Birth of the Wolf (Wahaya) (6 page)

“I respectfully suggest, sir, that you send
your
aide by
my
quarters this afternoon sir, if Captain Harris gives him back to you.” The Colonel was smiling broadly. The Admiral looked around the small room for his aide, a tall, rugged looking young SEAL officer destined for high rank, who was nowhere to be seen.

“What the hell?” the Admiral bellowed. The General had a strained smile on his face. 

The Colonel walked outside and waved his arm around his head and pointed to the ground in front of him. Thirty odd men watched in awe as Nick appeared in their midst, barefoot and wearing only the trousers of his class A uniform, with the bedraggled SEAL officer thrown across his shoulders like a sack of flour. 

Nick carefully sat him down, unconscious on the ground in front of the Colonel.  “I tried not to muss his uniform sir, but he was a handful until I put him out.”  Nick stepped back, came to attention, and saluted.

“You may go, Captain Harris,” the Colonel said, mugging it to the hilt in front of the Navy and the Marine Corps. Nick turned and loped off.

“Wait a minute. I want to talk to that man! Catch him and bring him back here!” the General ordered. 

"Nick had simply disappeared.  One second we were all watching him lope off and then he just wasn’t there anymore.”

Cynthia was looking at Dave skeptically, and Amanda was staring at him in outright disbelief. Abbie looked utterly unsurprised -- she was smitten. 

“I swear that story is true, I was there,” Dave said sincerely, “and when we get back to the states I’ll give you the Admiral and the General’s names.  They live right next door to each other in Alexandria.  They’re retired now too.”

He gathered them up and started them moving at a quick pace about ten meters to the left of the path along the river bank.  Cynthia took on the responsibility of helping the still hobbling Abbie.

* * * * *

Nick had crawled to within feet of the first sentry.  He lay still in the tall grass, determining the best way to take the guy out. The second sentry was close enough to reach after taking out the first one, but he was also close enough to hear the soft ‘phutt’ of the silenced .22 when it was fired. 

Taking the Glock out of its holster very quietly, Nick transferred it to his left hand.  With his right hand he unclasped his combat knife and prepared to take down the first sentry. 

In the movies it was always so easy. The spy sneaks up behind the poor unsuspecting sentry and slits his throat, dropping him silently to the ground. Real life is substantially different. 

Men make the most horrible moaning and gurgling sounds from an open throat, loud ones.  The arterial bleeding can also alert another sentry even if the sounds didn’t get out.

Nick placed the inside of his left elbow across the first sentry’s mouth and drove his combat knife directly into his heart.  The first sentry died without a sound, but the second sentry heard his clothes rustling and turned, aiming his weapon at Nick, who instantly fired three shots into his eyes. Nick dragged the bodies off the path just as Dave showed up with the three women.

Nick motioned for them to take kneeling positions so they couldn’t be seen from the river.  He waited for the chug of the outboard of the first patrol boat. “This is going to happen in a hurry.  They’re a moving target, so I may have to fire two or three rounds before I hit them.”

He jacked a forty millimeter grenade into the launcher on his M-203.  “Run for the rope bridge as soon as I yell,” he said, “and remember to spread the top two ropes out to keep yourself stable.”

Nick stood and fired his first round directly into the gunmen on the small boat.  The boat’s motor howled as it came out of the water, running free, and Nick fired another round into the confused cluster for good measure.”

“Run,” he yelled. Dave went first, demonstrating the proper way to cross a three rope bridge rapidly.  Amanda followed, not as fast as Nick would have liked, but she was moving. Cynthia, about four steps behind her was bouncing wildly on the rope but she was more agile than the older woman and she was coping.

They were nearly across when Nick heard a yelp and looked up -- just in time to see Abbie sink below the muddy looking surface of the swiftly moving river.

Without breaking stride, Nick dropped through the support webbing of the three rope bridge and sank beneath the surface.  He hit so close behind Abbie that it only took a few seconds to locate Abbie and drag her back to the surface. 

Nick didn’t even look to see whether there were survivors from the small boat before striking for the banks of the river.  There were creatures and parasites in this river he chose not to contemplate.  The sooner they were on dry land the better off they would both be.

Dave, Amanda, and Cynthia met them at the river bank and pulled them quickly out of the water.  Nick pushed Abbie out before him, but scrabbled right behind her.  He beat his right trousers leg. 

