Payback

59

The green arrow in Dean’s goggles began to blink, indicating that he had three seconds before pulling the rip cord. He reached his hand to the ring, waiting. As the arrowhead changed to a plus sign and a tone sounded in his helmet’s headset, Dean pulled.

It was a good, solid tug, exactly as he had been taught as a Marine Corps “guest” at the Army’s Fort Benning airborne training center nearly three decades before. The parachute jerked him against his restraints — a very welcome jerk, given the alternative — and he reached for the control toggles. The green arrow was solid again and stayed there the whole way down, showing he was right on course.

Even so, his anxiety and adrenaline continued to build. Dean did everything right, braking the chute on cue and even managing to flex his legs as he hit the ground. But he tumbled over like a sack of potatoes and found he was hyperventilating so badly he had to rest a moment before getting up.

“Hey, Charlie, right on target,” yelled Karr, landing a few yards away. “Our gear and the boat are back about a quarter mile. Just missed landing in one of those funny-looking trees.”

Dean’s legs were so unsteady he thought he was going to collapse as he undid his harness.

“Hey, you OK?” said Karr, giving him a hand.

“I’ve been better.”

“Aw, come on. Don’t tell me it wasn’t fun.”

“Barrels,” said Dean. “I wish I could do it every damn day.”

The river was a half mile from where they landed. The large pack of equipment contained a small raft that inflated in a few seconds once Dean twisted the plastic lock on the air canister. As Dean loaded the backpacks into the raft, Karr assembled a small electric outboard motor. It looked like it had come from an oversize kids’ Erector set. The sturdiest part was the battery, which was about the size of a dictionary. But it proved not only quiet but relatively powerful, propelling them upriver against the current at about seven knots.

The village where the warhead had been found lay three and a half miles upriver, perched on the side of a cliff about two hundred feet above the water. Dean and Karr planned to stop at a bend about a half mile south of the village, hide their boat, and then sneak through the jungle. They had to get close enough to the warhead to get good pictures of it, take readings with a radiation meter Fashona had given them, and if at all possible plant a tracking device on the bomb or its transport.

Dean sat in the front of the boat, working as lookout as they made their way upriver. He tried warding off the memories of Vietnam, but they marshaled among the shadows along the riverbanks. He’d worked in terrain somewhat similar to this when he got the North Vietnamese sniper they called Fu Manchu. That had been in the highlands, too; drier on the whole, but there’d been a stream there as well.

As much as he tried to focus on the present dangers, the past ones clawed their way into his consciousness.

Fu Manchu had been hitting a South Vietnamese army outpost southeast of the demilitarized zone. The South Vietnamese were supposed to be interdicting the stream of North Vietnamese supplies, weapons, and men south, but what they were mostly doing was hunkering in an abandoned American bunker and trying to stay alive.

The ones who hadn’t deserted, that is.

A Marine unit was sent to stiffen their resolve. After they set up a post on the military crest of the hill near their ally’s bunker, the North Vietnamese sniper began taking shots at them as well. Dean and another Marine sniper called Turk ended up going after the man, volunteering one muggy afternoon and ending up on a cat-and-mouse chase that stretched nearly five days.

It was difficult to say who was the cat and who was the mouse. Turk was a gunnery sergeant, a veteran of two tours as a sniper in Vietnam, and as wily a hunter as Dean had ever met. Dean had only been in country a month and, though he’d seen quite a bit of action, was a novice at the trade.

Fu Manchu — Turk gave him the name for no particular reason — slipped through the jungles on both sides of a five-meter-wide stream so smoothly and silently that for much of the time they weren’t sure whether he was one person or three. They eventually discovered that he had several hides, where he prepositioned weapons and ammunition.

Something splashed in the water ahead. Dean jumped back to the present, raising not a sniper’s gun but the A2.

“Something?” whispered Karr.

Dean stared at the riverbank through his lightweight night goggles. A medium-sized cat hunkered down a few dozen yards away, eyes fixed on the strange craft as it sailed past them.

“Jaguar,” Dean said.

“I thought jaguars were extinct.”

“Then it’s a ghost,” said Dean.

Karr’s chuckle cracked the stillness.

They made landfall and stowed the boat under some foliage. A collection of small satellite-launched audio bugs had been dropped on the village, allowing the Art Room to scout the general layout of the troops there. Their runner, Sandy Chafetz, wanted Karr and Dean to launch a small unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, nicknamed a crow, so they’d have real-time visuals of the village. (It was called a crow because it was about the size of a large bird and looked like one, at least from afar and at night.)

