"Man, that"s harsh," said the voice in my ear piece. Phillips.
"Just shoot him, Lorenzo. That would totally be a mercy killing." Roland.
"Guys, stay off the radio," I hissed. I pointed my gun at the sobbing functionary. "The rope to the compound, is there a code word?"
"Lotus Blossom!" he shrieked.
I groaned, and took a seat on the rug. This was going to make for a long evening at this rate, and I had two helicopters full of terrorists and mercenaries waiting on me. "Listen, kid, you"re not the first guy to ever get taken advantage of. That"s just business. I"ve been shafted myself a few times. What"s your name?"
He took his hands off of his groin long enough to wipe the blood from his lips, and muttered "My name is Wing."
"Okay, Wing. I"m going to break this down for you. I heard what you said earlier. Sala Jihan is evil, we both know it, and as soon as he finds out that you"ve been sneaking out to meet that hot little nomad and compromising his security, he"s going to torture you to death. So you help me out, and I"ll go kill him, so you won"t have to worry about it."
"You can"t kill the Pale Man."
"Oh, I"m pretty sure I can. I"m good at killing stuff."
"You cannot kill what does not die," Wing insisted. "The Pale Man will destroy us all. I was a fool to betray him." Wing started to cry again. He really was afraid of Jihan. "Lotus Blossom! How could she betray me?"
"Wing. Focus. You"re not helping me, buddy. If you don"t tell me about how to get into the compound, I"m going to hurt you until you do. Do you understand?"
Wing curled up in a really pathetic fetal position, heartbroken and afraid, and probably nauseous from the nut kick. It was actually kind of sad. I could only imagine that if Jill were here she would probably like . . . comfort him, or something, and within thirty seconds he would be giving me the keys to the front gate of the compound.
"Hurry up, Lorenzo. Start cutting off his fingers already," Anders said over the radio.
"This is your last chance, Wing. You"re pretty much screwed. You either help me, or I kill you. You help me, and I let you go. If I kill Jihan, you"re home free. If I fail, at least you"ve got a head start."
"I don"t deserve to live. I"ve been helping a monster. My Lotus Blossom can"t love me because of the evil I"ve done."
New strategy. "Then this is your chance to atone for you sins." He looked at me, confused. "Atone, make up for, say you"re sorry, fix past mistakes. You help me kill Jihan, so we can free the slaves that are her relatives, and then maybe Lotus Blossom will forgive you, and take you back." It was stupid, but from the look on his face, it seemed to work. "You"ll be a hero. Come on, Wing. Do the right thing." You idiot.
The wheels were spinning. "Yes. I will help you. You will still fail, because I don"t think you know what you"re dealing with. At least I can go to her and beg forgiveness." He smiled through blood stained teeth. "Then she"ll love me again!"
"Yeah, sure. That"s awesome. Code word?"
"The man who lets down the rope, his name is Tausang. He works for me. I just call to him. I pay him as soon as he pulls me up. Don"t yell from the bottom, or the guards will hear you. Wave your arms with the flare in the pocket." Wing gestured at his coat. "He"ll see the movement, and toss down the rope. When you"re close enough to the top to whisper, call him by name. Otherwise, he"ll cut the rope, and you will die on the rocks below."
I could tell he was telling the truth, the poor deluded moron.
"Now, I"m going to go and find my love. I"ll beg her forgiveness!" Wing stood, a man on a mission. "I know she loves me!"
"Good luck with that."
Wing ran out the exit, not even bothering with his coat, just blundering out into the cold, to go randomly barge into the other yurts. I took off my fancy Goretex, and put on the functionary"s grey fur coat. He was bigger than me, but that meant my gear could still fit beneath. My radio crackled in my ear. "You think he told you the truth?" Anders asked.
"Roger that. I"m heading for the canyon now."
"Why didn"t you kill him?"
Outside, I could hear someone calling out "Lotus Blossom!" over and over, as well as a few guttural responses in a language I didn"t recognize.
"I have a feeling somebody else is about to do that for us." I pulled the stolen coat tight, picked up my rifle, and ducked back into the night.
I stood at the base of the cliff and slowly waved my arms back and forth, road flare burning red in my hand, casting an unearthly glow on the surroundings. The spot I was standing in was basically a tube cut through the black rock by a long since disappeared glacial runoff. Now smooth ice covered the walls and hung in bizarre shapes all around, with a single slash of moonlight visible overhead. Through the gash in the ice was the slick wall that seemed to leap up for nearly a hundred feet before terminating at the back of the compound.
