Echo Platoon (29 page)

If the sniper log was accurate, there’d be three Japs in the comms shed, and two pair of bad guys on roving security details. The good news was that the security detail stayed well within the perimeter fence line. So we were talking about a total of twenty-three bad guys. I asked if anybody’d seen any Ivans, and Hammer said the answer was no—they all looked like your typical full-bearded Shiite mujahideen. Not a single Ivan among ’em.

That meant sixteen easy targets for me and my squad, all tucked into their beds in the dorm unit,
dreaming whatever sorts of nasty dreams that tangos dream. And while my squad did the fish-in-a-barrel number on the sixteen sleepers, Randy’s shooters would take care of neutralizing the remaining seven.

Prisoners? You want to know about prisoners? Okay, that’s simple: there would be none. I expected 100 percent enemy casualties tonight.

0127. My guys and I started moving south. The most important element of any night attack is noise discipline. Sound seems to carry farther at night than it does during daylight hours. In fact, it doesn’t—it just appears to. The reason is because with eyesight diminished by the darkness, your hearing becomes enhanced. And so, we’d made sure that every bit of our gear was tied or taped down. I didn’t want mags rattling, or weapons clacking.

To make doubly sure I for one wouldn’t make any noise, I was working barefoot tonight. Now, don’t try this at home, friends, because you’ll tear the soles of your feet into bloody shreds. But the skin on the bottom of my size-ten-extra Rogue feet is tougher and more durable than what you’ll find on most hiking boots. Remember that when I served my year in the Petersburg, Virginia, Federal Bad Boys’ Camp and Mayoral Blow Job Facility in 1990, I used to run six miles a day, every fucking day, rain, shine, heat, cold, snow, ice, or fog, on the camp’s six-laps-to-the-mile cinder track. Yeah—every single fucking day. And I ran barefoot. Oh, I bled like hell for the first two weeks. And then, my feet got tougher and tougher. By the time they released me, the half inch of callus on the bottom of my feet made ’em as hard and durable as the Vibram sole of a running shoe or a hiking boot. Even today, I seldom wear shoes when I’m out running the hundreds
of acres of woods at Rogue Manor. Sure, there are thorns and thistles and sharp-edged rocks, but they don’t bother me. In fact, I can move through the fucking woods as silently as any stealthy Algonquin, Iroquois, or Mohawk in a James Fenimore Cooper or Charles Brockden Brown novel.

I cut through a natural defilade that ran for perhaps two hundred yards, then emerged onto a long, wide, open field strewn with huge rocks and short, dry brush. When you move at night, you have to make the terrain work for you. Give the enemy nothing. Use the darkness as a friend: no silhouettes, skylines, or quick, jerky moves that attract attention. I like to have bow hunters in my units, because bow hunters learn young how to move so as not to disturb the game as they get into position.

Now the going got slow. I worked my way from cover to cover, keeping myself as low as I could, providing no S-3, which stands for shadow, shine, or silhouette. We were spaced out at eight- to ten-yard intervals, with Timex providing rear security, and Hammer just in front of him, sweeping the area in front of me with the night-vision sight of his suppressed sniper’s rifle to make sure I didn’t run into any surprises.

I’d made it to within a hundred yards of the perimeter fence when I heard a
“tsk-tsk”
in my left ear. I froze where I was, which was prone, just beyond an irregular pool of light from one of the security lamps, lying half in the shadow of a rock and half out.

I lay there for eight, nine, ten seconds, not breathing. Listening. And then the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up as I heard the crunch of boots on ground, approaching from my left. The sound was followed by the scent of cigarette smoke, garlic, and
b.o. I guess that meant the enemy had arrived. So much for roving security patrols keeping inside the perimeter fence.

I dropped my face into the crook of my arm, so no light reflected by my eyes would betray me. I e-a-s-e-d the muzzle of my MP5 alongside my temple, so it could be brought up with almost no effort. And then I lay, as inert as a corpse, and waited, my heart beating a loud tattoo in my ears.

