Hostage Zero

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Jonathan saw the aura of the compound in the sky twenty minutes before they reached its outer perimeter. The factory glowed like daytime, thanks to slung arrays of incandescent lightbulbs that gave the place the look of a 1960s Route One used-car lot.

Any remaining doubt that the enemy had been alerted to this raid evaporated the instant Scorpion and his team got to see the compound up close. In addition to the lights, teams of soldiers wandered about in random pairs and trios, most with rifles slung, but enough with them at the ready that it was clear they’d been alerted to something.

But for all their nervousness, they’d forgotten the basic tenets of defense. By turning the center of the compound to day, they no doubt took solace that no one could sneak around the interior; but they’d rendered themselves blind to intruders’ approach from outside their perimeter. Even worse, the noise from the generator they used to create the light masked the intruders’ approach.

Jonathan and his team approached from the southwest corner of the compound, the one nearest the generator. Their location put them on the far side of the compound from the sleeping huts that lined the eastern perimeter. To their left, maybe forty feet away, sat the storage shed for the gasoline, while to their right, only twenty feet away, sat the enormous trailer-mounted electrical generator, which, to Jonathan’s surprise, was enclosed in a sticks-and-chicken-wire fence, the gate for which was on the eastern side. The enclosure contained all kinds of tools and equipment that apparently were of great enough value to warrant extra protection. To gain access through the gate would require Jonathan to expose his presence to the entire compound.

“Who the hell builds a fence around a generator?” Boxers whispered.

Jonathan eased quietly out of his rucksack and laid it on the ground to make himself smaller and quieter, then dug into the thigh pocket of his trousers and removed his Leatherman multipurpose tool, one of God’s greatest inspirations. Opening the tool, he folded back the handles and revealed the needle-nose pliers and wire snips. Out of another pocket of his ruck, he removed a coil of detonating cord, from which he removed a four-inch length with a slice of his KA-BAR. Then he cut the four-inch strip in half again. Yet another pocket produced two electronic initiators and a roll of black electrician’s tape.

“A grenade would be easier,” Boxers quipped.

And if they hadn’t needed a delay in knocking out the power, he might have done exactly that. As it was, stealth trumped everything. He made sure he had both their attentions when he said, “Keep an eye out, but don’t discharge your weapon unless there’s no other way.”

He got nods from them both, then went on with what he had to do. A distance of about twenty-five feet separated the periphery of the jungle from the nearest side of the fence. Pressing himself on his belly, as close to the ground as his vest and extra ammo would allow, Jonathan belly-crawled like a lizard through the open space, and then aligned himself with the wire wall, hoping that by keeping the lines of his body parallel to the lines of the fence he could remain invisible to all but those who would know what to look for.

He started at the bottom of the fence, peeling the lowest edge out of the ground to expose it. Using the snips on the Leatherman, he cut ten of the one-inch hexagonal links vertically, and then another ten across, forming a kind of sideways doggy-door for himself. He bent the snipped panel out of the way and rolled onto his back so that he could guide himself past the sharp edges of the mangled wire. He offered up a silent prayer of thanks for the thrumming noise of the generator to mask his activities.

Shoulders and head were always the most difficult. Pressing himself into the moist ground, he wrapped his leather-palmed fists over the sharp protrusions with his hands joined thumb-to-thumb above the bridge of his nose to protect his eyes. He flexed his knees, dug his heels into the ground, and pushed. Conditions cooperated, and with relatively little effort, the top half of his body was free and clear, inside the enclosure. From there, all he had to do was sit up and draw his feet in.

Jesus, it was bright in here. With light streaming in from every angle, there weren’t even any decent shadows to hide in. He moved quickly. Keeping low, he duck-walked past a collection of stacked buckets, funnels, troughs, stir poles, and piles of accumulated drums of diesel fuel to the generator, which itself was situated near the front gate. It was a monstrous old thing, about the size of a big desk on a trailer platform. His mind conjured images of the team of workers it must have taken to haul this bad boy all the way from the road to here; then he wondered if maybe they didn’t get help from a helicopter.

From here out, speed and luck would play a big role. He steadied himself on the unseen side of the generator, taking a deep breath through his nose and letting it go through his mouth. Then it was time to go.

At a deep crouch, he peeked to make sure no one was in the immediate vicinity, then swung himself around to the front of the machine and pulled open the front panel to reveal the controls. There were two basic parts of the machinery: the generator itself and the diesel engine that drove it. Each part got its own little bomb, the latter with a charge around the fuel line, and the former with a charge around the main outgoing electrical line. Det cord made the life of a demolition expert a piece of cake. All you had to do was insert the detonator and tape it around what you wanted to destroy. He was using radio-activated detonators tonight, but he’d used all kinds of initiators in the past, including OFF-old-fashioned fuse, the kind you see in cowboy movies where they light the bomb and throw it-and det cord had never once let him down.