Dave saw a half dozen of the slab-sided piranha whose teeth were caught in the ripstop nylon of Nick’s pants flopping wildly, and immediately jumped to his aid.  The shallow water Nick had just slipped out of roiled with hungry, disappointed fish.

The school left as quickly as it had come, and the water cleared a bit as Nick pulled the last one from his pants. He stood and tested his leg.  There was pain, but the fish had not breached the integrity of the ripstop material. Their teeth had passed through however, and he could feel the blood running down his leg.  The pain was sharp and bitter, but it was manageable.  Had they been in the water even another second, neither of them would have survived. 

Nick made motions for all of them to move into the wood line rapidly.  After only a few steps he had mastered the pain and he was outwardly the same as he was before he went into the river.

They could hear the approach of the second small craft as it came into range at speed.  Obviously they had heard the explosions of the forty millimeter grenades and the gunfire.  Nick worried they might see them and come after them. 

When he heard the screams from the survivors as the school of piranha found them, he knew the second group would be delayed. When he heard the single shots ring out from the AK-47’s, he grimly realized what was happening. 

Anyone who had ever seen a school of piranha feed would have known why the men in the boats were shooting the survivors left in the water.

Nick hurried them into the jungle, not making any attempt to navigate or pick a particular direction.  His only concern was that they continue in a straight line.  GPS and the Satellite phone would allow them to navigate, even in the deepest jungles of the Amazon -- as inimical to humans as this place was, it was nowhere near as dangerous as the jungles further inland.  His instincts honed by years of combat, Nick knew the second group would soon be on their trail.

“
Come here a second, Dave,” Nick asked. 

Reading Nick's mind, Dave opened up the acetate covered map and spread it on the ground.  After searching the map for a few moments, Nick placed his forefinger on an easily recognizable terrain feature about five klicks (military jargon for kilometers) away. 

“
Head for this ridge,” he said, “Contact the General by sat phone and wait for me. If you have to set up the pickup before I can get there, leave a cache at the peak of the ridge and I’ll try to catch up.  You remember my pace count?”

Dave laughed, “Unless it’s changed in the last six months, it’s still fifty eight.”  Nick’s pace count hadn’t changed in twenty years.

“
All right, I’m going to backtrack now.  Try to spread out and leave no trail for at least a klick, then close up and concentrate on speed. They clasped hands in the manner of the Cherokee, their forearms pressed together and their hands around their upper forearms, and Nick loped back in the direction they had just come from.

* * * * *

Amanda, Cynthia and Abbie looked at each other and then at Dave.  “You realize, of course,” Cynthia said, “that we understood exactly none of that, right?”

Dave wondered if he could magically call Nick back and trade jobs with him.  He shook his head ruefully, because he knew Nick was right.  Nick had an uncanny knack for tracking and land navigation.  He was always aware of where he was and where he had to go. 

With a sigh, Dave explained what was happening to the three women.  With Nick backtracking to set a false trail, he had a few minutes.

“
When it’s impossible to travel without leaving a trail, a patrol leader will backtrack, obscure the trail he has left for twenty or thirty meters, and then double back again to start an obvious false trail for his enemy to follow. It’s freakishly hard, dangerously time consuming, and absolutely effective. 

"Nick will go back and leave a false trail, one that’s easily read, and probably leading into incredibly difficult terrain.  I saw a swamp on the map in the opposite direction we’re traveling in, and my money says that is where Nick will lead them.  He will corkscrew into some very difficult terrain (he made a spiraling motion with his finger) and then, when they are completely unsure of where they are, he will stop leaving a trail and leave them, lost and confused and with no way to follow him.

"After he leaves his pursuers, Nick will head directly to this rendezvous point (he pointed to the ridge on the map.)  If we have to leave before he gets there, I have to leave a cache giving him an azimuth and pace count to where we are headed for the extraction. 

"He will follow the directions I leave to the LZ location I get from the General on the sat phone.” 

He could tell that Abbie was still in shock from her experience with the piranha and in pain from the cut on her foot, and made a mental note to clean and redress her foot when they could take the time.  It needed to be done now, but there was no time. 

He started to rise to his feet and Cynthia touched his arm.  “What’s a cache?” she asked with a stubborn set to her jaw.

“
A cache is an Indian method for leaving direction to friendlies.  It’s a pile of stones, stacked from largest to smallest.  The number of stones indicates the number of steps in each leg you have to follow from the stack of stones to where the message is hidden.  Three stones for Nick means three paces North, and three paces East.  I’ll bury a note or hide it under a log giving him directions to where we’re going.”

