haven't even started the shooting part yet. Shit.
And my boys, dead like that. He pushed the thought away violently. Mourn later; there's a job to do now.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night;
when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
-Sun Tzu, 'The Art of War'
D-Day, Safe House, Elayo, Ophir
The text signal from the ship had been simple. 'Auth. Cd. RBF. Do it, 02:15 hours, plus or minus 15.'
Though some hundreds of miles farther north, the same wind that blew dust from the stern of the Merciful and made rubber boat-borne RTOs want to cough raised clouds of dust around the safe house and the town, on the outskirts of which it sat.
Buckwheat closed a wooden shutter, then looped a piece of string around two handles. 'Let's go.'
Fletcher, Rattus Hampson, Vic Babcock-Moore, and Wahab all sighed. Most did so with a trace of fear. In Fletcher's case it was pure anticipation.
Wordlessly, the five filed out of the safe house and boarded their vehicles in the dusty yard just behind. They left one of the Land Rovers behind. The vehicles started without problem. The team drove nine miles east from Elayo, past the utterly insignificant fishing village of Siyaada, before they killed their lights. They then passed the last major wadi before the airport. At the wadi, they turned south into the intensely, even incredibly rough patch of hills cut by wadis that ran perpendicular the coast.
By compass and GPS they moved another four and a half miles eastward through that, the bouncing of the vehicles causing pain to kidneys and, in Rattus's case, a bit tongue. They came at last to a steep sided bit of ground, small and most unlikely to be investigated. There they pulled the vehicles in tight against the sides and dismounted.
Leaving Wahab behind to guard the transportation, the other four, moving in single file, began the two thousand meter trek to the northeast. They left their gear, most of it, behind, carrying only their weapons and ammunition, dun-colored gillie suits, night vision devices, a GPS, personal communicators, and in Buckwheat's pocket a satellite phone.
The way led steeply up, past a thin dirt road. They crossed this by simply getting on line on the near side, listening for a few moments, then rushing across as one. On the far side they flopped down again, listening for several minutes after.
Hearts were pounding and not just from the minor exertions of walking and rushing.
'Okay,' whispered Fulton, 'now to the ridge.'
The closer they came to that feature, the lower they walked, until finally, perhaps a hundred meters shy of it they went to hands and knees and began to high crawl. From there, they crawled all the way to it, to a point from which they could see the airfield below.
There they waited while Buckwheat flicked on his night vision scope, took a firing position, and slowly swept the scope's field of view across the airfield. He counted silently as he did, then again, just as silently, as he swept it back.
'I count six Hips,' he said, 'plus eight fixed wing, four of those jets.'
'No change then,' Fletcher said. Despite the plain and simple words, his voice held the passionate tone of a man about to make love to a woman he has long desired. 'And I agree with your count.'
'Good. Let's go.'
On bellies now, the men crawled forward another two hundred meters to some rocks. There they stopped while Buckwheat used his world phone to send a brief, pre-set text message. The answer came back immediately, a text message that simply said, 'Roger.'
'You take this position,' Fulton whispered to Fletcher. 'Vic, let's go.'
Those two then crawled, Buckwheat leading, to a different set of rocks perhaps one hundred meters east of the set they'd just left and about as much closer to their targets. There, once again Fulton used his scope to view targets.
'Fletcher, Buckwheat,' Fulton whispered over his personal radio. 'From left to right . . . engage.'
D-Day, five miles north-northeast of Nugaal, Ophir
The airstrip was about six thousand feet in length, running east-northeast to west-southwest, paralleling the road that lay to the southeast about half a mile distant. There was a single, white, propeller-driven aircraft at one end of the strip, guarded by two armed men who seemed reasonably alert. Between the main road and the airstrip stood a large house-more of a palace, really. That palace was the objective. It belonged to the chief of Ophir, and leader of the Habar Afaan clan, Gutaale.
The palace was surrounded by a wall, at three to four feet in height more decoration and demarcation than defense. Built into the wall were two buildings. One of these was presumed to be servants' quarters, the other a barracks large enough to hold at least fifty men. In front of the palace were a couple of sedans, one commercial truck of about five tons capacity, and a few rattletrap hoopties.
The chief wasn't expected to be home, since this was only one of several palaces he maintained. According to Wahab's sources, and Buckwheat's confirmation, Gutaale's accountant, however, was.
From his prone position, overlooking the airfield, Welch scanned with night vision goggles. He could see the entire area well, or at least as well as could expected through image intensification.
'Grau, Semmerlin,' Terry whispered, pointing at the two airplane guards. 'There are two men there. They're not in range. So far as I can tell they're not night vision equipped. You two get in range-there's a decent firing position to our left-and take them out.'
'Roger,' Semmerlin answered, softly. 'Come on, Grau.'
Both men, like the rest of the team minus the already black translators, wore 'Black-is-Beautiful,' a creamy camouflage makeup that resembled nothing so much as boot polish.
