Gomez just hoped he could avoid a contact high while he dealt with this one. He wasn’t too worried about it—they were outside, and he was barely five yards away from his target. This would be over very quickly.
He wasn’t crawling—that would have been too slow, and up close it made too much noise. Instead, while he was low to the ground, he was in a predatory crouch, his Galil slung across his back and cinched down tightly, a long knife in his hand.
This wouldn’t have been something that he’d ever have done in the Marine Corps. While there wasn’t a Recon Marine alive who didn’t wax rhapsodic about the dream of getting that knife kill, for the most part, the Marine Corps still believed in standoff whenever possible. Going to a knife meant your rifle was down, all your team’s rifles were down, and either nobody had a pistol, or all of those had gone down, too.
But Mario Gomez’s combat experience had spanned a great deal more than just his time in the Marine Corps.
He placed each foot with exaggerated care, feeling his way with his toes before putting his weight down. He was also careful to keep at least one tree between him and his quarry as he moved closer. The jungle was thick enough that he could move from tree to tree with relative ease, and with that glowing ember of burning marijuana right in front of the man’s face, it wasn’t as if he was going to be able to see more than three feet in front of him in the dark, if that.
The sentry looked back at the lights of the house, further damaging what night adaptation he might have left, and cursed. From some of the noise up that way—pounding music and harsh laughter—Gomez could imagine why he was upset. The Green Shirts were having some fun.
Gomez’s jaw clenched. If they were having the sort of fun he thought, they were about to pay dearly for it.
Then he was at the last tree. His target was just over an arm’s length away, and still had no idea he was there. Gomez had circled around until he was behind the sentry, freezing whenever the Green Shirt had turned toward him, especially as he’d gotten closer. Now, as the frustrated young man turned back toward the jungle while taking another deep drag on his joint, Gomez moved.
The slow, deliberate movement he’d maintained for the last two hours was no more. He moved like a striking snake, knocking the Green Shirt’s rifle out of his slack hand with his own free hand before he grabbed him, almost burning his hand on the joint as he clapped a palm over the suddenly frightened and confused thug’s mouth and nose.
A second later, he brought the knife down, stabbing deep into the hollow between the Green Shirt’s neck and his clavicle. Hot blood gushed out onto his hand, and he twisted the knife, doing as much damage as possible as he held the sentry tightly, squeezing his nose and mouth shut with an iron grip.
The Green Shirt tried to struggle, but he was already dead. It took just over three seconds for him to bleed out from the cut subclavian artery, and he went limp in Gomez’s grip.
Easing the body to the forest floor, he turned toward the house, unslinging his rifle and bringing it around to the ready.
The music still thumped in the house, and hoarse, harsh voices were still raised, but not with alarm. He hadn’t heard a gunshot yet. Which meant that they hadn’t been made yet.
He would have been willing to bet that he had more knife kills than any of the other Blackhearts, but they were all deadly, and with only a couple of exceptions, he didn’t doubt that they could sneak up on a bunch of distracted, stoned thugs.
Moving through the brush like a panther, his rifle up and ready, he crept toward the fields.
***
Vincent Bianco wasn’t a stealthy man. He knew that all too well. Oh, he could move through the brush smoothly—compared to many of the grunts he’d served with back in the day, he was a ghost in the woods. But compared to the likes of Flanagan, Gomez, or the man that Childress had been, he was a blundering ox, and he knew it.
He’d never wanted to be that guy who snuck up on sentries and knifed them. If he was being honest—though he’d never admit this around the rest of the team—the idea of ending a man’s life so up close and personal made him a little ill. He’d much rather have that standoff, and the IWI Negev in his hands as he crept forward to the edge of Fuentes’s upper field, where he had a good view and field of fire down toward the house and the road below, was emblematic of the way he preferred to do his killing.
The light machinegun didn’t have an optic, but Bianco had come up before optics on machineguns had been common, so that didn’t bother him. There were enough tracers in the belts he’d brought that he would be able to direct his fire easily enough once things started off.
He scanned the farm below him carefully before checking his left and right. The Blackhearts didn’t have IR strobes
