Damn, there has got to be more than two hundred out here.
The white shapes appeared everywhere in his bi-ocular’s range of vision. Most were walking in line, following a trail on the top of the ridge.
It will be light soon, and they will be above us.
With daylight, the thermals would be neutralized as an advantage. The high ground was what any force would want.
Moncrief followed the bed farther down the hill, and then cut across using the trail of the two. He felt his Apache blood taking over as he looked for the subtle markings left by both the two that had passed him and the others moving into the valley. At the base of the valley he took his bearings from Yousef ’s ruined truck and calculated that the tent stood less than a hundred yards away.
“How in the hell am I going to do this?”
Two of the enemy were posted by the site of the tent, seemingly in case Zabara decided to return.
Moncrief drew his pistol and tightened the silencer. But it would take more than the silencer to quiet the round. With the enemy army covering most of the mountainside, a bullet had to be perfectly silent. He sidled up to Yousef ’s truck, finding the body of a young fighter. Yousef was gone. Moncrief had to get close to the two guards without raising their suspicion.
The sky was starting to turn gray.
I’m running out of time.
He picked up the dead body that had taken the sniper round to the head and hauled it over his shoulder. Moncrief slid the pistol and silencer in between his own chest and the body. The dead man was small and weighed little, even in death.
“As sala’amu alaikum,” he called out to the two guards.
Both turned and, seeing a fellow soldier in the dark with a wounded warrior, lowered their rifles for a moment. It only took a moment. Moncrief’s silenced rounds tore through each of the guards.
One fell onto the remains of the tent. Moncrief pulled the body away and as he did he struck the boot of another, larger man wedged between the rocks. A moan came from the body.
Moncrief pulled out his pistol and aimed a round at the head of the body on the ground and then, for some reason, paused.
“Shit, I don’t have time to pop every damn body.”
He turned and dug through the collapsed tent until he felt the outline of a small ice chest. He plunged his hand in and retrieved the full IV bag just as two other fighters marched toward him noisily from the direction of the truck. Moncrief slipped behind the boulder and quietly moved down toward the creek bed, carefully cradling the bag in between his shirt and warm body.
CHAPTER 74
“Do you see them up there?” Furlong pointed to the ridgeline to both the south and north. They were slowly being surrounded. Now the wind and storm had left, moving off to the east. It had become quiet. Quiet on the battlefield is never good. Like the eye of a hurricane, silence only ever signals the imminent return of the storm.
“They’ll be above us if we don’t move.” Frix was huddled nearby in the rocks with Parker. As it was nearing dawn, the temperature was dropping. Frix’s words had a wisp of visible vapor as his warm breath turned cold.
The stars were back, but with the increasingly graying light they were disappearing one by one.
“Can he be moved?”
“I can do it.” Parker suddenly stirred, then leaned up from the rock. The transfusion of blood had bought him time and a false sense of security. The fentanyl lollipop hadn’t hurt either.
“Captain, you have to make a call.”
“What?”
“Now! I may not have much time.”
Furlong reached for the radio. A broadcast at this point would let the world know who they were and where.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as the four million in Chicago.”
Parker spoke with Scott only briefly, giving him two cell phone numbers. One was in Chicago and the other, locked in Yousef ’s phone and Parker’s memory, in New York.
The message was sent through the system by a plasma designator. Red hot. No higher designation. In a few minutes, teams from the FBI and Canadian Mounties were chasing the trail of every new transient that had arrived in Canada. The description was a young woman with a limp.
“It’s a hump up to that plateau, but they can’t get above us.” Furlong was studying a laminated map in the gray dark. He was using a small pin light with a red filter and was hugging the bottom of a rock to stay out of sight. “Any chance of you making it, Colonel?”
“Yeah, I can make it.”
“What about the gunny?” Frix asked.
“Where’s Moncrief?” Parker’s face looked chalky in the dark, all the more so framed by his black-and-white checkered shawl wrapped tightly around his neck and pakol hat pulled down as far as it would go.
“He went on an errand.” Frix put his finger on Parker’s neck to check the pulse.
Like the leader he’d been trained to be, Furlong didn’t hesitate with his decision. “Fury, you and Villegas get to LZ Echo on that plateau and lay down cover fire. If the Gunny gets back, Frix will give Parker the IV. We will gather up the rest and join you as soon as we can.”
“We’ll stay on this eastern face.” Fury pointed out a path that cut up the ridge.
James Scott looked up at the digital clocks above the screens in the bridge.
“It’s getting near dawn.” Prevatt’s face showed a look of frustration. The clock seemed to slow down as they waited. Both Scott and Prevatt stared at the thermal feed from the Predator on station above. The two watched the small white dots move in small lines across the terminal screen like ants moving across a sidewalk. The dots seemed to be surrounding a much smaller group of other dots in the center.
“You told them about the core?”
“Oh, yes.”
Prevatt had made it clear to the Marine Special Operations Team that the stakes were very high, not merely combat-essential. The MSOT team would not turn around for any reason.
“Checkmate six, this is Dash One.”
The radio transmission was being fed directly into the bridge. Everyone in the operations center had gotten a sense of what was going on. The tension was building as the transmissions were broadcast over the speakers.
“Dash One?” Scott questioned the call sign.
“It’s a Marine squadron,” said Prevatt. “VMM three-six-five. The Blue Knights. I’ve seen them in Iraq. They come back with their aircraft looking like Swiss cheese, no problem. Nothing stops them.”
“How are they going to get through that front?” Scott held up a printout of the weather over the Hindu Kush. The lines of isobars indicated powerful winds when they were close together. Similar to the topography lines on a map, when the parallel lines were bunched together like the engravings on a dollar bill, they indicated one was heading toward a cliff on a map. On the weather map, one was flying through a cliff.
Prevatt looked at the weather map again and shook his head. Mountains that topped twenty-four thousand feet, flying on night vision and close isobars, meant one hell of a ride. In those mountains, there were no ground lights. At well over three hundred knots, a hiccup would mean eating a cliff face.
“Dash one, this is checkmate six.”
“We are rocking and rolling up here. We are one zero miles out.”
“Dash one, roger.” Prevatt was handling the communications directly. “Slashing talon six, are you at LZ Echo?”