"All right, sir. Jim, you trade in your SVD for an MP5. That way you'll have two silenced subs if you do have to go."
"Fuck the red light. Take the lens off so I can see," Olinski hissed at Reese, who was holding the light. Olinski continued to work on
O'Shaugnesy. He knew that white light could be seen for a long way, in the unlikely event someone was in the area to see it, but if he didn't get O'Shaugnesy to stop bleeding soon they were going to have a corpse on their hands. A red light doesn't do much good when you're trying to find where all the blood is coming from.
Olinski had already bandaged some of the more obvious places. O'Shaugnesy is really screwed up, Olinski thought. He'd already given the wounded man a syringe of morphine, and he was still moaning in pain. Damn! We need a medic and we need him fast. He looked at his watch — another fifteen minutes until he could call the ORP.
"Hey, Ski," Reese whispered.
Not now, thought Olinski, as he probed a gash on O'Shaugnesy's stomach. "What?"
"Maybe they heard the shots at the base camp and are monitoring."
Why hadn't he thought of that? Olinski chided himself. In all the excitement it hadn't occurred to him that they might have heard the shots over at the ORR "Get the radio and see if they're monitoring," he told Reese.
"ORP, this is PZ. Over."
Mitchell grabbed the radio. "This is ORP. Over." "We need a medic over here ASAP. Denser is all screwed up. Over." "Roger, what happened and what's the extent of his injuries? Over," Mitchell replied calmly as he hand-signaled Riley to get Comsky and Devito.
"He got attacked by a bear. He's got lacerations all over; his stomach was torn open and Ski just finished strapping his guts in place. He's got bites on his arms and shoulders and face. It's real hard to tell. Ski's been bandaging him for twenty minutes now and there's blood all over the place. We need that medic real fast. Over."
Mitchell turned to Comsky, who had come over from his security position. "Got that?" he asked. Comsky nodded. "Get your stuff together. I'm sending you and Trapp. As soon as you're ready, go. Take Riley's 68 with you, too. Keep it on until you link up with those guys." Comsky moved out.
Mitchell punched the send button. "Roger, you've got a medic and help on the way now. They're monitoring a radio, so if you need any professional advice, go ahead and ask. I'll also have the other doc here monitoring this radio. Put out an IR chem light for them to home in on. Over."
"Roger. Right now we got white light down here. It's the only way we can work on him. But we'll pop the IR and turn the light out as soon as we can. Over."
Mitchell looked at Riley. They both shared the same thought: a bear?
The more Riley thought about it, the more he realized the high probability of such an occurrence. During the briefback Devito had said that brown bears were dangerous wildlife endemic to the operational area. The pickup zone team probably had left food out, or done something else that attracted the bear. Normally, bears didn't attack unless provoked.
Riley watched as Comsky and Trapp moved out, wearing night-vision goggles. In a little more than six hours, Riley knew he would have to go forward and check the target security in preparation for the hit. At least O'Shaugnesy was already at the PZ. We won't have to carry him there, Riley thought — about the only bright spot in the situation.
10
"And as water has no constant form,
there are in war no constant conditions."
Jean Long slid her night-vision goggles down on her helmet, twisting the on switch when they were in place. She adjusted the focus of each eyepiece separately, looking around the darkened flight line to make sure they were set correctly. Satisfied, she peered underneath the bottom edge of the goggles at the dimly lit instrument panel and checked the gauges. All good to go.
The 309th Battalion was presently out in the field on maneuvers about forty kilometers from Camp Page, due to return the next day. Jean had flown back to Page from the field site three hours ago on a parts run. In the back of the helicopter a mechanic was sitting with the critical parts they needed to fix one of the battalion's aircraft.
As she watched the engine rpm's increase on the gauge, she briefly thought about her husband. She hadn't heard anything from him since he'd been alerted. She felt bad that she hadn't gotten out of bed to say good-bye when he left, but she knew he understood. She was just grateful he was on staff now and wouldn't be doing anything dangerous. He'd joked with her, shortly after moving up to the S-3 shop, that the most dangerous thing he did there was staple together oporders.
With sufficient engine power, Jean lifted collective and pushed forward on the cyclic. The Blackhawk shuddered, then lifted. Jean turned the aircraft to the southeast and accelerated, thoughts of her husband forgotten as she concentrated on the job at hand.
On the bridge of the Rathburne Comdr. Rich Lemester shifted his weight nervously as he looked over the shoulder of his chief radar operator. His ship was threading a needle and Lemester didn't like the eyehole. To the north, the radar blipped the outline of the southern tip of Sakhalin Island, only twenty-one miles away. To the south he didn't need radar to tell him where the land was — lights on Hokkaido Island could easily be seen twinkling in the dark. Those two pieces of land on either side squarely placed the Rathburne in La Perouse Strait, separating Japan and the Soviet Union. Cruising at twenty knots, Lemester knew they had another hour before they'd break out into the Sea of Japan.
Lemester was uncomfortable with the whole situation. His orders had told him where he was to go, what he was to do, and how long he would be doing it, but they had not answered the nagging question of why. The Rathburne was sailing into a Soviet bathtub and, like any sane U.S. naval officer, he didn't like it. While the rest of Rathburne's battle group was sailing southeast around Japan to the waters off South Korea to participate in naval exercises, he'd been ordered to break off on this course two days ago. Following his orders he had gone in the opposite direction, northeast around Japan.
For ultimate destination all he had been given was a set of coordinates, 132 degrees longitude and 42 degrees latitude. The Rathburne was to stay within a one-kilometer circle of that point on the ocean. It was most unusual — Lemester had never done or heard of anything like this.
Be there, and be prepared to land and refuel two helicopters between 1500Z on the eighth and 1500Z on the tenth, the orders read. When Lemester had radioed his battle group commander to ask for more information, he was told that there wasn't any more. When he'd protested about sitting still, surrounded to the north and east by Soviet territorial waters and to the southeast by the North Koreans, who were known not to be friendly to American ships, his commander had been unsympathetic, informing Lemester that he didn't know what was going on either, but that these orders had come from very high. The commander's bottom line had been blunt: Get moving.
Outstanding, thought Lemester as he watched the water flow by on either side. I'm going to go sit there, surrounded by Soviet territorial waters on two sides, North Koreans on the third, no room to maneuver, and wait for some helicopters. Obviously he wasn't cleared to know what the helicopters were doing. Just refuel them and do whatever else the pilots ask.