My rifle was stashed further down the canyon. It was too large to conceal, and the last thing I wanted was for Wing"s accomplice to think something was up and cut the rope while I was halfway up. Anders and the others were coming up behind me, but had to hang back far enough in the darkness to not be spotted.
"Come on . . . Come on . . ." I whispered, ice crystals forming in my goatee as the vapor from my lungs instantly froze. I had to put away my face mask, and Wing"s bulky coat was not nearly as warm as my previous garment. There had been a scarf with the coat, and I pulled it up over my face to disguise the fact that I wasn"t a twenty-something Chinese man. It still smelled of perfume.
Wing had really loved the girl. This was unbelievably dangerous. All it would take to end his charade was a single slave soldier happening to patrol this area at the right time, and his whole plan would have been toast. He had done this over and over. With my luck, his accomplice, Tausang had already bailed, and I was waving this stupid flare at some sniper up there with a Dragunov.
Finally, a thick hemp rope flailed out of the darkness and landed with a thump against the ice. I tossed the flare and kicked snow over it until I was back in blessed shadow. So either Tausang had seen me, or some slave soldier had a twisted sense of humor. I fashioned a basic harness around my waist, and then gave the rope a tug to indicate readiness.
The rope was pulled taut, cutting into my midsection. I put my boots against the wall, wrapped my extremely expensive neoprene shooting gloves around the rope, and waited. It would have been faster to just climb, but that would have aroused suspicion. I had no idea what Wing weighed, and hadn"t even thought of the possibility until now that I would be drastically different enough for his accomplice to notice while he hauled me up. I"d left my equipment below, he was bigger than me, but I had a lot more muscle packed onto my frame, so hopefully it was close enough not to matter.
Now I was up out of the creva.s.se and dangling in the open moonlight. Somehow the air seemed even colder, or maybe it was just my nerves. The trembling in my hands was either from hypothermia or adrenaline, I wasn"t sure. The rope creaked above, and I bounced slightly as Tausang did something with the line. He probably would hoist me up a bit, and then loop it around something so that if he lost me, I wouldn"t plummet back into the rocks.
"Looking good, Lorenzo." Anders could see me. The downside was that if the guys below could, anyone looking over the wall above could too. "The choppers are airborne. They"ll wait until we"re secure before entering the canyon."
The pull continued. I would ascend a few feet, and then pause for about thirty seconds, and then ascend another few feet. At this rate, a.s.suming Tausang had good cardiovascular fitness, I was only minutes from the top, and with that thought, a sudden bolt of dread traveled down my spine and lodged in the pit of my stomach. I rummaged through my vest until I found my radio, and clicked the dial over to another predetermined frequency. I really didn"t have time for this, but I needed to hear her voice.
"Jill, come in."
"Lorenzo, I can hear you."
"I"m almost at the top. I"ll make this quick."
"Go."
". . . " I stopped. What was I going to say? That this was dangerous? That my odds of survival were low? That there were a million things that could go wrong up there? That if the raid failed her and Reaper needed to flee the country as fast as possible, and not look back? We had talked about all of that before.
"Lorenzo? Come in."
"I . . ." Honestly, I was selfish, weak, uncharacteristically nervous, and had just wanted to hear her voice. The words didn"t come out.
"I know."
The radio was silent. I took a long, deep breath. Cold air filled my lungs and burned.
Jill"s voice was authoritarian. "Now get your head back in the game. I need you to come back safe. Got it?"
"Got it. Lorenzo out." I clicked the radio back to my team"s channel. For some stupid reason, I felt better. So I relaxed and enjoyed the view.
The sheer ice wall gave way to black rock laced with fat rivulets of ice, rough enough to actually climb. The lip of the cliff was now just ten feet overhead, and I could hear the grunts of exertion as the rope jerked to another stop and was tied off. A large fur ball, no . . . a head in a hood, appeared over the top, and gazed down at me, as if waiting for something.
"Tausang," I hissed, keeping my face driven as deeply into the scarf as possible.
The shape paused, and the hood tilted slightly to one side. "Pa.s.sword?" he queried softly. Oh, give me a break.
"Tausang." I said, louder this time.
The head disappeared back over the lip, and I prepared myself for the final pull to the top.
Then I heard something. A metallic click, like a clasp of a folding knife . . .
d.a.m.n it, Wing. Then I heard the sawing. It hadn"t been just addressing his accomplice by name. When I had been interrogating Wing, "The rope to the compound, is there a code word?" I had asked.
