Nick of Time (39 page)

“Listen to me, Harry,” Jonathan said before cutting the final ropes. “Are you listening to me?”

Dawkins nodded.

“I need verbal answers,” Jonathan said. After this kind of ordeal, torture victims retreated into dark places, and audible answers were an important way to show that they'd returned to some corner of reality.

“I hear you,” Dawkins said.

“Good. I'm about to cut your arms free. You need to remain still while I do that. I could shave a bear bald with the edge on this blade, and I don't need you cutting either one of us up with a lot of flailing. Are we clear?”

Dawkins nodded, then seemed to understand the error of his silent answer. “Yes, I understand.”

“Good,” Jonathan said. “This is almost over.” Those were easy words to say, but they were not true. There was a whole lot of real estate to cover before they were airborne again and even more before they were truly out of danger.

The ropes fell away easily, and in seconds, Harry Dawkins was free of his bonds. Deep red stripes marked the locations of the ropes. The man made no effort to move.

“Do you think you can stand?” Jonathan asked. He offered a silent prayer with the question. He and Boxers were capable of carrying the PC to the exfil location if they had to, but it was way at the bottom of his list of preferred options. He glanced behind him to see Boxers continuing his search of the torturers' pockets, pausing at each body long enough to take fingerprints that would be transmitted back to Venice for identification. Uncle Sam had not asked him for that information, but if a request came, Jonathan would consider it.

“I think I can,” Dawkins said. Leaning hard on his arms for support, he rose to his feet like a man twice his reported age of forty-three. He wobbled there for a second or two, then took a tentative step forward. He didn't fall, but it was unnerving to watch.

“How long have you been tied to that chair?” Jonathan asked.

“Too long,” Dawkins said with a wry chuckle. “Since last night.”

Jonathan worked the math. Twenty-four hours without moving, and now walking on swollen feet and light-headed from emotional trauma, if not from blood loss.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen.” Venice's voice crackled in his right ear. “Emergency traffic.”

Air One beat her to it: “Break, break, break. Alpha Team, you have three—no, four victor-bravo uniform sierras approaching from the northwest.” Vehicle-borne unknown subjects.

“If that means there are four vehicles approaching your location, I concur,” Venice said. She didn't like being upstaged.

Jonathan pressed both transmit buttons simultaneously. “I copy. Keep me informed.” He turned to Boxers, who had heard the same radio traffic and was already on his way over. Jonathan opened a Velcro flap on his thigh and withdrew a map. He pulled his NVGs back into place and clicked his IR flashlight so he could read. “Hey, Big Guy, pull a pair of boots off one of our sleeping friends and give them to the PC. The jungle is a bitch on bare feet.”

“What's happening?” Dawkins asked.

Jonathan ignored him. According to the map—and to the satellite images he'd studied in the spin-up to this operation—the closest point of the nearest road was a dogleg about three-quarters of a mile from where they stood.

“Alpha Team, Overwatch,” the teenager said from under his blanky. “The vehicles have stopped and the uniform sierras are debarking. I count eight men in total, and all are armed. Stand by for map coordinates.”

Jonathan wrote down the minutes and seconds of longitude and latitude, and knew from just eyeballing that the bad guys had stopped at the dogleg.

“Air One, Alpha,” Jonathan said to the Little Bird pilot. “Are the bad guys walking or running?”

“I'd call it strolling. Over.”

“So, they're not reinforcements,” Boxers said, reading Jonathan's mind. He handed a pair of worn and bloody tennis shoes to Dawkins.

“I'm guessing shift change,” Jonathan said.

“What, people are coming?” Dawkins had just connected the dots, and panic started to bloom.

Jonathan placed a hand on Dawkins's chest to calm him down. “Take it easy,” he said. “We've got this. Put those on your feet and be ready to walk in thirty seconds.” To Boxers, he said, “Let's douse the lights. No sense giving them a homing beacon.” It was a matter of turning off switches, not exactly a big challenge.

With the lights out, Dawkins's world turned black. “I can't see anything,” he said. His voice was getting squeaky.

“Shoes,” Jonathan snapped. “You need to trust us. We're not going to leave you, but when it's time to go, you're going to need to move fast and keep a hand on me. I won't let you get lost or hurt.”

“Are we gonna fight them?” Boxers asked. Ever the fan of a good firefight, his tone was hopeful as Dawkins's was dreadful.

