'Sir,' the petty officer told him in the radio shack, 'we just got a transmission from an Air Force helo, says he's got a person he has to drop off here. Says it's secret, sir. I don't have anything on my board about it, and... well, sir, I didn't know what to do, sir. So I called you.'
'Oh?' The woman handed him the microphone. Wegener depressed the transmit button. 'This is
'
Sierra- Oscar meant some sort of special operation. Wegener thought for a moment, then decided that there wasn't all that much to think about.
'Roger, CAESAR, say your ETA.'
'ETA one- zero minutes.'
'Roger, one-zero minutes. We'll be waiting. Out.' Wegener handed the microphone back and returned to the bridge.
'Flight quarters,' he told the OOD. 'Miss Walters, bring us to Hotel Corpin.'
'Aye aye, sir.'
Things started happening quickly and smoothly. The bosun's mate of the watch keyed the 1-MC: 'Flight quarters, flight quarters, all hands man your flight-quarter stations. Smoking lamp is out topside.' Cigarettes sailed into the water and hands removed their caps, lest they be sucked into somebody's engines. Ensign Walters looked to see where the wind was, and altered course accordingly, also increasing the cutter's speed to fifteen knots, thus bringing the ship to Hotel Corpin, the proper course for flight operations. And all, she told herself proudly, without having to be told. Wegener turned away and grinned. It was one of many first steps in the career of a new officer. She'd actually known what to do and done it without help. For the captain it was like watching his child take a first step. Eager and smart.
'Christ, it's a big one,' Riley said on the bridge wing. Wegener went out to watch.
The helicopter, he saw, was an Air Force -53, far larger than anything the Coast Guard had. The pilot brought it in from aft, then pivoted to fly sideways. Someone was attached to the rescue cable and lowered down to the waiting arms of four deck crewmen. The instant he was detached from the harness, the helicopter lowered its nose and moved off to the south. Quick and smooth, Red noted.
'Didn't know we were getting company, sir,' Riley observed as he pulled out a cigar.
'We're still at flight quarters, Chief!' Ensign Walters snapped from the wheelhouse.
'Yes, ma'am, beg pardon, I forgot,' the bosun responded with a crafty look at Wegener. Another test passed. She wasn't afraid to yell at the master chief, even if he was older than her father.
'You can secure from flight quarters,' the CO told her. 'I didn't know either,' Wegener told Riley. 'I'm going aft to see who it is.' He heard Ensign Walters give her orders, under the supervision of a lieutenant and a couple of chiefs.
The visitor, he saw as he approached the helo deck door, was stripping off a green flight suit, but didn't appear to be carrying anything, which seemed odd. Then the man turned around, and it just got stranger.
'Howdy, Captain,' Murray said.
'What gives?'
'You got a nice quiet place to talk?'
'Come along.' They were in Wegener's cabin shortly thereafter.
'I figure I owe you for a couple of favors,' he said. 'You could have given me a bad time over that dumb stunt we pulled. Thanks for the tip on the lawyer, too. What he told me was pretty scary - but it turns out that I didn't talk to him until after the two bastards were killed. Last time I ever do something that dumb,' Wegener promised. 'You're here to collect, right?'
'Good guess.'
'So what's going on? You don't just borrow one of those special-ops helos for a personal favor.'
'I need you to be someplace tomorrow night.'
'Where?'
Murray pulled an envelope from his pocket. 'These coordinates. I have the radio plan, too.' Murray gave him a few more details.
'You did this yourself, didn't you?' the captain said.
'Yeah, why?'
'Because you ought to have checked the weather.'
27. The Battle of Ninja Hill
ARMIES HAVE HABITS. These often appear strange or even downright crazy to outsiders, but for all of them there is an underlying purpose, learned over the four millennia in which men have fought one another in an organized fashion. Mainly the lessons learned are negative ones. Whenever men are killed for no good purpose, it is the business of armies to learn from the mistake and ensure that it will never happen again. Of course, such mistakes are repeated as often in the profession of arms as in any other, but also as in all professions, the really good practitioners are those who never forget fundamentals. Captain Ramirez was one of these. Though the captain had learned that he had too much sentiment, that the loss of life which was part and parcel of his chosen way of life was too difficult a burden to bear, he still remembered the other lessons, one of which was reinforced by the most recent and unpleasant discovery. He still expected to be picked up tonight by the Air Force helicopter, and felt reasonably sure that he had evaded the teams set out to hunt Team KNIFE, but he remembered all the lessons of the past when soldiers died because the unexpected happened, because they took things for granted, because they forgot the fundamentals.
The fundamental rule here was that a unit in a fixed location was always vulnerable, and to reduce that vulnerability, the intelligent commander prepared a defense plan. Ramirez remembered that, and hadn't lost a keen eye for terrain. He didn't think that anyone would come to trouble his men that night, but he had already prepared for that eventuality.
His deployments reflected the threat, which he evaluated as a very large but relatively untrained force, and his two special advantages: first, that all of his men had radios, and second, that there were three silenced weapons at his disposal. Ramirez hoped that they wouldn't come calling, but if they did, he planned to give them a whole series of nasty surprises.
Each of his men was part of a two-man team for mutual support - there is nothing so fearful as to be alone in a combat action, and the effectiveness of any soldier is multiplied many times over merely by having a single comrade at his side. Each pair had dug three holes - called Primary, Alternate, and Supplementary - as part of three separate defensive networks, all of them camouflaged and carefully sited to be mutually supporting. Where possible, fire lanes were cleared, but always on oblique lines so that the fire would take the attacker from the side, not the front, and part of the plan was to force the attacker to move in a direction anticipated by the Team. Finally, if everything broke down, there were three preplanned escape routes and corresponding rally points. His men kept busy all day, digging their holes, preparing their positions, siting their remaining claymore mines, until their rest periods were occupied only with sleep and not conversation. But he couldn't keep himself quite that busy, and couldn't keep himself from thinking.
Through the day things kept getting worse. The radio link was never reestablished, and every time Ramirez came up at a scheduled time and heard nothing, the thinner became his explanations for it. He could no longer wave it off as an equipment or power failure at the downlink. Throughout the afternoon he told himself that it was impossible they were cut off, and he never even considered the possibility that they had been cut off, but the nagging thought grew louder in the back of his mind that he and his men were alone, far from home, facing a potential threat with only what they had carried in on their own backs.
The helicopter landed back at the same facility it had only left two days before, taxiing into the hangar whose door was immediately closed. The MC-130 that had accompanied them down was similarly hidden. Ryan was exhausted by the flight and walked off with wobbly legs to find Clark waiting. The one really good piece of news was that Cutter had neglected to take the simple expedient of meeting with the base commander, never thinking that his orders would be disregarded. As a result, the reappearance of the special-operations aircraft was just another odd occurrence, and one green helicopter - in shadows they looked black - was pretty much the same as another.
Jack returned to the aircraft after making a trip to the rest room and drinking about a quart of water from the
