Echo Platoon (31 page)

Time to move. I backed away. Boomerang took point. Now it was his turn. He didn’t bother making nice-nice. He started with the Mark 3A2. Pulled it from his vest, pitched it into the door he’d just kicked in, then dropped onto the deck. The earth moved once more, and the laws of physics prevailed, proving that TNT can be hazardous to human flesh.

0312. We mopped up. You can take that simple declarative sentence literally, because there wasn’t much left of the opposition except for lots of small, bloody chunks of skin and bone and flesh. We’d managed to go through ’em like the proverbial shit through pig. But there was no time for high-fiving now. We began working at a double-time pace to sort through the camp, assess the situation, grab all the intel we could lay our hands on, set the explosives, and then haul our butts down to the sea at flank speed.

While the guys are doing their jobs, let me nutshell the most important thing I discovered. It was that the tangos we’d waxed were either the stay-behind force or the terrorists who hadn’t been assigned their targets yet.

How did I understand that? Well, by looking over the clothes, supplies, equipment, as well as the creature features, bunks, and other accoutrements. All the signs I read told me that as recently as a week ago, this camp had been home to at least twice the number who were currently lying dead.

Couple that info-shard with the materials I’d discovered in Steve Sarkesian’s office, as well as the fact that he and his foundation were tied in with Ali
Sherafi and Oleg Lapinov, and I got real worried, real fast.

Moreover, the bad guys had made our lives difficult before they’d died. These hadn’t been pussy-assed opponents who’d provided only token resistance. They’d fought with determination—and they’d extracted a high price for riding the magic carpet to Allah’s side.

My left arm was virtually useless. I could hardly make my fingers obey my brain—which indicated some sort of nerve damage—and the dull constant pain between my wrist and elbow told me I’d jammed the bone in some new way. Boomerang could probably use a dozen stitches to close the nasty gash above his eyebrows. And if I’d had a staple gun, I’d have used it on the two inches of my right cheek that ran right up to the ear.

But all that was superficial compared to Rodent, who’d taken a round through the chest, and was bleeding the kind of bright red blood that told me he’d been shot through the lung. Yes, he’d been wearing his bulletproof vest. But the shot had hit him at an oblique angle at the armhole, ricocheted off a bone, gone into his chest, and punched out the back through the scapula. Digger and Nigel had stabilized him as well as could be done. They’d filled the tough little SEAL with morphine, inserted an IV, packed the wounds, started the procedures that would, I hoped, keep him alive. Then they’d improvised a litter so Rodent could be carried out. But once we got back to Baku, Rodent would be heading straight for the military hospital at Rhine Main for major surgery and who knows what else. As much as I wanted to believe otherwise, I knew his shooting and looting days were over.

The rest of us had assorted dings and dents, too—
but nothing to compare with Rodent. Although Randy Michaels, who is as indestructible an asshole as you’ll ever find, had managed to hyperextend his knee as he blew through the hatch of the comms shed. The joint had swelled to the size of a small melon. Oh, he was gonna
love
the exfil.

All the above was on the debit side of the book. On the credit side was the fact that we had twenty kilos of intel materials—journals, diaries, notes, and messages,
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radio logs and frequencies. Two of the men—Nigel and Randy—read Farsi. Not perfectly, but well enough to be able to provide me with the gist of what we’d discovered. But the most valuable intel we were able to lay our hands on was a half dozen sheets of paper that looked like hand-drawn maps of streets and buildings, overlaid with tiny Xs in black, red, and orange. Yup—they were the diagrams the tangos had been using to lay out all those colored wood stakes.

I discovered that one of those targets had been Avi Ben Gal. When I looked at the sheet of paper, with its hand-drawn map and overlaid pattern of small red, white, black, and orange Xs, it suddenly made sense.

Avi’d told me he lived on a one-way street—Abbas something or other street. And that he couldn’t vary his route until he made the turn onto Azadiyg Prospekt. And he’d told me that at the corner of his street and Azadiyg, there was a big house with a high wall on the left-hand side. I looked at the sketched sheet of paper in my hands.

