Clear and Present Danger

'Negative, negative. KNIFE, we cannot come in now. You must get clear, you must get clear. Acknowledge!' Clark told the radio. No reply. He repeated the instructions and again there was nothing.

And now there were only eight left of what had once been twenty-two men. Ramirez was carrying a wounded man, and his earpiece had fallen out as he ran for the LZ, two hundred meters up the hill, through one last stand of trees into the clearing where the helicopter would come.

But it didn't. Ramirez set his burden down, looking up at the sky with his eyes, then with his goggles, but there was no helicopter, no flash of strobe lights, no heat from turboshaft engines to light up the night sky. The captain yanked the earpiece out of the radio and screamed into it.

'VARIABLE, where the hell are you?'

'KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. We are orbiting your position in a fixed-wing aircraft. We cannot execute a pickup until tomorrow night. You must get clear, you must get clear. Acknowledge!'

'There's only eight of us left, there's only -' Ramirez stopped, and his humanity returned one last, lethal time. 'Oh, my God.' He hesitated, realizing that most of his men were gone, and he had been their commander, and he was responsible. That he wasn't, really, was something he would never learn.

The enemy was approaching now, approaching from three sides. There was only one way to escape. It was a preplanned route, but Ramirez looked down at the man he'd carried to the LZ and watched him die. He looked up again, looked round at his men, and didn't know what to do next. There wasn't time for training to work. A hundred meters away, the first of the enemy force emerged from the last line of trees and fired. His men returned it, but there were too many and the infantrymen were down to their last magazines.

Chavez saw it happening. He'd linked back up with Vega and Le n, to help a man whose leg was badly wounded. As he watched, a line of men swept across the LZ. He saw Ramirez drop prone, firing his weapon at the oncoming enemy, but there was nothing Ding and his friends could do, and they headed west, down the escape route. They didn't look back. They didn't need to. The sound told them enough. The chattering of the M-16s was answered by the louder fire of the AKs. A few more grenades went off. Men screamed and cursed, all of them in Spanish. And then all the fire was from AKs. The battle for this hill had ended.

'Does that mean what I think it means?' Larson asked.

'It means that some stateside REMF is going to die,' Clark said quietly. There were tears in his eyes. He'd seen this happen once before, when his helicopter had gotten off in time and the other hadn't, and he'd been ashamed at the time and long thereafter that he had survived while others had not. ' Shit! ' He shook his head and got control of himself.

'KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. Do you read me, over? Reply by name. Say again, reply by name.'

'Wait a minute,' Chavez said. 'This is Chavez. Who's on this net?'

'Listen fast, kid, 'cause your net is compromised. This is Clark. We met awhile back. Head in the same direction you did on the practice night. Do you remember that?'

'Roger. I remember the way we headed then. We can do that.'

'I'll be back for you tomorrow. Hang in there, kid. It ain't over yet. Repeat: I will be back for you. Now haul your ass out of there. Out.'

'What was that all about?' Vega asked.

'We loop around east, down the hill to the north, then around east.'

'And then what?' Oso demanded.

'How the fuck should I know?'

'Head back north,' Clark ordered.

'What's an REMF?' Larson asked as he started the turn.

Clark's reply was so low as to be inaudible. 'An REMF is a rear-echelon motherfucker, one of those useless, order-generating bastards who gets us line-animals killed. And one of them is going to pay for this, Larson. Now shut up and fly.'

For another hour they continued their futile search for Team BANNER, then they headed back to Panama. That flight took two hours and fifteen minutes, during which Clark didn't say word and Larson was afraid to. The pilot taxied the aircraft right into the hangar with the Pave Low, and the doors closed behind him. Ryan and Johns were waiting for them.

'Well?' Jack asked.

'We made contact with OMEN and FEATURE,' Clark said. 'Come on.' He led them into an office with a table. There he spread out his map.

'What about the others?' Jack asked. Colonel Johns didn't have to. He already knew part of it from the look on Clark's face.

'OMEN will be right here tomorrow night. FEATURE will be here,' Clark said, indicating two places marked on the map.

'Okay, we can handle that,' Johns said.

'Goddammit!' Ryan growled. 'What about the others?'

'We never made contact with BANNER. We watched the bad guys overrun KNIFE. Most of it,' Clark corrected himself. 'At least one man got away. I'm going in after him, on the ground.' Clark turned to the pilot. 'Larson, you'd better get a few hours. I need you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in six hours.'

'What about the weather?' he asked PJ.

'That fucking storm's jinking around like a Weasel on a SAM hunt. Nobody knows where the hell it's going, but it ain't there yet, and I've flown in weather before,' Colonel Johns replied.

'Okay.' The pilot walked off. There were some cots set in the next room. He landed on one and was asleep in a minute.

'Going in on the ground?' Ryan asked.

'What do you expect me to do - leave them there? Ain't we done enough of that?' Clark looked away. His eyes were red, and only PJ knew that it wasn't from strain and lack of sleep. 'Sorry, Jack. There's some of our people there. I have to try. They'd try for me. It's cool, man. I know how to do it.'

'How?' PJ asked.

'Larson and I'll fly in around noon, get a car and drive down. I told Chavez - that's the kid I talked to - to get around them and head east, down the mountain. We'll try to pick them up, drive 'em to the airport, and just fly them out.'

'Just like that?' Ryan asked incredulously.

'Sure. Why not?'

'There's a difference between being brave and being an idiot,' Ryan said.

'Who gives a fuck about being brave? It's my job.' Clark walked off to get some sleep.

'You know what you're really afraid of?' Johns said when he'd left. 'You're afraid of remembering the times that you could have done it and didn't. I can give you a play-by-play of every failure I've had in twenty-some years.' The colonel was wearing his blue shirt with command wings and all the ribbons. He had quite a few.

Jack's eyes fixed on one, pale blue with five white stars. 'But you...'

'It's a nice thing to wear, and it's nice to have four-stars salute me first and treat me like I'm something special. But you know what matters? Those two guys I got out. One's a general now. The other one flies for Delta. They're both alive. They both have families. That's what matters, Mr. Ryan. The ones I didn't get out, they matter, too. Some of them are still there, because I wasn't good enough or fast enough or lucky enough. Or they weren't. Or something. I should have gotten them out. That's the job,' Johns said quietly. 'That's what I do.'

We sent them in there , Jack told himself. My agency sent them in there. And some of them are dead now, and we let somebody tell us not to do anything about it. And I'm supposed to be ...

'Might be dangerous going in tonight.'

'Possible. Looks that way.'

'You have three minis aboard your chopper,' Ryan said after a moment. 'You only have two gunners.'

'I couldn't whistle another one up this fast and -'

'I'm a pretty fair shot,' Jack told him.

28. Accounting

CORTEZ SAT AT the table, doing his sums. The Americans had done marvelously well. Nearly two hundred Cartel men had gone up the mountain. Ninety-six had returned alive, sixteen of those wounded. They'd even