CHAPTER 4
T
he moment Harvath popped the Land Cruiser’s door open and climbed out, the soldiers began shouting at him to get back in. Keeping a smile on his face, he ignored their commands. Instead, he moved toward them.
The medical bag was slung over one shoulder and in his arms he cradled an assortment of supplies. Nodding toward the soldier with the bandaged hand, he offered to change his dressing in exchange for being allowed to step off the road and relieve himself afterward.
One soldier in particular raised his rifle as if he was about to strike Harvath, but the man with the bandaged hand told him to stop. He needed his dressing changed, badly.
Harvath stepped into the beams cast by the Land Cruiser’s headlights and motioned the man to him. Once he was there, Harvath convinced two more to join him and assist. Slinging their rifles, they accepted the supplies and did what Harvath asked.
Even lightly touching the man’s bandaged hand caused him to wince. He was in considerable pain. Harvath could see that the wound was oozing. It was infected.
As he carefully unwound the bandage, he asked the young man how he had been injured. The soldier, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, explained that his hand had slipped while using his machete. Congolese rebels could be horrific butchers. Harvath didn’t want to know the details.
The wound was a week old, and another soldier had dressed it for him. The bandage hadn’t been changed. As soon as Harvath had it unwound, the stench alone told him the man’s hand was a lost cause.
“Is it very bad?” the young soldier asked in French.
Holding the man by the wrist, Harvath rotated the hand from side to side. “We need more light,” he said, moving the soldier farther away from the group. Gesturing with his head, he encouraged the other two to move with them. They did.
Once he had them where he needed them, he pretended to examine the wound once more and then told the man’s compatriots what he needed them to do. Explaining that they had limited disinfectant, he told one man he would need to pour it over the top of the wound while the other man held a clean dressing underneath to catch the liquid as it poured down. They would then wring the bandage out over the wound to give it a second cleansing.
As men who led lives of unfathomable paucity, reusing the liquid made complete sense to them. In order to keep their attention focused on the wound and off of him, Harvath further instructed them to watch for any indication that the discharge was changing color.
Harvath had his patient, as well as his two assistants, squat down so they could all work better via the Land Cruiser’s headlights.
One of the men became agitated when he saw him reach into his medical bag and demanded to know what he was doing. Harvath held out then penlight and showed it to him. Satisfied, the rebel returned his focus to his colleague’s wound.
Taking one last look around and fixing everyone’s position in his mind, Harvath instructed the man with the disinfectant to very slowly start pouring it over the wound and reminded the man holding the dressing underneath to make sure he caught every last drop.
Standing up straight, he moved the penlight to his left hand and held it where Ash and Mick would be the only ones able to see it. Then, sliding his right hand into the medical bag, he wrapped it around the butt of his weapon and took a deep breath. Exhaling, he depressed the light’s tail cap, giving out two quick flashes as he began to count backward from ten.
When the Land Cruiser’s high beams kicked on, Harvath already had
the suppressed Glock free of the bag and his finger applying pressure to its trigger.
The three rebels next to him were stacked almost like a totem pole, with one head on top of another. Harvath started with the man who was pouring the disinfectant and worked his way down. Three headshots in less than two seconds.
Before the bodies had even crumpled to the ground, Harvath had his weapon up and trained on the remaining soldiers. Mick, though, had been just as deadly. All of his shots had found their marks.
Nevertheless, Harvath moved over to them to make sure they were dead. They were. The Brits joined him and quickly helped secure the scene.
After stripping the dead rebels of their weapons, ammunition, and sole radio, which they gave to an amazingly unperturbed Jambo to monitor, they tossed the bodies in the jungle on the opposite side of the road. Life in Africa, and especially Congo, was exceedingly cheap.
“How do you want to handle Dr. Decker?” Ash asked.
Harvath had never wanted her along in the first place. After what she had done, part of him wanted to leave her here, but he couldn’t do that. He knew he was going to have to be the one to get her out.
He also knew that Murphy, of the eponymous law, loved Africa more than any other country in the world. If it could go wrong, it would go wrong, especially in Africa. That went double for Congo.
Looking at the weapons they had taken off of the dead soldiers, two options popped into Harvath’s mind. A cigar roll or a picket fence.
