As much as he wanted to bolt out of there, he had to look inside to make sure that he hadn’t left any living children to burn. He cleared the two steps in a single stride. Keeping close to the floor, where the air was still breathable, he crawled a few feet inside and took a look. Just an empty room on this end. On the far end, a wall of fire had become a living monster, consuming everything. If someone had been left behind, they were dead now.
He scooted back outside.
The children from the burning barracks weren’t going anywhere. They clustered around Boxers and Harvey, and now that Jonathan had rejoined the scene, they clustered around him, too. One boy of about twelve who appeared in the firelight to be missing his right eye and ear from an old injury grabbed Jonathan by his web gear and said in Spanish, “What do we do? Where do we go? Please take me with you.”
Others were doing the same with Boxers and Harvey. These kids were in a total panic, yet somehow they knew that the strangers with the rifles provided a better future than the locals who paid for their labors.
Jonathan said nothing. What could he say? This mission was coming unzipped in enormous proportions.
“We’ve got to move!” he shouted to his team.
“Guns to the north!” Boxers yelled.
Jonathan pivoted right and dragged Evan to the ground by cupping the back of his neck with his left hand while shouldering his M4 with his right. A dozen or more men in various stages of uniform undress had left their instinct to fight the fires and were dialing in to the real threat. Word was passing quickly among them, and many were assuming shooting positions. Jonathan dropped two with two three-round bursts.
Bad guys opened up from what felt like every compass point. It was panicked fire, largely unaimed and therefore not particularly dangerous, but the old adages of war still applied: If you throw enough lead out there, something’s bound to get hit.
The children scattered. Most of them. In the barracks hut behind them-Building Hotel, the one still locked but not burning-children screamed and pounded on the walls, no doubt terrified by the bullets that missed the intended targets and slammed through the wooden panels as if they were not even there.
Jonathan and Boxers both dropped to their bellies to present smaller profiles, Jonathan’s body covering Evan, who was squirming like a grounded fish to get the weight off him. “Get the PC under cover!” Jonathan yelled to Harvey, who seemed momentarily to be frozen in place, neither standing nor crawling, but stuck somewhere in between.
“Harvey!”
That snapped him back to awareness.
Jonathan rolled off of Evan. “Take Evan behind Building Hotel and sit on him. Anybody comes close you don’t recognize, shoot him.”
For the first time, Harvey seemed to fully understand the stakes, to become fully aware of his surroundings. He stooped low, grabbed Evan under his armpits, and pulled.
Evan needed no additional encouragement. Once he was free of Jonathan’s weight, he darted like a loose rocket behind the center hut. Charlie, too. Harvey had to hurry just to keep up.
“We can’t stay here!” Boxers shouted. Bullets kicked up dirt in the space between them, and the Big Guy drilled the shooter.
Jonathan knew he was right. There was no way to spirit Evan out through all of this. Two-and three-man battle teams were forming all over the compound now. Their movement and their muzzle flashes marked their locations, but with so many of them and one common target, it was only a matter of time.
“We can’t defend this position!” Jonathan yelled, firing at a running target and missing.
“Oh, ya think?” Boxers yelled back. He dropped a magazine and slapped in another one.
“We’re gonna move left,” Jonathan announced, this time using the radio so Harvey would know, too. “Harvey, stay put. Box, our rally point is the black side of the burning barracks.” He dropped a magazine that still had six rounds in it and inserted a fresh mag of thirty. “Okay, Big Guy, you shoot everything north of two-seventy, I’ll take everything south. Covering fire!”
Moving with remarkable harmony, they let go with a hail of barely aimed bursts of machine-gun fire as they rose to a deep crouch and made their move for cover. Jonathan dumped his first thirty rounds in seven seconds and two seconds later had a fresh mag that he emptied in six seconds. The goal here was not to kill-although he’d take whatever he could get-but rather to land rounds close enough to the enemy that they hit the dirt. Another basic rule of warfare was that you can’t cower and kill at the same time. Calmness under fire was the single deadliest trait that separated professional soldiers from amateurs. Well, that and the ability to hit what you’re aiming at.
To Jonathan’s right as they moved to cover behind the inferno that used to be Building India, Boxer managed to unload ninety rounds with such speed that Jonathan never heard his pauses to reload.
Jonathan arrived to relative safety in the shadow of the burning building first, followed by Big Guy just a couple of seconds later.
“No return fire,” Boxers said. His eyes were wide with anticipation, his face as anxious as a kid awaiting his turn with Santa. “We can take them.”
Jonathan nodded. Covering fire, or suppressing fire, was as much a test as a strategy. You learned how thoroughly the enemy cowered under fire. If the roles had just been reversed, and two amateurs had been fleeing a dozen pros while randomly shooting into the night, the amateurs would have been easily dispatched.
“We have to move fast, though,” Jonathan said. “We’ll roll them up from left to right.”
“They’re gonna seek shelter in one of the remaining buildings,” Boxers predicted.
Jonathan smiled. “With any luck.” Hand grenades were invented for eliminating enemies hunkered down inside buildings.
There was no need to review the strategy. They’d both done this drill so many times that it was nearly as instinctive as breathing.
When the radio broke squelch, Mitch Ponder heard the sounds of battle before he heard any voices.
“They’re blowing up the whole factory,” Victor shouted in Spanish. “Huge explosions! There must be twenty of them! Hurry!”
Without having to be told, the pilot cranked up the engine of their luxurious, leather-upholstered Sikorski S-76 chopper. They’d been standing alert, thirty miles away in the yard of a business associate, awaiting the attack that Ponder had known was on the way. The spin of the turbine woke up the machine gunner in the back.
“Everything’s on fire!” Victor hollered. “They’re killing everyone. The factory is being destroyed.”
Something jumped in his chest. “What do you mean, destroyed?”
“Listen!” The mike remained open, and in his mind, Ponder had visions of Victor holding it out a window. The sound of gunshots was unmistakable.
“Well, stop them,” Ponder commanded. “You’ve got a whole fucking army. I know because I paid for their weapons.”
“We will try,” Victor promised. “But I can no longer guarantee the safety of the white boy.”
“Fuck the white boy,” Ponder spat. He owed a debt to the American secretary of defense, but nothing was worth the millions he would lose if the factory was destroyed. Most cocaine manufacturers were lucky to manufacture a few kilos a month; his operation made hundreds of kilos a week. There was no bigger operation anywhere in South America. “It’s better to keep him alive, but if he has to die, he has to die. We’re on our way.”
He nodded to his pilot, and the ground dropped away as the rotors bit into the humid night. As they cleared the trees and pivoted north, the glow of the attack was evident on the horizon, a dome of yellow and orange that tore the darkness like a floodlight.
“My God,” Ponder muttered. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. He’d agreed to shelter the Guinn boy at the factory because it was the only place under his control where he could be constantly watched and where he could earn his keep.
Victor and his soldiers were supposed to have stopped the rescuers from taking the boy. This helicopter was supposed to have been the last-resort insurance policy to be used only if the rescue had succeeded and the attackers disappeared into the night. Equipped with forward-looking infrared technology, and with each of the crew members wearing night-vision goggles, there would have been no hiding for invaders retreating through the jungle.
In a perfect world, they wanted the Guinn boy to stay alive; but if he died, no one would ever have to know.
