After Keith saw two sets of bubbles moving down the river he ran down the slope, bobbed and swam across the river, and exited the other side. He left boot marks, rolled in the mud, and made his feet slip several times. He pulled on the grass and broke some tree limbs. Then he gently backed into the river, inserted his own mouthpiece, and moved downstream. Just as he was entering the river he heard two loud bangs as two of the flash stun grenades, each fitted its own proximity detector, exploded at the feet of the men exiting the golf carts. He took a deep breath of surface air around the mouthpiece and submerged. Almost sixty seconds later, a man moving toward the wall set off the proximity detector on top of the rope of CS tear gas putty. The top of the wall exploded in a cloud of tear and nausea gas that knocked him back and washed over the other men lined up in back of him.
The bottom of the river was soft, but things —-she hoped they were branches-kept brushing against her legs. Ted had hold of her left hand. She tried to count her steps, but she got to fifty, suddenly found herself counting eighty, and doubted that she had touched sixty or seventy. Then she felt
someone, she hoped it was Keith, steadying her from behind. His hand gave her a squeeze on the butt and she didn't mind a bit.
She concentrated on counting and she got to three hundred steps, but she knew that these were tiny steps. She was barely touching the bottom while Ted steadily pulled her from ahead and Keith occasionally pushed from behind. She gave up trying to fend things in the water away from her face, reached forward, and got a grip on Ted's shirt with her other hand. She kept bobbing up. She tried to breathe shallowly and easily, but she was afraid she was sucking air so fast that she'd run out at any second.
She had bounced in Ted's wake seemingly forever, counting, losing count, and trying to control her breathing, when he pushed her back and down into the mud. Obviously he wanted her to stay put, but just then there was no more air. It just suddenly stopped!
She tried breathing in, but nothing more came from the bottle. She remembered to exhale as she pushed herself off of the muddy bottom and toward what she hoped was the surface of the river.
She broke the surface of the water, spit out the mouthpiece and breathed in with a gasp. Ted, who had been trying to look like another black lump in the water while watching for pursuers, raised his head. He said nothing, but waved her to shore. Keith appeared silently a second later behind her.
She wanted to rest on the river bank, but Ted and Keith silently half lifted and half dragged her up the bank and into the forest beyond. It was a tropical forest outside a city, so it wasn't really a jungle, but it was thick, hot, and humid. Ted grabbed her wrist and dragged her along. Sally was gasping, but she kept up.
"Keith is gone." she managed to say.
"He's cleaning up the crawl to make it harder to spot where we came out of the river. He knows where he's going, he'll be along." he spoke very softly.
They worked their way through the forest for about fifteen minutes when they came to a clearing with a plowed field. Ted stopped and whispered, "Get under that bush. As far as you can. Be very still."
At first it wasn't too bad. She got under a thick green bush. The small branches poked her, but she was wet, full of adrenaline, and numb. She had on a pullover shirt, cotton slacks, sneakers, and socks and they were all wet and twisted and chafing. She heard the bugs in her ears before she felt them.The biggest mosquitoes in front of her eyes looked like they were an inch across, but they had smaller and nastier cousins. Their high-pitched whine was like a drill in her head. She saw beetles, worms, and things she couldn't identify. A three inch long centipede with pincers that looked like they could go through a finger was parked eight inches from her right hand. Her hands were streaked with mud and what she was afraid was stuff from the river. She wanted to swat, itch,
and scratch -she wanted to scream -she wanted to run- but she stayed silent and still.
A few minutes later, Ted tugged at the sleeve of her shirt. She backed out, now feeling the stab of every branch, every thorn, and every bite. Keith was crouched near Ted, the green was mostly washed from his face by the river. "Nobody behind us yet." He said quietly.
Keith motioned with his hand, palm forward, and led them across the field. They had moved about a hundred years when suddenly he stopped, reached down, and pulled up a three foot round section of dirt. Ted pushed her head down and said, "Crawl down the hole!" Under the dirt, there was a tunnel. It was dark and Sally had no idea where it led. Behind her, Ted produced a small but very bright flashlight and handed it up to her.
