With the tables turned now and 30K sprinting madly to prove himself, he had red-zoned his heart by the time he reached the edge of the forest to spy on the four guards posted near the back of the shack. They had crouched down, rifles raised, their eyes intently panning along the clearing and probing farther out, into the deep maw of tangled branches.
‘Marked four,’ said Ross.
30K’s Cross-Com shimmered with the targets. He lifted his rifle. Took a breath. He had a bead on the first one and practised panning right to the second. No scope on his Stoner. Just experience and instincts. ‘Got two, just right of the door,’ he told Ross.
‘Gotcha. On three.’
30K would remark later that, yes, it had been his fault. He’d been a little too eager.
Ross never made it to three. By the time the word ‘two’ left his lips, 30K had already opened fire.
‘Damn it, I said three!’ cried Ross not a second after 30K had taken out his two guards.
30K saw them now, the other two FARC rebels, the ones Ross was supposed to drop. Both charged inside the shack, where that unmoving third target had remained.
‘Uh, sorry, boss, not much of a math guy.’
‘Great,’ said Ross. ‘Now it gets fun. Pepper? Kozak? You cover the exits. 30K? Get over here. You’re taking point.’
Oh, well, he was in trouble now. He rushed up to the shack’s wall, then shadow-hugged the wood, slipping his way to the corner, wary of more contacts. Every footstep was measured, his gaze flicking between the ground and the wall, making sure he didn’t do something stupid like trip and give up his location. He turned and met up with Ross near the main door, which was actually a pair of doors, cracked open a few inches.
Ross raised an index finger with one hand, cupped his hand to his ear with the other. He nodded over something, then reported over the team net. ‘AFEUR guys report the rest of the rebels have fled back into the jungle. Hold fire.’
After that, Ross nodded and rolled left beside the door, rifle at the ready. He gave 30K the hand signaclass="underline" Go!
But 30K frowned as he drifted closer to the doors, stealing a look inside.
What he saw made him recoil. ‘Whoa …’
Ross had tugged free a flash bang grenade, and 30K turned back, put his hand over the boss’s, and shook his head.
‘What?’
‘Take a look.’
FIVE
‘Aw, hell,’ grunted Ross.
At least fifty plastic gasoline containers lined the shack’s rear wall. To the right were bushel baskets brimming with almond-shaped coca leaves, stacked as high as refrigerators. Six or seven wheelbarrows filled with what might have been salt or limestone were parked across from the stacks, and at least twenty or more oil drums formed two rows down the center of the shack, as though they were stacked on the deck of a cargo ship. Still more containers with labels that read SULFURIC ACID and SODIUM PERMANGANATE sat on wooden shelves buckling under their weight. Beneath them were piles of brand-new microwaves still in their boxes.
‘Well, they ain’t making burritos,’ said 30K.
Ross knew all about the infamous cocaine labs of Colombia and how these guys needed about 1,000 kilos of coca leaves to yield just a kilo of paste or 2.2 pounds. That’s why they needed so many bushels of leaves, and the process for making cocaine was painstaking, the materials highly flammable. Drawing gunfire, let alone tossing in a grenade, might send them all into low earth orbit.
‘Kozak, get the drone over here, crawler mode.’
Even as the UAV came over the rooftop, quadrotors humming, a rustling along a rise to their south had Ross scanning the tree line, where his Cross-Com showed the blue silhouettes of the AFEUR troops, establishing a perimeter. Nothing would leave the shack, nothing that remained alive anyway.
‘Ghost Lead, Pepper. We’re secure out here. Clear to do your thing.’
The drone landed not a meter from Ross and rolled toward the doors. 30K opened one door wide enough for the crawler to roll through.
‘Show it to me, Kozak.’
A window opened in Ross’s HUD, and the camera view and data bars from the drone crackled to life. Superimposed over the video was a wireframe representation of the shack, with dimensions displayed and the drone’s coordinates scrolling below as it advanced.
‘Good,’ said Ross. ‘Put me on the speaker.’
‘In three, two, one, and you’re live,’ announced Kozak.
Ross cleared his throat and spoke in Spanish. ‘Listen up, boys. Your comrades have gone home for dinner. We have this area secured. You can’t run. So you know the drill. Put down your weapons and come out slowly with your hands behind your heads. You do that, and you won’t get hurt. You play games, and I’ll kill you.’
The crawler rolled farther into the shack, past the stacks of oil drums to an open area beyond, where in the light of a single flashlight sitting on the floor appeared a figure sitting in a chair, hands bound behind the back, a cowl of some sort pulled over the head. The image was too grainy to make any further distinctions. At either side of the prisoner were the guards, one with a pistol to the man’s head.
‘Ghost Lead, Kozak. What do you think?’
‘Get in a little closer.’
Kozak complied, advancing another meter with the drone.
‘Hold on a second,’ said Ross, getting a better look at the prisoner.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ shouted one of the rebels, a clean-shaven man with thick eyebrows and several missing teeth. ‘You know what we’ll do!’
‘Kozak, get the drone out of there.’
‘Say again?’
‘You heard me. Back off.’ Ross faced 30K and shook his head. ‘That’s not our guy. Too small. This is a bullshit diversion to stall us. Our package is already on the move …’
‘Either way, they got a prisoner. Intel said our CIA guy wasn’t the only one in the car.’
As the drone rolled out of the shack and past them, Ross knew they were out of time.
‘Ghost Lead, Pepper. I dropped another sensor just outside the shack. Signal’s clean. I can take out the guy with the pistol — right through the wall.’
Ross smiled inwardly. This was why he’d become a Ghost — to work with aggressive, creative operators from all branches of the service who could teach him their tactics, techniques and procedures, the good old TTPs of any good operation. Like him, Pepper was an old salt who’d mopped up bloody operations in Sangin, hunted bomb makers in Waziristan, and danced around the conflicting orders between higher and intelligence offices like the CIA. His experience had taught him to always be thinking ahead and keep the mission tempo high by not succumbing to the deep bitterness and cynicism that could easily rule your life.
‘Pepper, this is Ghost Lead. You’re the man.’
‘Roger that.’
Ross looked at 30K but continued speaking to Pepper. ‘Now can you count to three?’
Pepper gave a snort. ‘No problem, boss.’
‘Okay, then. Here we go.’
SIX
Pepper steeled himself and was just a breath away from firing. The target’s head was perfectly centered beneath his crosshairs, and the M24A2 felt magnificent in his hands.