Hostage Zero (38 page)

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Authors: John Gilstrap

Tags: #Suspense, #Fiction, #Thrillers

BOOK: Hostage Zero
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Jonathan keyed his mike. “Keep focused on the bad guys, Mom. I’ve got the coordinates of the trap here. We’ll find it. I want to make sure that we find the second one if they set it.”
“I’m liking my decision to come along less and less every minute,” Harvey grumped. “Booby traps. Jesus.”
Jonathan admired Boxers for just letting it go. It was safe to say that the Big Guy didn’t like strangers in general—make that
people
in general—and he
hated
having tagalongs on missions. For him to keep his mouth shut on a setup like Harvey just offered took enormous self control.
It took all of five minutes for them to close the distance and arrive at the site of the first trap. When the GPS said that they were ten yards away, Jonathan brought the team to a halt and gathered them around, combining them into an unacceptably compact target, but judging the risk to be low at this point.
Besides, given the darkness of the night, they’d have been invisible to anyone more than just a few feet away.
They spoke in whispers. “Okay,” Jonathan said, “the trap they set is about ten yards up the trail. Harvey, go find it.”
“
What?
” His tone was one of abject horror.
Jonathan laughed. “I’m kidding,” he said.
Harvey brought a hand to his chest. “Holy shit.”
Jonathan turned serious again. “From here on out, we’re prepared for battle. I want weapons charged and safeties off, which means special attention to trigger discipline. Roger that?”
Harvey made a show of thumbing the safety switch on his MP5 to three-round burst. Jonathan and Boxers had both been in fire mode since they’d slung their weapons. Trigger discipline meant that you kept your finger away from the damn thing until it was time to shoot. The American public would be horrified to know the number of their sons and daughters who had been killed in various wars by some inattentive yahoo who tickled his weapon’s trigger at the wrong time.
Jonathan continued, “I’m going to go on white light to find this trap, so keep your eyes averted. Box, I want you for close cover. Harvey, stay back here and turn your back to me. One of us needs continued good night vision. We good?”
“Good as gold,” Boxers said.
“Oo-rah,” Harvey grunted.
Jonathan smiled.
Oo-rah
was the Marine Corps version of the Army’s
hoo-ah
(Marines always had to be different), and it meant that Harvey’s Inner Marine was being reborn.
Snapping his NVGs out of the way, Jonathan brought his muzzle-mounted flashlight to life and pointed it at the ground at a spot three feet in front of him. He bent low at the waist to a half-squat and advanced cautiously, scanning the light from one edge of the path to the other to search for any signs of a trip wire or other triggering device. Next to him, his hips pressed to Jonathan’s ribs, Boxers advanced in lockstep with him, his rifle trained on the trail up ahead, trusting Jonathan to find any hazards they might step on. The two men had depended on each other so completely and so successfully over so many years and through so many battles that it seemed sometimes as if they knew each other’s thoughts.
They advanced with agonizing slowness—the kind of advance that made younger soldiers impatient and frequently cost them their lives. A minute or so into it, Jonathan stopped and consulted his GPS, which said they should be within a foot or two of whatever they were looking for.
Where was it?
What
was it? He took another few tiny steps forward, then stopped and consulted his GPS again. “Okay, Box,” he said, “don’t move anymore, okay?”
The Big Guy froze. “Am I in danger?” he asked. He never stopped scanning for potential targets.
“I don’t know. This is definitely the spot that Venice marked, but I’m not seeing anything. I was expecting a trip wire. A grenade or something. I’m not seeing anything.”
“What about a mine?” Boxers asked.
Wow
, Jonathan thought. Could these guys be that sophisticated? He pulled the light from its muzzle mount and stooped to his haunches, scanning the dirt of the path for any signs of disturbance. “I don’t suppose you have a ground-penetrating radar on you,” he quipped.
“I left it in my other pants.”
