“Bullshit,” Gloria radioed.
“They’re in Cuba!” the OD came back. “We can’t do diddly.”
Gloria jumped to her feet and started down the steep slope, Talarico right behind her. “We’re going after them,” she radioed. “Tell your tower guards we’re on our way. And warm up a chopper, we might need a quick extraction.”
“The beach will be crawling with Frontier Brigade—”
“Negative. I’m betting that they’re all on the northeast perimeter.”
Gloria clipped the walkie-talkie to her belt, and at the bottom she and Talarico crossed the no-man’s zone to the drainage culvert. She motioned for him to hold up, as she cautiously peered into the tunnel. It was possible that the POWs and whoever had sprung them knew they were being pursued, and had stationed someone at the other end.
“You sure we want to do this?” Talarico whispered urgently.
The tunnel was empty. Gloria could see a circle of dim light on the other side. She looked up at her partner. “Why’d they go through the trouble to stage a jail break from Echo when most of those guys are scheduled for release anyway? Unless someone didn’t want us to talk to them.”
He immediately saw her point. “What are we waiting for?”
Gloria nodded. He was a good man; smart, talented, and she had a lot of respect for him. He had a couple of kids and a successful marriage, which was something of a rarity for a field officer. She envied his wife. She ducked into the tunnel and scurried through to the other side, holding up once again at the opening to make sure she wasn’t leading them into an ambush.
The night on this side of the base was quiet. During a momentary lull in the small-arms fire to the north, Gloria was certain she heard something out ahead to the south; someone running through loose gravel.
Talarico was at her shoulder. He’d heard it too. “They’re heading for the beach.”
Gloria grabbed the walkie-talkie and called the OD. “TAC One, this is Ibenez. They’re trying for the beach. We’re going after them, but you’d better give the Coast Guard the heads-up.”
“Stand down, Ibenez, that’s an order direct from Commander Weiss. He’s en route your position.”
“Negative, negative,” Gloria radioed back. “I want a chopper standing by, ASAP.” She switched off the radio, crawled out of the tunnel, and headed south along the perimeter fence, keeping her pistol at her side, the muzzle pointed slightly away from her leg.
The timing of the breakout bothered her almost as much as the professionalism. They’d known the exact route to Camp Echo, which meant there had to be prisoners they wanted out before the CIA could get to them. It was driving her nuts to think that not only were the Cubans cooperating with al-Quaida, but that there might be someone inside Gitmo on the payroll as well.
Talarico fanned out to the left, slightly behind her, his pistol in hand.
They moved quickly, and as noiselessly as possible, stopping every few dozen meters to listen.
One hundred meters from the drainage tunnel, Gloria spotted the silhouettes of a small group of figures moving south, at the same moment one of them, dressed in black, turned around. She pulled up short and motioned for Talarico to stop.
For several seconds the main body of the escaping prisoners continued toward the beach, while the one figure remained where he stood, thirty or forty meters out. He dropped to one knee and raised something in front of him.
All of a sudden Gloria realized that the son of a bitch was armed and was about to shoot at them. “Down!” she shouted to her partner.
The black-clad figure opened fire with what sounded to Gloria like a small-caliber suppressed carbine of some sort.
She squatted to a shooter’s stance, brought her pistol up, thumbed the safety catch to the off position, and started firing.
The range was all but impossible under the conditions, but the noise from her unsilenced pistol was impressive. A lot of people on both sides of the fence had just been put on notice that the battle had shifted here from the northeastern perimeter.
Talarico opened fire, as several other black-clad figures turned and returned fire.
She dropped to the ground, and continued firing, until her weapon went dry. Talarico suddenly cried out and went down. But there was no time to help him. This was her fault, because she had been stupid; she hadn’t counted on them being so heavily armed. She ejected the spent magazine, pulled the spare from her back pocket, and rammed it home. The returning fire was starting to concentrate on her now, rock chips flying all over the place from near misses.
She rolled left as she continued to fire.
A helicopter swooped down from the crest of the Camp Delta hill with a deep-throated clatter of its rotors, its spotlight cutting a broad swath down the slope, across the fence, and along the no-man’s zone. Gloria and Talarico were briefly illuminated, but then the knot of black-clad shooters and prisoners dressed in orange was lit like day.
Spotlights in the guard towers all along the perimeter fence came on and a lot of sirens started blaring up and down the line.
The Boeing MH-6J chopper peeled off to the east, firing a spray of 7.62mm rounds from both of its miniguns, bracketing the escaping prisoners.
At least one of them raised his weapon and fired at the helicopter, but the rest of them concentrated their fire on Gloria.
Something blunt hit her hard, like a baseball bat, in the left hip, and her leg went instantly numb. She squeezed off two more shots, and one of the POWs in orange went down.
The chopper was coming around for a second pass when two of the black-clad figures suddenly turned and started shooting the POWs.
Gloria propped herself up with her good leg so she could get a better look. It made no sense that they would kill one another.
The helicopter pulled up short in a hover twenty or thirty meters away, its spotlight illuminating the scene like day. All of the POWs were down. One of the black-clad figures looked up, shook his fist at the chopper, and suddenly disappeared in a bright flash-bang, the noise hammering off the side of the hill.
Gloria’s mouth dropped open. He’d killed the POWs he’d come to rescue, rather than let them be recaptured, and then had committed suicide.
She pulled out her walkie-talkie to warn the chopper pilot to stay back, when the other three black-clad figures disappeared like the first in flash-bangs, blowing themselves up.
Moments later the chopper came back and set down hard ten meters from where Gloria was up on one knee. Two armed men in Marine Corps BDUs sitting in the starboard doorway jumped out and raced back to her.
“We’re going to have company real soon, ma’am,” one of them said, hauling Gloria to her feet. His sewn name tag read JONES.
The other marine had dropped beside Talarico, who lay facedown in the sand. He looked up and shook his head.
“Okay, we’re outta here — now,” Jones said urgently.
“We’re not leaving Bob,” Gloria said, pulling away.
“We’ve got a Frontier Brigade patrol just about on top of us, and we’re not allowed to shoot at them—”
“We’re not leaving my partner!” Gloria shouted.
Jones slung his weapon, hustled Gloria over to where Talarico lay, and between him and his partner dragged the body back to the chopper. They stuffed it unceremoniously inside, then helped Gloria up onto the sill.
The instant the marines were aboard, the chopper pilot hauled the machine airborne and immediately peeled to the west, just clearing the razor wire atop the perimeter fence, before climbing steeply to the crest of the Delta hill.