Code of Honor

59

The first bullets snapped the air beside Ding Chavez’s head ten minutes after they crested the mountain. Chavez was fairly certain Habib and his friends were engaging in spray-and-pray tactics, but the rounds were close enough that one of those prayers was bound to get an answer sooner or later.

Konner dropped to his belly at the shots, peering around the base of a vine-choked tree at their back trail. His eyes appeared to glaze over, like he was stoned.

Chavez and Adara crouched beside him. Chavez had done enough work in this kind of environment to know exactly what the wiry Papuan was doing. Dense vegetation had a tendency to trick the eye, making it difficult to see anything but a wall of mottled green. Periodically allowing your vision to relax and unfocus helped give what Chavez’s instructors had called “jungle eye.”

Seeing nothing at the time, they were up and running again in less than a minute.

The dense foliage was alive with the buzz of insects and screeching birds, masking the noise of anyone’s approach. Vines, trees, and banana leaves formed an almost impenetrable mesh that was difficult to see through, let alone navigate, without leaving an obvious trail.

“How wide is the beach?” Adara asked as they half ran, half fell down the mountain.

“Maybe here to that banana tree, me think,” Konner said, pointing to a tree some thirty meters downhill as he moved. “Big hibiscus trees, then beach, then water.” He looked up at the thick canopy above, the way someone might check their watch. “It low tide now. Beach maybe little more wide.”

Another bullet whirred by, high overhead. Chavez chanced a look over his shoulder. His vision was too blurry to see much of anything anyway, but he knew Habib and his goons had made it over the mountain.

More rounds snapped in the air, followed by the distinctive report of an AK-47 behind them. One of the rounds neatly clipped a fat banana leaf above Adara’s head, sending it falling to the jungle floor.

“Voices!” Adara hissed, picking up her stride.

Chavez could hear little but the muffled whoosh of his own pulse in his ears. Adrenaline was a marvelous thing, but he’d been living off a steady diet of the stuff for the last couple of hours. He could handle fatigue, but the throbbing pain and nausea from his injuries pushed their way to the fore as the adrenaline ebbed. He was reduced to carrying his broken wrist as he ran to keep the bones from grinding.

The shots came more quickly now, peppering the foliage just a few meters to the right.

“How much farther?” Chavez asked through clenched teeth, panting heavily. It took so much concentration to speak he nearly lost his footing.

The Papuan’s hand shot out to steady him. “We goin’ downhill very quick,” he said. “Maybe five minutes.”

Chavez glanced at Adara, who met his eye.

“We’re trapped between these bastards and ocean,” she said. “They’re going to get to us before the ship does.”

“Me knows good hiding spot.”

More shots. Closer now.

Adara shook her head. “You think they could have people ahead of us?”

“I do,” Chavez said.

The Papuan grew wide-eyed as he reached the same conclusion.

He hefted the homemade shotgun and looked back and forth along the side hill, obviously trying to come up with an alternate plan. “They driving us to a trap.”

Littoral combat ship USS Fort Worth was fifty-six miles away when the comms officer received a call via satellite telephone. The female operative they were supposed to pick up informed them she and her partner were ten minutes from the beach and taking fire from an unknown number of pursuers.

The seas had become choppier and the powerful Rolls-Royce engines, based on the same engine that powered Boeing’s 777 jets, pushed the ship along just below thirty-five knots.

Commander Akana stood in the bridge, looking out over the foredeck boat that stretched out in front of him like a clean parking lot. In addition to the officer of the watch and the two enlisted personnel who were driving the boat, the executive officer and the command master chief were also present. All wore Navy work blues and uniform ball caps.