Fuck. They’d outlined the street Avi lived on. The position of the wall was highlighted. And the car holding the bomb was also highlighted. A row of black Xs depicted Avi’s route. The position where the bombers would make ready was delineated in orange, and the detonation point was a red X. It was all there: they’d worked out the positioning; determined the placement of the explosive charges; laid everything out on paper. When I walked the compound, I discovered corresponding stakes—and pieces of burned vehicle. So they’d even tried it for real, using junked autos.

Oh, I was glad right then we hadn’t taken any prisoners, because I wouldn’t have trusted myself with ’em. Oh, I stared at the burned-out car in that desolate place, and I wept. At that instant my rage was absolute, and my hate was incendiary, as hot as white phosphorous. These cockbreaths had killed the wife of my good friend, and I would not have been gentle with them if I’d had the opportunity.

I stood on their range, holding the hand-drawn diagrams in my hand. Without a detailed map of Baku, they were useless. And who was to say that all the targets were in Baku. I might be looking at sketches of streets in New York or Washington. London. Paris. Geneva. Rome. Obviously, I’d have to get these docs to Tony Merc so he could use his computers to narrow the search. Because once I knew where the targets were, I could get to ’em first. And then I’d Boehm the assholes. Yeah, that’s right. I’d fuck the fucking fuckers.

0355. We set the timers for 0420, and headed out, more than half an hour behind schedule. Timex and Hammer carried Rodent’s litter. Randy’d built himself a makeshift crutch, and hobbled gamely as we picked our way up onto the ridge and moved east, down the
bolder-strewn defilade toward the dry streambed, and the safety of the water, eighteen kliks away.

0500. I decided to break radio silence. The way I’d designed this mission, we’d scheduled to exfil the camp at 0330, then scamper back to the Caspian by 0700. But we’d made less than three kliks, because between Rodent’s litter and Randy’s knee, we were moving ahead at about one quarter of the speed we needed to make the rendezvous.

So I’d need them to hold for a while. I didn’t want Pick and Butch bobbing offshore for almost a full day while we struggled out of the mountains.

I turned the power switch on, adjusted the squelch knob, then pressed the transmit button on the secure VHF transceiver. Let me be succinct about this. The fucking radio didn’t work.

I pulled it from the pouch on my CQC vest to check the battery, and realized that perhaps—
ah-hah!
—perhaps it was the large shard of shrapnel, which had lodged itself in the radio’s guts and mashed most of its transistors, that was causing the problem.

Of course, since Mister Murphy had helped me plan this mission from the git-go, he’d made sure that I was carrying the only secure VHF transceiver. Just like he’d made sure I was the only asshole with the wire cutters.

My friends, remember this advice: do as I say, not as I do. Because obviously, if you do as I do, you are going to be stuck in the fucking middle of fucking Iran without the means to get yourself out.

Okay. It was time to go to Plan B. Except we didn’t fucking have a Plan B. And Plan A had just come apart at the seams.

That was when Digger kinda hemmed and hawed
and scratched his boot soles on the rough ground, and looked at me all guiltylike because he’d forgotten something, and then displayed the dozen cellular phones he’d stashed in his assault pack. It was good intelligence gathering—by tracing the numbers and the billing, we’d be able to see who was funding the Fist of Allah tangos.

Okay, now I had a bunch of cell phones. Sure, it was better than nothing. Except Mahmoud’s place didn’t have a phone, and neither did Butch and Pick.

But Ashley Evans had a phone. And she’d be home now. I held out my palm until Digger laid a sample of his booty in it. I turned the phone on, flipped it open, and listened for a dial tone. Nada. I tried a second unit without success, and a third.

Gator surveyed our position. “Maybe we’re in a dead spot, Skipper. I bet it’ll work when we’re closer to the coast.”

That might be true, but it would also mean a long, long wait—and Rodent’s condition wasn’t improving as time went on. I tried a fourth phone. This one worked, but when I tried to dial Ashley’s number, I heard a series of beeps, and instructions in Farsi.

“Nigel?” I handed him the phone.

He shrugged. “Try again, Skipper.”

