Tengu (26 page)
My brother squinted at me, hands on his hips. There’s an old picture of my father in just that pose, standing in the desert outside of Las Vegas on some long-forgotten business trip. Children seek to create their own sound in the world, only to discover in part that they are echoes. “Buddy boy,” Micky said to me, “since we were kids, you have been nothing but a pain in my ass.” But there was a smile playing on his lips.
“Like you’re any better, Mick,” Art retorted. “Connor, I could tell you stories that would curl your hair . . . ”
“Well, I just want you to know . . . ” I began lamely, but then my voice petered out. It wasn’t just that I was unsure of how to explain things; there was a funny tight sensation in the back of my throat.
Art smiled tightly. We were all trying to keep it light. “This is what we do, Connor. You, too, I suppose . . . ”
“In your own, really weird way,” Micky added.
Ueda emerged from the warehouse and Art opened the door to the SUV. The black duffels were stacked neatly in the back. He reached in and patted one. The armament inside gave a little dull clink in response.
“Have gun, will travel,” he told me, and winked.
“Run this by me again,” Cooke said in exasperation. The new arrivals sat across the briefing table looking tense, their faces washed out in the fluorescent light of the briefing room, their expressions ludicrously serious. “I mean you have got to be kidding!” The noise of helicopters cycling up over the steel mesh landing pad robbed his tone of some of its intensity.
The alert had come in late that morning: a cryptic radio message to Aguilar from Brigade to suit up and prepare for a mission. Details were sketchy.
They always are
, Cooke thought—other than the team could go at any time, there were multiple hostages involved and it would be what was politely termed “a contested insertion.” But someone had neglected to tell them where. Cooke looked at his Filipino counterpart and they both rolled their eyes and got to work. Aguilar and his troopers always had a go-pack ready for short-alerts like this. They drew ammunition, water, and rations, checked their rucksacks, and settled down for one of the truly difficult things in professional soldiering: the enervating experience of waiting.
Cooke watched the soldiers go about their duties. He noted that his people—
Aguilar’s people
, he corrected himself—moved quickly, but didn’t rush. There was a certain underlying excitement among the troops, but no real tension that he could see. As the day wore on, the soldiers talked quietly or slept, propped up against their rucksacks in the shade. Cooke grunted in satisfaction: they had become real soldiers. He wished that Barnes and Abruzessi could have seen this, but they had been redeployed to work with other teams.
Aguilar said that someone from Manila would be down to give them the briefing. Cooke snorted at that:
Manila
. He hoped that their intel was up-to-date; he’d been dropped into more empty places because of old intelligence than he cared to think about. What was worse than that was landing in a hot zone when you hadn’t expected it. The insertion could play either way. Nobody down here had a high opinion of the counter-terrorist people in the capital. When the strings were being pulled in Manila, the operational end of things was always made more perilous. They weren’t in real good touch with things on the ground down here. The old joke was that you needed a passport to travel from Manila to Mindanao—they were in the same country but a world apart.
That was bad, but Cooke also sweated the local angle. Operational security was always a problem. It was hard for the locals not to get a fix on what was going on at the base. Like their American allies, the Filipino military had outsourced many of the non-combat functions to contractors. The place was alive with civilians —truck drivers, cooks, maintenance people—and it leaked like a sieve. Cooke hated to bring it up to Aguilar—the Filipino officer took it personally—but it was a fact.
On top of all these concerns, when the briefing party arrived from Manila, they had turned out to be a grab-bag group of comedians spinning him a story that was so convoluted he could barely believe it. But their identities had been verified, and the information they brought tallied up just enough with what he knew already to make it all seem possible. Just barely.
He sighed, tapped the topographical map spread out in front of them, and compared the GPS notations on the satellite imagery they’d brought with them. “This stuff is how old?” he asked the Filipino.
“Two days,” the Inspector told Cooke. Reyes looked to him like someone who once had known his stuff but had grown thick and slow behind a desk somewhere and now resented having his considerable girth yanked out from behind it. He might have been one of those people who was generally pissed at the world. One thing was for sure, however: he was really pissed now.
