The coin paid for such silence is exhaustion. In muscle strain and nervous tension, a few hundred yards of such brush creeping can be the equivalent of a five-mile road march.
Stone Quillain noted that the trees and ground cover were thinning out and that his men now had solid ground underfoot instead of the slushy morass of mud and mangrove roots that had made up the floor of the tidal swamp. They had reached their target area, the small island that held the Union boat.
The range of their night-vision visors increased as more ambient light leaked down from the sky overhead. More illumination issued a second new source, a dancing flicker of white through the trees. A fire.
The enemy.
The squad leader required no instructions. He breathed commands into his lip mike, calling in his flankers and redeploying his column of men into a skirmish line. One of the squad’s three four-man fire teams sheered off, heading for the gun emplacement that covered the land-side approach to the island. Using sand maps and computer displays, the raiders had already worked through these actions a dozen times over. Now it was real thing.
Stay low! Use the cover. Hunker down and duckwalk from one brush clump to the next. Snake forward on your belly. Round in the chamber. Safety off. Keep your finger off the trigger.
Scan! Watch for sentries. Watch for fox or spider holes. Watch for the telltale, unnaturally straight line of a gun barrel protruding from a bunker.
Look down! Brush the ground ahead of you with your fingertips. Ever so lightly feel for the monofilament trip wire of a booby trap or a ground flare, or for the prongs of a land mine.
Look up! Watch the trees. The gnarled bolls of the mangroves could hide a sniper.
Breathe! Recharge your senses and flush the fatigue poisons out of your body with deep, silent, and deliberate breaths, then sidle on.
Quillain and the squad leader moved up behind a waist-high mound on the forest floor, the interwoven plastic ribbons and netting of a camouflage tarp becoming apparent as they drew closer. Quillain slipped his hand beneath it and felt the metal of a row of stockpiled five-gallon jerricans. A whiff of petroleum escaped from beneath the tarp. Gasoline.
They moved on. A few yards more and the heart of Union camp was in sight.
As a military installation, it didn’t look all that impressive. A cluster of small lean-tos half circled around a small firepit. Its strength lay in the caches of stores and equipment dispersed in the forest around it and in what it meant to the Union soldiers and seamen who rested and resupplied here. The hide served as a haven, a place where a warrior could let down his guard for a little while among friendly faces.
Unfortunately for them, the Union guerrillas had let down their guard a little too much. They’d gone unchallenged in their coastal strongholds for so long that they had stopped conceiving of a threat creeping in on them from the night. They would pay for that conceit.
Eight men clustered around the fire, some in ragged jungle camouflage, the others in the sun-faded khakis of the Union navy. Assault rifles and submachine guns leaned against log seats and a tea billy hung suspended over a low, smoldering flame that served as a mosquito smudge rather than a source of warmth. An outboard motor had been carried into the circle of firelight as well and stood half disassembled on a makeshift wooden stand, two of the navy hands working over it. Tools and tin cups clinked, and there was a low murmur of conversation interspersed by an occasional burst of laughter.
Quillain’s AI2 visor adapted to the higher illumination levels, the low flames of the smudge sparkling with a clear and crystalline light. Glancing aside, he could see the IFF lights bobbing close to the ground as the fire teams established position on either flank. Suddenly, a dazzling pencil point of brightness appeared within his field of vision, swinging toward the cluster of men around the fire. A second followed, a third, more. Small, clear-cut dots of light converged on the Union guerrillas, seeking out and fixing on heads and chests.
Peering through a conventional set of gunsights while wearing a night-vision visor was not an easy task. Instead, each Marine had a small helium-neon infrared laser clipped to the lower grab rail of his M4 carbine or MP-5 submachine gun, the laser carefully dialed in to focus at the weapon’s point of impact at short range. Where the laser would touch, the bullet would strike.
The AN/PAQ-5 laser sight was a mated system to the AI2 night visor, its targeting beam filtered to be visible to the wearer of the vision system but invisible to the naked eye. The Union guerrillas were unaware of the death dots dancing across their bodies.
The range was about fifty yards, and Quillain had a discarding sabot slug load in the breech of his shotgun. Coming up on one knee, he rested the side of the Mossberg’s barrel against the coarse bark of a small mangrove. Picking his man, a tall, gaunt soldier who had kept a hand resting on his FALN rifle as he sat in the smoke plume of the smudge, Quillain pressed the laser actuator with his thumb. He could swear that the Union jungle warrior looked up for a moment as the beam touched him.
“Team Red to Mudskipper,” the words of the detached fire team leader leaked into his awareness through the radio ear piece. “We are in behind the gun emplacement. Emplacement is manned. Two-man crew with Bren gun.”
“Roger, Red. Can you make capture or execute a quiet takedown?”
“Negative. Two-man bunker. Both men inside. No line of fire. Grenade.”
“Acknowledged. Grenade. Get yourself set. Burn ’em on my word.”
The U.N. rules of engagement issued to UNAFIN required that any potentially hostile elements encountered must first be challenged and a call to surrender issued before the use of lethal force was authorized. Quillain was quite aware of those rules of engagement, and he was also quite ready to ignore them.
Sorry, Mr. Secretary Goddamn General, but that ain’t how things work in the real world.
Quillain would give as many of the Union guerrillas as much of a chance as he could afford, but not by putting his people at risk. And that brought up another problem.
In his mind’s eye he sketched out the situation. The potential fire zone was roughly triangular in shape. Quillain and the bulk of the squad were at the peak of the triangle while the Union camp was at the center of the base. Off to the left point of the triangle from Quillain’s perspective was the Union machine-gun emplacement, covered and set to be taken out by his detached fire team.
Off to the right, however, was the Boghammer moorage, out of night-visor range and partially screened by a scattering of trees and underbrush. The database on the Union gunboats indicated that they usually had a crew of six, and Quillain had visuals on only four Union sailors. Were the other two seamen standing watch on the gunboat, manning its weapons and covering the sea approaches?
Quillain’s first instinct was to peel off a second fire team to scout out the boat moorage. However, given his limited man power, he also recognized the danger of “detaching himself to death,” losing the advantage of mass and firepower by dispersing his meager forces too widely. In addition, the longer he and his men stumbled around out here in the dark, the greater their chance of being spotted.
Much as he disliked the thought, he was going to have to rely on somebody. He dropped a hand to the “Press to Talk” pad on the Leprechaun transceiver. “Royalty, Royalty, this is Mudskipper…”