Mexican Heat (Nick Woods Book 2) (43 page)

Chapter 4

Nick called a halt at 4
a.m. They needed to find a hide before dawn. The team gratefully stacked packs
against each other and left Truck with his big RPK machine gun to watch them.

Nick, Red, and Marcus
pulled out compasses and headed off in opposite directions to search for a good
position. The men had rehearsed this procedure back at base camp. One would go
toward twelve o’clock, one toward four o’clock, and one toward eight o’clock.
Dividing up would hopefully help them find the best position faster, plus give
them more information about their surroundings.

This search procedure was
just one of about two dozen SOP actions, or Standard Operating Procedures, that
the team had practiced hundreds of times. Hasty ambushes, break contact,
reaction to direct fire (and indirect fire), and countless other tactical
responses that might prove necessary.

They knew how each man
would react, they memorized where each man had stored every single item in each
pack, and they had discussed and rehearsed every contingency they could think
of.

Twenty minutes later, Red,
the last of the three, returned. They huddled in a circle and debated in
whispers who had found the best position in as low of tones as they could
speak. Truck kept his eyes outward while they discussed their finds.

In the end, they went with
Red’s position. He said he’d found a low spot in a gully between two draws. It
would barely be defensible, but had the benefit of being almost perfectly
hidden. Without another word, they broke the huddle, and the men slipped on
their packs for what they hoped would be the last time today. Well, at least
for another twelve hours.

Ten minutes later, Red
guided them into the place he’d found. Again, without a word, the team set up a
hide as they’d rehearsed. Packs were stashed facing outward and low nets were
pulled out and staked into the hard ground by boot heels -- the rubber was much
quieter than shovels.

Dawn found all four men
under the low net, alert. After it was confirmed they were secure, they began
two-man watches. Two on watch facing opposite directions, two sleeping.

Nick and Red took the
first watch, with Red looking down the hill and Nick looking uphill. Marcus and
Truck laid down to get some much needed rest and sleep.

Nick’s mind wouldn't stop
racing. He had followed one of the truest maxims in the military: the KISS
principle, or “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Yet as the team lay hidden
approximately 4.7 miles inside Pakistan, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d
gone overboard on the KISS principle. After all, the team had only made it
about three-quarters of the distance he’d planned for them to make.

Perhaps they should have
parachuted in. The CIA had offered to push them through an intense,
mission-specific four-week course, but Nick had ruled it out. It held too many
dangers, as it was hard to keep the team together. Gear often got separated.
Ankles sprained. Legs broken. As a general rule, Nick thought that if you had
to parachute in, you should find another way.

Yet there were other
options besides parachuting. They could have tried to take a 4x4 truck past the
Pakistani army. They could have taken money and tried to bribe their way
through a checkpoint, or snuck past sleeping guards. Option three, which Red
favored, was killing the guards and making it look like the Taliban had done
so. “And if that leads to some Paki-Tali killing afterward, so much the
better,” the short man scoffed with a sick grin.

They had also considered
silenced, souped-up four wheelers, but that brought up all kinds of possible
gear malfunctions, fuel requirements, and possible toolkit needs. Even studying
it for a few hours made Nick’s head spin with the possibilities of everything
that could go wrong.

Bottom line, Nick was used
to walking, and he’d walked into Afghanistan too many times to count back in
the day, so walking is what they’d do. And it’d be a hell of a lot of walking
before they were done.

Nick tried to shut his
mind down and focus on the ground up the hill, looking for any form of
movement. He had three of America’s greatest warriors with him, and they were
completely committed to one of the riskiest missions in the world. And in the
end, the boldness of the plan would either soar or come crashing down on top of
them.

Chapter 5

The various watches passed
without any major drama. Despite finally making it into a more heavily
populated area, the team’s resting position high up in the hills continued to
go unnoticed. It was clear that this far into Pakistan, the Taliban had little
to no concern about using the roads and open areas as they pleased. And if
there was any fear of coalition forces, either air or ground, it certainly
didn't show.

All throughout the day the
team observed loads of beat-up cars, a couple farm tractors, and lots of foot
traffic pass on the road below. Still no one stopped to even glance up into the
hills. The Taliban's confidence must have been contagious as it appeared that
even the everyday man had no reason to question their safety.

Dusk approached, and
Marcus passed out another eight hundred milligram round of ibuprofen. Nick
motioned for the men to crawl closer under the net.

“Alright, guys,” he
whispered, “tonight we make up for the fact that we’ve covered so little ground
today. Red, I want you to step it out, just like it’s an all-out hump.”

