Stephen Coonts - Combat

In the courtyard against one wall stood a water tank on legs, with plastic lines leading away to the kitchen area. I opened the fill cap and looked in. I estimated the tank contained fifty gallons of water. Apparently people using this facility brought water with them, poured it into this tank, then used it sparingly.

I stood in the courtyard looking at the water tank, cursing under my breath. The best way to kill these people would be to poison their water with some kind of delayed-action poison that would take twenty-four hours to work, so everyone would have an opportunity to ingest some. Julie Giraud could have fucked a chemist and got us some poison. I should have thought of the water tank.

Too late now.

Damn!

Before I had a chance to cuss very much, I heard a jet. The engine noise was rapidly getting louder. I dived for cover.

Seconds later a jet airplane went right over the fort, less than a hundred feet above the radio antenna.

Staying low, I scurried up the staircase to the top of the ramparts and took a look. A small passenger jet was circling to land at the airport.

I double-timed down the staircase and hotfooted it out the gate and along the trail leading to the path down to the oasis, keeping my eye on the sky in case another jet should appear.

It took me about half an hour to get back to the oasis, and another fifteen minutes to reach the place where Julie was waiting in the Humvee. Of course I didn’t just charge right up to the Humvee. Still well out of sight of the vehicle, I stopped, lay down, and caught my breath.

When I quit blowing, I circled the area where the Humvee should have been, came at it from the east. At first I didn’t see her. I could see the vehicle, but she wasn’t in sight.

I settled down to wait.

Another jet went over, apparently slowing to land on the other side of the ridge.

A half hour passed, then another. The temperature was rising quickly, the sun climbing the sky.

Finally, Julie moved.

She was lying at the base of a bush a hundred feet from the vehicle and she had an M-16 in her hands.

Okay.

Julie Giraud was a competent pilot and acted like she had all her shit in one sock when we were planning this mission, but I wanted to see how she handled herself on the ground. If we made a mistake in Europe, we might wind up in prison. A mistake here would cost us our lives.

I crawled forward on my stomach, taking my time, just sifting along.

It took me fifteen minutes to crawl up behind her. Finally I reached out with the barrel of the Model 70, touched her foot. She spun around as if she had been stung.

I grinned at her.

“You bastard,” Julie Giraud said.

“Don’t you forget it, lady.”

Blowing up the fort was an impractical idea and always had been. When Julie Giraud first mentioned destroying the fort with the bad guys inside, back in Van Nuys, I had let her talk. I didn’t think she had any idea how much explosives would be necessary to demolish a large stone structure, and she didn’t. When I finally asked her how much C-4 she thought it would take, she looked at me blankly.

We had brought a hundred pounds of the stuff, all we could transport efficiently.

I used the binoculars to follow the third plane through the sky until it disappeared behind the ridge. It was some kind of small, twin-engined bizjet.

“How come these folks are early?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.”

“Your CIA friend didn’t tip you off about the time switch?”

“No.”

The fact these people were arriving a day early bothered me and I considered it from every angle.

Life is full of glitches and unexpected twists — who ever has a day that goes as planned? To succeed at anything you must be adaptable and flexible, and smart enough to know when backing off is the right thing to do.

I wondered just how smart I was. Should we back off?

I drove the Humvee toward the cliff where we had the Osprey parked. The land rolled, with here and there gulleys cut by the runoff from rare desert storms. These gulleys had steep sides, loose sand bottoms, and were choked with desert plants. Low places had brush and cacti, but mainly the terrain was dirt with occasional rock outcroppings. One got the impression that at some time in the geologic past the dirt had blown in, covering a stark, highly eroded landscape. I tried to keep off the exposed places as much as possible and drove very slowly to keep from raising dust.

Every so often I stopped the vehicle, got out and listened for airplanes. Two more jets went over that I heard. That meant there were at least five jets at that desert strip, maybe more.

Julie sat silently, saying nothing as we drove along. When I killed the engine and got out to listen, she stayed in her seat.

I stopped the Humvee in a brushy draw about a mile from the Osprey, reached for the Model 70, then snagged a canteen and hung it over my shoulder.

“May I come with you?” she asked.

“Sure.”

We stopped when we got to a low rise where we could see the V-22 and the area around it. I looked everything over with binoculars, then settled down at the base of a green bush that resembled grease-wood, trying to get what shade there was. The temperature must have been ninety by that time.

“Aren’t we going down to the plane?”

“It’s safer here.”

Julie picked another bush and crawled under.

I was silently complimenting her on her ability to accept direction without question or explanation when she said, “You don’t take many chances, do you?”

“I try not to.”

“So you’re just going to kill these people, then get on with the rest of your life?”

I took a good look at her face. “If you’re going to chicken out,” I said, “do it now, so I don’t have to lie here sweating the program for the whole damned day.”

“I’m not going to chicken out. I just wondered if you were.”

“You said these people were terrorists, had blown up airliners. That still true?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I won’t lose any sleep over them.” I shifted around, got comfortable, kept the rifle just under my hands.

She met my eyes, and apparently decided this point needed a little more exploring. “I’m killing them because they killed my parents. You’re killing them for money.”

I sighed, tossed her the binoculars.

“Every few minutes, glass the area around the plane, then up on the ridge,” I told her. “Take your time, look at everything in your field of view, look for movement. Any kind of movement. And don’t let the sun glint off the binoculars.”

“How are we going to do it?” she asked as she stared through the glasses.

“Blowing the fort was a pipe dream, as you well know.”

She didn’t reply, just scanned with the binoculars.

“The best way to do it is to blow up the planes with the people on them.”

A grin crossed her face, then disappeared.

I rolled over, arranged the rifle just so, and settled down for a nap. I was so tired.

The sun had moved a good bit by the time I awakened. The air was stifling, with no detectable breeze. Julie was stretched out asleep, the binoculars in front of her. I used the barrel of the rifle to hook the strap and lift them, bring them over to me without making noise.

The land was empty, dead. Not a single creature stirred, not even a bird. The magnified images I could see through the binoculars shimmered in the heat.

Finally I put the thing down, sipped at the water in my canteen.

South Africa. Soon. Maybe I’d become a diamond prospector. There was a whole lot of interesting real estate in South Africa, or so I’d heard, and I intended to see it. Get a jeep and some camping gear and head out.