I dialed Ashley’s flat, and handed the phone back. He listened and nodded. “It wants your access code,” he said.

Well, I didn’t fucking have a fucking access fucking code. I looked at Digger. “Couldn’t you have fucking stolen a fucking satellite phone without a fucking security system, asshole?”

He had to check twice to see that I wasn’t serious. Except, I was serious, and he knew it. He rummaged
through his stash, then bright-eyed, came up with a Motorola, and examined it closely. “Hey, this is an Iridium,” Digger announced proudly. He switched the damn thing on, watched as it cycled, then punched in about twenty numbers, and waited until he heard something on the other end. A huge, self-satisfied grin spread over his round face. “Yo, Skipper . . .”

He handed me the phone. This is what I heard: “. . . the weather forecast for New York City and vicinity. Today, partially cloudy with winds from the southeast, highs in the sixties, lows in the midfifties.”

I disconnected quickly, then hit him on the arm hard enough to make his eyes water. “Good work, cockbreath,” I said, using the universal SEAL term of endearment. “Now let’s hope you didn’t fuck the battery with that call.”

I could spend the next twenty pages or so giving you a minute-by-minute description of our exfil. But that wouldn’t do much to move the action of this book along, so I’m just going to skip it and tell you that eventually, we made it out sans too many more visits from Mister Murphy, and/or his relatives.

But we didn’t do it in the single day I’d scheduled. Remember how I just knew that Ashley would be home? Well, she wasn’t at home. It took me two hours to make contact. And then she informed me—very brusquely, now that I come to think of it—that it would be another five hours minimum before she could make the drive south, give Butch and Pick a cell phone that I could dial, and tell them what I needed ’em to do.

“You should not have gone off without telling me,” she said, her voice deliberate, cold, and angry.

“What I’m doing is ‘need to know,’ ” I told her.

“Screw ‘need to know.’ I have been trying to help you all along, and you left me in the dark. That was stupid, Dick. It was shortsighted.”

“Shortsighted?”

“The situation here has changed dramatically.”

“How so?”

“I’m not going to talk about it now. I’ll explain when you’re back up north.”

It struck me she was being coy. I had a wounded man to look after, I hurt like hell, and I wasn’t in the mood for coy.

“Tough shit,” she said, very uncharacteristically. “Deal with it.” And then the phone went dead.

And so, I dealt with it in the only way I know how: one fucking step forward at a time. We made our way slowly down toward the sea, moving carefully because it was daylight, picking our way meter by nasty meter. And then, we hunkered just west of the coastal road until it was dark, and the traffic let up, and we crossed carefully, obscuring our tracks, into the sandy, thorn scrub-and-sea-grass-covered dunes.

At 2140, I stood atop the highest dune I could find, my night vision on, my left arm throbbing like hell, and flashed Infrared out to sea. Three dots, four dots, one dot and a dash said it all, so far as I was concerned.

And of course I got no response. Yes, it was the perfect end to a perfect mission. And yes, I am employing the literary device known as irony here.

Sixty-eight seconds later (I was definitely counting, dammit), the signal was finally returned, in reverse. I flashed the light pattern once a minute for the next eighteen minutes until I could make the RIBs out as
they cut through the chop, their faint wakes heading straight toward my IR. We loaded Rodent first. The rest of us clambered over the gunwales and hunkered down in the heat. The extraction took two hours, plus another four and a half in those fucking wheezing diesels chugging up the coast road to Baku. I rode in the back of the lead truck, splitting my attention between the satchel of intel we’d taken, and checking on Rodent.

The tiny SEAL looked tallowy, and he was running a fever. He’d lost a lot of blood—he was probably in the first stages of exsanguinary shock. But he was holding on—barely. Like all my men, he had so much sheer WILL and DETERMINATION that he would fight right to the end, no matter how badly he’d been wounded.

I checked to see the IV was dripping properly, mopped his sweaty forehead with a damp cloth, and lay my hand along his carotid artery to feel the pulse in his neck. It was weak. But it was regular. The way I looked at it, since Rodent hadn’t died yet, there was no way I was gonna allow him to croak on me now.