“Not worth it with this foliage,” said Karr. “We won’t be able to see much, and it’ll be tough to recover. I think we just slide in and out. Plenty of gaps.”

“Your call,” said Chafetz.

“Thanks, sweets,” said Karr.

As they pulled on their rucksacks, Dean thought of the strange pack Turk had used in ’Nam. Taken from a North Vietnamese sapper, it was a big, sturdy bag with handy pockets and pouches. Turk had found a rigger or someone who could sew and added a few more of his own. At the time the Army was using very basic packs, and everyone who saw it was envious.

Fu Manchu had sent one of his bullets through the side of the pack. It was the sniper’s other bullet that had taken Turk, drilling through his temple.

Dean’s thought when he heard the second shot was that their quarry had failed — a second shot meant you had missed the first time.

And more important in this case, the second shot showed Dean where Fu Manchu was. He put his bullet there.

It took him several hours to get to the sniper’s body. Fu Manchu had crumpled into a pile of bones. He was so skinny he looked as if his flesh were made of paper.

He was a kid, younger even than Dean, who’d gotten into the Marine Corps the year before at sixteen, fudging on his age.

“Sentry, fifty yards,” said Karr, pointing to the left. He took point, moving through the trees toward the low-slung huts ahead. For a big man — and Karr was very big — he moved extremely quietly. He would have been a good sniper.

The village consisted of six small huts scattered around a clearing near the water. The woods on the south side were so thick that even with infrared night glasses, Dean and Karr had trouble seeing more than a few feet ahead. That helped them more than hindered them; the soldiers in the village had no night-vision gear at all.

Several vehicles were parked at the edge of the clearing and on the rough trail of a road, which snaked off to the west. Two men walked back and forth in the center of the compound.

Dean and Karr observed the area carefully, comparing what the Art Room had told them with what they saw, making sure they knew where everyone was. Knots of soldiers were strung out along the roadway and shoreline, but they were all far enough away that they could be ignored. Several soldiers were sleeping in the huts; they, too, wouldn’t be a problem — as long as they remained sleeping.

The target was a large military truck parked behind an SUV on the dirt road that ran in front of the huts. Dean counted seven soldiers, each about thirty feet from the truck, strung out in a loose circle around it. When they were sure they knew where everyone was, Dean and Karr backtracked ten yards into the jungle, circling to the east, where the brush and the alignment of the guards left a narrow lane they could use to get close to the truck without being seen. The night was almost pitch-black, but they couldn’t entirely count on the darkness to hide them; at least one of the guards had a flashlight on his belt, and Dean suspected flares would be kept nearby.

When they were five yards from the road and about a dozen from the truck, Karr pulled off his pack, dropped it to the ground, and handed Dean his rifle. Then he removed a small device about the size of a TV remote control. This was a radiation detector “tuned” to find specific isotopes of plutonium — the common warhead material for Russian missiles — and a uranium by-product that often accompanied the material.

Just in case there was any shielding, Karr carried a device that would look for extremely dense material by sending X-rays through it. Nicknamed “the interrogator,” it was about the size and shape of two fat coffee thermoses put back-to-back together. The interrogator had two modes, one for simply detecting large mass elements and the other for estimating their size. The X-rays were extremely powerful; the beam could burn flesh and cause radiation damage if you stood too close.

“Give me a whistle if anybody’s coming,” said Karr, and before Dean could say anything he began gliding toward the vehicle.

Just like Dean had done with Turk on the third day they were out.

“You got more guts than noodles.” the old-timer had told him. “Before we go anywhere we fully reconnoiter the situation, figure our in and our out, get our signals straight — then we go.”

The old-timer was right; acting impulsively was a good way to get killed.

Old-timer?

Turk was, in a sense, but he’d probably been in his early thirties at most. Maybe less. Certainly younger than Dean was now.

Unlike Rockman, Chafetz said almost nothing while the ops were in the middle of a mission. Karr transmitted the readings back through a link in the com system; she acknowledged with a simple “got it” as each one came through.

Dean saw something moving near the back of the truck. He raised his gun, then realized it was Karr, already on his way back.

“Fake. It’s a fake,” whispered the op. “The readings are all wrong.”

“I didn’t hear the Art Room say that.”

“They will. It’s a phony.”

“You sure?”

“I had a mission just like this in Russia six months before you joined us, babysitter,” said Kan, resurrecting the very first nickname he had given Dean. “Cruise missiles. Pretty much the same gig, though. Come on. Let’s blow.”