and stooped to his haunches, scanning the dirt of the path for any signs of disturbance. “I don’t suppose you have a ground-penetrating radar on you,” he quipped.
“I left it in my other pants.”
The hairs on Jonathan’s arms and the back of his neck felt electrified as he lowered himself to his knees and leaned to within a few inches of the dirt. “They’re damn good,” he mumbled. He saw nothing. Leaning closer to the ground, he moved the light to the side, hoping that the different angle might give him a different perspective.
He was about to abandon the effort and move on when he saw the brush marks. They were just light track marks in the dirt-an obvious effort to even out the ground-too regular in their appearance to be a natural occurrence. There was only one reason Jonathan could think of for someone to brush over an area like that, and it was to conceal a hole that had been dug for a mine. (If anything else had been concealed, the burier would have just used his foot-something a mine installer would be foolish to try.)
“I found it,” Jonathan announced. “Good call, Box.”
“I live to serve,” Boxers replied. “Now mark it, and let’s get on with it.”
“No, we need to pull it out.”
Big Guy sighed loudly. “I hate it when you say macho shit like that. I hate it even more when you play with toys that can turn us both into humidity.”
“If we leave it, we’ll have to worry about it during extraction,” Jonathan explained. “We’ll be moving a lot faster then, I expect. For now, we’ve got the luxury of time.”
He wasn’t soliciting votes on this. He unclipped his M4 from its sling and set it on the ground. With the light clamped in his teeth like an old stogie, he drew his KA-BAR from its scabbard on his left shoulder and gently inserted the blade into the disturbed earth. As he’d expected, it went in easily, indicating that the hole had been gently backfilled. Using the tip of the blade, he began the painstaking process of exposing the face of the mine. After three minutes, there it was.
“Well, well, well,” he mused aloud, removing the light from his mouth. “The Soviet Union lives on. We’ve got a PMN-2 here.” He returned the KA-BAR to its sheath.
“Of course we do,” Boxers growled. “What’s the sense of finding a mine if it’s not a nasty one?”
The PMN-2 anti-personnel mine first arrived in large numbers in Southeast Asia. Smaller and lighter than its predecessors, the weapon was extremely man-portable, and with an explosive load of one hundred grams of a TNT/RDX mixture, it carried a hell of a wallop, guaranteed to rip off the foot that tripped it, and presenting a high likelihood of doing substantially more damage than that. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had seen more than their fair share of these nasty buggers.
On the positive side, because they were so widely carried by so wide a spectrum of soldiers, the trigger mechanism was a forgiving one, thus explaining how so many untrained insurgents survived long enough to get them into the ground.
Jonathan said, “If you want to take a few steps back, I won’t think badly of you.”
“If you blow me up, I’ll beat your ass blue for all eternity,” Boxers said. “Just do what you’ve got to do, and let’s get on with the fun part.”
Smiling around the flashlight he’d returned to his mouth, Jonathan used the first two fingers of both hands to oh-so-gently excavate the loose dirt from around the mine. Fully exposed, it was about the size of his hand.
“I’m lifting it out now,” he said around the flashlight. “Last chance to walk away.”
“A daily ass-whuppin’ for all eternity, boss. Just think about that. Succeed or fail, I figure I win either way.”
Fair enough. Jonathan raised to his haunches and then to a squat, his feet straddling the hole he’d just dug. He reached between his feet, tickled his fingers under the explosive mechanism, and stood. On a different day, if stealth were not a priority, he might have just Frisbee’d the mine into the jungle and let it blow up, but today he didn’t have the luxury. He was reasonably sure that he remembered how to defuse a PMN-2, but reasonably wasn’t sure enough. He settled on carrying the weapon five feet into the jungle and gently setting it down.
He stood tall again, clapped the dirt from his hands, and reassembled his weapons load.
“I guess some spider monkey is in for the surprise of his life, huh?” Boxers joked.
Jonathan smiled and turned off his flashlight, then snapped his NVGs back over his eyes. He keyed his mike. “The booby trap is secure. Have our friends set any more?”
Venice’s voice said, “Negative. I’ll keep watching them and let you know if they stop again.”
Harvey rejoined them. “What was it?” he asked.
Jonathan caught him up on the removal of the mine and its current location.
“They mined a trail that the locals use to travel to and from the compound,” Harvey recapped, his voice heavy with disdain. “These guys are assholes of a whole new order.”
“I don’t know,” Boxers said. “When your business is using kid labor to produce a product that kills kids all over the world, I think you might have already set the asshole bar as high as it can go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Jonathan saw the aura of the compound in the sky twenty minutes before they reached its outer perimeter. The factory glowed like daytime, thanks to slung arrays of incandescent lightbulbs that gave the place the look of a 1960s Route One used-car lot.
Any remaining doubt that the enemy had been alerted to this raid evaporated the instant Scorpion and his team got to see the compound up close. In addition to the lights, teams of soldiers wandered about in random pairs and trios, most with rifles slung, but enough with them at the ready that it was clear they’d been alerted to something.
But for all their nervousness, they’d forgotten the basic tenets of defense. By turning the center of the compound to day, they no doubt took solace that no one could sneak around the interior; but they’d rendered themselves blind to intruders’ approach from outside their perimeter. Even worse, the noise from the generator they used to create the light masked the intruders’ approach.
Jonathan and his team approached from the southwest corner of the compound, the one nearest the generator. Their location put them on the far side of the compound from the sleeping huts that lined the eastern perimeter. To their left, maybe forty feet away, sat the storage shed for the gasoline, while to their right, only twenty feet away, sat the enormous trailer-mounted electrical generator, which, to Jonathan’s surprise, was enclosed in a sticks-and-chicken-wire fence, the gate for which was on the eastern side. The enclosure contained all kinds of tools and equipment that apparently were of great enough value to warrant extra protection. To gain access through the gate would require Jonathan to expose his presence to the entire compound.
“Who the hell builds a fence around a generator?” Boxers whispered.
Jonathan eased quietly out of his rucksack and laid it on the ground to make himself smaller and quieter, then dug into the thigh pocket of his trousers and removed his Leatherman multipurpose tool, one of God’s greatest inspirations. Opening the tool, he folded back the handles and revealed the needle-nose pliers and wire snips. Out of another pocket of his ruck, he removed a coil of detonating cord, from which he removed a four-inch length with a slice of his KA-BAR. Then he cut the four-inch strip in half again. Yet another pocket produced two electronic initiators and a roll of black electrician’s tape.
“A grenade would be easier,” Boxers quipped.
And if they hadn’t needed a delay in knocking out the power, he might have done exactly that. As it was, stealth trumped everything. He made sure he had both their attentions when he said, “Keep an eye out, but don’t discharge your weapon unless there’s no other way.”
He got nods from them both, then went on with what he had to do. A distance of about twenty-five feet separated the periphery of the jungle from the nearest side of the fence. Pressing himself on his belly, as close to the ground as his vest and extra ammo would allow, Jonathan belly-crawled like a lizard through the open space, and then aligned himself with the wire wall, hoping that by keeping the lines of his body parallel to the lines of the fence he could remain invisible to all but those who would know what to look for.
He started at the bottom of the fence, peeling the lowest edge out of the ground to expose it. Using the snips on the Leatherman, he cut ten of the one-inch hexagonal links vertically, and then another ten across, forming a