“What makes you think this is where the hostages are being held,” Cooke pressed. “We’ve been humping a ruck all over these hills for months. There’s more of these little camps than you can count. You scrub one and two more pop up within days.” He looked skeptically at the cop from Manila.
“We know the general location where the woman—the first victim—was taken,” Reyes explained, “here in Mindanao. We,” his eyes flickered at the guy from the Jap consulate, and Cooke noted the tension between the two men, even as the Inspector continued. “We have traced the links between the ransom go-betweens in Manila and the terrorists holding them.”
“How’d you manage that?” Cooke asked. He didn’t think much of the Philippine cops. He’d seen too much corruption down here. Then again, he hadn’t thought much of Aguilar and his men when he first started to work with them. Maybe Reyes had something.
The cop from up north drew his chin back into his neck and took a deep breath through his nose. He seemed like he either didn’t want to explain or he couldn’t.
The Jap leaned toward Cooke. “We were able to utilize some . . . assets I had in place, Sergeant,” he said smoothly. “The details are not as important as the fact that we’ve established a chain of association that provides actionable intelligence for you. I believe that the Lieutenant’s brigade commanders have confirmed this for you? And you have been asked to cooperate, yes?”
Cooke didn’t much care for the Jap. He was a little too smooth and a little too sure of his standing. Cooke had seen guys like this fly in from various places at different duty stations, all laptop computers and models and certainty. They were all too smug for Cooke’s taste.
No one’s dropping you into a hot LZ any time soon, I’ll
bet
. But he looked at the Jap impassively; he was an old hand at hiding his feelings.
Cooke shook his head and continued. “Not enough. How’d you come up with this particular location? There are scores of these camps. Probably five more within a fifty klick radius.”
Again, Cooke noted the hostile glances that darted between Reyes and the Jap.
These guys are working together, but clearly not by
choice
. He sat up a little straighter, squared his wide shoulders, and looked around. The guys from the States were not saying much. Cooke shook his head and eyed Aguilar, who was sitting with him. “I wouldn’t authorize anything until I get a better explanation. Your men are too valuable to waste on some wild goose chase, Lieutenant.”
The Philippine lieutenant nodded. He looked at Reyes for an explanation. The Inspector was still glaring at the Jap.
Two of them were cops: Art Pedersen and Micky Burke. But it was the other Burke named Connor who spoke.
“Tell him, Ueda,” the American said.
The Jap named Ueda lifted his eyebrows a little and smirked. “When the original ransom drop was arranged, we were . . . ” He paused and looked at the Americans. Cooke thought he saw a shadow of something—guilt? —flit across his eyes.
Ueda paused, then began anew. “The ransom bag was fitted with a small GPS unit and transmitter. Since there might be a possibility that the money could be separated from the person carrying it, we surgically implanted a similar device under his skin. The device is the size of a grain of rice. It is highly unlikely that it would be discovered.”
The smaller American cop with the white patch in his hair commented acidly, “Figures. Now I know how you ran down that guy so quick.”
Ueda looked at him without expression.
“What happened?” Cooke’s voice was flat, his expression stolid. He didn’t have an emotional investment in the question: he was just looking for information.
“The transmitter has a limited range—perhaps twenty kilometers,” Ueda explained. “The . . . ” he paused and looked at Inspector Reyes, “complications at the ransom delivery permitted them to abduct our representative. By the time we were able to begin tracking, he was out of range.”
“So?” Cooke was not letting up.
The Inspector leaned forward and interjected with some acid in his voice, “With our recent discoveries—provided almost too late by our friends at the Japanese consulate, I may add—we were able to request a low-level flight over suspected areas in this vicinity. As a result, we now have a fix on their location.” He nodded at Aguilar in reassurance.
“Look,” Connor Burke broke in, “the important thing is that we’re running against a seventy-two hour deadline, and we’re already . . . ” he looked at his watch, but one of the cops—he had the same last name and they looked like they were related—beat him to it.
“We’ve already burned twenty hours, Connor,” the cop said.
