2013: Beyond Armageddon (3 page)

So far so good. The HALO—high altitude/low opening—insertion had come off without a hitch. Jumping from 25,000 feet and not opening their parachutes until just under 4,000, they had been impossible to detect while making a pinpoint landing on the Cambodia-Vietnam border.

The clock had started ticking the moment they left the plane. They had—at most—a six-hour window before daylight would erase their advantage of being able to see in the dark. They couldn’t be sure who or what they might encounter, but eight American soldiers coming through the Vietnamese jungle in full combat gear would not be good. They had a lot of ground to cover and needed to get out before the sun came up. Period. The timing had to be flawless. Seconds would count.

They bulled their way through three miles of thick woods and relentless underbrush that wanted to cling to every piece of equipment. Monkeys howled and screeched at the invaders into their territory. Zeke suppressed the thought that if anyone wanted to find his team, all they had to do was follow that sound.

Nothing to be done about it. He forced himself to concentrate on the mission.

Operation Lazarus. Only three people outside the team knew of its existence, and the Commander-in-Chief wasn’t one of them. The odds against it were too high. If it failed and the public found out, not only would the political fallout be fatal, it would reopen one of the country’s deepest wounds. Adding salt to that wound was the fact that they were heading into the very place where the seeds of American involvement in Vietnam had been sown in 1954.

The French had suffered their final defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and two American pilots had been lost while lending air support. Now we were returning to the site of those first combat deaths to prevent four men captured in the final days of the conflict from becoming the last. The chance to honor the memory of those two pilots had been a strong motivating factor in putting together the highly improbable Operation Lazarus.

No one had believed the report when it first came in. Privately, most involved still didn’t. But after checking it out, the intelligence was deemed reliable—or as reliable as such a far-fetched story could be. Reliable enough that it had to be acted upon.

Somewhere near here, four MIAs from the Vietnam War were supposedly still being held. Their names were not yet known. The intelligence had come through channels from a Vietnamese family who claimed to know the exact whereabouts of the four captives. In exchange for divulging information that would essentially make them traitors, the family of six wanted safe passage to the Unites States.

The deal had been made and the team put together and trained.

Captain Zeke Sloan held up his hand and the men behind him stopped. He felt his undershirt sticking to his skin. Between gaps in the thick foliage he saw something moving. A shadow in the shape of a man. He thought he’d seen it earlier, but when they’d checked it out and found nothing, he’d dismissed it as paranoia. Now he felt sure someone was stalking them.

He decided to risk breaking radio silence, whispering into his mike as softly as he could: “Does anyone see anything over there?” He told them where to look and what to look for. A long silent minute later the responses came.

Negative. It was unanimous. Zeke kept staring. The shadow slowly evaporated. Continuing to stare at the same spot, he saw only two red dots at eye level. For an instant he thought they were laser sights from a weapon, but that made no sense. Why would they be aiming in that direction? Maybe it was the eyes of some jungle animal. He asked the team if they saw the spots.

Negative.

No more time. He motioned for them to get moving. A few minutes later he pointed through a small gap in the thick foliage. The other men came up beside him and nodded. They saw it too. A small house, little more than a hut, stood twenty yards dead ahead in a clearing.

Communicating with hand signals, Zeke motioned for his men to begin a drill they’d rehearsed hundreds of times. He remained stationary while the others fanned forward into a U. With his Guilly Suit of leaves and debris added to his camouflage, Zeke became one of the trees as the team slowly eased along both sides of the house.

Standing at the edge of the clearing, Zeke sensed the shadow watching him, but looked all around and saw nothing. While his men got into position he ran the key points of the mission through his head one last time:

Get the location of the MIAs from the family. Leave the signal beacon on top of their house so the chopper could find them for extraction. While the family stayed put, Zeke’s team would find the MIAs, who were
supposedly
—that word had been a nagging splinter in his brain from day one—no more than two miles from the house. Liberate the MIAs, as quietly as possible. That could be tough, depending on how well-guarded they were. Almost as tough would be getting the MIAs back to the house. At best that meant a fifteen-minute sprint through dense jungle. Plus the MIAs couldn’t be counted on to have the clothing or stamina for the trip, so stretchers had been brought to carry them. Not to mention that the Landing Zone was the family’s front yard.

