Stephen Coonts: Combat

As I was meditating on fuses and bombs, I went outside and walked around the Osprey. There was a turreted three-barreled fifty-caliber machine gun in the nose of the thing. Air Force Ospreys didn’t carry stingers like this, but this one belonged to the Marine Corps, or did until twenty-four hours ago.

I opened the service bay. Gleaming brass in the feed trays reflected the dim evening light.

Julie was standing right behind me. “I stole this one because it had the gun,” she remarked. “Less range than the Air Force birds, but the gun sold me.”

“Maximum firepower is always a good choice.”

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

We discussed contingencies as we wired up the transfer pump in the bladder fuel tank we had chained down in the cargo bay. We used the aircraft’s battery to power the pump, so all we had to do was watch as three thousand pounds of jet fuel was transferred into the aircraft’s tanks.

My plan had bombs, bullets, and a small river of blood — we hoped — just the kind of tale that appealed to Julie Giraud. She even allowed herself a tight smile.

Me? I had a cold knot in the pit of my stomach and I was sweating.

We finished loading the Humvee and the trailer attached to it before sunset and ate MREs in the twilight. As soon as it was dark, we donned our night-vision goggles and drove toward the oasis. I stopped often to get up on the vehicle’s hood, the best vantage point around, and take a squint in all directions.

I parked the vehicle at the foot of the trail. “If I’m not back in an hour and a half, they’ve caught me,” I told Julie Giraud. I smeared my face with grease to cut the white shine, checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, then did my neck and the back of my hands.

“If they catch you,” she said, “I won’t pay you the rest of the money.”

“Women are too maudlin to be good soldiers,” I told her. “You’ve got to stop this cloying sentimentality. Save the tears for the twenty-five-year reunion.”

When I was as invisible as I was going to get, I hoisted a rucksack that I had packed that evening, put the M-16 over my shoulder, and started up the trail.

Every now and then I switched the goggles from ambient light to infrared and looked for telltale heat sources. I spotted some small mammal, too small to be human. I continued up the ridge, wondering how any critters managed to make a living in this godforsaken desert.

The temperature had dropped significantly from the high during the afternoon. I estimated the air was still at eighty degrees, but it would soon go below seventy. Even the earth was cooling, although not as quickly as the air.

I topped the ridge slowly, on the alert for security patrols. Before we committed ourselves to a course of action, we had to know how many security people were prowling around.

No one in sight now.

I got off to one side of the trail, just in case, and walked toward the old fortress, the Camel. Tonight light shone from several of the structure’s windows, light visible for many miles in that clean desert air.

I was still at least five hundred yards from the walls when I first heard the hum of the generator, barely audible at that distance. The noise gradually increased as I approached the structure. When I was about fifty yards from the wall, I circled the fort to a vantage point where I could see the main gate, the gate where I entered on my last visit. It was standing open. A guard with an assault rifle sat on a stool near the gate; he was quite clear in the goggles. He was sitting under an overhang of the wall at a place where he could watch the road that led off the ridge, the road to the oasis and the airfield. He was not wearing any night-vision aid, just sitting in the darkness under the wall.

The drone of the gasoline generator meant that he could hear nothing. Of course, it handicapped me as well.

I continued around the structure, crossing the road at a spot out of sight of the man at the gate. Taking my time, slipping through the sparse brush as carefully as possible, I inspected every foot of the wall. The main gate was the only entrance I noticed on my first visit, yet I wanted to be sure.

A man strolled on top of the wall on the side opposite the main gate; the instant I saw him I dropped motionless to the ground. Seconds passed as he continued to walk, then finally he reversed his course. When he disappeared from view I scurried over to a rock outcrop and crouched under it, with my body out of sight from the wall.

If he had an infrared scope or any kind of ambient light collector, he could have seen me lying on the open ground.

I crouched there waiting for something to happen. If they came streaming out of the main gate, they could trap me on the point of this ridge, hunt me down at their leisure.

As I waited I discovered that the M-16 was already in my hands. I had removed it from my shoulder automatically, without thinking.

Several minutes passed as I waited, listening to the hypnotic drone of the generator, waiting for something to happen. Anything.

Finally a head became visible on top of the wall. The sentry again, still strolling aimlessly. He leaned against the wall for a while, then disappeared.

Now I hurried along, completed my circumnavigation of the fort.

I saw only the two men, one on the gate and the man who had been walking the walls. Although I had seen the man on the wall twice, I was convinced it was the same person. And I was certain there was only one entrance to the fort, the main gate.

I had to go through that gate so I was going to have to take out the guard. I was going to have to do it soon, then hope I could get in and out before his absence from his post was noticed or someone came to relieve him. Taking chances like that wasn’t the best way to live to spend that three million dollars, that’s for sure, but we didn’t have the time or resources to minimize the risk. I was going to have to have some luck here or we had no chance to pull off this thing.

This whole goddamn expedition was half-baked, I reflected, and certainly no credit to me. Man, why didn’t I think of poisoning their water supply when we were brainstorming in Germany?

In my favor was the fact that these people didn’t seem very worried about their safety or anything else. A generator snoring away, only two guards? An open gate?

I worked my way to the wall, then turned and crept toward the guard. The generator hid the sounds I made as I crept along. He was facing the road.

I got about ten feet from him and froze. He was facing away from me at a slight angle, but if I tried to get closer, he was going to pick me up in his peripheral vision. I sensed it, so I froze.

He changed his position on the stool, played with the rifle on his knees, looked at the myriad of stars that hung just over our heads. Finally he stood and stretched. For an instant he turned away from me. I covered the distance in two bounds, wrapped my arm around his mouth, and jammed my knife into his back up to the hilt.

The knife went between his ribs right into his heart. Two convulsive tremors, then he was dead.

I carried him and his rifle off into the darkness. He weighed maybe one-eighty, as near as I could tell.

One of the outcroppings that formed the edge of the top of the ridge would keep him hidden from anyone but a determined searcher. After I stashed the body, I hurried back to the gate. I took off my night-vision goggles, waited for my eyes to adjust. I took off my rifle, leaned it against the wall out of sight.

As I waited I saw the man on the ramparts walking his rounds. He was in no hurry, obviously bored. I got a radio-controlled bomb from the rucksack, checked the frequency, and turned on the receiver.