Rockne swept the area with his night-vision goggles. He could make out two railroad-maintenance sheds, at least five shacks, and two more substantial cement-block buildings. “Which one?” he muttered. The driver gave an expressive shrug. “Fuckin’ lovely.”
“Okay,” he told his team, “me and Boyca will lead the way in and try to pick up the general’s scent. If we can identify the building, Jess, you take a four-man team inside.” Paul and Jake stiffened but said nothing. “Go in on my command,” Rockne said, “and do it by the book.” He pulled Pontowski’s flight cap out of his rucksack and held it for Boyca to sniff. He unsnapped her leash. “Seek.”
Boyca ranged back and forth as she moved into the compound. Behind her, Rockne moved from shadow to shadow, staying out of sight. He was about to give up and return to the team when Boyca started to move back and forth as if moving toward the apex of a cone. She had picked up the scent, and Rockne followed her, moving in the deep shadow of one of the maintenance sheds.
A man stepped out of a doorway and called to Boyca, the Malay equivalent of “Come here, doggie.” He squatted on the ground and called again, beckoning to her. But Boyca refused to move and stood still. The man pulled out a knife and inched toward her. Boyca sensed the danger and darted away, directly toward Rockne. Rockne laid his M-16 on the ground and carefully removed his goggles. Boyca came up to him, panting. Without a word, he stroked her ears and drew his knife. The man was almost to the shadows, totally unaware of what was there. Again he spoke in Malay, cajoling Boyca to come to him. His right hand dangled at his side, still holding the knife.
Rockne went into a linesman’s stance, as if he were playing football. The man took another step toward him, paused, raised his knife, and then took another step. Rockne exploded out of the shadows, his left hand sweeping the man’s knife aside as his own knife flashed in an upward motion. He drove it into the man’s sternum, lifting him off the ground. The man hacked up a cough, but it died with him. Rockne pulled him back into the shadows and rolled the body under the shed. He quickly donned his gear, but Boyca was already moving. She stopped and lay on her stomach, paws outstretched, her head up, looking directly at the door of a cinder-block building.
Thirty-three
Paul, a young airman called Spike, and Jake lined up behind Jessica in the shadows as they waited for the command to move on the building. But Boyca was still lying in front of the door, an obstacle in their way. The first half-light of the approaching sunrise cut at the shadows, and Jessica’s night-vision goggles began to wash out. She ripped them off and jammed her helmet back on. The men did the same as her eyes adjusted to the ambient light. Now she could see Rockne’s dark mass against the wall of the shack, gesturing at Boyca, trying to get her to move out of the way. Finally he gave a low whistle, and Boyca scampered to him, clearing the path.
“Go,” Jessica said in a low voice. As one, her team moved out, trying to stay in the rapidly dissipating shadows. They made it to the door as the upper limb of the sun cracked the horizon. Automatically, they stacked against the wall, boots touching. Jake, the last man, squeezed Spike’s arm, signaling that he was ready. Spike relayed the signal to Paul, who passed it to Jessica. She reached for the doorknob and tested it. The door swung open, and she moved quickly, bursting through the “fatal funnel.” She buttonhooked to the right and into the corner, never stopping as she moved down the sidewall. Paul was right behind her, moving to the left wall, clearing his side of the room.
Before Spike could move through the door, a burst of gunfire raked the doorway, knocking him backward. Jessica fired a short burst into the muzzle flash and was rewarded with a scream of pain. A weapon clattered to the ground as Jake came through the door.
“Don’t shoot!” Pontowski shouted. A flashlight snapped on and swept the room. Pontowski was on the floor, a dead body lying across him. “One more in the next room,” he said.
Paul never stopped moving and went through the next door as Jake fell in behind him. They were a team and moved as one with blinding speed. Another short burst of gunfire. Silence. “All clear,” Paul said.
Jessica stepped around him and took a deep breath. A man was down on the floor, crunched over his weapon, an M-16. “What the hell?” Jessica muttered to herself. She examined the body. It was a teenage boy wearing a Malaysian Army uniform. She kicked the M-16 aside and picked it up. “Jammed,” she said. “You are one lucky dude,” she told Paul. She hurried back into the first room to check on Pontowski. He was still under the body.
“Mind untying me?” Pontowski muttered. “Damn, that was fast.”
“That’s the idea, sir,” Jessica said, relief in her voice. “Who else is in the building?” she asked.
“That’s it.” He rolled clear of the body. “They were deserters. Malaysian Army. Kids scared silly.”
“Check on Spike,” she told Paul and Jake.
“He’s dead,” Rockne said from the doorway. He knelt beside Pontowski. “You okay, sir?”
“Just my shoulder. Broken collarbone, I think.”
“Can you travel?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Rockne stood and walked to the doorway. He spoke into his whisper mike, asking for a status report from the men posted outside. “We’ve got lots of movement out here,” a staff sergeant told him. “The gunfire must’ve stirred ’em up. It’s hard to tell in this light, but I think they’re all civilians.”
“Find a wheelbarrow or a cart and get ready to move out.”
“That’s not necessary,” Pontowski told him. “I can walk.”
“It’s for Spike, sir. No way am I gonna leave him here.”
The three men clustered around the chart table in the back of Alpha’s command post. “SEAC is pressing us hard to take this one,” Maggot said. “Singapore can’t take many more missile strikes and think this will stop it. But if this is what they say it is, it’s got to be heavily defended.”
Waldo carefully plotted the GPS coordinates in the tasking message and spanned off the distance. “One hundred and sixty nautical miles. Thirty minutes’ flying time.” He visualized the terrain and different attack headings. “All we need are a couple of F-16s to discourage any SAMs.”
“I already asked,” Maggot told him. “None available.”
“This is very important,” Colonel Sun said. He searched for the words to make the two Americans understand. “In Singapore the people are so packed in, a single missile kills many. They are so helpless.”
Maggot shook his head. “If we had something cosmic like an AGM-154, that would give us enough standoff distance and we could send one right down the entrance.” An AGM-154 was a fifteen-hundred-pound standoff glide bomb with an inertial or GPS guidance system that under the right delivery conditions could fly up to forty miles.
Waldo thought for a few moments. “We got some AGM-65Gs.” He looked at Colonel Sun. “That’s a Maverick with a double IR seeker head and a three-hundred-pound blast-fragmentation warhead. It’s good for taking out tanks and hardened targets. Pretty accurate with the right jock.”
Maggot shook his head. “The Maverick has a standoff distance of fourteen miles max. But you’re going to have to get a lot closer than that.”
“Innocent people are dying,” Sun murmured. “My family is there.”