In the cigar roll, he’d stagger Ash and his men along a route between the road and wherever Jessica Decker was. Once he had her, and they were making their escape, the shooters would give them cover and then join them in their retreat, “rolling” the cigar as they worked backward toward the vehicles. But that was one of the spots where Mr. Murphy would be waiting with the vehicles.
They needed to keep the Land Cruisers running and ready to go. There was no telling how many rebels they might have on their tail as they tore through the jungle. It would be a death sentence to arrive at the road and discover that something had happened to their only means of ultimate escape. They couldn’t risk leaving the vehicles.
Judging by the little he knew about Ash, the Brit wouldn’t like Harvath’s plan. Ash was a good man, a soldier. He’d want to go into the jungle too, but Harvath couldn’t ask him to do that. It wasn’t right. Not with how much had already been kept from him and his team.
Harvath decided to go with the picket.
CHAPTER 5
A
sh looked at Harvath in disbelief. “That’s got to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Four blokes from the Regiment—
four
—and you want us to mind the car park? Are you out of your tree?”
“It’s a SEAL thing,” Harvath responded. “Don’t take it personally.”
“The hell it is. You have no idea what’s waiting for you in there. If it goes pear-shaped, you’re going to need backup.”
“Give me a radio,” he replied. “If anything happens, I’ll call you.”
“Sure you will, Superman,” Ash said as he walked away to get a radio. “Bloody Americans.”
Even though Ash didn’t like it, the picket was the right way to do this, and he knew it.
Harvath walked over and checked on Simon and Eddie. It was amazing how fast they moved. He could almost sense a rivalry between the two as they fieldstripped the dead rebels’ AK-47s, wiped everything down, and rapidly reassembled them. Lives depended on those weapons working, specifically the lives of Scot Harvath and Jessica Decker.
Mick duct-taped magazines together so that all Harvath would have to do was spin a spent mag upside down in order to reinsert a fresh one. He knew, though, that if Harvath needed a second mag for any of these weapons, it was because he was in more trouble than a second mag was likely to ever help him get out of.
“Here’s your radio,” Ash said, handing it to him. “Don’t be afraid to use it.”
“I won’t,” Harvath replied as he worked the bone microphone into his ear.
After a quick commo check, Harvath pocketed a stack of loaded Glock mags and shouldered six AK-47s. It was a rough load, but he had humped worse. It would get lighter as he got closer to Decker. Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
“You’ll want these too,” Ash remarked as he gave him a handful of mini chemical light sticks.
Harvath thanked him, and without another word, turned and headed off in the direction Dr. Decker had been led into the jungle.
The great thing about the British SAS was that they viewed war the same way the American Special Operations community did. You didn’t win by thinking inside the box and following someone else’s rules. You turned the box upside down and made your own rules, no matter what the enemy threw at you.
Just as they had found a way to suppress their Glocks, they had also found a way to lay their hands on a pair of night vision goggles.
As Harvath picked his way through the jungle’s total darkness with them, he was thankful for the team’s ingenuity. Using a flashlight would have been like taking out a billboard telling the bad guys he was coming and when he was going to be there. With what he had planned, he preferred that they not have any advance notice. Surprise was one of the things he needed to keep on his side.
Though it wasn’t raining, it might as well have been. Everything was damp and drops of water continued to roll off the heavy tree canopy high above. The rain forests of the Congo Basin contained so much water that they caused their own weather system, and were known as the “Lungs of Africa.”
Harvath had operated in plenty of jungles, and he had never liked any of them. He hated humidity. He preferred the high desert. High altitude and cold were his favorites. Jungles were just plain dangerous. You not only had to worry about bad guys but everything else lurking out there that wanted to eat you too.
Then there was the orchestra of noise. One sound layered upon the next. There was so much of it, it was hard to think, much less listen for
any indication of danger. You had no way of knowing if what you had heard was five yards away, or five inches. That went double in the dark.
The path Dr. “Do Gooder” and the lead soldier had taken was pretty well trampled and easy to follow. As Harvath positioned his first AK and marked its hiding spot with one of the mini chemlights, his mind was taken up by how pissed off he was at Decker.