The hairs on Jonathan’s arms and the back of his neck felt electrified as he lowered himself to his knees and leaned to within a few inches of the dirt. “They’re damn good,” he mumbled. He saw nothing. Leaning closer to the ground, he moved the light to the side, hoping that the different angle might give him a different perspective.
He was about to abandon the effort and move on when he saw the brush marks. They were just light track marks in the dirt—an obvious effort to even out the ground—too regular in their appearance to be a natural occurrence. There was only one reason Jonathan could think of for someone to brush over an area like that, and it was to conceal a hole that had been dug for a mine. (If anything else had been concealed, the burier would have just used his foot—something a mine installer would be foolish to try.)
“I found it,” Jonathan announced. “Good call, Box.”
“I live to serve,” Boxers replied. “Now mark it, and let’s get on with it.”
“No, we need to pull it out.”
Big Guy sighed loudly. “I hate it when you say macho shit like that. I hate it even more when you play with toys that can turn us both into humidity.”
“If we leave it, we’ll have to worry about it during extraction,” Jonathan explained. “We’ll be moving a lot faster then, I expect. For now, we’ve got the luxury of time.”
He wasn’t soliciting votes on this. He unclipped his M4 from its sling and set it on the ground. With the light clamped in his teeth like an old stogie, he drew his KA-BAR from its scabbard on his left shoulder and gently inserted the blade into the disturbed earth. As he’d expected, it went in easily, indicating that the hole had been gently backfilled. Using the tip of the blade, he began the painstaking process of exposing the face of the mine. After three minutes, there it was.
“Well, well, well,” he mused aloud, removing the light from his mouth. “The Soviet Union lives on. We’ve got a PMN-2 here.” He returned the KA-BAR to its sheath.
“Of course we do,” Boxers growled. “What’s the sense of finding a mine if it’s not a nasty one?”
The PMN-2 anti-personnel mine first arrived in large numbers in Southeast Asia. Smaller and lighter than its predecessors, the weapon was extremely man-portable, and with an explosive load of one hundred grams of a TNT/RDX mixture, it carried a hell of a wallop, guaranteed to rip off the foot that tripped it, and presenting a high likelihood of doing substantially more damage than that. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had seen more than their fair share of these nasty buggers.
On the positive side, because they were so widely carried by so wide a spectrum of soldiers, the trigger mechanism was a forgiving one, thus explaining how so many untrained insurgents survived long enough to get them into the ground.
Jonathan said, “If you want to take a few steps back, I won’t think badly of you.”
“If you blow me up, I’ll beat your ass blue for all eternity,” Boxers said. “Just do what you’ve got to do, and let’s get on with the fun part.”
Smiling around the flashlight he’d returned to his mouth, Jonathan used the first two fingers of both hands to oh-so-gently excavate the loose dirt from around the mine. Fully exposed, it was about the size of his hand.
“I’m lifting it out now,” he said around the flashlight. “Last chance to walk away.”
“A daily ass-whuppin’ for all eternity, boss. Just think about that. Succeed or fail, I figure I win either way.”
Fair enough. Jonathan raised to his haunches and then to a squat, his feet straddling the hole he’d just dug. He reached between his feet, tickled his fingers under the explosive mechanism, and stood. On a different day, if stealth were not a priority, he might have just Frisbee’d the mine into the jungle and let it blow up, but today he didn’t have the luxury. He was reasonably sure that he remembered how to defuse a PMN-2, but reasonably wasn’t sure enough. He settled on carrying the weapon five feet into the jungle and gently setting it down.
He stood tall again, clapped the dirt from his hands, and reassembled his weapons load.
“I guess some spider monkey is in for the surprise of his life, huh?” Boxers joked.
Jonathan smiled and turned off his flashlight, then snapped his NVGs back over his eyes. He keyed his mike. “The booby trap is secure. Have our friends set any more?”
Venice’s voice said, “Negative. I’ll keep watching them and let you know if they stop again.”
Harvey rejoined them. “What was it?” he asked.
Jonathan caught him up on the removal of the mine and its current location.
