“Papa, get up and follow me,” Ojeda said. He led off into the marsh, the setting sun at their rear coloring the edges of the sharp grass rising from the water with a fiery brightness. Two squads of men, twenty in all, were ten yards in front of the colonel and his five-man headquarters detail.
“Jeez!” Antonio said, cringing as several bullets ripped through the thick grass above his head. The water was waist-high, already lapping at the weatherproof radio on his back. Short bursts of return fire from the two squads sounded to his front. Then more in return, and more from another direction, and all the while Antonio was moving, following the colonel, instinctively crouching into the soggy marsh as much as he could and having no idea in hell what he was supposed to do.
Ojeda’s hand came up just in front of Antonio. He followed the colonel’s lead, stopping and sinking deeper into the water until just his nose and eyes were exposed. The taste of thick, dirty water seeped through his lips, filling his mouth. He continued breathing through his nose, smelling the staleness of the marsh and the decay that was an ever-present part of its ecosystem. They stayed still, almost fully submerged, for several minutes, Antonio’s heart beating faster with every passing second.
CLICK.
The sound came from Antonio’s right. He turned his head easily to look, then back at the colonel, who was staring intently toward the direction in which his men had moved. Then back to the right.
CLICK.
Antonio ran his fingers along the body of the submerged Kalashnikov until he found the safety. Remembering the colonel’s brief instructions he moved it up one notch, to single shot, and started to bring the weapon to his eye level. He turned the rest of his body slowly right, disturbing as little of the coarse vegetation as possible as he did, causing just a few crackles as the sharp-edged blades of grass rubbed against each other, and stopping when he was facing the direction of the sound. The distinctive top of the Kalashnikov broached the surface of the water. Antonio’s eyes looked past the sights into the gently moving forest of light green blades. His eyes moved, searching, his body still except for the soft up-and-down caress his finger was giving the trigger. He watched, expecting to see someone not unlike him staring back from behind another AK-74. But there was none. No movement, no sound.
“Papa Tony.”
Antonio’s body jumped at the colonel’s voice. He let go of the trigger and stood, lifting his weapon out of the water as he did. “I heard something.”
Ojeda scanned the direction of the CIA officer’s interest and discounted the claim very quickly. “We killed three of them,” he said, looking back to Antonio. “More escaped.”
“Three? I saw at least six of our men go down.”
“We were fortunate. A well-executed ambush could have killed ten times that number.” Ojeda saw the surprise in Antonio’s eyes. “This is war, Papa Tony. Welcome to it.”
The colonel turned and headed back out of the marsh. Antonio looked once more over his shoulder, still expecting to see someone with the means and the desire to kill him lurking among the vegetation but finding only that which scared him more: the unknown. He turned and followed Ojeda, his right hand squeezing the Kalashnikov’s rear grip more tightly than he’d thought possible.
The first unit of the 106th Guards Air Assault Division to leave its base northeast of Moscow was the reconnaissance company. In wartime, after having been inserted in the enemy’s rear by airdrop according to the still-followed Soviet doctrine of battle, the two hundred officers and men of recon would be tasked to seek out and identify the enemy units in their area. This morning, however, the objective was not elusive, and they expected no resistance to their advance.
Just after the witching hour, in the bitter chill of the ever-longer Russian nights of autumn, a single Russian Army staff car rumbled through the main gate and turned south onto the M8 highway. Twenty BMD-3 Infantry Combat Vehicles of the recon company followed their commander’s vehicle but would not even attempt to keep up. Unlike in battle, his job was to announce their presence before they would strike. Next came ten BMP-2s, the larger and slower cousins of the lead element, and these were followed by 160 trucks that would stagger their departure in groups of five every few minutes. By the time the last of the division had passed through the brown-painted gates, adorned with the blazing white parachute emblem of Russian airborne forces, the lead elements would be a quarter of the way to Moscow, and their commander would be well on his way to deliver the requisite message to the president.
Force, after all, was most effective when employed as a threat.
“We’re going where?” Frederico Sanz asked.
“The Cape,” Chris Testra answered, still trying to figure out the call from the director.
“To do what?”
“Didn’t say. He said we’d be briefed once we got there by someone named Drummond.”
“Drummond?” Sanz let the name roll around in his head for a minute. “Drummond. You don’t mean…?”
“I don’t know,” Testra said. “So don’t think it yourself. If the director didn’t tell us, maybe we ain’t supposed to know.”
Sanz closed the hard case that held their recording gear and started for the van.
“Don’t lock it up, Freddy,” Testra directed his partner.
“Why?”
“Because we’re supposed to bring some stuff with us.”
Sanz looked down at the silver suitcase. “This? I hope someone has a warrant.”
“Don’t need one,” Testra said. “Remember where we’re going?”
Lieutenant Duc brought the Pave Hawk down to eight hundred feet after an easy two-hundred-mile cruise out to sea at three thousand. A hundred miles east of Great Abaco Island, a crescent-shaped finger of land at the northern end of the Bahamas chain, he nosed the helicopter to starboard, making his course just east of due south. They would be meeting up with the Combat Shadow in two more hours off the eastern tip of Cuba. Until then, the plan called for staying away from the more inhabited land masses and skirting shipping whenever possible.
“Yo, Cho. Look.”
Duc heeded his copilot’s direction and shifted his attention briefly left, looking over the Pave Hawk’s instrument panel to the white capped sea below. He scanned the scene for a few seconds, then pressed the intercom switch on his yoke. “Major, take a look to port. Coming up off about a hundred yards.”
Sean undid his safety belt and crouch-walked past his team members to the port-side gunner’s door, the coiled wire of his headset dragging and sagging behind. “What is it?”
Duc took another brief look. “Looks like a debris field to me. Got some orange floaters down there, a few pieces of something, but I don’t know what from.”
Sean took a pair of binoculars and stared past the minigun to the sea. “A whole bunch of stuff, Cho. No oil slick, though. Anything about a plane going in?”
“Not that I’ve heard. Nothing about a ship either.”
Well, something had either sunk, crashed, or blown clean up, and there were no people in any of the dozen or so life vests bobbing in the swells. No bodies, either, as far as Sean could see. But that didn’t mean none were down there. “Cho, better report this over SATCOM. Just to be safe.”
“Gotcha.”
Sean swept the area once more with the glasses. Still no sign of life. Hopefully a closer look would find someone. If the Pave Hawk hadn’t been fitted with the most sophisticated communications suite possible, that closer look might never come. To report it in that case, they would have had to broadcast on the standard radio, giving off an omni-directional message of “Here I am.” SATCOM, which bounced its directional signal off a satellite, was far less likely to reveal their position, and then only if someone was looking for them. The latter was not in the cards.