The XO, Lieutenant Commander Nicole Carter, was an Annapolis grad, but she didn’t appear to be a ring-knocker. She let her daily output of stellar work speak far louder than her CV ever could. Command Master Chief Alfredo Perez was tall, with the lined face of a man with a long history. He had an intense Danny Trejo look going that at once terrified and endeared him to officers and enlisted alike. Equivalent to the chief of the boat, or COB, on a submarine, a command master chief or command senior chief was the senior enlisted person on a surface vessel. The Navy didn’t strike sailors anymore or restrict them to bread and water — but one cross look from CMC Perez had the same effect on most young sailors. He was fiercely protective of his crew, advocating for them to leadership at every turn, but unafraid to dispense the frequent ass-chewings needed to keep recalcitrant youngsters in line. Like the rest of the crew, the XO and command master chief were finishing up their assigned four-month rotation. Akana had taken over for the previous skipper, making him the new guy. Fortunately, his reputation as a pirate hunter aboard the USS Rogue had preceded him — bringing enough sea-cred that he had time to prove himself as a servant leader. It seemed to Akana that every sailor just assumed that a new skipper was going to be an incarnation of Captain Queeg. That sort of leader certainly existed, but in Akana’s experience, there were more Horatio Hornblowers in the Navy — more deckplate leaders — than there were Captain Blighs.

Good leaders thought about leadership, not management, and that meant getting out in front of things. This mission was tricky, and if it failed, he would be the one to take the heat, not the XO, not the CMC.

“Have Engineering wring out flank speed for as long as practical,” Akana said.

Where full speed was a high percentage of power that, while not fuel-efficient, was not the maximum, flank speed meant as fast as the boat could go. Period. Such speed was reserved for emergency situations, and came at a cost if carried out for too long. Maintainers didn’t much care for flank speed, because it had a tendency to break things.

The XO passed the word, and Akana felt a gradual shift as the vessel dug more aggressively into the waves.

“If they’re taking fire, there could be injuries,” Akana said. He didn’t have to explain himself, but talking out certain decisions allowed him not only to train his executive officer but to think everything through in front of the command master chief — who had a full decade more experience at sea. “Any distance we can close shaves off valuable seconds.”

“Understood, sir,” Carter said. “Air Ops reports the MH-60 and the Fire Scout should be on station in two minutes.”

“Very well,” Akana said, moving into what, for him, was the most difficult part of any operation — waiting for things to happen.

With his hands clasped behind his back, Perez squinted, the corner of his mouth turning up a little, Popeye-like.

“Is something bothering you, CMC?” Akana asked.

“Far from it, Captain,” the command master chief said. “I was just thinking what a great day it is to be in the Navy.”

The shooting stopped as they neared the beach, a good indicator that Habib did indeed have friends down there waiting.

“Movement!” Adara said. “Eleven o’clock.”

She, Chavez, and the Papuan man all lay facedown under the cover of a curtain of creeping vines. Chavez faced uphill, watching their back trail, while she and Konner studied the route ahead.

Konner Toba shook his head, not understanding. Chavez glanced back to see Adara hold her hand straight in front of her, knifelike, then moved to the left. “Twelve, eleven, ten…”

“Me sees it,” the Papuan said, pressing his face closer to the debris on the jungle floor. “Under big hibiscus tree.”

Chavez saw it, too, even with his blurred vision. At least three men with long guns. Beach hibiscus were not the tallest trees in the jungle, but what they lacked in height they made up for in spread. Their large branches, some as big as a man’s waist, pointed skyward off a thick trunk, before arching back to touch the ground. These arches and heavy foliage of hand-sized leaves formed shadowed roomlike hiding spots beneath the sprawling trees.

Had the men stayed back in the shadows a little farther, they would have been invisible. Fortunately, they were drug runners, not trained snipers.

Focusing back uphill, Chavez popped the mag out of his Smith & Wesson and checked for the second time to make certain he’d done a tactical reload. He was normally more sure of himself, but the head wound had him loopy. “I’m down to ten rounds,” he said.

Adara gave a grim nod. “I’m at six.”

He passed her his partial mag. “Top off,” he said. “I’m seeing two of everything anyway.”

“Me gots four,” Konner Toba said, holding up a shotgun shell from his pocket. He’d turned the ball cap so the bill and the curling blue feather faced backward. He didn’t mention the thighbone dagger.

The voices uphill grew more animated since they knew the jaws of their trap were closing. Chavez estimated they were less than a hundred yards away now. The men along the beach were even closer.

“What’s that way?” Chavez asked, gesturing to his left.

“Waterfall,” the Papuan said. “That way no good.”

“How about to the right?”

“Maybe,” Konner said. “But big fern field above. Open, so me think this way better.”

“Not at the moment,” Chavez said.