Red raised his eyebrows,
giving Nick an apprehensive look.

Nick stopped him before he
could say a word.

“Look,” Nick said, “all
day long we’ve been here, and we’ve seen that nobody is paying attention. And
we’ve also seen that nobody is moving this high up the hill. While we needed to
move slow last night, close to the border, our chances of running into anybody
tonight are slim.”

Nick turned his attention
to Truck.

“If your knee can’t take
the faster pace, let me know. We’ll slow it down, or even steal a vehicle if we
have to.”

The big man nodded.

Nick met each man’s eyes
and asked if there were any questions.

Clenching jaws and
fidgeting hands were the only response he got. No, there were no questions
about the plan. Questions about how the hell they were going to pull this
mission off, however, they had those in surplus.

Nick was right there with
them. His back and legs were no more improved from the rest. The cover they
camped under during the daylight hours was no match for the malicious summer
sun. Their water supply was being consumed at an alarming rate and then
unavoidably being sweated back out almost twice as fast.

Nothing you can do about
it right now, Nick. Just got to keep moving.

As soon as they were
cloaked in the night’s dark, Nick helped his team to tear down and stow the
netting, wishing he could stow his worries away just as easily.

That night, they pushed
harder than the previous night. Now with the realization that the Taliban
wasn’t looking for foreign troops, they were able to move faster. They crossed
deep gullies, angled draws, and steep fingers. They walked as fast as the
terrain allowed, trudging, slipping, and cursing when it worked against them.

Several times they paused
for possible sightings, and Red and Nick would scan the area with their night
vision goggles (NVGs), but each time proved to be a false alarm. Before
daybreak, they scouted for a hide, then assembled their nets to lay under.

And for four more days
they followed this pattern. Push hard at night, stop with enough time to scout
a hide, then attempt to physically recover in the day under camouflage cover.
Each night they covered 4.0 to 5.0 miles.

Nick lay under the net
around noon on the seventh day, keeping watch and feeling like the day was
creeping by slower than a single drip could fill a barrel. Now taking stock of
their situation, Nick saw that there were more problems than solutions. The
heat was burning them in more ways than one. The massive supply of water they
had lugged in seemed to be evaporating before their eyes, and the sun
relentlessly drained what little energy they had left.

To make things worse, that
hellish, oven-like temperature was keeping them from getting the sleep they so
desperately needed. The four men of Shield, Safeguard, and Shelter looked
rough, to say the least.

Their bodies reeked, and
their clothes were filthy, ripped, and stained. Nick figured he had lost more
than ten pounds, and he really didn’t have ten pounds to lose. The sweat, the
sleep deprivation, and the inability to keep up his muscle mass from a diet now
solely comprised of dried fruits and meats -- all had sapped his body and
knocked him down from his optimum operating condition.

Any more than three more
days of this, and Nick knew the men would arrive gaunt and weak. Like men who
had survived a hundred-mile march. Granted, their forty miles didn’t come close
to that, but with the crushing amount of gear they had to carry and their need
to be alert -- not a day passed when their adrenaline didn’t spike three or
four times from some false alarm -- it might as well have been.

And it wasn’t like they’d
arrive to their destination and be greeted by a finish line, cheering
supporters, and plenty of rest. Instead, they’d arrive and be forced to fight
and make perfect split-second decisions, or they’d all be dead within hours
after firing the first shot.

Besides the exhaustion,
Nick also knew they were all increasingly banged up. A twisted ankle here, a
throbbing knee there, and that didn’t take into account the bumps, scrapes, and
bruises each had collected in spades.

Nick realized his plans to
cover the distance on foot had erred on what their conditioning could endure.
Sure, they were in the top three or four percent of athletes in the world in
terms of physical conditioning, but the mission required more than Nick had
ever dreamed when he drew it up on paper.

The terrain -- the ups and
downs, the slanted slopes, the loose rocks, the requirement to only move at
night -- all had slowed them down and made Nick and Marcus’s conservative
estimates on distance per night seem like a naive, unrealistic wager made by
some drunk and desperate gambler on the Las Vegas strip.

S3 would reach their
objective, and they’d be ready to fight, but it was going to be pretty ugly.
And that was best case.

Chapter 6

Disaster struck on the
following night, just three days away from their destination. It was as if
Nick’s fears had cast a line baited for trouble, and then caught a whole school
of it. Actually, loads of it.

The four men had barely
covered a mile in the dark when Red, ahead on point, signaled for a halt
mid-stride.