“Someone’s coming your way,” Boxers’ voice said in his ear.

Jonathan dropped to his haunches and drew his. 45. Two seconds later, he’d scooted back around to the far side of the generator and the limited shelter it offered.

With his back pressed to the noisy generator and his weapon at the ready, he pressed his mike button. “Did he see me?” Jonathan whispered.

The answer was slow in coming. “Hard to tell,” Boxers whispered. “He doesn’t seem spooked, but he’s by-God coming right this way. Maybe he needs to refuel the beast or something. He’s got an AK slung, but the muzzle’s down. I think we’re okay. Did you get done what you had to?”

Jonathan gave a thumbs-up, knowing that Boxers had an eyeball on him.

“Then get the fuck outta there and come back to daddy.”

Of the choices available to him, that truly was the best one. Normally at night, the smart move was always to remain still when there was an increased likelihood of being seen because the human eye is much more sensitive to movement than to static objects; but when bathed with this much light, such nuances didn’t matter.

Still bent at the waist, Jonathan holstered his weapon and threaded his way back through the accumulated clutter and aimed for the hole he’d cut in the fence. Dropping to a push-up posture, he rolled over onto his back to inchworm back out into the night. His chest had just cleared the opening when Boxers hissed, “Stop, stop, stop. Abort. He’s going to be right on top of you. Shit.”

Jonathan froze. Without any cover now, he cranked his head to the left and then to the right, trying to eyeball the threat. And there he was: a uniformed soldier quick-walked into view from his right, making a beeline for him. Jonathan thought he was a dead man. He reached for his. 45 and realized with a flash of horror that the small opening in the fence blocked his access to his weapon.

Shit indeed.

Only the soldier, it turned out, wasn’t heading for him, after all. The beeline he was making had nothing to do with Jonathan. It had everything to do with a need to urinate. Even as he passed within ten feet of Jonathan, the soldier was unzipping his fly and his eyes were trained on the shadows. The urgency in the soldier’s body language reminded Jonathan of a man who’d sat at the bar for one beer too many. Two seconds later, Jonathan heard a forceful stream being released into the jungle foliage, and you could almost feel the man’s sense of relief.

With the soldier’s back turned to him, Jonathan used the moment to drag himself the rest of the way through the hole in the fence. He rolled over and brought himself up to one knee just as the stream died away and the only remaining sound was the steady churn of the diesel engine.

As he’d feared, the soldier sensed the movement and turned to face it.

To call the soldier a man was to overstate it significantly, but like soldiers the world over, this teenager’s eyes showed lethal intent even as his face showed utter shock. His hand reached for the grip of his assault rifle.

Jonathan drew his Colt in an instant and leveled it at the kid’s forehead. They were close enough to each other that Jonathan could have counted the pulses in his neck. The kid froze, his shock turning to terror as Jonathan raised his left forefinger to his lips to signal for silence.

The soldier’s face was a mask of indecision as duty and obligation battled with survival and pragmatism. Jonathan could almost hear him deciding to be stupid. He shook his head to talk the kid out of it, but youthful resolve is a strong force to deal with.

As the soldier opened his mouth and took a breath to yell, Boxers’ enormous silhouette rose from the shadows behind him. Big Guy grabbed a fistful of the soldier’s hair and lifted him while at the same time thrusting his KA-BAR knife through the side of the kid’s neck. In half of a second, the blade severed both jugulars, both carotids, and the voice box. Amid a fan of blood spray, the soldier dropped without a sound. In less than a minute, he’d be dead.

Jonathan watched for a few seconds as the kid’s body struggled against the inevitable, and he offered up a silent apology. If there could have been a way to let him live, they would have; but it was the nature of war that sometimes you just wander into a place where you don’t belong. The price for doing so was always unspeakable.

Harvey watched in horror, swallowing the urge to vomit. It wasn’t the gore, or even the fact of the killing; it was the efficiency of it. He’d spent five years of his life in the company of professional Marines, three of those in a no-shit killing, shoot-’em-up war, so he was no stranger to the product of battle; but in the past, there had always been an element of hesitation, a humanizing sense of fear. Here, there was none of that. A young man strayed to where he’d no doubt strayed for the identical purpose hundreds of times, and he’d been dispatched with no more hesitation than if the same act had been perpetrated on a troublesome insect.

