward until the side of his head disintegrated.
Rapp let his momentum carry him to a clearing large enough to land the chopper. It began to descend, and he dove through the open door while the skids were still a couple of feet from the ground. A moment later, he felt the increased gravity as Fred Mason started to climb.
“You good?” Scott Coleman shouted, and Rapp gave him the thumbs-up before putting on a headset.
“Have you been able to hear the shooting?” Coleman asked over the comm.
“Yeah. Kind of intermittent and hard to pinpoint, though.”
“Not anymore. It’s turned into a full-blown firefight.”
“You think it’s the American team?”
“I don’t know who else it could be. Not exactly a high-traffic area down there.”
Rapp nodded, taking a moment to consider what he wanted to do. “Fred, can you fly us over their position?”
“No problem, Mitch. Give me two minutes.”
The sun had just disappeared over the mountains when they arrived, putting the forest in shadow and highlighting the muzzle flashes beneath the canopy. Coleman was right. It wasn’t just harassment anymore.
“Do we have external sound?”
They’d rigged some of their aircraft with megaphones to provide instructions to Chism. If this was one of them, they might be able to use it to find out what was going on down there.
“Yeah,” Mason responded. “You want me to patch you in?”
Again, Rapp paused to think. He was a private contractor now. The self-inflicted problems of the US military really weren’t any of his business. A cooler full of beer and a lift to the Entebbe airport were only a few minutes away.
“Shit. Yeah. Do it.”
“Okay, you’re live.”
“American team. This is Scott Coleman of SEAL Demolition and Salvage…”
It seemed more practical to use that name. Rapp’s own wouldn’t be recognizable to anyone but top operators. Coleman, on the other hand, was a legend throughout the armed forces.
“If you can hear this, the following is my phone number. Call it.” He began repeating the number over the megaphone and on the fourth time, his satphone started to ring.
He shoved it beneath one side of his headphones and shouted into it.
“Go ahead.”
The response was a string of what he assumed were extremely graphic threats, but the English was too heavily accented to be sure. Apparently, Auma supplied his disciples with phones and actually paid the bill.
Coleman held out his own. “Try again.”
“Okay,” Rapp said over the megaphone. “New number. The first digit is…” He pondered for a moment. “The amendment that gives you the right to bear arms. The second is the last number in the White House address.” Then he just read off the rest.
After a few repeats, the phone began ringing. This time, the accent on the other end was American.
“Who am I talking to?” Rapp said.
“Lieutenant Jeremiah Grant, US Army.”
“Give me a sitrep.”
“We’re engaging hostiles on the south, east, and west. Moving north. Six of us left. One injured.” A burst of gunfire drowned him out for a moment. “They’ve been watching us for days, but when you pulled Chism out, they decided there was no reason to just watch anymore.”
“They’re driving you into an ambush,” Rapp said.
“I one hundred percent agree with you, sir, but there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it.”
Coleman held out a map and aimed a penlight at it.
“Stand by, Lieutenant,” Rapp said.
“We can’t shoot blind down on them,” the former SEAL said. “But we could bring in a couple of choppers with miniguns. Using thermal, we should be able to find the ambush and take it out. Then we create a scorched-earth path right to the clearing west of cache six.”
Rapp nodded. “Lieutenant. Keep heading north. We’ll deal with anybody waiting for you. I’m sending coordinates for an extraction point. You should be able to reach it in…”
Coleman held up two fingers and then five.
“Twenty-five minutes. Copy?”
“Continuing on our current heading, waiting for coordinates for extraction. Twenty-five-minute ETA.”
“I’ll see you there,” Rapp said. “And good luck.”
16
“PASS over one more time, Fred.”
“I’ll do it, but I don’t like those rockets, Mitch.”
Three had gone up so far, one aimed at them and the others at the additional choppers they had in the air. The aim and trajectories were so erratic, though, that Rapp was starting to wonder if they were rockets at all. If he had to bet, he’d say they were some kind of glorified firework that Auma used to keep the Ugandans off balance.
Rapp leaned out the chopper’s open door and sighted through a thermal scope mounted to a Sage International EBR M14. Gray splashes of human heat were visible through the canopy, but they appeared and disappeared like ghosts. The chance
of getting off a kill shot from his current position was pretty much zero—too much movement from the aircraft, too much foliage, and too much erratic movement from potential targets.
He’d hoped to bring some heavier weaponry to bear, but the American team hadn’t been able to outpace their pursuers enough to discern who was who. Auma’s men—as undisciplined as they were—had the home field advantage and superior numbers. They also didn’t seem concerned about friendly fire, which allowed them to come along either side of the Americans and put them in crossfires. In all likelihood, they were whacked out on ajali, a locally produced narcotic that acted like a ten-foot line of PCP-laced cocaine. According to Rapp’s intel, it made things like death, fear, and fatigue irrelevant. Users fought like wounded civet cats until either they caught a bullet or their heart gave out.
“Mitch,” Joe Maslick said over Rapp’s headphones. He was in a chopper just to the north, searching for the ambush. “We’ve found ’em and it’s not pretty. Hard to get an exact count, but I’m going to guess twenty-five guys. All dug in directly in front of our new friends. Permission to fire?”
“Fire at will.”
In the distance, two helicopters that had been invisible a moment before were lit by the muzzle flashes of their door-mounted guns.
“Lieutenant,” Rapp said over the satellite phone now linked through his headset. “We’ve located and are neutralizing the opposition ahead of you. You’re clear to pick up your pace. Keep those assholes from getting alongside you for just a few minutes.”
“Copy. We’ll go as fast as we can.”
“Understood. We’re going to drop in in front of you. Two men. We should make contact in about five minutes. Copy?”
“Two friendlies dead ahead. Contact in five.”
Rapp switched the comm back to Joe Maslick. “Mas, are you going to have that ambush cleaned up in time?”
