Don Pendleton: Rolling Thunder

Manning’s voice suddenly crackled through the small speaker mounted over one of the cargo holds. “We’re there, guys. Give yourselves a ten-count, then go give ’em hell. We’ll hook up with you as soon as we set this bird down.”

The three paratroopers lined up before the open doorway. James counted down, then lunged out of the plane. He immediately paralleled his body with the ground below and extended his arms and legs outward, slowing his fall. It felt for a moment as if he were flying. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Encizo and Hawkins were airborne as well, framed against the sky above him, similarly spread-eagled. The Talon had flown on and was already banking to the right, ready to dip behind the nearest mountain peak and begin its descent toward a remote, long-abandoned airstrip dating back to days when there had been plans to develop one of the neighboring valleys into a resort community. There, according to plan, McCarter and Manning would rendezvous with the arriving Spanish militia. There were supposedly a few mountain-worthy Jeeps in the convoy, and Manning had been told that a pair of AH-1Q Cobras were additionally being diverted to the site from a military air base in Bilbao. Using Jeeps and choppers, it would hopefully be possible to move quickly and have the ETA forces surrounded by the time they reached the meadow. The trick, obviously, would be to capture or neutralize the enemy without detonating its lethal cargo.

As he drew closer to the meadow, James spotted a few dozen sheep grazing in the tall grass fifty yards to his right, watched over by a young boy and a large black sheepdog. He tugged at his shroud lines, trying to veer as far away from them as possible. The boy had already spotted him, however, and soon the dog had turned and begun charging through the grass toward him, barking loudly.

“Beat it, Lassie,” James muttered under his breath as he prepared to touch down. “You’re blowing our cover.”

The dog continued to yelp, but the moment James hit the ground, it stopped in its tracks, apparently intimidated by the size of James’s quickly collapsing chute. James tumbled expertly and was already unhitching the chute harness when he rose to his feet. He jerked at the lines and hissed at the dog, sending it chasing after Hawkins and Encizo.

Once he’d gathered up the chute and bunched it into a ball, James stuffed it beneath a nearby bush, then strode quickly toward the young shepherd, putting a finger to his lips. The boy, no more than eleven years old, took a tentative step back. A black beret was cocked at an angle on his head, and his hands were clenched around an old Steyr SBS Forester rifle. The weapon was nearly as big as he was, but James had the sense that the boy knew how to fire it.

James had learned to speak Spanish while growing up in a Chicano neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, but he knew that the boy most likely spoke Basque, a language as dissimilar from Spanish as it was from English. Still, he needed to say something to calm the boy. The last thing he wanted to do was to have to draw on him.

“¡Hola!” he called out softly, holding his hands out at his sides. Continuing in Spanish, he said, “Don’t be afraid. We come as friends.”

The boy’s expression remained unchanged and he continued to aim the rifle at James. Finally he spoke, not in Spanish or Euskara, but in English.

“Why should I believe you?”

James was momentarily taken aback. By now Hawkins and Encizo had landed and were headed toward him, the sheepdog barking at their heels. The boy took another step back, fanning his rifle back and forth to keep all three men covered.

“He doesn’t trust us,” James told the others out of the side of his mouth.

“I gathered that much.” Encizo stopped alongside James and sized the boy up, then offered a disarming smile. “Your papa taught you well,” he said. “Atzerri otserri, eh?”

It was the boy’s turn to be surprised. He kept his rifle aimed at the men but slowly lowered the barrel as he called out to his dog. The dog fell silent and scampered to the boy’s side, then sat on its haunches, tongue trailing from its mouth as it caught its breath.

“Where the hell did you learn how to speak Basque?” Hawkins asked Encizo.

“There was a Basque janitor at my high school,” Encizo said. “We got to know each other with all the time I spent in detention. I picked up a few phrases.”

“What was the one you just ran by him?”

“‘The alien’s land is a land of wolves,’” Encizo said.

“Well, tell him the wolves he ought to be worried about are gonna be here any second.”

Encizo turned his attention back to the boy, who’d clearly been listening to the conversation.

“What other wolves?” he asked. “BLM?”

Encizo nodded. “Yes,” he explained. “There are perhaps two dozen of them, and they’re armed. You need to get out of the way and take cover while we—”

Encizo’s voice was drowned out by the thundering echo of a single gunshot. A split second later, the sheepdog howled and toppled onto its side briefly. As it tried to get back on its feet, blood began to glisten on its fur where it’d been shot. The boy stared down at the dog and was crying out its name when another shot ripped its way through the nearby grass a few feet to his right.

James instinctively lunged forward and pulled the boy to the ground as he cried out to the others, “Ready or not, here they come….”

PEERING OVER the boy’s shoulder, James stared past the scattering flock of frightened sheep. More than a dozen BLM gunmen, all wearing trademark red berets, had appeared at the edge of the meadow. Four of them walked carefully alongside a slow-moving ATV, each holding a rifle in one hand while they used the other to steady the vehicle’s cargo, a large, rectangular wooden crate loosely tethered in place by shock cords. Given the crate’s dimensions, James could understand why AMI suspected it might well contain the missing warheads.

THE OTHER SEPARATIST fighters had fanned out and were scrambling up into the nearby foothills, which were strewed with rocks and boulders. The terrain provided ideal cover; in fact, it was the same area where Phoenix Force had planned to take up position in hopes of pinning down the BLM forces once they reached the meadow. Now, unfortunately, the Basques had beat them to the higher ground, and it was Phoenix Force that had been placed at the disadvantage.

The gunner who’d fired the first shot was crouched on a low promontory thirty yards up the mountainside. He was lining up James in his sights, but before he could get off another shot, James hurriedly brought his M-14 into play and fired an autoburst across the meadow, driving the man to cover.

As he scanned the foothills for another target, James noticed, for the first time, a small stone hut concealed in the shade of two large chestnut trees less than fifty yards from where the BLM was swarming. A split-rail fence encircled the hut, and a rusting metal water trough sat near the pen’s open gate. Just beyond the corral’s perimeter, a crude knee-high wall of stacked boulders had been erected behind the house to act as a barrier against rockslides from the mountain.

“Is that where you’re staying?” James whispered to the boy.

The boy nodded fearfully. James ducked as another shot whistled past, then asked the boy, “Is anyone inside?”

“My papa,” the boy replied. Tears began to well in his eyes. “He’s sick. I was tending the sheep so that he could sleep.”

James looked over his shoulder and quickly passed the information along to Encizo and Hawkins, who’d both taken cover behind a cluster of boulders rising up through the grass a few yards behind him.

“I’ll try to get to him,” Hawkins replied. He fired his carbine into the foothills, then split away from Encizo, rolling down into a shallow ditch. Once he’d crawled back up to where he could see the enemy, he called back to James.