And not two seconds after the men firing at Ross and Pepper reached the dry dock, not one, not two, but six rocket-propelled grenades streaked through the air, half targeting the first dry dock, the rest screaming in toward the second, and it was all 30K could do to hit the deck and shout into the Cross-Com, ‘Incoming! Get down!’
A young SF lieutenant, fresh out of school, with absolutely no combat experience had once asked 30K, ‘In the heat of the battle, do you ever get, like, post-traumatic stress disorder or flashbacks to other battles? Do you ever just sit there and freeze, you know, the whole thousand-yard stare thing?’
30K had thought about that for a long moment — or at least he had pretended to do so. In truth, he was repressing some serious laughter. Poor guy. He didn’t have a clue. After an appropriate amount of time that might’ve had the lieutenant’s imagination running wild with what 30K had seen and done, he answered, ‘When you’re in the fight, you don’t think about anything. You shoot, move and communicate. You kill anything in your way. And you protect your buddies at all costs. Like I said, you have no time to analyse it. As a matter of fact, you don’t even have time to be scared.’
Sure, that was one man’s opinion, but 30K had hoped that he could clean out those dirty fuel injectors between the kid’s ears and get him thinking about real life instead of the way things unfolded on TV or in his imagination. Dialing into the ebb and flow of the battle put you in a place both mentally and physically that was much safer. He’d once compared it to riding his mountain bike. You never looked around as you rumbled across hair-raising terrain; you always looked forward, out there, beyond the bike, past that narrow bridge that was barely wide enough for your front tyre. You looked where you wanted to go. Same thing in battle. Keep looking out. Not within.
The blast wave from all those grenades hit 30K hard enough to wrench his head back, and when he dared steal a look up, his face warmed as twin mushroom clouds of flames haloed in black smoke roared up through the storm, past the canopy to points beyond the gray sheet of clouds.
He allowed himself another second to enjoy the bonfires before bolting to his feet and triggering another barrage with his Stoner — cutting down a half dozen troops scattering like insects toward the road leading north.
‘Ghost Team, this is 30K! They’re on the run!’ he cried. Off to his right, four of the Colombian SF guys broke from cover to pursue the escapees.
The battle had taken a quick turn in their favor.
Or so 30K had thought.
The Ras-whatever-they-were-called dudes had regrouped about twenty meters down the river, near where the submarine had just met its watery grave, and 30K marked at least ten of them strung along mangroves, laying down fire on the shoreline, trying to prevent Pepper and Ross from getting the package to safety.
Hadn’t he just cleared that area?
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Kozak from behind him, bringing in the drone above their positions.
‘I’m going, bro. Get the drone in there, draw their fire. On three. One, two —’
Kozak cried for him to wait, but he just grinned to himself and took off jogging across the riverbank, rushing up past the dock and alongside the dry docks — now flaming skeletons of timber and smoking debris.
A secondary explosion lifted from the smaller building, probably some diesel fuel igniting, and then came the fireworks show of ammunition the drug runners had stored there, now beginning to cook off like popcorn on the stove, rounds bursting, ricocheting and sparking skyward.
All right, Jimmy Boy, he warned himself. Don’t screw this up …
He juked right, and even as he moved, the Cross-Com showed him the targets ahead, the ground at his feet thumping with rounds that either paralleled his steps or cut through his boot prints. You play with fire and you will get burned, the old saying went. He was going to need cover in about two seconds.
Holding his breath and still running, he opened fire on the first target, panning away not a second after that guy went down. He struck the second guy and the third before he broke left now, heading toward the river. To hell with cover. He was on a roll now …
Three more guys accepted his free bullets before he had the remaining four all shooting at him as he reached the muddy bank. He answered with one more salvo, then abandoned the machine gun and dove beneath the waves.
As he swam, sensing they were tracing his path with their shots, he drew his FN Five-seven from its holster, then came up on his hands and knees, firing one, two, three, four 5.7mm rounds, striking two men. He stole a look back at Ross and Pepper dragging Delgado onto the shoreline. Their CIA operative was not moving.
Two guys left, with only 30K standing in their path. The captain needed time.
He scowled at the mangroves within which hid the last two soldiers. Get out here and fight like men …
The razor’s edge between bravery and insanity was a place few operators visited. 30K had bought several acres there, planned to build himself a house, three-car garage, have some horses out back. It was all about location, location, location, right? If you wanted to save your buddies, you had to be in the right place at the right time. You had to make your own luck. You had to stop thinking in clichés and start firing your weapon –
Which was exactly what he did. Took out the ninth guy with a single round. Missed the tenth guy with the first shot but got him with the second.
But shit, he didn’t realize he’d been nicked in the arm until the needles took hold and his sleeve grew bloody. He cursed again, jogged back toward the captain and Pepper.
Only then did he realize that Kozak had never brought in the drone to draw their fire. He glanced up in the kid’s direction –
And realized why.
Aw, no. No, no, no …
Delgado was turning blue, and Ross was trembling with the desire to save this guy.
They each carried a medical kit, but those were mostly stocked with supplies to treat wounds you’d expect in battle: trauma, gunshot, etc. Automatic defibrillators were a bit too cumbersome to pack along, and Ross seriously doubted that Jiménez’s team had one.
So it was up to him to perform CPR on Delgado, who was still unconscious, not breathing, looking DOA. Two breaths followed by the chest compressions. Over and over. Ross knew the routine, had his CPR cert refreshed every year, but after the first round of compressions, he couldn’t go on.
Memories …
He looked at Pepper, his eyes burning, and said, ‘Take over. Do it!’
Pepper jumped right in — just as 30K ran past them, crying, ‘Kozak! Kozak!’
SIXTEEN
Kozak knew he was lying facedown in the mud, and he understood that his brain must be short-circuiting like a laptop left in the rain, but he didn’t care. He was ten years old again, up in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, and he’d just tossed his Heddon Torpedo lure into the lake, hoping to catch a bass. He slowly worked the reel, drawing in more line, and the lure’s forward prop created a perfect bubbling noise and ripple across the surface. Pepper, a fellow bass-fishing aficionado, would’ve been proud of the city boy’s technique, but it wasn’t Pepper who’d been proud:
‘That’s really good, Johnny,’ said David, the college guy with the funny beard who’d served as Kozak’s camp counselor.
Behind them lay the lush grounds of Saint Tikhon’s Monastery and Seminary, and Kozak was there attending the annual one-week summer camp sponsored by the Diocese of Eastern Pennsylvania. Russian Orthodox Christians like himself attended services and learned about courage, good sportsmanship, and how to raid a girl’s dormitory to steal their pyjamas (the older boys called it a ‘panty raid’).