Nightwatch

Chapter 50

It was at a temporary ORP at the side of the trail that Ted Cal-la han called together Thomas, Sergeant Reed, Captain Christian, and Ranger Glickman. They convened beneath the protective cover of a camouflaged tarp. With Reed illuminating a detailed U.S. Forest Service map of the Irish Wilderness with his redlensed flashlight, Jody Glickman pointed out their current position.

“Tater Hill is right over the next rise,” she whispered, her right index finger circling the corresponding topographical feature on the map.

“It’s another kilometer at most, and it’s here that we’ll find the entrance to the Defense Department’s underground facility.”

“Surely it can’t be accessed by the general public,” remarked Callahan.

“There’s a barbed-wire-topped, chain-link fence and an iron barricade protecting the entrance, which most hikers mistake for the opening of a collapsed cavern,” Glickman said.

“Since it’s apparent that’s where the footprints we’ve been following are headed, why not bypass this booby-trapped trail altogether?” Thomas suggested.

“It would certainly speed things up.”

“Not really,” objected Reed, who had just put a pinch of tobacco in his mouth.

“My R&S team reports that the surrounding woods are saturated with freshly placed claymores. The footpath might seem slow, but it’s safer in the long run. At least we know where to look.”

“I wish we had time to call in some of that mechanized equipment from the Alton staging area,” said Jay Christian.

“A Grizzly could clear us a safe lane to Tater in a matter of minutes.”

“Though we don’t have a Grizzly, my Sappers are carrying bangalore tube charges,” Reed revealed with a grin.

“They might be noisy as all heck, but I guarantee that we can clear us a lane to that cave entrance without taking the time to probe by hand.”

Less than a meter away from the five individuals gathered beneath the tarp. Doc Martin peeked out of the heavily camouflaged slit trench in which he was buried. He was so close to the intruders he could almost reach out and touch them, and the ex SEAL fought the temptation to take all of them out with a single frag grenade.

His mission and that of his three-man unit was R&S, with strict rules-of-engagement limitations imposed on them by Dick Mariano. This was fine with Doc, who got just as much satisfaction from tracking a man down as from cutting his throat.

He had been taught this forgotten skill by some of the best trackers on the face of the earth — Vietnam’s Montagnards, or Yards, as the members of SOG preferred to call them. The Yards were Vietnam’s largest minority, their culture organized along tribal lines much like the American Indians. They were nomadic hunters and foragers who still used the crossbow, and had taught Doc that the real art of camouflage was blending one’s spirit into the forest as well as one’s own body.

He had also learned from the Yards how to sharpen his senses through meditation. Through a variety of self-realization techniques such as deep breathing and chanting, he discovered that one could smell an enemy long before he could be seen or heard.

Nowhere was this more evident than from Doc’s current vantage point, where the distinctive scents of the five intruders overpowered his sensitive nostrils. Without having to even hear her voice, he knew that one of them was female. Yet another chewed tobacco, while all of them were most likely meat eaters.

Of course, masking their own body odors through eating a native diet was only one of the tricks that this group of neophytes needed to master in order to survive. They made too much noise, and wasted valuable time fidgeting with their high-tech NVGs.

They also needed to better utilize listening halts to become more aware of their surroundings, while their R&S teams had to learn to slow down and quit trying to cover so much territory on their sweeps.

It was only too apparent that these soldiers had never seen battle. They were most likely instructors from nearby Fort Leonard Wood, whose combat was limited to organizing war games.

Doc had been there himself, and knew they’d get a sobering dose of reality the moment Mariano inevitably changed their rules of engagement.