Nick watched as the little
man’s body went completely rigid then slowly inched downward. Attempting to
silently crouch with nearly one-hundred pounds of gear working against you was
no small feat.

As soon as the bottom of
his water jug brushed the ground, Red released it and used his hands to help
him take a knee without pitching forward under the weight. Without even looking
to Nick for instruction, Red lowered all the way prone while keeping his gaze
locked ahead of him.

He didn’t even bother to
take his pack off. Going prone with that kind of crushing burden was never
something you did by choice.

Nick, in the second
position, froze. He moved as slow as he could and passed the signal back to
Truck and Marcus in the rear of the formation. Red remained motionless for
nearly three minutes, which felt more like three hours in the quiet, night air.

Red’s behavior was so
uncharacteristic that Nick avoided moving at all. With the way Red was acting,
any sound could be devastating. Finally, Red pushed himself up. He lifted the
water jug as if it was full of unstable explosives, and tip-toed backward. His
other hand kept his AK-47 pointing straight ahead, and he refused to turn his
back on whatever he had seen.

The team moved backward,
covering each other in bounds, until they were a couple hundred yards away from
danger. The team circled up, and Nick leaned down by Red.

“What’d you see?” Nick
asked.

“Enemy troops,” Red said.

“Taliban?”

“Couldn’t tell. Saw a
silhouette coming toward me. Thought he saw me, then heard the sound of water
hitting the ground. He was pissing.”

Nick considered the
situation. Was it one man? Or more? He needed more information.

“Leave your pack and go
scout forward,” Nick whispered. The team staged their packs and set up a quick
perimeter, while Red dropped his pack, slung his AK-47, and pulled out a
silenced Glock .45.

It took thirty minutes for
Red to return, far longer than Nick preferred.

“We’re fucked,” Red said,
dropping to the ground.

He looked exhausted as he
guzzled from his CamelBak. Nick waited, and looked around their small
perimeter. Truck faced their front in the prone, lying behind his RPK machine
gun and its extended bipod legs. Marcus monitored their rear, while their gear
sat stacked in the center of their ten-foot perimeter.

Red and Nick lay huddled
among the packs, keeping a low profile. Nick wondered how many men it’d take to
spook Red. The crazy little Marine had never shown an ounce of fear as far as
Nick knew.

Red stopped drinking and
collected himself. Nick saw his face take on a stern look in the rays of
moonlight shining through a mostly clear night.

“We’ve got a
battalion-sized element of Pakistani troops right in front of us,” Red
reported.

“What?” Nick said. “That’s
impossible.”

“I would have thought so,
too, but go check for yourself.”

Nick chewed on the news.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“I’m certain,” Red said,
nodding. “They’re broken up and spread out all over the hill. Straight ahead
there’s about a platoon-sized element, cooking fires and all. They’re mostly
bedded up, but some of the men are still hanging around the fires,
bullshitting. Tried moving up the hill to see if we could go around them.
Walked nearly half a mile up it. Troops as far as you could see.”

Nick sat there, stunned.

“I turned around,” Red
continued, “moved down the hill back to my starting position, then walked half
a mile down from there. Same thing. Troops as far as you can see. There’s
probably an entire battalion on that finger ahead.”

“A thousand troops?” Nick
asked, shaking his head with disbelief. They had studied satellite images prior
to their departure, and the entire region had been clear of Pakistani troops,
except at the border.

Nick tried to calm
himself. “Are they in blocking positions? Facing this way or the other
direction? Like they’re looking for someone? Or maybe looking for us?”

“No way,” Red said.
“They’re all completely unprofessional. No fighting positions. Guys horseplaying,
singing, cooking shit over fires. But they’re there. No going around them.”

Nick processed the
information. The good news was the battalion didn’t seem to be looking for
anybody, especially Nick’s group. If they were, they’d be tactical: patrolling,
looking, hiding.

That was the good news.
The bad news, as Red had stated, was that there was no getting around them.
Nick pulled the poncho liner over his head and used his red-lens flashlight to
study the map. He wanted to confirm his suspicions. Unfortunately, his
suspicions had been right on the money. The satellite imagery showed a hell of
a number of cliffs and drop-offs farther up the hill top in this area.

Nick’s team would need
mountain climbing gear to ascend the peak and move to the other side, which was
a complete no go. They lacked the gear, and it was far too dangerous in the
dark when they hadn’t prepped for it.

Nick stayed under the
poncho liner longer than necessary. He needed to think, and he for damn sure
needed to come up with a solution. Fast.