The man named Connor nodded and looked at Cooke. “We’ve got about two days to get the hostages back. So can we save the explanations for later?” There was strident urgency in his voice. Too much emotion for Cooke’s liking. Personal involvement was not an asset in his line of work.
The big sergeant looked at the map again. He pursed his lips. “This is cutting it close.” He looked at Aguilar, who nodded in agreement. Cooke turned to Inspector Reyes. “Are we sure they’re not moving them around?”
Ueda started to answer, but Reyes overrode him. “Our best information suggests that they are remaining in this location. They consider it very secure.”
Cooke examined the map closely. “This is Indian Country, all right. Other side of Mount Apo, here.” His big index finger touched a site. The fingernail was discolored by a recent injury. “Twenty-eight hundred klick peaks. A few logging roads for access, but this is roller-coaster land. You’re gonna slog up one ridge only to slog down another. Then start all over.” He scrutinized contours on the map and details from the satellite imagery. “The site they’ve got is hard up along the coastline. Narrow band of rocks and beach with the mountains jumping right up. Makes it hard to take from the water.” He traced a road. “Even here, you’ve got maybe ten klicks . . . ”
“What’s a click?” the one named Connor asked.
“Kilometer,” the bigger American cop, Art, told him quietly.
“Ten klicks of mountain to negotiate,” Cooke continued. “It means we should be at this point no later than noon tomorrow if we want to reach the camp by dawn the next day.”
“That’s cutting it too close,” Connor exclaimed. “Can’t we just use the helicopters?”
Cooke looked up at him. “You ever do this kind of thing before, Mister?” His eyes were hard. “Ever rappel down ninety feet of rope from a swaying chopper carrying eighty pounds of gear, hopin’ no one shoots your balls off before you get to the ground? Huh?” The American looked down and Cooke continued. “I didn’t think so.”
“They’ll hear us coming, Connor,” Art explained. He saw Cooke’s expression and answered the unspoken question. “I’ve done this before, Sergeant.”
The Special Forces trooper wasn’t mollified. He looked around at the group. “Then you should know better. We gotta get a few things straight, gentlemen. You need help and we can give it. But it’s going to have to be on our terms. Because we’re the best chance you’ve got of salvaging even a piece of what is one of the most truly fucked up situations I have ever encountered.”
“Okay, Cooke, we’re clear,” the smaller cop said, simultaneously laying a restraining hand on Connor’s arm.
The soldier pushed himself up and jerked his head to Aguilar, who followed him from the briefing table. The two men conferred in a corner of the room. Then Aguilar left, calling to a corporal, while Cooke approached the table once more.
“Okay. First things first. We’ll insert tomorrow morning at this point along this logging road.” The men at the table stood to get a better view of the details on the map. “We move inland toward the site. With any luck, we’ll be in place before nightfall. Optimum time for a strike is around three a.m. Backup plan is for dawn. Either way, we’re in for some hard soldiering. We can probably get you people to a forward ops base at the insertion point to monitor . . . ”
“Sergeant Cooke,” Ueda interrupted. The soldier looked right at him. “The security issues are such that we are authorized to accompany you.”
“Bullshit!”
Ueda smiled. “Perhaps so. But this is essentially a Filipino operation and the arrangements have been approved. Perhaps you should check with the Lieutenant . . . ”
Cooke stomped off and returned some twenty minutes later. He seemed bigger and blacker and more intense than he had before. He shot them all a look of pure disgust. “You people are baggage. Understand? You fall off or fall behind, I’m not stopping to come back for you.” He glared around the table. “You got weapons?” They nodded. It hardly seemed to mollify him. “Any experience with air assault tactics?”
Ueda nodded.
“Where?” Cooke demanded.
“Hostage Rescue Training at Quantico. Two years ago.”
Cooke looked around for new victims. “How about you,” he asked the big American named Art, who nodded. “How long ago?”
Art looked sheepish. “Too long,” he admitted.
“Too long—what’s that mean?” Cooke snapped. “You’re workin’ on stuff twenty years old if it’s a day. And you?” he said, turning on Connor.
“None.”
Cooke got right up into Connor’s face. “None? What makes you so all-fire eager to do this then? You special? Or just stupid.”