Why? Because I didn’t want to have to kill this asshole. Not now. Not yet. We were still way outside the fence line, and dispatching him, as pleasurable as it might be, given my mood and the way the day had gone, would give away the fact that hostile visitors—i.e., us—had come a-calling. More to the point, it is mainly in Hollywood pictures that up-close-and-personal killing is accomplished sans any noise whatsoever. In real life there is always the possibility of ambient sound—a body collapsing onto the ground; the chance that the kill won’t be completely silent and your target will manage one bloody scream; or the sudden appearance of Mister Murphy (or one of his damn relatives) to gum up the situation.

And so, I lay there and waited. Because I knew that unless this asshole had night vision, or thermal, or he was an accomplished fucking hunter, he wouldn’t see me, even if he looked right at me.

Why? Because at night, you don’t see the same way you do in daylight. In daylight, you look directly at an object to see it. That’s because you use the cone cells of your eyes, which are concentrated in the center of the retina. At night, you use the rod cells, which are grouped around the cones. I’ve taught my guys that at night, they should never look directly at anything. Instead, they
should skew their vision by about the width of a human fist. And by doing that, they’ll see their enemy before their enemy sees them.

But not everyone knows that trick. Obviously, the tango who was out for a stroll didn’t know it. Moreover, his night vision was spoiled by the cigarette he was smoking. So he ambled on past, oblivious to
moi,
and got to live for a few more minutes, enjoying what would probably be his last cigarette.

0201. Fifty-nine minutes until Show Time. I lay up against the chain-link fence in the partial shadow between the security lights, fumbling for the wire cutters in my fanny pack. And fumbling. And fumbling. In point of fact, I could have fumbled all fucking night, because the fucking wire cutters weren’t in my fanny pack. Where were they? you ask. Good question. Ask Mister Murphy, because I knew goddam well I’d stowed ’em there when I’d loaded my gear in Baku.

It took me six minutes to wriggle and slither my way back to where the rest of the squad lay behind cover, only to discover that I was the one fella carrying the wire cutters tonight.

Now the Naval Special Warfare technical term for what’s just happened is “goatfuck.” Why? Because redundancy is supposed to be built into every mission. Put simply, if I get killed, my men have to be able to complete the mission, and they can’t do that if I’m the OFACWC—only fucking asshole carrying wire cutters.

But I was the OFACWC tonight. So doom on me, because now we were nine minutes behind the schedule that was scrolling in my head.

And we were still outside the fence.

But not for long. I silent-signaled that we’d go up and over the top. I pulled off my flak jacket. I’d use it to go around the coil of razor wire. I looked at Nod and mimed a slingshot. Nod gave me an upturned thumb, patted himself down, then reached into his left-hand cargo pocket and displayed a slingshot and a bag of ball bearings. He made the return trip with me, lay on his back, and shot out the closest security light with his first shot. At least some things were working tonight.

Have I ever told you to never think like that? Well, never think like that. Because when you assume everything’s going right, then something will always go wrong.

Because just as I was giving Nod a big grin for his job well done, I heard a quick
tsk-tsk-tsk
in my ear. So did Nod. We froze—because that triplet was the trouble signal. We lay on our backs, trying to become invisible in the darkness. That was when I heard the crunch of approaching boot-falls on the gravel, coming from just inside the perimeter fence.

They slowed, then stopped. I didn’t dare look, because looking would mean motion and motion is what gives you away. But the hair on the back of my neck was standing as fucking straight as it ever had when my body is telling me I am in extremis. And then, the footsteps began again. Slowly. Deliberately. Evenly. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. And then I heard the sound of a boot sole stepping on broken glass.

That’s because Mister Murphy had made the fucking security lamp lens fall inside the fence.

The footsteps stopped. In my mind’s eye I could see him, bending over, looking for what had caused that disparate sound.

I heard intake of breath as he realized something was wrong. And then, a soft
thwop,
as if someone had punched a pillow in the next room, and then the very welcome muffled sound of BCOD—body crumpling onto the deck.

No time to lose. I looked over to where the sentry had fallen. He was still clutching some kind of automatic weapon in his lifeless hand. I scrambled to my feet, clambered up the chain-link fence, molded my flak jacket over the sharp coils of razor wire, rolled over the top with the practiced motion of someone who’s done this exercise hundreds of times before, and dropped down the eight or nine feet to the ground.

