“Then why do they have us surrounded?” Garrison asked, but there was no more time for discussion.
“Team one, move,” Scott ordered.
Five shadowy figures slipped across the road, Boyd leading the way, the only one who knew the escape route through the minefield he had sown-a mistake, Garrison was realizing much too late. That information should have been disseminated; it was a basic rule he’d had beaten into him in Ranger School over sixteen years ago.
A line of tracers seared down the road, intersecting with Boyd and sending his body tumbling, confirming the mistake. The sound of the machine gun ripped through the jungle stillness a millisecond later. The other four men dropped to the dirt and returned fire.
“Boyd,” Garrison hissed. “Boyd!”
There was no answer. Another burst of machine-gun fire lit up the darkness with a line of green tracers that passed over the road and barely a foot above Garrison’s head. Sergeant Buhler, manning the M-60, sent a long burst of red tracers in the opposite direction.
An amplified woman’s voice echoed out of the night. “American soldiers. You are surrounded. Surrender and we will let you live.”
The first tinge of dawn was lighting up the sky to the east. Garrison knew there was no way they could break out and make it to the extraction pickup zone without more losses.
“ ‘War to the knife,’” he whispered to Captain Scott, quoting Palafox’s response to a French general’s request to surrender at Saragossa in 1808. This was a situation they had discussed, and the team consensus had been to never surrender. To go down fighting. The saying was a code word for a situation that they hoped they’d never be in.
“I’m calling this in,” Scott had the handset for the SATCOM radio in his hand.
Garrison couldn’t tell which direction the voice was coming from as it spoke once more. He could pick up a slight accent, although he couldn’t place it in the distortion.
“American soldiers. There are nine of you still alive. Your dead bodies have the same leverage as your live ones. The only ones who will care about the difference are yourselves and your families. It is your choice how this ends for you.”
“How do they know our strength?” Garrison wondered aloud.
“I’m not getting anything on the SAT link,” Scott said, dropping the handset in disgust. “Just static.”
“We’ve been set up.” Garrison pulled extra magazines out of his web vest and stacked them, ready for use.
“Why? Who?” Scott was bewildered as another burst from the machine gun caused them to duck their heads. The angle of fire had changed, meaning the gun had moved. The four men in the road were no longer in defilade, as rounds struck one of them, ripping into his leg.
“Granger’s hit!” the senior medic, Lambier, yelled from the road.
Before the machine gun could fire again, Lambier grabbed Granger and rolled toward the far ditch, preferring the chance of the mines against the certainty of the gun. They landed with a splash in two inches of water, and both men tensed, waiting for the explosion, but nothing happened. The last man trapped on the road, Staff Sergeant Baldwin, low-crawled after them. He dove headfirst into the ditch, landing on top of one of the claymore trip wires.
The semicircular mine exploded, ripping Baldwin ’s body in half, throwing the torso back onto the road. Amazingly he was still alive, his hands scratching into the dirt, trying to pull himself to safety. He made it about five feet, leaving a trail of blood and intestines behind, before he died.
Garrison hit Scott on the arm, shaking his team leader out of the shock of seeing Baldwin ’s dying efforts.
“Captain-Sir-”
“No more,” Scott said. “This isn’t worth it.” He began to stand, hands upraised.
Garrison jumped up and grabbed his team leader around the shoulders. “Get down!”
They were Garrison’s last words, as a fifty-caliber round entered just below his left eye, under the night vision goggles. The massive bullet, over half an inch in diameter and designed in the early 1900s to be used against tanks, carried such weight and velocity that Garrison’s head exploded, spraying Scott with his team sergeant’s blood, bone, and brain matter.
On top of the ridge, over three quarters of a mile away, Natasha Valika lay perfectly still, the recoil of the fifty-caliber Barrett M-82A1 rifle having gone from the shoulder pad through her body. The warm blast reflected back from the muzzle break had passed over her cheeks like a lover’s caress.
“They’re surrendering,” she muttered into the boom mike in front of her lips as she saw the man next to the soldier she had just shot waving his arms wildly. The words were relayed to her mercenaries surrounding the Special Forces team and to a retransmitter in a Land Rover nearby that uplinked to a satellite and forwarded the transmission to a dish on an island in the middle of the Caribbean.
The SATCOM retransmitter took up only a small part of the cargo bay of the Rover. The rest was filled with two rows of high-power lithium batteries on the floor, on top of which sat a series of power converters which were linked by cable to the mast on the roof, much like that on news vans, but in addition to the normal satellite dish, there was a dipole antenna and dish at the very top, extended sixty feet into the sky but angled toward the ground in the direction of the Special Forces team.
A second Land Rover was right behind the first, connected to it with several power cables. The shocks were strained to the utmost, as the truck’s entire cargo bay was dedicated to batteries. Stenciled on the side of the vehicles in small letters was the name Aura III.
The passenger seat in the front Rover faced backwards. In it was a woman, Dr. Souris, surrounded by numerous consoles and gauges governing the equipment, the human link between Valika and her employer, eight hundred miles away. Souris was reclined back in the seat, her eyes open but unfocused, seeing nothing of her immediate surroundings. Her head was shaved and various leads, each ending in a pad a quarter inch in diameter, were stuck to her scalp at locations marked by red tattoos.
Her lips moved, whispering into the boom mike in front of her lips, as she reported in what she was “seeing.” “Three of them are dead, one is wounded. There are six others. I think Valika is going to kill the surviving Americans even though they are surrendering.”
On the ridge, Valika centered the reticules of the scope on the man’s head, her finger resting lightly on the steel trigger. She was aware of her breathing, her heartbeat. Even the pulse of blood through the vessels in her body could affect the shot. She knew there was a round in the chamber, eight more in the box magazine. The weight of the heavy barrel rested on a bipod, the stock tight in her shoulder.
“We want them alive,” a man’s voice crackled in her ear.
So much power in the two-pound pull of a sliver of metal. Valika’s tongue unconsciously licked her thin lips.
“I said we want them alive,” the man repeated. “Put the gun down, Valika, and send the men in.”
Valika removed her eye from the scope. “I don’t like being spied on, Señor Cesar,” she radioed. “Where is the witch?”
A new voice, very low, feminine, echoed in her earpiece. “Where I can see you.”
“It worked, Professor,” Valika granted. She barked out commands to the mercenaries’ lieutenants, ordering them to take the Americans prisoner. “We don’t need you anymore, Souris. Turn off the Aura generator.”
“This is just the beginning,” Souris said. “The world will be ours.”
The radio clicked off. Valika slowly stood and looked about, knowing there was no way she could tell if Souris ’s spirit was still watching her. A chill ran down her back and she shivered.
Reluctantly Professor Souris’s left hand reached toward the switch for the Aura generator. She did not want to return to her Earth-bound body. Her spirit was soaring free above the trees, swooping and gliding, unrestricted by gravity, by the foibles of the flesh. To turn off the generator was like asking an alcoholic to smash the bottle at the golden moment of drunkenness when all felt just right; telling a marathoner to stop just as the body reached the runner’s high of perfect rhythm and the feet were gliding effortlessly over the road and it felt like one wasn’t even breathing.