“They mined a trail that the locals use to travel to and from the compound,” Harvey recapped, his voice heavy with disdain. “These guys are assholes of a whole new order.”
“I don’t know,” Boxers said. “When your business is using kid labor to produce a product that kills kids all over the world, I think you might have already set the asshole bar as high as it can go.”
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-NINE
Jonathan saw the aura of the compound in the sky twenty minutes before they reached its outer perimeter. The factory glowed like daytime, thanks to slung arrays of incandescent lightbulbs that gave the place the look of a 1960s Route One used-car lot.
Any remaining doubt that the enemy had been alerted to this raid evaporated the instant Scorpion and his team got to see the compound up close. In addition to the lights, teams of soldiers wandered about in random pairs and trios, most with rifles slung, but enough with them at the ready that it was clear they’d been alerted to something.
But for all their nervousness, they’d forgotten the basic tenets of defense. By turning the center of the compound to day, they no doubt took solace that no one could sneak around the interior; but they’d rendered themselves blind to intruders’ approach from outside their perimeter. Even worse, the noise from the generator they used to create the light masked the intruders’ approach.
Jonathan and his team approached from the southwest corner of the compound, the one nearest the generator. Their location put them on the far side of the compound from the sleeping huts that lined the eastern perimeter. To their left, maybe forty feet away, sat the storage shed for the gasoline, while to their right, only twenty feet away, sat the enormous trailer-mounted electrical generator, which, to Jonathan’s surprise, was enclosed in a sticks-and-chicken-wire fence, the gate for which was on the eastern side. The enclosure contained all kinds of tools and equipment that apparently were of great enough value to warrant extra protection. To gain access through the gate would require Jonathan to expose his presence to the entire compound.
“Who the hell builds a fence around a generator?” Boxers whispered.
Jonathan eased quietly out of his rucksack and laid it on the ground to make himself smaller and quieter, then dug into the thigh pocket of his trousers and removed his Leatherman multipurpose tool, one of God’s greatest inspirations. Opening the tool, he folded back the handles and revealed the needle-nose pliers and wire snips. Out of another pocket of his ruck, he removed a coil of detonating cord, from which he removed a four-inch length with a slice of his KA-BAR. Then he cut the four-inch strip in half again. Yet another pocket produced two electronic initiators and a roll of black electrician’s tape.
“A grenade would be easier,” Boxers quipped.
And if they hadn’t needed a delay in knocking out the power, he might have done exactly that. As it was, stealth trumped everything. He made sure he had both their attentions when he said, “Keep an eye out, but don’t discharge your weapon unless there’s no other way.”
He got nods from them both, then went on with what he had to do. A distance of about twenty-five feet separated the periphery of the jungle from the nearest side of the fence. Pressing himself on his belly, as close to the ground as his vest and extra ammo would allow, Jonathan belly-crawled like a lizard through the open space, and then aligned himself with the wire wall, hoping that by keeping the lines of his body parallel to the lines of the fence he could remain invisible to all but those who would know what to look for.
He started at the bottom of the fence, peeling the lowest edge out of the ground to expose it. Using the snips on the Leatherman, he cut ten of the one-inch hexagonal links vertically, and then another ten across, forming a kind of sideways doggy-door for himself. He bent the snipped panel out of the way and rolled onto his back so that he could guide himself past the sharp edges of the mangled wire. He offered up a silent prayer of thanks for the thrumming noise of the generator to mask his activities.
Shoulders and head were always the most difficult. Pressing himself into the moist ground, he wrapped his leather-palmed fists over the sharp protrusions with his hands joined thumb-to-thumb above the bridge of his nose to protect his eyes. He flexed his knees, dug his heels into the ground, and pushed. Conditions cooperated, and with relatively little effort, the top half of his body was free and clear, inside the enclosure. From there, all he had to do was sit up and draw his feet in.
