Each of the two Campus operators now had ninety rounds of rifle ammo and fifty-two rounds of pistol ammunition. This would be a lot of ammo for most any imaginable scenario, but neither Caruso nor Chavez felt confident in their ability to defeat eight to ten well-trained operators with their weapons in hand.
Still, they both knew they needed to get moving. They pushed their way into the trees going just west of the north-south road, planning to skirt anyone left on the gravel road as a sentry to watch for approaching traffic.
As they moved through the woods the rain picked up dramatically. It obscured their vision ahead, but they also knew the rain made it tougher for the opposition to see or hear, so they welcomed the bad weather.
After just three minutes of quiet movement, Caruso grabbed Chavez by his forearm and both men dropped to their knees. He said, “Lights ahead.”
Ding squinted into the darkness; he saw nothing, but he trusted Caruso’s eyes over his own, since Caruso was fifteen years younger.
Both men slung their rifles on their backs, reached into their packs, and pulled out monoculars. Ding’s was a fat rubber device that looked like half of a set of waterproof binoculars, with a battery pack on the bottom. It was a FLIR scope, capable of picking up heat sources in darkness or behind thin concealment.
Dom’s device was a three-power fourth-generation night-vision monocular. It rendered the blacked-out area in front of him in soft green hues. The image was essentially two-dimensional, but it provided excellent illumination in the darkness.
At first all either man saw was more trees, but after another two minutes to get into position, they arrived fifty yards away from the two trucks, finding them parked in front of a small cabin in the trees. Next to the cabin, a tiny barn was open on both sides.
And just beyond the two trucks and the two structures, Dom saw the eight-foot-high metal fence that separated Belarus from Lithuania.
The Campus men crawled forward a little more, just until they each had a good position on the floor of the forest — Ding behind a large pine tree, and Dom down behind a fat root system sticking out of the mud at the base of a partially felled maple.
The men were a dozen feet from each other, but close enough to see hand signals or converge quickly if they needed to speak.
Chavez held his FLIR monocular up to his eye. As soon as he directed it in the right area, he saw several men running along next to the cabin. The motion had drawn his attention, but when the men disappeared around the other side, he lost them, so he scanned back toward the location of the two trucks. The first vehicle seemed to be empty except for a driver sitting behind the wheel. The second vehicle also had a driver, but in the back, through the canvas wall of the vehicle, Ding could make out a large luminescent blob in his optic. He knew this would be several men, at least three or four, sitting close together on the bench in the back of the vehicle.
He assumed Branyon would be in the middle of the pack, surrounded by kidnappers.
Chavez estimated there were ten men at this location other than Branyon, which was the high end of their earlier estimate, but at least it meant the kidnappers had not picked up any more gunmen who’d been back here waiting for the trucks to return.
While Chavez had been scanning the driveway and the house and barn with his FLIR, Caruso had been using his night-vision monocular to look at the fence line in the distance. It was only sixty or seventy yards away from where he now lay, so he had a decent view of all of it except the portion he could not see on the other side of the house.
As near as Dom could tell, there was no breach in the fence at all.
He crawled over to Chavez. “You can’t see the fence through that, can you?”
“Not at all. I see people, and I see warm truck engines. That’s it.”
Caruso nodded. “Well, I don’t think these fuckers have cut a hole in the fence. You think they are going to climb it?”
Just as he asked this, both men could hear the noise from an engine, its low rumble growing out of the sound of the heavy rain.
The men put their optics back up to their eyes and trained them on the scene. Three men removed Branyon from the rear vehicle. His arms were bound behind his back and he wore a bag over his head.
And beyond the fence, a large truck pulling a trailer came into view. On the trailer was a crane with a basket: a medium-sized cherry picker. The truck began a slow process of backing through the mud in the heavy rain, positioning the trailer right up to the metal fence.
Chavez said, “There’s your answer.”
Caruso cussed. “Shit. They’re about to take him over. We’re going to have to engage them right now.”
“Yeah,” replied Chavez. Quickly, he reached into his Maxpedition bag and retrieved a roll of duct tape. He laid his rifle on the wet ground, quietly removed a long strip of the tape, and began to wrap his infrared monocular onto the left side of the weapon.
Caruso watched this for a moment. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Poor man’s nightscope, I guess. Better than nothing.”
Caruso said, “If you are trying to make it a scope, why aren’t you putting it on top of the weapon?”
“I still need to use the iron sights, for distance. This will be helpful for close in. I’ll aim left when I shoot.”
Caruso shrugged, took tape from Ding’s roll, and attached his night-vision monocular to his simple Kalashnikov rifle in the same fashion.
As he did this, Chavez said, “We need to separate. It might make them think there are more of us.”
Caruso nodded. “Okay. You’re a better shot than me. I’ll move off to the west, try to flank them and get a little closer.”
Chavez whispered, “I’ll move closer to the road, I’ll have a more complete sightline on their poz there. I’ll engage from seventy-five yards or so, any further out in these conditions and I might hit the CoS. I’ll wait till I see as many of them together and as close to the light as possible, and then I’m going to open fire, left to right. You follow my lead, shooting right to left.
“Watch out for Branyon, okay?”
Caruso looked to Chavez. “We can’t let him fall into the Russians’ hands.”
Chavez shook his head. “Don’t even think about it. I’m not shooting a CIA officer, and neither are you. You do have a green light on any combatant you see. Do what you have to do.”
Dom nodded slowly. “Roger that, Ding.” And then he held out a hand to Ding. “Let’s do it.”
The two men slapped hands and pounded fists. Chavez said, “Sixty seconds. On my ‘Go.’ Don’t fuck it up.”
Dom rolled off to the right and began to crawl away quickly with his rifle on his back.
50
Pete Branyon knew his ribs were broken, several, in fact, all on his right side. He could feel an awkward and painful catch every time he took even a shallow breath. He had a broken tooth, at least one, and as bad as this was, it was even worse because he had a gag in his mouth and had been working for five minutes to dispel the tooth through the fabric before he swallowed it. This, and a blow to his nose that left it swollen and bloody, had made Branyon concentrate on little besides breathing for the past few minutes.
He finally managed to use his tongue to push the broken tooth fragment out through the gag in his mouth. It made its way out onto his lower lip and became stuck there on the thick blood that had been pouring out of his nose.
He’d taken a rifle butt to the side of his head ten minutes earlier for trying to escape out the back of the moving truck. The broken ribs came in the initial assault, when he’d been dragged out of his Mercedes disoriented and he’d had the side of his body slammed on the running board of the SUV.