He squinted and stared at the single light bulb on the far right side of the dark and humid cavernous room. It illuminated a small table. He frowned and walked toward it. He carried no weapons — another request from Vanderhoff. Higgins understood his logic. Do nothing that would arouse suspicion.
Higgins spotted some barrels on the left side of the otherwise empty warehouse, which was probably used by the homeless for refuge during the winter months. He noticed a briefcase on the table.
Strange, he thought. He reached the edge of the table and looked in every direction. Nothing. He shifted his gaze back to the black leather briefcase and the note taped to the front of it. It said to check for instructions inside while a surveillance team made sure nobody was following him.
“Hmm…” He decided that Vanderhoff could be extremely careful when he wanted to be. He pressed the side levers on the front of the briefcase. Both latches snapped open at once. Higgins opened the briefcase.
His senses registered the loud explosion, accompanied by a split-second vision of fire. Then he could not see or hear anything, be he felt agonizing pain. He tried to move his arms and turn around but couldn’t. His legs buckled and he tried to put his arms out to stop the fall but they were no longer there. The heat intensified. Blissfully, he began to lose consciousness. An excruciating burning pain engulfed him as the flames consumed him.
Dizzy and tense, Pruett surrendered himself one again to the humiliating agony of nausea over the small aluminum toilet in the lavatory of the VIP transport plane.
“Oh, God,” he mumbled as his stomach forced nothing but bile up his throat. He didn’t try to resist, and let it all out. His eyes watered as the overwhelming odor nauseated him even more.
Cameron knocked on the door. “You okay, Tom?”
“Ah… yes… I’m fine… it happens all the… oh, shit!”
Cameron heard Pruett’s guttural noises and decided to leave him to his privacy. He walked back to his seat, next to Marie.
“Is he all right?” she asked.
“Looks like his stomach can’t handle airplane flights anymore. His ulcers are eating him alive.”
“Oh, God. How terrible. He should go see a doctor.”
Cameron smiled. “Not the Tom Pruett I used to know. He’d rather die than go see a doctor.”
Cameron heard the rest-room door opening. “You all right?” he asked Pruett.
“Fucking planes… pardon the language, Marie,” Pruett murmured as he eased into a seat a few rows ahead of them. The rest of the plane was empty. They were the only passengers.
Cameron shook his head and stared at Marie’s bloodshot eyes. “You better get some sleep while you can.”
She nodded, lifted the armrest in between them, leaned her head against his shoulder, and closed her eyes. A minute later, Cameron felt her breathing steadying. Marie. The only person that knew about his past, and to this moment Cameron still didn’t know what had compelled him to tell her. Maybe trying to ease my pain by bringing it out in the open? By sharing it with someone who would understand? Someone who seemed to care?
He simply stared at the clear sky as they flew over the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico, he thought. In spite of what most people said about their large neighbor to the south, Cameron had enjoyed his years there, certainly more than the years in Vietnam, in hell, everyone trapped in his own world, not knowing who to trust and struggling not to make any friendships.
It seemed that in Vietnam death hid behind every corner, behind every bush. American forces became good at handling the dead. All properly body-bagged and tagged for their silent return. So many of his friends returned home that way.
Cameron checked his watch. One more hour before they arrived at Howard Air Force Base in Panama, where a Special Forces team would be waiting for Pruett’s briefing.
Cameron sighed and continued gazing out at the blue sky as his thoughts drifted back to Marie, the beautiful stranger who had so abruptly come into his life and literally turned it upside down. He hadn’t felt so comfortable in someone else’s presence since Lan-Anh. There was definitely a chemistry between them. She understood the way he felt. That Claude Guilloux had been a lucky man indeed.
The thought faded away the moment Cameron closed his eyes. His past haunted him again. Marie’s face was replaced by the face of Skergan. The pleading eyes cut through his soul. Go, Cameron…
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MAMBO
Discipline is the soul of the army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak and esteem to all.
The day was warm and humid, the sky clear. Firmly clutching a modified Colt Commando submachine gun, First Sergeant Francisco Ortiz moved through the dense forest slowly and warily. Every calculated step was preceded by a careful scan of the heavy foliage around him as he checked for anything that did not belong in the woods. An irregular noise, boot prints, branches broken at an unnatural angle.
Nothing.
Satisfied, he moved once more in a deep crouch, softly feeling the terrain with the tip of his boot before setting it down. The strain on his slim but muscular legs was enormous but still bearable. Ortiz belonged to the 7th U.S. Special Forces Operational Detachment Delta, one of the elite squadrons made out of volunteers from the Green Berets, the 82nd Airborne, and the Rangers, trained specifically for tropical jungle warfare. The squadron of over a hundred men was divided into easily deployable platoons.
Ortiz’s platoon followed his footsteps fifty feet behind. Fourteen others depended on how well he did his job. Ortiz was the eyes and ears of his platoon, code-named Mambo.
Ortiz sensed something foreign, but wasn’t sure what it was. He stopped, raised his left hand in a fist, and silently dropped to the ground.
Which of his senses had detected it? Had he seen, heard, or smelled something? Ortiz wasn’t sure, but he felt certain that there was something out there that didn’t belong. He waited a few more seconds before slowly, almost imperceptibly, rising back up to a deep crouch.
There it was again. This time he decided it was a sound, almost masked by the swaying branches of a nearby rosewood tree. Ortiz smiled. Whoever was out there was good, but not good enough to get by trained ears. Ortiz had worked hard at developing each of his senses to levels of equal sensitivity. Most jungle warriors had one sense they depended on more than the others. The problem with that, Ortiz knew, was that it imposed limitations on their abilities to adapt to different battle conditions. At night, even though he wore night-vision goggles, Ortiz could also rely on sounds and smells. An enemy standing still at night in the forest would be very difficult to spot, even with the Sopelen TN2-1 goggles Ortiz would be wearing. But the enemy could make a slight noise, or his body give out an odor that could be detected by Ortiz’s nostrils. Ortiz tried his best to avoid becoming too attached to mechanical enhancements constantly used by other point men because, in the end, he knew one day he could find himself in a situation where it was just him, his hunting knife, and the forest against the enemy. No fancy electronic gear to protect him. Ortiz knew he would be prepared if the day ever came. In his mind there was no other way. A true jungle warrior could use the forest alone to stalk, attack, and retreat totally undetected, leaving the enemy wondering how it had all happened.