"Lotus blossom. Lotus blossom!" I hissed, but it was too late. The rope was severed.
Panic. The rope made a hissing noise as it shot across the rock lip, pulled by my weight. My hands shot out, scrambling for purchase, for anything. My gloves struck the black rock. My shoulders screamed as I swung like a pendulum and smashed into the mountain.
I opened my eyes. By some miracle, I was dangling by my right hand from a tiny lip of stone. A few more feet down and there would have been nothing at all to grab onto. The glove began to slip. I raised my left hand, bit down hard on the glove, tore it off, and barely had time to put my naked skin on the freezing stone and find another groove before I lost my grip. I spat the glove out and watched it tumble. Then I hurried and repeated that with the other glove, and was able to get both hands grasping tiny bits of stone, legs dangling over the abyss.
I tried to pull, every fiber of my being screaming in pain, fire and electricity scorching through my fingers as the frozen rock cut through my skin, and the outer layer of skin died from the cold. I found a deeper pocket with my left hand, and latched on tight.
The fur shape reappeared above. I was ready. Hanging by one hand, I reached into Wing"s coat, and pulled my STI 9mm from the holster, the long suppressor seemingly taking forever to clear. The long tube extended, there was a single match flicker of light from the muzzle and ejection port, and a noise that sounded like closing a fat book hard.
The shape reeled back, and for a brief moment I thought that I had missed, but then he reappeared, and sailed silently over the edge. Tausang"s body hurtled past me, close enough to brush the snow off my back, and disappeared into the darkness below. I didn"t even hear the impact.
I struggled to shove the long pistol back into the coat, got it roughly secured, and turned my attention back to climbing. Each inch was pure pain, and the rock was jagged and sharp. Blood seeped from my palms and instantly froze into a red crystal pudding. Finally I was high enough to get my boots above the ice layer, and onto a toe hold so I could take some weight off my protesting finger tips.
"Lorenzo"s down. He fell off the cliff."
"Son of a b.i.t.c.h. Ibrahim. Abort. Abort."
I paused, keyed my mic, and then realized I was breathing too hard to talk. I forced the words. "No . . . I"m alive. Not me . . . down there."
"What happened?" Anders demanded.
". . . cut rope . . . climbing," I grunted.
"Status?"
". . . little busy . . . right now . . ." I almost added the word a.s.shole, but I was a little distracted.
It took me another five minutes to make it up those last few feet. There was almost nothing to hold onto. I was an experienced climber, but had never done anything like that before. I finally pulled myself up over the lip, and sprawled face first into the packed snow, my legs still hanging over the edge, but not really caring. h.e.l.l, if a slave soldier had walked up right at that moment, I would have been too spent to notice until they poked me with a bayonet to make sure I was alive.
Finally, I rolled over. The stars glared back down at me. It took me a moment to catch my breath before I got to my knees, and studied my surroundings. The lip was hidden from the rear of the compound by a few piles of stone and some discarded vehicles, their origin impossible to tell since they were covered in snow. The whole area was cloaked in darkness. The nearest light was sixty meters away in the rear of the compound. I untied the rope from around my waist and tossed it.
"I"m up. Hang on, I"ll send down the rope." Tausang had been securing the rope between two heavy stakes pounded into the ground. My hands burned and ached as I unwound it, made sure one end was still tightly secured, and then threw the remainder over the side.
"Rope is down. I"ll secure the perimeter." I studied my palms as I spoke. They looked like cheese graters, practically shredded. Gloveless, my hands were freezing. This was off to a great start. You know how little kids" moms will clip their mittens onto their sleeves to keep them from losing them? Yeah, that didn"t seem like such a stupid idea right about now. "And bring up my rifle."
Chapter 19: Joy Ride.
VALENTINE.
Exodus Safe House Crossroads City March 25th This is it. With all of my weapons and gear, I stepped out of the safe house, into the cold night air. My SIG 716 rifle was slung at my side, and my vest was full of magazines for it. I carried in my hands an AKMS with an under-folding stock, loaded with a seventy-five round drum. This was to be my dump weapon, something I could lay down some fire with and discard if it got in the way.
The 6x6 trucks that formed the heart of our convoy were in the vehicle yard. They had been hastily fitted with improvised armor. Sandbags lined the beds and thick metal plating had been affixed to the sides of the trucks. Large-caliber machine guns were bolted to the backs of two of the vehicles, positioned so they could fire over the top of the cab. Heavy 14.5mm KSVs, as near as I could tell, a machine gun nearly twice as powerful as a standard .50-caliber.