Directly onto a sharp, sharp stone about the size of a tennis ball. Yes, my feet have half an inch of callus. But sharp is sharp, and big is big, this one caught me right at the forward part of the arch, at the precise pressure point Chinese martial artists call
hsing hsüan.
A properly executed strike at
hsing hsüan
causes immediate spasm and loss of mobility. And since I execute nothing improperly, I fucked myself up but good.

I did not pass GO. I did not collect the two hundred fucking dollars. I went straight to PAIN. I collapsed as if I’d been sucker-punched. The fucking spasm shot up my leg, radiating from the arch of my foot, through my Achilles tendon, all the way up past my knee, into the semitendinous muscle at the base of my butt. I couldn’t straighten my fucking leg out. I just lay there, the cap of my knee touching my chin, in perfect, complete, God-given agony.

Nod was the first to get to me. He uncoiled my leg and pushed me down on the ground until I was stretched out on my back. Then he began to work the
muscles and tendons in my leg. I looked up through unfocused eyes and saw Boomerang arrive. He took up a defensive position close to the body of the man Hammer had sniped. Then Duck Foot came over the fence, followed by Timex and Gator, who held his position long enough to retrieve Hammer’s big MSG90 sniper rifle so my sniper-man could climb up and drop down unharried.

Enough of this shit. I sat up and tried to massage the spasm out of my foot. But it wasn’t going anywhere. So I stood up, planted it on the ground—
hard!
—and grimaced, because the fucking thing still contained a big knot of absolute white-hot pain.

Which, of course, was precisely when the cigarette-smoking asshole who’d been patrolling the outside of the fence decided to make his repeat appearance.

We heard him before we saw him, because he started shouting at us in Farsi or whatever. I turned toward the sound. The sumbitch was coming from the gully we’d used, his AK up to his shoulder, the muzzle waving vaguely in our direction. Obviously he saw motion. But since the security lights were pointed outward, and we were in darkness maybe 150, 160 yards from where he was, he didn’t know what he was looking at. All he knew was that we shouldn’t be where we were, and he was gonna check us out.

Gator swung the fourteen-pound semiauto sniper rifle up to his shoulder, dropped into his half-crouch MP5 position, stuck the muzzle through the chain-link fence, squinted into the ten-power night-vision sight, flicked the safety downward, and squeezed off three quick shots.

No, he’s not a sniper, but he’s a shooter—and he hits what he shoots at, even with an unfamiliar piece
of hardware that was sized for Hammer’s big frame. The first shot kicked up rock fragments just above the tango’s left shoulder. The second and third shots scored—the bad guy went down, knocked back as if he’d been punched, but still moving. Now, his target immobilized, Gator took his time, and holding the big rifle rock-steady, got a match-quality cheek mold and put a fourth shot into the Jap’s head, exploding it like a fucking melon.

I gave the kid a look that told him he’d just done great work. But there was no time for further Bravo Zulus. We had to move our butts.

0212. Let me pause here long enough to tell you about a highly important element of unconventional warfare. It is keeping quiet during the infil. Noise discipline is critical. You can’t go up to a target making a ruckus, because if you do, the bad guy will hear you coming, and he will wax your ass before you can wax his ass. Now, I see you out there, protesting that what I’ve just said is such basic common sense I didn’t need to say it. But you are mistaken. Even the best of us violates noise discipline from time to time. And so, as you make your approach, you must ensure that it is wholly silent, hushed, and quiet. No crunching of gravel. No stepping on twigs or leaves. No whispering. No nothing.

Now, that kind of technique takes time. You cannot just run up to the target, because running ain’t silent. And so, we’d have to move slowly, cautiously, prudently, as we made our way across a wide, open graveled area, toward the long side of the L.

The larger of the two structures had a makeshift deck/porch about ten feet wide, running its entire length. There were two doors on the long side of the
L
, one door on the short side, and no windows. I hadn’t been able to tell from the surveillance photograph, since the entire structure was under one roof. But now, I could see that the two sides of the L were not attached. That was good news, because it’s easier—less complicated—to hit a pair of targets simultaneously than work your way through a long, double target, especially when you do not know what the interior layout looks like.

Last, between the perimeter fence and the structures, just shy of the seven o’clock position, was that big, tractor trailer–size corrugated steel container that, from the surveillance pictures, I’d concluded the bad guys used as their armory and equipment stowage facility. It would offer us protection and cover, and so we’d stage there, then go hit the motherfuckers.