As the soldier bled out and the fountain of red subsided to a trickle, Boxers wiped his blade on the dead man’s trousers before sliding it back into its sheath. Harvey had no idea why he found that one gesture as horrifying as he did. Perhaps it was because he knew to a certainty that he would never be able to do such a thing himself. He understood now why the Big Guy didn’t want Harvey to be there: Hesitation was a sin that could cause others to die.

For Harvey, though, that meant that being human was a sin. If a moment of hesitation in taking a life triggered the loss of another life, was that so bad? Wasn’t it better than the alternative-to kill indiscriminately on the off chance that a bad guy might win?

Perhaps Boxers was right. Maybe it had been a huge mistake to invite Harvey along on this mission.

They caught a break at the gasoline shed. This structure had a front door and a back door, and Boxers was able to get in and out quickly while Jonathan and Harvey covered him without incident. While they waited, Jonathan used a ten-power monocular to examine the hut where they believed Evan Guinn to be imprisoned. He took in the blocked windows, and the single door that appeared to be secured with a sliding bolt and a garden-variety padlock that should be easy fodder for Boxers’ bolt cutters.

Far more troubling than the lock were the two guards who flanked the door holding their rifles at a loose port arms that telegraphed readiness to engage the enemy that they knew was on the way.

“I hope those guards take the bait when we start blowing things up,” he whispered to Harvey.

The other man made an odd grunting sound.

Jonathan pivoted his body to face him. “You okay?”

Harvey seemed to have aged a couple of years. “It’s just been a while.”

Jonathan nodded, showing none of the concern he felt for what he saw. “Just do your job,” he said. “You’re more about fixing people than breaking things, and that’s fine. Any luck at all, you won’t have to do anything but a lot of running.”

The door to the shed reopened, and Boxers emerged with a big grin. “I used five GPCs,” he reported. Jonathan recognized the acronym as general-purpose charges, Unit-speak for half-pound blobs of C4 explosives with a tail of detonating cord. “There’s three on the drums of gas and two on the building itself to make sure we get the most fire. I armed them all with initiators, but then I also daisy-chained the charges on the drums. We should get one hell of a show.” Daisy-chaining meant running a hefty length of det cord between the GPCs to form a train. The det cord would transmit the explosion from one charge to the other at a speed exceeding five thousand feet per second, with the result being a pressure wave that would significantly exceed the overpressure that the charges could produce individually.

“The bigger the fireworks, the better our chances,” Jonathan said. He smiled at his team. “Everybody ready?” He phrased the question for both of them, but the target was Harvey.

The medic nodded.

“Remember the girl they raped,” Boxers said. “The people they killed. Nothing we do can beat that.”

Jonathan gawped at his friend. That was as close as he’d ever heard the Big Guy get to being sensitive. And he seemed to mean it. How about that?

Jonathan led the way back into the cover of the shadows. Staying inside the dark perimeter, they circled clockwise around the compound, over the northern end on their way to Evan’s hut. Animated voices rolled out of the hut at the very northern edge of the perimeter-Building Delta. From what Jonathan picked up, it was the idle chatter of men off duty-a combination of good-natured insults and sexual innuendos.

Boxers placed a hand on his shoulder to get his attention, then poked a thumb at the barracks and mimed an explosion with his hands. Jonathan shook his head and gave him a thumbs-down. As tempting as it was to place a charge on the barracks building just for the hell of it, there was a lot of ground to cover between here and the exfil point, and it made no sense to squander resources.

As always happened with modern planning tools like satellite imagery and computer mapping, Jonathan felt as if he’d already been here. The layout of the compound was exactly as he’d anticipated. Distances were a bit deceiving-in this case, the place was bigger than he’d expected it to be-but once you got accustomed to the scale, the relative position of the buildings and the nature of the terrain came to feel very familiar.

Finally, they’d worked their way around to Evan’s hut, the one they’d designated as Building Golf (letter G in the military alphabet). From the black side like this, the compound was invisible to them, and they were blind to the positioning of the soldiers. Jonathan placed a gloved hand on the wooden siding of the hut and leaned on it. Pretty stout construction, overall.

Jonathan beckoned Harvey close enough so that his words were more breath than whisper. “Remember, as soon as we cut the power, snap your NVGs in place and don’t look at the fire.”

When he looked at Boxers, the Big Guy already had his cell phone open and ready to send the signal to his detonators. Jonathan slipped his own out of its narrow pocket on his thigh, thumbed the three-digit code, and hovered his thumb over the send button.

“On three,” Jonathan said, and then he bounced his arm with the phone as if they were playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. “One, two…”