She had placed her ideology over her instincts. Harvath, who was all instinct, had seen her type before. It never ended well for them. And in a conflict zone, it all too often ended very badly for the people around them. He had no intention of letting that happen here.
As he worked his way deeper into the jungle, he continued to hide rifles and leave chemlights along the way. What he wouldn’t have given for a ruck full of Claymores, but it was much better than nothing.
The problem with spacing out the rifles was that he had no idea how far in he would have to go. It was all based on his gut.
As he was about to place the last one, he began to hear voices.
Every muscle in his body tensed and he stood absolutely still, his ears straining to not only discern what they were saying but also to determine how far away they were, and if they were moving in his direction.
Quietly, he stepped off the path and crouched down. His suppressed Glock was pulled in tight to his chest, his finger on the trigger, ready to fire.
Seconds felt like minutes. Drops of water thudded onto him as well as on the broad leaves of the plants all around him. It sounded like rain hitting a canvas awning. It made it difficult to hear anything else.
As best he could tell, there were two voices, both men, and they were coming closer. He slowly began to apply pressure to his trigger.
By the time they were close enough to be intelligible, they were almost on top of him. Whatever language they were speaking, he didn’t recognize it.
They were walking in single file and appeared to be alone. There was no one else on the path.
Harvath discharged his weapon and a muffled spit accompanied each of the two rounds as they ripped through moist air and found their targets.
The lifeless bodies collapsed onto the wet vegetation, each with a
dime-sized hole near the bridge of their nose. Any sound made by the clatter of their equipment was gobbled up by the cacophony of the jungle.
Stripping them of their weapons, he then dragged them far enough off the path that they wouldn’t be noticed until daylight, which unfortunately was fast approaching.
Stepping back onto the path, he pushed on. Soon enough, he found what he was looking for.
The sentry was forty meters out. He dispatched him the same way he had the others and moved the body. There were no other defenses he could see between him and the small encampment.
Circling around to the west, he counted three canvas tents. There were no fires. It was a “cold” camp. They obviously didn’t want to attract any notice.
For several moments, he did nothing but listen, trying to figure out which of the tents Decker might be in. The drops began falling harder and he realized that it was now raining. From somewhere, there was a rumble of thunder. If he was lucky, the storm might hold back the daylight and help keep the rebels in their tents.
There was no logic to picking which one to check first. She could have been in any one of them. He decided to work from right to left.
Just as he was about to step out of the bush, something caught his eye.
Trip wire.
Backing away, he traced it to its source. It was a crude, but deadly antipersonnel device that had been fashioned by running a length of paracord to the pin of a hand grenade, which itself had been secured to a tree trunk.
Without any chemlights left, there was no way to mark it. Carefully, he stepped over the cord and slipped into the camp.
The rain was coming down hard enough to mask the sound of his movement even to his own ears. He could only imagine it sounded twice as loud for anyone inside the tents.
He approached the first one and listened as the rain beat upon the canvas. He couldn’t hear anything.
Creeping around to the front, he parted the fly and peered inside. There were six soldiers, all asleep, their AKs propped up next to them. Two of his worst fears had been confirmed.
The first was that they had encountered something bigger than just a handful of rebels extorting money from passing motorists. The second was what he had said back on the road—that whoever the patient was, he appeared to be someone who couldn’t go to a regular hospital.
The next tent contained supplies. There was a smattering of heavier weapons, what looked like an RPG crate, some ammunition, food, and water.
With two tents down, he only had one to go. Already, he was mentally composing his evacuation route out of the camp, back to the path, and down to the road. He and Decker would need to be extra cautious as they slipped out of the camp, making sure they didn’t hit any trip wires along the way.
Coming up to the third tent, he stopped once more and listened, but the pounding rain made it impossible to hear anything else.
He took a deep breath and, readying his weapon, pulled back the fly. Two men inside were lacing up their boots while another two were sleeping. The men lacing up their boots looked up immediately.
Shooting with night vision goggles on was extremely difficult, especially when you had to move fast.
Harvath’s first shot went low and through the man’s throat. After drilling his colleague in the head, he came back and finished him, along with the other two who still lay sleeping.
There was no sign of Jessica Decker or the rebel who had led her away from the road.