Jonathan pressed his transmit button. “Air One, Alpha. Give me the bad guys' distance and trajectory. Also, are they carrying lights?”

“I show them approximately three hundred meters to your northeast, still closing at a casual pace. They have white light sources. I'm guessing from their heat signatures that they're flashlights, but I can't be certain.”

Jonathan started to acknowledge the information when the pilot broke squelch again.

“Alpha, Air One. Before you ask, I cannot engage from the air. This is not a US government operation.”

Jonathan and Boxers looked at each other. With the four-tube NVG arrays in place, Boxers looked like a huge creature from a
Star Wars
movie.

“What the hell?” Big Guy said. “Where did that come from?”

Jonathan had no idea. The last thing he wanted was an overzealous chopper driver shooting up the jungle from overhead. He'd spent too many missions receiving air support from the best in the business to trust his life to an amateur.

Jonathan didn't want to take a defensive position and have a shoot-out with a bunch of unknowns. It wasn't the risk so much as it was the loss of time. In a shoot-out, it's easy to identify the people you've killed, and if the wounded are screamers, they're easy, too. It's the ones who are smart enough to wait you out who you have to worry about. When he was doing this shit for Uncle Sam, he could remove all doubt by calling in a strike from a Hellfire missile. At times like this, he missed those days.

Waiting out a sandbagger could take hours, and their ride home—the Little Bird—didn't have hours' worth of fuel.

“We're going to skirt them,” Jonathan announced.

Boxers waited for the rest.

Jonathan shared his map with Big Guy and traced the routes with his finger. “The bad guys are coming in from here, from our two o'clock, a direct line from their vehicles, which are here.” He pointed to the dogleg. “We'll head due north, then double back when we hit the road. If we time it right, we'll be on our way in their truck before they even find this slice of Hell.”

“We're gonna pass awfully close,” Boxers observed.

“Fifty, sixty yards, probably,” Jonathan said. “We'll just go quiet as they pass.”

“And if they engage?”

“We engage back.”

“And we're doing all of this with a naked blind man in tow,” Boxers said.

“Hey,” Dawkins snapped. “I'm right here.”

“No offense,” Boxers grumbled.

“Let's go,” Jonathan said. He moved over to Harry, taking care to make noise in his approach so he wouldn't startle the guy. “Hold your hand out, Harry,” he said.

The PC hesitated, but did as he was told.

“I'm going to take your hand,” Jonathan said as he did just that, “and put it here in one of my PALS loops.”

“Your what?”

“They're attachment straps for pouches and other stuff,” Jonathan explained. “Stuff you don't need to worry about. You think of them as finger rings.”

Dawkins yelped as he fitted his wounded fingertips through the tight elastic. “Hurts like shit.”

“Better than dyin',” Boxers observed.

No response. None was needed.

“Okay, here we go,” Jonathan said, and they started off into the night. He keyed both mikes simultaneously and relayed their plans. “I want to know if anybody wanders off or drifts toward us. My intent is not to engage. But more important than that is not walking into an ambush.”

“I copy,” the Overwatch teenager said. “I'll let you know if I see anything.”

For three, maybe four minutes, they moved as quietly as they could through the thick underbrush. The approaching bad guys were so noisy and clueless that Jonathan's team could have been whistling and not be noticed. Then, like flipping a switch, all that talking and jabbering stopped. The beams turned in their direction, painting the jungle with a swirling pattern of lights and shadows.

Jonathan and Boxers took a knee, and Dawkins followed.

“What's happening?” Dawkins whispered.

“Shh,” Jonathan hissed.

The bud in his right ear popped. “Break, break, break,” Venice said. “The other team seems to be turning in your direction.”

Jonathan's stomach knotted. This was wrong. Why would they do that? It was almost as if they'd been informed of Jonathan's presence.

He keyed the mike to the Little Bird. “Air One, Alpha,” he whispered. “How are we doing?”

“Alpha, Air One, you're doing fine,” the pilot said in his left ear. “You're close to the approaching hazard, but they are staying to their course.”

“That's a lie!” Venice declared in his right ear. “They're closing on you.”

“Overwatch, do you concur?” Jonathan asked. But apparently the teenager had taken a soda break.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen” Venice said. “I smell a trap.”

“So it looks like we're going to have a gunfight after all,” Boxers said with a chuckle on the local net. “Maybe two if the dickhead in the sky is trying to get us hurt.”