I walked up to one of the trucks and yanked open the pa.s.senger"s side door. The driver, a young Exodus operative that I guessed was from The Philippines, nodded at me as I climbed in next to him. The crew cab was not armored and was vulnerable, but the heaters worked. I chose to be warm over being slightly better protected.
They offered to let me ride in one of the BTR-70s, with Skunky and Ling. These vehicles were in a different yard, being readied at the same time. I politely declined the offer without telling them why. Basically there was no way in h.e.l.l I was going to ride in one of those claustrophobic commie deathtraps. Prudent mercenaries make it a point to avoid old Russian APCs on general principle. More to the point, being the only two armored vehicles we had, they were going to draw fire like a t.u.r.d attracts flies. They weren"t any faster than our trucks and weren"t particularly maneuverable. The only way in and out of the troop compartment was through a small hatch on either side, just between the third and fourth wheels. I"m probably five inches taller than the Soviet conscripts those hatches were designed for. If you had to get out while the vehicle was still rolling, there was a good chance you"d get crushed under the wheels. G.o.d only knew what condition the internal fire suppression system was, if there even was one.
So, I said no thanks. I felt better in the truck, where I could see what was going on and could una.s.s the vehicle in a hurry if I had to. Not that that would do me any good if a hail of bullets came through the windshield, but what can you do?
There was no point in worrying about it now. We were about to start our Thunder Run through Crossroads City to the first checkpoint. We"d quickly link up with the other vehicles in town, forming the convoy, and haul b.a.l.l.s toward the dam. We were waiting for the signal, the notification that whatever they were doing to infiltrate the compound was happening as planned. If we left too soon we"d tip our hand. If we left too late they might have time to reinforce the dam.
As I adjusted the seat belt around the bulk of my body armor, Exodus troops climbed into the back of the truck and took up positions around the bed. Equipment was loaded into the beds and strapped down. n.o.body wanted to get hit in the back of the leg with a crate of grenades that wasn"t secured if the truck had to stop in a hurry.
My radio, and that of the Exodus operative in the truck with me, crackled to life at the same time. I turned down the volume on mine as Ibrahim"s voice came through. He was transmitting on all of our channels simultaneously, broadcasting from wherever the Montalban Exchange"s helicopters were being staged out of. Our radios were encrypted, frequency-hopping types, so there was no chance anyone else could be listening in.
"Attention all elements, this is Sword One Actual. The operation will begin soon. We undertake the greatest, most daring mission Exodus has attempted in any of our lifetimes. The risk is great, the enemy is fanatical and merciless. Offer no quarter, for none will be given to you. Know that our cause is worthy! We go forth into the night, ready to wipe the scourge of Sala Jihan from the face of the Earth. And here, in this place, where the rocks and soil have been stained with so much blood, where the very mountains have bore witness to so much suffering, we will be remembered for this. This will be our finest hour! The defining moment of our lifetimes! G.o.d be with us all." He paused for a moment. "Commanders, conduct final pre-operation checks. Stand by for orders. Sword One Actual, out."
While I hadn"t done any long operations in the Middle East during my time with Vanguard, we did spend a couple of months training the Iraqi Army before they sent me to Central America. It was an easy gig that paid well. I learned there that Iraqi commanders loved giving big pep talks before operations, and often put more effort into their speeches than they did their actual mission planning. Ibrahim didn"t fit that stereotype, of course, but the dramatic speech didn"t surprise me. Exodus was an old-school organization that did things the old-school way.
The other Exodus leaders checked in. First was Fajkus. "Sword Two acknowledges," he said tersely.
Next was Katsumoto, his voice imposing and serene at the same time. "Sword Three copies." And so it went with the others.
My driver seemed to have taken Ibrahim"s words to heart. He was young, couldn"t have been more than nineteen. I could see the uncertainty in his face, the fear, which he stoically tried to hide. My G.o.d, I thought. Was I ever that young? I remembered then that I wasn"t as old as I felt. Only seven years had pa.s.sed since I was the baby-faced tyro getting his first taste of war.
"Hey, what"s your name?" I asked him.
He seemed almost startled by the question. "Paolo," he said. "Are you Valentine?"
"Call me Val. Where you from?"
"Manila."
"Are you new to Exodus?"
"I am, sir. I have only been on a sword for five months."
"Holy s.h.i.t, kid," I grinned. "You picked a h.e.l.l of a first op. Go big or go home, hey?"
"As you say, sir," he stammered.
"How is it you came to work with Exodus? If you don"t mind my asking."