Jesus, it was bright in here. With light streaming in from every angle, there weren’t even any decent shadows to hide in. He moved quickly. Keeping low, he duck-walked past a collection of stacked buckets, funnels, troughs, stir poles, and piles of accumulated drums of diesel fuel to the generator, which itself was situated near the front gate. It was a monstrous old thing, about the size of a big desk on a trailer platform. His mind conjured images of the team of workers it must have taken to haul this bad boy all the way from the road to here; then he wondered if maybe they didn’t get help from a helicopter.
From here out, speed and luck would play a big role. He steadied himself on the unseen side of the generator, taking a deep breath through his nose and letting it go through his mouth. Then it was time to go.
At a deep crouch, he peeked to make sure no one was in the immediate vicinity, then swung himself around to the front of the machine and pulled open the front panel to reveal the controls. There were two basic parts of the machinery: the generator itself and the diesel engine that drove it. Each part got its own little bomb, the latter with a charge around the fuel line, and the former with a charge around the main outgoing electrical line. Det cord made the life of a demolition expert a piece of cake. All you had to do was insert the detonator and tape it around what you wanted to destroy. He was using radio-activated detonators tonight, but he’d used all kinds of initiators in the past, including OFF—old-fashioned fuse, the kind you see in cowboy movies where they light the bomb and throw it—and det cord had never once let him down.
“Someone’s coming your way,” Boxers’ voice said in his ear.
Jonathan dropped to his haunches and drew his .45. Two seconds later, he’d scooted back around to the far side of the generator and the limited shelter it offered.
With his back pressed to the noisy generator and his weapon at the ready, he pressed his mike button. “Did he see me?” Jonathan whispered.
The answer was slow in coming. “Hard to tell,” Boxers whispered. “He doesn’t seem spooked, but he’s by-God coming right this way. Maybe he needs to refuel the beast or something. He’s got an AK slung, but the muzzle’s down. I think we’re okay. Did you get done what you had to?”
Jonathan gave a thumbs-up, knowing that Boxers had an eyeball on him.
“Then get the fuck outta there and come back to daddy.” Of the choices available to him, that truly was the best one. Normally at night, the smart move was always to remain still when there was an increased likelihood of being seen because the human eye is much more sensitive to movement than to static objects; but when bathed with this much light, such nuances didn’t matter.
Still bent at the waist, Jonathan holstered his weapon and threaded his way back through the accumulated clutter and aimed for the hole he’d cut in the fence. Dropping to a push-up posture, he rolled over onto his back to inchworm back out into the night. His chest had just cleared the opening when Boxers hissed, “Stop, stop, stop. Abort. He’s going to be right on top of you. Shit.”
Jonathan froze. Without any cover now, he cranked his head to the left and then to the right, trying to eyeball the threat. And there he was: a uniformed soldier quick-walked into view from his right, making a beeline for him. Jonathan thought he was a dead man. He reached for his .45 and realized with a flash of horror that the small opening in the fence blocked his access to his weapon.
Shit indeed.
Only the soldier, it turned out, wasn’t heading for him, after all. The beeline he was making had nothing to do with Jonathan. It had everything to do with a need to urinate. Even as he passed within ten feet of Jonathan, the soldier was unzipping his fly and his eyes were trained on the shadows. The urgency in the soldier’s body language reminded Jonathan of a man who’d sat at the bar for one beer too many. Two seconds later, Jonathan heard a forceful stream being released into the jungle foliage, and you could almost feel the man’s sense of relief.
With the soldier’s back turned to him, Jonathan used the moment to drag himself the rest of the way through the hole in the fence. He rolled over and brought himself up to one knee just as the stream died away and the only remaining sound was the steady churn of the diesel engine.
As he’d feared, the soldier sensed the movement and turned to face it.
To call the soldier a man was to overstate it significantly, but like soldiers the world over, this teenager’s eyes showed lethal intent even as his face showed utter shock. His hand reached for the grip of his assault rifle.
Jonathan drew his Colt in an instant and leveled it at the kid’s forehead. They were close enough to each other that Jonathan could have counted the pulses in his neck. The kid froze, his shock turning to terror as Jonathan raised his left forefinger to his lips to signal for silence.