A volley of Kalashnikov fire rattled uphill as one of their pursuers fired into the air, working to drive them downhill toward the hibiscus. Thick foliage dampened the sound, but they were close enough now that Chavez could hear the clack, clack, clack of the rifle’s heavy action slamming back and forth as it cycled.

He squinted, trying to clear his vision, to do something about the crippling pain in his head. These guys would be on top of them in minutes, if not seconds.

Adara had her hand cupped over the mouthpiece of the satellite phone. She pointed her chin downhill to get Chavez’s attention.

Another volley of automatic gunfire. More voices. The jungle thinned somewhat on the lower third of the mountain. Chavez counted eleven men, less than fifty meters away, ghosting through the trees.

Chavez could clearly see the trails the three of them had made through the grass and undergrowth. Habib and his men would have no trouble walking straight to them.

“We have to move,” he whispered.

Adara gave an emphatic shake of her head, going so far as to reach over and kick Chavez in the calf with the point of her boot. She mouthed the word Wait! and then began whispering into the sat phone again.

A moment later, Chavez picked up the sound of a lawn mower, or perhaps a tractor from the direction of the ocean, and then the beautiful image of an MQ-8 Fire Scout rose into view behind the hibiscus tree.

A branch snapped in the foliage to Adara’s left, and Chavez caught a glimpse of brown movement. One of Habib’s men had flanked them. Chavez swung his pistol, but Konner lunged into the brush, leaving his shotgun behind. The brush thrashed for a moment, and then the lanky Papuan crept back to the group in a half-crouch, his grandfather’s bloody thighbone dagger clutched in his fist.

“Thanks,” Chavez whispered, scanning for others.

“You give me medicines,” Konner said. “We be even Steven.”

“Okay,” Adara said into the sat phone. She was talking to the air boss on the ship now, and the pilot who was remotely operating the Fire Scout from the USS Fort Worth. She held out her hand to Chavez, who knew exactly what she wanted. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and cued up the compass, aiming it at the UAV to give her an azimuth. “We’re lined up,” she said. “The Fire Scout is directly over the tree with the first group of bad guys. They are armed and hostile. We’re seventy-five meters due north if you line us up. Second set of bad guys another fifty meters to our north, spread out.”

Adara listened and then said, “Roger that. We don’t have a choice.”

She turned to Chavez and Konner. “Hug the ground, boys,” she said.

The Hydra 70 laser-guided rocket fired by the MQ-8 had a blast radius of ten meters and a lethal fragmentation radius of fifty meters. Delivering a ten-pound warhead, the slender rocket traveled at speeds approaching Mach 3. At this range, it didn’t have time to reach full speed, but the explosion was nearly instantaneous from the time of firing. Bits of dirt and foliage and probably drug smugglers rained down on Chavez and the others. He felt the blast as much as he heard it, and still wondered how long it was going to be before he’d need hearing aids.

Incredibly, stupidly, the men uphill began to fire at the helicopter.

“They’re too close for a missile,” Chavez said.

Adara simply smiled, pointing seaward again as the MH-60 Romeo Seahawk from the Fort Worth hove into view above the smoldering hibiscus tree.

The big sister of the little Fire Scout flew directly overhead, with Adara guiding her in. A half-second later, the remotely piloted helicopter’s GAU-17 “Vulcan” electric Gatling gun began to burp lead into the trees at six thousand rounds per minute.

The MH-60 pilot made two passes to surveil the hillside and then overflew the twisted remains of the hibiscus tree one more time. Satisfied the threat was neutralized, he gave the all-clear for Chavez and the others to come to the beach for pickup. The little Fire Scout remained aloft, providing overwatch.

The MH-60 pilots weren’t keen about spending any more time than necessary in Indonesian airspace, but since the orders to pick up this package had come directly from the secretary of defense, they did as Adara requested and flew seven miles down the beach, where they dropped off Konner Toba a mile past his house so he couldn’t be identified by any neighbors getting off the helicopter.

The Papuan shook Chavez’s hand and then cried when Adara gave him her entire med kit. “You good folk,” he shouted, as the helicopter prepared to lift off from the beach. “Me say prayer for you.”

Chavez collapsed into his seat, wounded, exhausted, and wondering to whom Konner Toba planned on directing his prayer.