Shadow Watch

hubs began to perform like the engines of a standard high-speed turboprop, bearing the Osprey on a westerly course toward the Chapadas as it rose to its cruising altitude of 26,000 feet.

Ferried in the spacious personnel/cargo hold of each Osprey were complements of twenty-five Sword operatives in indigo battle-dress uniforms and antiterrorist gear. They wore ballistic helmets with face shields, night-vision goggles, and digital radio headsets beneath the helmets. They wore Zylon soft body armor and load- bearing vests accessorized with baton and knife holders, incapacitant spray pouches, and other special-operations rigs. Their weapons included WRS automatic rifles, Benelli Super 90 12-gauge shotguns chambered to accept 3-inch nonlethal rounds, FN Herstal Five-Seven sidearms fitted with laser grips, and an assortment of incendiary, smoke, and phosphorous grenades. The strike team in the wing craft also wore padded knee guards, and had rappelling ropes and pitons on their web utility belts.

It was almost one week to the day since they had been taken by surprise and forced to do battle on the defensive; since their home ground had been invaded and torn apart with mines and plastic explosives; since fifteen of their friends and brothers-in-arms had been killed or wounded by a then-unknown invasion force.

Now they hoped to turn the tables.

* * *

Pocketing his aviator glasses in the waning daylight, Kuhl felt a cool breeze drift across the plateau and dry the perspiration on his dun colored head scarf. He heard the Lockheed’s turbines powering up on the airstrip behind him, turned from the partially evacuated camp in the ravine downslope, and watched as the last and most important items of payload were carried aboard the transport in plain wooden crates.

Despite how well things had gone, he was mildly ill at ease, and could not quite put his finger on the reason why. Perhaps it was just the precise and demanding timetable to which he’d needed to adhere, coupled with an impatience to get on to Kazakhstan. There was always a tightness within him before he made his finishing thrust. Yet this unsettled feeling had a somewhat different quality, and he wondered if the almost too smooth progression of events thus far — the absence of any outward sign that Roger Gordian’s people had made substantial headway following the trail of their attackers, or were pursuing it with the aggressiveness one might expect of such an estimable force — might not be the cause of it. As a hunter, Kuhl knew the advantage of circling in silence. But he also knew that there were circles within circles. That a hunter at the edge of the smaller circle could all too easily become prey at the center of the larger…

A pair of men in khaki fatigues with Steyr AUG assault rifles slung over their shoulders — the FAMAS guns already on their way to Kazakhstan — approached him from outside the plane’s cargo section.

“We’ve been told everything is ready for your takeoff,” one of them said.

Kuhl motioned toward the retrofitted DC-3 further down the ramp. It was still being packed with freight conveyed by the lines of jeeps and trucks moving between the airfield and the gully below.

“I want the decampment to continue without holdup,” he said. “Make sure the pilot of that plane knows he’s to leave here no longer than half an hour after we’ve gone. And stay on top of the loading.”

The man who’d spoken to him nodded. Before he could turn to begin carrying out his orders, Kuhl took note of the bandage around his upper arm.

“How is the wound, Manuel?” he asked in Spanish.

“Esta mejor, it is much better.”

Kuhl made a fist and struck it to his heart.

“A lo hecho, pecho, ” he said. It was an old expression he had picked up somewhere along the way. “To the chest, that which is done. Accept gladly all you have accomplished.”

Manuel looked at him in silence. Then he nodded again and strode off toward the DC-3 with his companion.

Kuhl lingered for a brief while afterward, his back to the runway, staring out into the shadows as they rose from the lowlands like the waters of some dark, swollen river that had begun to overflow its banks, spreading across the lofty, sand-blown table on which he stood.

At length, he went to board the waiting transport.

* * *

Graham cursed, gazing out his windscreen into the distance. He had spotted the taillights of a plane ascending through the gloom at twelve o’clock.

“Got to be the Lockheed, from the size of it,” Winter said, scanning the FLIR readouts on his helmet visor. “Of all the stinking breaks.”

“Yeah.” They were back down at just over six thousand feet, preparing to tip the Osprey’s rotors to their vertical positions as they swooped toward the plateau only two miles up ahead.

“I can see the other one on the strip,” Winter said. He pointed slightly off to starboard. “The goddamn DC- 3.”

Now it was Graham who checked his HUD’s sensor imagery.

“You catch its IR signature?” he asked.

Winter nodded. “Engines are cranking. It’s getting ready to fly.”

He cranked his head around, shot a glance portside and aft. He could make out the wingman’s face close behind them, his dismayed frown communicating that he’d also seen the L-100 take off.

A moment later Winter and Graham got verbal confirmation.

“What the hell do we do, Batter One?” the other Osprey’s pilot asked over the radio.

Winter breathed.

“Forget the big bird, Batter Two, we’ll take the nest as planned,” he said, and pulled throttle.

Hard.

* * *

Manuel knew the sound of helicopters. He had hidden from them in El Salvador when, eighteen years old and woefully naive, he had joined the Marxist FMLN in their failed revolutionary campaign. Years later, while a paid soldier of the Medellin cartel and the guerrilla armies that emerged after its downfall like countless tiny snakes issuing from the belly of a slain dragon, he had played cat-and-mouse with the Black Hawks, Bell 212’s, and Cobras flown by U.S. Special Forces and Marine Corps personnel in Colombia… and once or twice, had successfully assumed the role of the cat and swiped them out of the air. He knew the sound of helicopters, had heard it throughout Latin America as he had sold his services to whoever could meet his price, and was able to differentiate between them with his eyes closed.

However, the rotor aircraft he suddenly heard now, descending through the near-total darkness that had settled over the plateau, was unlike anything in his experience. But for the speed at which it was vertically dropping, he might have mistaken it for a large plane.

He stood outside the DC-3, looking up, listening along with the others who had frozen on and near the cargo ramp. His heart thumped in his chest. They were close, close, almost overhead—

Then he saw their winged shadows fall over him in the remaining daylight and, raising his Steyr bullpup, waved for his men to scatter.

* * *

Graham was about to deploy his landing wheels when he heard the first bursts of submachine-gun fire rattling against the cockpit floor.

Not this time, you fuckers, he thought.

He dipped the Osprey’s nose slightly and turned toward Winter.

“Release a couple of Sunbursts…”

Which were folding-fin, high-velocity rocket projectiles fitted with combination phosphorous/smoke warheads in launch tube pods below the Osprey’s wings. Their purpose was to blind and confuse, although the rockets could have been capable of massive destruction had their warheads contained explosive charges.

“… then let’s hit ’em with the Peacemakers…”

These being elastomer-cased 40mm bullets containing a liquid core of dimethyl sulfide, a powerful sedative that is instantly absorbed through the skin and mucous membranes. Fired at a rate of 650 rounds per minute from a specially chambered nose-mounted turret gun devised by Sword’s less-than-lethal-ordnance technicians, these rounds would disable first through kinetic energy, and second, by rupturing on impact to release their DMSO fill. Again, the nose gun might have easily been converted to take deadly 30mm full-metal-jacket ammunition — but a