Yaya said solemnly.
“Know what they call a virgin in Patpong?” Walker asked.
“What?
“Oh, I thought you knew. I’ve never heard of one.”
“Very funny. Is that your way of telling me we don’t have a chance in hell of finding them or something?”
“Or something.”
“If only our coms worked. We need SPG and support more than ever now.”
“We could check the soldiers.” Remembering Yaya’s wounds, he hastily added, “I mean I could check them. We might be able to get something from their pocket trash. I’ll bring you what I find.” He gestured toward some of the boxes and containers along the walls. “Maybe there’s something in one of these you can use to fix the coms.”
Yaya stared morosely at the darkness, then hauled himself to his feet.
“Fine. You go check the dead and I’ll see what I can find here.”
Walker exited the building and began searching the bodies. They’d already started to smell. Offal and entrails were the worst. Neither were smells that should be outside the human body. Now, mixed with the humid Myanmar night, it created an olfactory cauldron from the bodies’ unexpected excrescence. The smell and feel of the corpses was something new to Walker. As he worked among the dead, he fought to keep his stomach from crawling all the way out.
He’d killed before. But the pirates had been over a mile away and he’d been too busy to deal with the aftermath of the deaths of the Chinese Triad enforcers. This was something different. It was truly a butcherous job to check all the pockets. He found a lot of packs of cigarettes along with lighters and matches, but no wallets or identification cards. Several times he found a slip of paper with writing on it, but without Laws’s facility with languages, he had no hope of knowing what they said. Still, he pocketed these in case he could use them later.
He found a strip of map on one soldier who had stars on his shoulder boards. Just a piece torn from something larger, but it showed a town on a coast, with the ocean to the west. Or was it the east? He turned the page upside down. It had Chinese characters, and remembering the shape of the characters Laws had showed them helped him determine which direction. He turned it back around so that the ocean was on the west. Here and there Xs had been made. What looked like a sporting field of some sort had been circled several times.
The sky was brightening by the time he climbed out of the hole. When he stood on the edge, he gratefully inhaled the clean air. As if the oxygen was capable of increasing his awareness, a thought came to him.
He hurried inside. He found Yaya on the floor amid a pile of odd cables and electronic parts. He held up a shredded wire and gave it a look of sheer disgust.
“They’re coming back,” Walker said with a certainty.
Yaya looked up. “Who’s coming back?”
“The soldiers. They didn’t finish their cleanup. And my guess is that they’ll be looking for you. I think you got lost in their rush to remove the others.”
Yaya’s expression went from concerned to thoughtful. “If they come back, then we have a chance to find the others.”
Walker nodded. “Exactly. And we need to be ready.” He pointed toward the pile of electronics. “Any luck with those?”
“I don’t even think the love child of Jules Verne and Guglielmo Marconi could make sense of these. Some of these cables come from World War Two.” He tossed one aside and got to his feet. His legs were wobbly. “With any luck they’ll bring back the MBITRs all fixed, shiny, and like new.”
“Yeah, just don’t hold your breath.”
54
SPG OFFICES. CORONADO ISLAND.
The lack of radio communications was driving Jen crazy. All they could figure was that the roughness of the team’s multiple-tree landing had caused some problems with the uplink. She’d hoped that Chief Petty Officer Jabouri would have been able to fix them, but the lack of contact told otherwise.
What was even more infuriating was watching the attack unfold. If they’d had coms, they could have warned the SEALs about the trap. Even though the satellite hadn’t been in place to see them set the trap, once it was overhead, the heat signatures from the bodies beneath the wood were obvious. All it would have taken was one word and the SEALs could have dealt with the threat.
But as it appeared now, three of the five SEALs were dead. Guiltily, Jen was happy to see Walker alive.
They’d followed the convoy of trucks south to the town of Kadwan. A little research determined that it was the old traditional capital of the Karen and seemed as likely as any place for a Karen insurrection to be headquartered.
But a strange thing happened when the satellite tried to view the city. It couldn’t. Not only was there an improbable and immobile cloud layer over the town, but there seemed to be thousands of fires that were keeping the thermal imaging system from correctly sensing.
Musso had been in contact with technicians at the NRO to determine what was spoofing the images, but so far they were at a loss.
Suddenly the door opened and Billings marched in. Jen had never seen her look so concerned.
“We’ve lost three,” Billings said, more of a statement than a question.
“So it appears … although they could just be wounded.”
“Do you have a copy of the firefight? I want to see it.”
Jen turned to a workstation. “Liz, prepare this system to replay the firefight. Check the log for the time stamp.” She gestured to the seat in front of the wide-screen monitor. “You can sit here, ma’am.”
“I’ll stand.”
Liz dialed the video up on the screen. The view seemed to be from several hundred feet, although it was really a thousand times that. Still, the images were clear. They could see the layout and the surrounding jungle. The video began with the four SEALs leaving the wood line.
Liz pointed to a spot in the trees. “Walker is positioned here.”
“Thank you,” Billings said tightly.
Everyone in the room stopped working as the video played on the smaller screen. The silence gave the events a sad undertone. Billings didn’t move a muscle as she stood with her arms crossed, watching the SEALs and their apparent demise. As the SEALs fell into the hole, her mouth tightened and her fingers began to twitch.
When it was all over, she said, “Again.”
Liz looked at Jen, who nodded.
Within five seconds, the entire video segment was being replayed.
Jen glanced at the other images. Kadwan was still virtually invisible. There was no action at the warehouse. The surviving SEALs had gone inside. Musso was charged with informing her when they moved outside.
When the video ended, Billings turned. “They were firing into the air,” she said.
“Muslim fighters do that frequently,” Musso pointed out.
“But usually after they accomplish something. They even fire in the air at weddings. It’s an expression of joy. Of accomplishment. These soldiers were in the middle of a firefight. Where was the accomplishment?”
Musso and Jen exchanged looks.
“Let’s run it again,” Jen said.
They ran the video again. Everyone gathered around the monitor and saw what Billings had seen. They also noticed that none of the soldiers appeared to be firing at the SEALs.
“What do you make of that?” Billings asked when it was all over.
“They weren’t aiming at them,” Jen stated as her mind began to work over that fact.
“Yet the SEALs were taken away.”
“The action in the hole was too jumbled and chaotic,” Musso said. “But I think there’s a chance that they