She poked the light ahead and saw that the tunnel was round and smooth. It didn't appear to crumble as she put her hands on the walls leading downward. There was a hand on her butt again, pushing her downward. She crawled like a baby for about ten steps and suddenly the tunnel opened onto a smooth broad floor."Keep going and let us get down." Ted said behind her.
She scooted sideways while shining the light around. She was in a squat room about twelve feet long and six feet wide with a domed floor.The headroom ranged from three feet high in the center to nearly five feet around the edges. There was a wall of dirt down the center of the room, but broad cuts led to another room on the other side of about the same size.
Ted shined his light around and said, "Wow, the grand hotel. You guys set a new standard of outdoor living!"
Keith said, "You said to prepare for four guests. We never practiced for anything like this, but we built it on the fly and it works so far. We've only had light rains though."
"Wait, guys." Sally said from where she sat in a corner. "What is this, where are we, who are you, and what the hell is going on?"
"This is what we call a hide." Ted said. "Although it's a lot bigger than any I've ever been in before."
"Isn't the ceiling going to fall in?" Janet asked as she moved the beam of light around. "Getting buried alive was always one of my nightmares."
"The top of the hide, the inside of the ceiling, and the floors and walls are all sprayed with a plastic and fiberglass compound -although I don't know how these guys got so much in here."
"Each of us carried a double load when we jumped." Keith said. "You said you wanted it big, Captain."
"You jumped?" Sally asked. Her unanswered questions were queuing up faster than she could think.
"Yeah, we did a Halo from thirty-two thousand feet." Keith replied. We had seven hours of darkness when we hit the ground, so we got the top layer treated and the initial hide dug before dawn."
Before Sally could ask another question, the room was filled with light. Actually, it was only a shaft of light coming down the tunnel from the outside, but her eyes had adapted to the gloom of the flashlight and she was blinded.
"Friendly coming in." a low voice said from the tunnel.
Sally swung the light toward the tunnel and a green figure came out of the tunnel and onto the floor.The hands revealed in Sally's beam were holding an automatic rifle with a long thick barrel. The hands were small but strong. When the figure rolled into a sitting position, Sally saw a few blond strands of blond hair under the green bandanna.
"Margaret!" Ted exclaimed softly. "What are you doing here?"
"Hi, Ted. I'm happy to see you too." From the way the figure filled out her fatigues, Margaret was obviously a woman. "You know the drill. The Colonel wouldn't allow a team to insert without an officer and I'm the only other ops-ready team leader."
"Yeah, and the whole story sounded like I was losing my mind... I'm not surprised."Ted said.
"Well, there is that. I've got enough contact information from the State Department, Drug Enforcement Agency, Central Information Agency, and CINCPAC to fill a phone book. You've stirred up some kind of bureaucratic hornet's nest." Margaret replied. Then she shifted her attention. "Hello, Sally. My name is Margaret. Are you okay?"
"Hi" Sally replied. "I'm wet, cold, and confused, but I'm awfully curious about all of this."
"Okay, we can handle all of that. We've got clothes for you. Keith, if you'll get changed and relieve Andy on the perimeter, I want him to check Sally out."
Even in the gloom of the single light, there was something about Ted's body language that told Sally he resented Margaret's authority, but he was silent.
Margaret produced her own small light and went to some rucksacks stacked in the center of the floor. She pulled out a small taped package with an S scrawled on it in black marker. "There's one clean change of clothes in here, including shoes, for you. That's if Ted got the sizes right." Keith let out a short laugh from the corner where he was changing clothes.
They crawled to the other side of the plastic and mud wall and Margaret said quietly, "This is Ted's team. He wants me here like he wants a broken leg. We'll work it out. He's got plenty to do. This thing is nuts."
"You mean the changing history?" Sally asked. "Yeah, that."
"I admit that it sounds nuts," Sally said. "but I've seen it work. They sent glass beads back in time."
"Yeah, and my uncle makes it look like quarters come out of my ears. That doesn't mean it really happens."
