A jerk in the rope just before I hit told me Diego was on his way down. The insertion site was a tiny patch of water-smoothed rock alongside a muddy, rushing stream, with the sapling forest leaning in around it. It was like landing a skydive. That fast. As soon as my boots touched ground I scrambled out of the way. Diego was right behind me. He cleared out quick, blazing a path into the trees, while I stood by to make sure everybody got down okay.
In just a few seconds, we were all on the ground. I gave the crew chief a thumbs-up and followed Mason into cover, listening to the engine noise as our ride pulled out. I couldn’t hear it for long. Not with the wind. It gushed through the trees, sounding like a river flowing overhead, with the squeaks and groans of branches grinding against each other. Every breath I took smelled of rain and sweet rot. And it was cold—a chill on the air that surprised me.
The terrain wasn’t what we’d expected either. Like I said, it was regrowth forest and it was tight. All young trees, just inches between them. We had to weave our way. Slow going. And the rain, blurring our lenses. We couldn’t see three meters.
Diego was on point, steering by GPS, but after twenty minutes he pulled up and we conferenced, our helmets close together so we could keep our voices low.
“GPS isn’t corresponding to terrain,” he said. “Saomong’s got it spoofed.” He knew the electronics better than any of us, so I wasn’t going to question him.
“You remember how to use a map?” I asked.
He cracked a smile. “That’s how I know we’re off course.”
“You’re our scout, then. Get us there.”
It wasn’t easy in the dark, in the rain, but it wasn’t the navigation that really slowed us down. It was the forest. Why the fuck did no one tell us the trees would be like that? We scraped our packs, squeezing between them. And we kept getting hung up. We’d have to drop back and find another way. I started to worry we wouldn’t make our destination in time.
Going in, we were following solid intelligence. That’s what I thought. Detailed intelligence. It was a cooperative mission, American and Chinese.
Somehow the field operatives had learned that our target would be passing a known point on a road, just after dawn. We needed to get there in time to set up an ambush. That was going to be our chance to quietly cut off Saomong’s head and we could not be late.
But nowhere in the pre-mission briefing did anyone think to mention the trees.
And we couldn’t go in by road, we couldn’t use any roads, because the roads were mined and electronically monitored. Anyone without proper credentials wasn’t going to get far. The local civilians didn’t even try anymore. If they wanted to visit between villages, they blazed paths in the forest like we were doing. Only Saomong and their collaborators used the roads.
Francis was tasked with monitoring transmissions from Command. After two hours he called another conference. “EW’s picking up. Saomong is working hard to jam across our frequencies. The software is trying to clean it up, but not much is getting through.”
“We expected communication problems,” I reminded them.
“Yeah, but what worries me,” Francis said, “is we don’t have a way to tell if it’s a cautionary action because Saomong leadership is about to move, or if they know we’re here.”
Jesse was all sunshine despite the storm. “Don’t worry. We’re good. Because if they knew we were here, they’d be after us.”
Mason, old and grim and reliable, put a stop to that happy talk. “If they’re after us, we won’t know until they start shooting.”
“Truth,” I said. “And nothing we can do about it. We focus on the job. Let’s move.”
It took us until oh-four-forty to reach the ambush site. “Two hours behind schedule,” Mason grumbled. But hell, by that point I was relieved we’d gotten there before our deadline.
The mission planners had picked a point where the road curved like a big smile along the base of a steep slope. “This would have been a good position,” Hector whispered, “if not for the damn trees.”
He was right. The trees crowded together there just like everywhere else. We could hide easily enough, but we couldn’t move quickly and we couldn’t get an unobstructed view of the road unless we were almost standing in it. This was a problem, because we were required to collect photographic evidence proving we had targeted the right people. It didn’t matter to Command if we collected that evidence before or after the ambush, but dead targets still had to be identifiable, and that’s not easy to guarantee when the woods light up.
One more minor point: we wanted to be long gone by the time the CCA’s foot soldiers came swarming out of their village barracks.
So, yeah, the trees were a problem, but not enough to stop the mission. We started setting up.
We’d brought with us a weird land-line system that let us wire up a temporary network. It used fine-gauge fiber optic lines. Clumsy. Easy to tangle, easy to break, but while we were sitting still, strung out along the road, it would let us stay in contact without using the radios. Better than nothing.
I reviewed the plan one more time. “We spread out. Take up separate positions. Diego takes point, I follow. We try to scope ’em, get the pictures we need. Once I clear you to shoot, we blow hell out of any vehicle on the road. Incinerate ’em. Then we retreat upslope. Rendezvous on the other side of the hill, where we made our last stream crossing. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Simple and clear.”
“Too easy.”
Idiots. They liked to play the Hollywood role, that cocky confident attitude. But they were professionals beneath it or they wouldn’t have been there with me. Diego, too. He’d been blooded in Kunar. He wasn’t a rookie anymore. The mission prep had been thorough, every piece of equipment checked and triple-checked, the geography memorized, and the faces of the targets memorized too.
“Hand me your lead,” I told Diego.
I plugged his comm line into an adjunct socket on my audio and handed my own lead to Mason. Francis, Hector, and Jesse hooked up one after the other. “Comm check,” I said. “Start with D and move down the line.”
“Delgado.”
“Walker.”
“Abanov.”
“Hue.”
“Chapin.”
“Powers.”
“Thumbs-up if you heard everyone.”
Gloved hands flashed the gesture. We were all good.
“Mason,” I said, “you stay here. Jesse and Francis, spread out down the road.”
I gestured to Diego and he set off, weaving silently between the trees in the direction we expected our quarry to come from. The fiber-optic line shimmered behind him, a spider web in night vision, linking us together. I kept close, only a few steps behind, until I’d gone sixty meters. I stopped when I found a place where the trees were a little more open so I could look down between them at the road. “This is my position,” I said, testing my angle through the scope.
Diego went on, the cable paying out behind him, laying down across fallen twigs and leaves and catching in the ferns, until he found a vantage another sixty, sixty-five meters along. “Got a good view of the road from here,” he said, whispering over comms. “I can see eighty meters or so. Should be able to scope everybody who’s not under canvas.”
“You do that, you get us a confirmation, and we can burn ’em in a crossfire when they get this far.”
“Roger that.”
We settled in to wait in the dark and the rain. It wouldn’t be long—I hoped. But the road was half flooded, a mud trap. Saomong might cancel their expedition. They might be late. We didn’t have a way to know ahead of time. We would only know when Diego got a visual on the vehicle and passed the word that they were coming.
I wasn’t used to working like that. None of us were. We were used to Command providing oversight, watching the surrounding region with a UAV, forwarding intel. In a normal operation we’d be told when Saomong got in their vehicles, when the ignition turned over, when they got bogged down in a mudhole and spun their wheels.