Grant Blackwood - Dead or Alive

“All right, guys, let’s clean this hole out. Look for a computer and any electronic stuff. Turn it upside down and inside out. If it looks interesting, bag it. Get somebody in here to take our friend.”

There was a Chinook on short-fuse alert for this mission, and maybe he’d be aboard it in under an hour. Damn, he wanted to hit the Fort Benning NCO club for a glass of Sam Adams, but that wouldn’t be for a couple of days at best.

While the remainder of his team was setting up an overwatch perimeter outside the cave entrance, Young and Tait searched the entrance tunnel, found a few goodies, maps and such, but no obvious jackpot. That was the way with these things, though. Weenies or not, the intel guys could make a meal out of a walnut. A little scrap of paper, a handwritten Koran, a stick figure drawn in purple crayon-the intel guys could sometimes work miracles with that stuff, which was why Driscoll wasn’t taking any chances. Their target hadn’t been here, and that was a goddamned shame, but maybe the shit the gomers had left behind might lead to something else, which in turn could lead to something good. That’s the way it worked, though Driscoll didn’t dwell on that stuff much. Above his pay grade and out of his MOS-military occupational specialty. Give him and the Rangers the mission, let somebody else worry about the hows and whats and whys.

Driscoll walked to the rear of the cave, playing his flashlight around until he reached the alcove the gomer had seemed so keen to frag. It was about the size of a walk-in closet, he now saw, maybe a little bigger, with a low-hanging ceiling. He crouched down and waddled a few feet into the alcove.

“Whatcha got?” Tait said, coming up behind him.

“Sand table and a wooden ammo crate.”

A flat piece of three-fourths-inch-thick plywood, about two meters square to each side, covered in glued-on sand and papier-mâché mountains and ridges, scatterings of boxlike buildings here and there. It looked like something in one of those old-time World War Two movies, or a grade-school diorama. Pretty good job, too, not something half-assed you sometimes see with these guys. More often than not the gomers here drew a plan in the dirt, said some prayers, then went at it.

The terrain didn’t look familiar to Driscoll. Could be anywhere, but it sure as hell looked rugged enough to be around here, which didn’t narrow down the possibilities much. No landmarks, either. No buildings, no roads. Driscoll lifted the corner of the table. It was damned heavy, maybe eighty pounds, which solved one of Driscoll’s problems: no way they were going to haul that thing down the mountain. It was a goddamned brick hang glider; at this altitude the wind was a bitch, and they’d either lose the thing in a gust or it would start flapping and give them away. And breaking it up might ruin something of value.

“Okay, take some measurements and some samples, then go see if Smith is done taking shots of the gomers’ faces and photograph the hell out of this thing,” Driscoll ordered. “How many SD cards we got?”

“Six. Four gigs each. Plenty.”

“Good. Multiple shots of everything, highest resolution. Get some extra lights on it, too, and drop something beside for scale.”

“Reno’s got a tape measure.”

“Good. Use it. Plenty of angles and close-ups-the more, the better.” That was the beauty of digital cameras-take as many as you want and delete the bad ones. In this case they’d leave the deleting to the intel folks. “And check every inch for markings.”

Never could tell what was important. A lot would depend on the model’s scale, he suspected. If it was to scale they might be able to plug the measurements into a computer, do a little funky algebra or algorithms or whatever they used, and come up with a match somewhere. Who knew, maybe the papier-mâché stuff would turn out to be special or something, made only in some back-alley shop in Kandahar. Stranger shit had happened, and he wasn’t about to give the higher-ups anything to bitch about. They’d be angry enough that their quarry hadn’t been here, but that wasn’t Driscoll’s fault. Pre-mission intelligence, bad or good or otherwise, was beyond a soldier’s control. Still, the old saying in the military, “Shit runs downhill,” was as true as ever, and in this business there was always someone uphill from you, ready to give the shit ball a shove.

“You got it, boss,” Tait said.

“Frag it when you’re done. Might as well finish the job they should have done.”

Tait trotted off.

Driscoll turned his attention to the ammo box, picking it up and carrying it into the entrance tunnel. Inside was a stack of paper about three inches thick-some lined notebook paper covered in Arabic script, some random numbers and doodles-and a large two-sided foldout map. One side was labeled “Sheet Operational Navigation Chart, G-6, Defense Mapping Agency, 1982” and displayed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, while the other, held in place with masking tape, was a map of Peshawar torn from a Baedeker’s travel guide.

WELCOME TO AMERICAN AIRSPACE, gentlemen,” the copilot announced.

They were about to overfly Montana, home of elk, big skies, and a whole lot of decommissioned ICBM bases with empty silos.

They’d be burning fuel a lot faster down here, but the computer took notice of all that, and they had a much better reserve than what they’d had westbound over the Atlantic a few hours before-with a lot of usable fields down below to land on. The pilot turned on the heads-up display, which used low-light cameras to turn the darkness into green-and-white mono-color TV. Now it showed mountains to the west of their course track. The aircraft would automatically gain altitude to compensate, programmed as it was to maintain one thousand feet AGL-above ground level-and to do so with gentle angles, to keep his wealthy passengers happy and, he hoped, turn them into repeat customers.

The aircraft eased up to a true altitude of 6,100 feet as they passed over the lizard-back spine of the Grand Teton Range. Somewhere down there was Yellowstone National Park. In daylight he could have seen it, but it was a cloudless and moonless night.

The radar-sending systems showed they were “clear of conflict.” No other aircraft was close to their position or altitude. Mountain Home Air Force Base was a few hundred miles behind them, along with its complement of young piss-and-vinegar fighter pilots.

“Pity we can’t steer the HUD off the nose. Might even see the buffalo on the infrared sensors,” he observed. “They are making a real comeback in the West, I’ve read.”

“Along with the wolves,” the copilot responded. Nature was about balance, or so the Discovery Channel said. Not enough bison, the wolves die. Not enough wolves, the bison overproduce.

Utah’s countryside started off mountainous but gradually settled down to rolling flatness. They again maneuvered east to avoid Salt Lake City, which had an international airport and, probably, a sufficiently powerful radar to get a skin-paint.

This entire exercise would have been impossible thirty years earlier. They would have had to cross the Pinetree Line, one of the predecessors to America’s DEW-Distant Early Warning-Lines, and alert the North American Air Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain. Well, given the current tensions between the United States and Russia, maybe the DEW and Pinetree would be recommissioned.