The soldier’s face was a mask of indecision as duty and obligation battled with survival and pragmatism. Jonathan could almost hear him deciding to be stupid. He shook his head to talk the kid out of it, but youthful resolve is a strong force to deal with.
As the soldier opened his mouth and took a breath to yell, Boxers’ enormous silhouette rose from the shadows behind him. Big Guy grabbed a fistful of the soldier’s hair and lifted him while at the same time thrusting his KA-BAR knife through the side of the kid’s neck. In half of a second, the blade severed both jugulars, both carotids, and the voice box. Amid a fan of blood spray, the soldier dropped without a sound. In less than a minute, he’d be dead.
Jonathan watched for a few seconds as the kid’s body struggled against the inevitable, and he offered up a silent apology. If there could have been a way to let him live, they would have; but it was the nature of war that sometimes you just wander into a place where you don’t belong. The price for doing so was always unspeakable.
 
 
Harvey watched in horror, swallowing the urge to vomit. It wasn’t the gore, or even the fact of the killing; it was the efficiency of it. He’d spent five years of his life in the company of professional Marines, three of those in a no-shit killing, shoot-’em-up war, so he was no stranger to the product of battle; but in the past, there had always been an element of hesitation, a humanizing sense of fear. Here, there was none of that. A young man strayed to where he’d no doubt strayed for the identical purpose hundreds of times, and he’d been dispatched with no more hesitation than if the same act had been perpetrated on a troublesome insect.
As the soldier bled out and the fountain of red subsided to a trickle, Boxers wiped his blade on the dead man’s trousers before sliding it back into its sheath. Harvey had no idea why he found that one gesture as horrifying as he did. Perhaps it was because he knew to a certainty that he would never be able to do such a thing himself. He understood now why the Big Guy didn’t want Harvey to be there: Hesitation was a sin that could cause others to die.
For Harvey, though, that meant that being human was a sin. If a moment of hesitation in taking a life triggered the loss of another life, was that so bad? Wasn’t it better than the alternative—to kill indiscriminately on the off chance that a bad guy might win?
Perhaps Boxers was right. Maybe it had been a huge mistake to invite Harvey along on this mission.
 
 
They caught a break at the gasoline shed. This structure had a front door and a back door, and Boxers was able to get in and out quickly while Jonathan and Harvey covered him without incident. While they waited, Jonathan used a ten-power monocular to examine the hut where they believed Evan Guinn to be imprisoned. He took in the blocked windows, and the single door that appeared to be secured with a sliding bolt and a garden-variety padlock that should be easy fodder for Boxers’ bolt cutters.
Far more troubling than the lock were the two guards who flanked the door holding their rifles at a loose port arms that telegraphed readiness to engage the enemy that they knew was on the way.
“I hope those guards take the bait when we start blowing things up,” he whispered to Harvey.
The other man made an odd grunting sound.
Jonathan pivoted his body to face him. “You okay?”
Harvey seemed to have aged a couple of years. “It’s just been a while.”
Jonathan nodded, showing none of the concern he felt for what he saw. “Just do your job,” he said. “You’re more about fixing people than breaking things, and that’s fine. Any luck at all, you won’t have to do anything but a lot of running.”
The door to the shed reopened, and Boxers emerged with a big grin. “I used five GPCs,” he reported. Jonathan recognized the acronym as general-purpose charges, Unit-speak for half-pound blobs of C4 explosives with a tail of detonating cord. “There’s three on the drums of gas and two on the building itself to make sure we get the most fire. I armed them all with initiators, but then I also daisy-chained the charges on the drums. We should get one hell of a show.” Daisy-chaining meant running a hefty length of det cord between the GPCs to form a train. The det cord would transmit the explosion from one charge to the other at a speed exceeding five thousand feet per second, with the result being a pressure wave that would significantly exceed the overpressure that the charges could produce individually.

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