Dogan dove to the side away from their fire and he felt another bullet pound his shoulder. The warm soak of blood was spreading now and it felt almost relaxing. The three men rushed at him, and he turned onto his stomach and finished them with a single burst from the Mac-10.
Mandala’s troops were being forced back by the Rangers into a narrower and narrower field. They were almost upon the runway when Dogan rose on his weakening legs and wedged another detonator into place, leaving him only three jets to go. He realized with terror that the explosions would begin in little more than thirty seconds, so he skipped the next two planes and jammed the three detonators set for thirty seconds onto the first plane in line.
The Rangers fired another burst of the thick, gray gas as Mandala’s troops converged on the runway.
Dogan’s wounds and desperation made him look enough like one of them for Mandala’s men to ignore his passage off the runway and into the fields. His eyes darted back to the sight of several pilots working frantically in their cockpits to get their jets ready for rapid takeoff. The explosions would send steel rocketing everywhere. He had to get clear, had to—
The first four explosions sounded virtually together, swallowing the sounds of gunfire and sending all those still alive, including Dogan, to the ground. The next explosions, five in all, were separated by a few seconds but spread quickly to all the jets until the individual fires merged into a single bloody graveyard for men, planes, and canisters. Numerous secondary explosions erupted as fuel tanks ignited, helping the flames claw out and upward, stretching for the sky.
The explosions had carried most of the debris straight up, sparing Dogan and, he hoped, the Rangers as well. Mandala’s troops who had retreated to the runway, though, had been almost totally wiped out. The battle was over.
But what of Mandala?
Dogan limped toward the approaching Rangers with arms clasped behind his head.
“Dogan, CIA,” he announced breathlessly. “I’m with you.”
Three of them moved near him suspiciously as the rest fanned out to continue herding prisoners together. One of the Rangers looked at him and nodded.
“I jumped from the plane just after you,” he said. “Helluva job back there on the runway. I assume it was your work.”
Dogan nodded.
“You spooks got all the tricks.”
The Rangers’ commander was moving among the wounded with Dogan limping at his side.
“He’s not here,” Grendel reported.
“We haven’t checked the corpses yet,” the commander said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Dogan told him. “He’s not among the prisoners or the bodies. I can feel it.”
“Then where the fuck is he?”
Dogan sat down against a jeep in the center of what had once been the town of San Sebastian and considered the question. The Rangers still had the entire area surrounded. No one had tried to get out and all stragglers had been captured and were being processed now, which meant Mandala must yet be in the vicinity waiting. Waiting for what?
If he could remain under cover until the Rangers left, he could mount his escape. But how? What was his plan?
A passing Ranger handed Dogan his canteen and Grendel gulped its contents gratefully. He had already been to the makeshift infirmary and the doctors were not at all pleased about letting him leave. The wound on his side was nothing but his shoulder would cause him problems for some time. The doctors had insisted on putting it in a sling, which Dogan promptly slipped out of, after making sure to get a large shot of Novocaine. None of the fingers on his left hand were broken but two were badly sprained and the swelling made holding objects virtually impossible. His knee, though, was the worst of all. The cartilage was torn and surgery would be necessary as soon as he returned to the States. Sudden motions, Dogan was warned, could result in further damage to the joint, and he should definitely stay off the leg altogether. Grendel shrugged and listened politely. There would be no staying off it until he had finished with Mandala.
What was his plan for escape?
The question hammered at Dogan’s mind. He grabbed a set of binoculars from the jeep and scanned the perimeter of the town, moving from hillside to hillside, scanning all levels. He passed the area where the children’s shack had been, where the direction of the wind had spared most of the flora from the flames weeks before, and froze on a plateau to the right of and above it.
He pulled his eyes from the lenses and wiped them. He had to be sure they weren’t playing tricks on him. He refocused the binoculars, feeling his mouth go dry as the sight was confirmed.
Then he was back on his feet, forgetting about his pain as he searched for the bearded commander of the Rangers. He found him in the area reserved for the infirmary.
“I need four of your best men,” he said.
“Care to tell me why?”
“A hunch.”
The commander, a career combat soldier who had led the first unit into Grenada, had played many himself. He had orders from Washington to cooperate fully with this man, but even without those orders, Dogan’s resolve impressed him and he would have done so anyway.
“You’ve got them. I’ll need to know what you’ll be doing, though.”
“Hunting,” Dogan replied.
“You’re not in the best of condition, my friend.”
“We’re not going very far.”
Dogan’s battered body made him suffer all the way up the hillside. He was shot so full of painkillers that he could feel his motions were slow. Any fast ones that were required he would leave for the Rangers. Mandala he would leave for himself.
It would have been far simpler to have just told the Ranger commander what he had seen and turned the operation over to him. But Mandala had to be his. Otherwise he could take nothing out of all this personally. Too many people had died, too many lives had been ruined or marred. Mandala had to pay. Dogan had to make him pay.
The Novocaine had worn off by the time they reached the plateau and Dogan dry-swallowed two more painkillers. The Rangers’ hands were tight on their rifles as the men watched out for a possible ambush. Dogan moved ahead of them.
The plateau looked different up close from what he had seen through the binoculars. He couldn’t get his bearings. Might he have imagined the sight that had brought him here in the first place? The fatigue and throbbing pain made him question himself. It could have been an illusion, a trick of weary eyes. He tried to picture the plateau as the binoculars had shown it to him. Perhaps it had been a different one, a little higher up perhaps.
The wind picked up and a sudden brightness forced Dogan to squint. But the sun was behind him. Why, then, the glare? The sun must have bounced off something, something metallic.
Dogan moved slowly forward, the picture from the binoculars all at once clear again. There was a whole nest of thick bushes and branches concentrated right before him. He reached up into it and his hand touched steel. He yanked some of the bushes and vines away, revealing part of a helicopter’s propeller — the metal the sun had reflected off and the sight he had glimpsed through the binoculars.
He stripped more of the camouflage away and the helicopter gained shape. It would have been hidden up there for Mandala’s escape, weeks ago perhaps.