He looked around the small clearing. With a perfect landing the chopper’s blades might miss the trees by inches.

A dozen things could go wrong but Zeke slammed a door in his head to keep those thoughts locked out. Things had to be dealt with as they happened. Only one thing mattered: get the mission accomplished and everyone in the LZ at the appointed minute. Period. No second chances.

Finally he heard Lt. Nolan’s whispered confirmation in his earphone: everyone was in position. Satisfied that there were no hostile forces waiting in ambush, Zeke whispered a single word back: “Go.”

Like silent lightning they burst through the front and back doors of the house, unlocked as the family had assured them they would be. Cowering in the living room were the two parents and four children. In seconds the complete interior was checked. Lieutenant Reese Nolan, standing at Zeke’s right side, signaled that the objective was secure. Zeke held his friend’s stare for an extra second.

Reese. Rock-solid and right where he was supposed to be. Always.

Zeke’s gaze swept from man to man, each at combat ready and waiting for his orders. The room almost seemed to vibrate with intensity. The moment for which they had endured months of constant training was here. Crunch time. What got said in this room in the next few minutes would mean success or failure.

Zeke signaled for Becker and Scimonetti to get the signal beacon onto the roof. They disappeared out the back door.

Even though it was mandatory that each man on the team speak Vietnamese, Zeke had appointed Kevin Andrews as the spokesman, since he’d attained perfect fluency.

Zeke stood in the center of the small room facing the nervous family. The wife stood half-hidden behind her husband. Zeke gauged the man at 5’6”, 140. Even at that he was the largest in the family. He nervously affected a protective posture. Zeke admired him for doing his duty in the face of all this firepower.

The four children huddled behind their parents. The three smaller ones formed a knot behind the biggest and oldest, a pretty girl Zeke guessed to be barely out of her teens. She gave him a faint smile.

He tried not to smile back. It struck him that she was about the same age as his sister. Behind her were a boy and two more girls, ranging in age from about fifteen to six.

Nolan stood on Zeke’s right, Andrews on his left. The other men guarded the doors and windows. That left Michael Price to keep his eyes moving and cover everyone’s back. He stood several steps to the right of Nolan, just inside a small open window, his AK-47 at the ready. They were all using the Soviet-made assault rifle to avoid having anything traceable to the United States if hostilities broke out.

Zeke’s gaze lingered on Michael Price. At thirty-nine he was the oldest member of the team. Zeke had specifically requested him, not only because of his reputation for fanatical dedication to drilling and staying in shape, but even more for the maturity and stability his age could bring. And yet a disturbing change had come over him in the last few seconds that had Zeke second-guessing his decision.

Hot rage seethed on Price’s face as he glowered at the family. What had brought that on? It made no sense to play hardass here; these people were on their side. Maybe the stare was what Price needed to psyche himself up.

Zeke nodded to Kevin Andrews. Everyone listened intently while he questioned the father. The timid man kept apologizing, bowing and chattering nervously, before Andrews could drag it out of him.

The MIAs had been moved. The family no longer knew where they were.

“He’s lying!”

Price had unshouldered his AK47 and thumbed the selector switch to fully-automatic. One pull of the trigger could empty his 30-round magazine in seconds. The rifle was trained on the middle of the father’s chest.

“Stand down, Sergeant.” The softness of Zeke’s words did not disguise the threat behind them.

Price lowered his rifle but the wild look remained. The safety was still off. Nolan edged a step toward him. One false twitch now and something really bad could happen. Price yelled at the father in Vietnamese. “Where are they, you gook son of a bitch!”

The father shook his head, body language totally subservient. The family had knitted themselves into a damp clump of fear.

Zeke spoke more forcefully. “Stand down.” When Price hesitated he added, as loud as he dared,
“Now.”