Sally pulled the tape off the package and found tightly rolled jeans, pullover shirt, sneakers, socks, athletic bra, and underpants —all in military green.In the middle was a plastic package of baby wipes.
"Humph." Margaret said. "Charming, isn't it? "Well, to answer some of your questions, we're an Air Force Special Operations team from Hurlburt Field. Right near Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle. This isn't our usual kind of operation, but because Ted stumbled into it, we got the mission. Whatever the hell it turns out to be."
Sally rolled on the floor as she struggled to pull off her slacks and underwear. She was surprised when Margaret shined her light over her legs and groin. "Looking for leeches." Margaret said. "Turn over."
Sally was laying on her side with her naked behind in Margaret's light when another light and voice joined them. "Playing doctor, Captain?"
"Better me than you, Andy." Margaret replied. "Sally, cover your private parts and let Andy check out your chest and head. He's our medic and, despite his rather large size there isn't a better needle sticker in the Air Force."
Andy, another green apparition in the room full of shadows, pulled a pair of rubber gloves on large black hands before he probed Sally's armpits, ears, and mouth. "I'm going to give you a couple of shots for whatever you might have swallowed in the river. One is a straight antibiotic and the other is my own secret brew of vitamins and things to keep
you healthy. Here's the baby wipes. Use them all over. And I mean ALL OVER."
True to his advanced billing, Andy was remarkably gentle and quick with the injections."Now let's put some drops in your eyes, nose, and ears and you're done." He said. "Okay, Captain Arthurs, didn't you go swimming too?"
"Yeah," Ted replied from the other room, "but I already checked myself for leeches."
"Okay, by me." Andy said. "But I still get to stick needles in you."
After Sally was dressed like the rest of the team she felt warmer, but she still had a lot of questions. Margaret supplied some answers. "We did a high altitude low opening drop from a C-141." She said. "It was pretty as a picture. We had done all of the planning and reconnaissance as an exercise, so when Ted passed the request for an evacuation team we were ready to go.There's five of us.Two are out as perimeter guards."
"You're both Air Force Captains?" Sally asked.
"Margaret, have you sent a recent situation report?" Ted interrupted.
"No, not yet, Ted. They got your text message through the satellite the same time we did, so they're probably waiting for a situation report. That side of the mission is all yours, Ted."
Ted's grunt was almost soundless, but Sally heard it. He went to the far corner of the room and opened a small but rugged-looking computer screen. "You'll like this, Sally. We're doing high speed bursts to a satellite. High compression. Secure squirts. In all of our surveillance, we've never seen anything like a signal interception system in the Woo family bag of tricks, but we're being very safe."
"What about Bill and Janet?" Sally asked.
"I still don't exactly know what happened." Ted replied. "I suspect that our friend Sonny panicked. Probably watched too many spy shows on TV when he was in Atlanta. I'm guessing that Sonny had the intercom system bugged and heard Bill describing the results of the computer run from the Florida computer. That cooling problem they had was probably an excuse to patch the program so it didn't show the Cuban Missile Crisis events. But I don't see how Bill and Janet were a threat. Despite what they know or think they know, what could they have done?"
"Couldn't they have -can't we go to the Indonesian authorities?" Sally asked.
"And say what? The Woo family is going to change the world? Remember, this is a proud and successful country. It is a leader in this portion of the world and a leader of Asian Muslims around the world. There is no deep love or respect here for the US. The status of the Woo family is certainly higher here than the status of a couple of Americans. I'm afraid we'd be in more trouble than we could cause."
"However," Ted continued, "I am going to ask the State Department to use their channels and ask the Indonesian Government about the location and welfare of Bill and Janet. We'll say that it was initiated by relatives in the US. It happens all the time."
Ted was obviously going to be on the computer for quite a while, so Sally went over to where Margaret was spooning something out of a plastic bag. Margaret had a little glow lamp on a strap around her forehead. It gave her enough light for jobs out to the end of her hands.
"Hungry?" Margaret asked. "We call this LURPS. Long Range Patrol Rations. Some people hate it, but I think it's pretty good for about the first three days.After that, I don't eat much."
"Not hungry." Sally replied."But tired. How do you flake out around here?"