Nolan leaned closer. If Zeke jumped he might get there in time to swat the barrel aside—

“WHERE’S RANDY STOKES YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT?”

Tears started streaming down the father’s face. His wife was weeping and howling. Zeke barked to Andrews. “Get them calmed down. Tell them no one is going to get hurt.” He rested his hand on the butt of his pistol and gave Price his most intimidating Delta stare.

“Sergeant, what are you talking about? Explain yourself.
Quietly.
”

Price was almost hyper-ventilating. “Randy Stokes was my best friend. He was in Nam in ’73, when our last guys were being evacuated. He never made it. He’s got to be one of the four we came for, but now that we’re here these fuckers are changing their tune. Somebody got to ’em, sir.” He held Zeke’s gaze. “I didn’t go through all this to get this close and not bring Randy back.”

Zeke stared at him thinking: how in the
hell
did the Army not find this out? And how did Price pass his psych evaluation? A flicker of guilt flashed through him. Price was
his
responsibility. And there’d always been something simmering beneath the surface, but Price was so solid in every other way Zeke had let it slide…

Didn’t matter. He needed Price to settle down so he took another approach. “Soldier, it’s honorable to want to save your friend, but there is no possible way you can know that one of the four men we’re here to find is Randy Stokes. None of us knows their names. Not the President, not the SecDef—no one.”

Calm overtook Price so suddenly that it alarmed Zeke almost as much as his anger.

“
I
know,” Price said, with a smile of complete assurance.

Beyond Price, Zeke saw the camouflaged faces of Becker and Scimonetti easing into view at the window. The opening looked too small for either one of them to get through, but maybe they could do something. As a last resort they could shoot the crazy son of a bitch. They lingered at the edge of Zeke’s vision like the disembodied heads of two jungle ghosts. Before he turned back to Price, he saw something else that disturbed him.

Hovering above and behind Becker and Scimonetti, he saw two pinpoints of red, like the ones he’d seen hovering in the jungle earlier. Again he thought of weapons being laser-sighted, but that was impossible. The area was secure. Besides, who would be aiming at air?

Forcing himself to continue the crucial exchange, he said, “How could you possibly know?”

“God told me.”

“God?”

“Yes. He gave me this one last chance to save Randy—and myself, for not enlisting with him back then.”

Nolan inched toward Price but Zeke stopped him with a small shake of the head. Zeke felt his heart constricting. There was no contingency for one of their own team suddenly turning into a religious wacko.

“Fine,” he said. “That’s good. Let’s just all be calm, then, and see if we can talk these nice people into telling us where Randy is.”

Price made a small nod and turned back to the family. He stood with the rifle at his side and his finger on the trigger. Anger was creeping onto his face again and making Zeke nervous. One wrong word…

Through the open window he saw that Becker had pulled his pistol. Unseen by Price, Zeke gave Becker a nod but held up a finger. He told Andrews to resume the interrogation.

The father begged and pleaded while his wife talked over him to emphasize that he was telling the truth. Andrews was getting nowhere. Nolan was now a yard away from Price and leaning toward him. Becker held steady aim with his pistol. Zeke looked at Price.

He seemed to be listening to something not in the room and nodding. Then he turned slowly to Zeke and spoke with a menacing calm. “If we lose Randy because of these scumbags, it’s on you.” He cocked his head again as if listening.

Zeke watched him tense up as anger started taking over. They couldn’t risk another blowup. Becker was going to have to take him out. Before he could give the signal, Price exploded.

“We’ve been set up! It’s an ambush!” He fell to one knee and pulled the trigger.

Price’s move took him below the window so that Becker couldn’t get a shot at him. Nolan had just begun his lunge but when Price went down he missed and stumbled past him. The other men started to collapse inward to protect the family but had to back off to avoid the hail of bullets.

Sounds of screaming madness erupted like vomit from the soul. In the instant before Zeke slammed Price to the floor, the pleading and anguish on the faces of the children were like flames leaping out from hell.

Five seconds later it was over.