“
What’s a pace count?” Amanda asked. 

“
It’s a method the military uses to measure a hundred meters,” Dave said patiently, “they measure out one hundred meters on the ground using a tape or some other accurate measuring device, and a man walks along the measurement at a relaxed walk.  He does it several times and takes an average, normally of the number of times his left foot touches the ground before he travels one hundred meters.  It’s checked numerous times and refined over the years.  Nick’s pace count is fifty eight, mine is sixty.  We keep track of the pace count by making a knot in a string or a bootlace every time we reach one hundred meters. With the advent of small portable GPS units, the method is outmoded, but useable.  The only GPS we have with us is this sat phone, so Nick has to do it the old fashioned way.

“
It sounds complicated,” Cynthia said with a worried look on her face.

“
It is complicated.” Dave said, “and very difficult to do.”

He refused to let his own worry show to the three women.  The odds of Nick catching up to them before the extraction were diminished substantially if he failed to catch them before Dave had to leave a cache…odds on the edge of impossible. “There’s nobody I’ve ever known that is anywhere near as good at it as Nick,” he said breezily.  “Now let’s get moving.  You ladies spread out, except for you Abbie, I’m going to carry you about a klick before I set you down…the track you leave hobbling is too easy to read.”

As they began to spread out, Cynthia whispered in his ear.  “He left his rifle with me Dave, he’s helpless!”

Dave grinned at Cynthia, happy to have a question he doesn’t have to resort to false hope to answer.  “Feel sorry for the bad guys Cynthia.  If they have something he needs, Nick will take it.  He’s the most dangerous man I have ever seen.”

He could have told her story after story of Nick’s ability to acquire weapons when he possessed none himself, but there wasn’t time…and besides, Nick had a knife and at least two spare magazines for the Glock .22 pistol.  It almost wasn’t fair to Conde’s goons.

Chapter 6

Nick backtracked their trail to a point about two hundred meters from the river.  The loud talk and confusion from the riverbank was barely audible, but it told Nick that he had time to implement his plan. 

He carefully covered the next forty meters of their trail, and then knelt on one knee as he reached into the left side cargo pocket of his night suit and pulled out the roll of green parachute cord he had carried in the field since he was a young second lieutenant.   Parachute cord is tough, small diameter rope that is light to carry and has more uses than the average human could conceive of. The fifty foot roll made a packet about six inches long and half that wide.

Nick cut off three lengths of the rope and secured them to his web gear, one left side, one right side, and one centered from the back of his belt. To the ends he attached sticks heavy enough to leave a trail when dragged, but not large enough to impede his progress much. This task completed, Nick set off at the easy lope he had conditioned himself to keep up for days on end.  He headed for what had appeared on the map to be a dismal mangrove swamp.

He ran for five klicks or so before he struck water, and then he moved another klick deeper into the swamp before he felt comfortable cutting the drags from his belt.  He was careful to cut the ropes from the heavy sticks before casting them randomly aside.  The parachute cord was wadded up and replaced in his cargo pocket.

Nick looked around and selected the oldest and largest of the old growth mangrove trees.  It is an established fact that men tracking other men keep their eyes on the ground unless they are professionally trained not to. “Death from Above” was not a motto created by Airborne troops, they had borrowed it from Native Americans.

Nick fumbled in the various pockets of his night suit for something to eat, and found an energy bar.  It was enough.  Half an hour later, Nick caught a break.  The point man for the scout team tracking him passed beneath his mangrove, AK-47 at the ready and ammo pouches full. 

Opening his combat knife, Nick slid silently out of the tree and slid the knife deeply at an upward angle just below the man’s lower left rib from behind. Without a sound the man fell dead in Nick’s arms.  Nick quietly removed the AK from the man’s dead arms and slung it across his back.  He then took as many of the man’s magazines as he could fit in his own four ammo pouches -- twelve thirty round magazines, and one fresh one for the magazine well. 

Nick had no idea if the magazine in the weapon had been used.  He would throw it away and insert the fresh one on the run. He lowered the body into the swamp water after quickly checking the body for useful items, and then looked around. 

The second man of the scout team was about forty meters away and was not looking in Nick’s direction.  Silently as death itself, Nick crept away from the advance scout, and began leaving clear signs of his passage, making it easier for them to follow him deeper into the swamp.  When he was almost certain that the men would have trouble finding their way out of the mangrove swamp, Nick stopped leaving a trail at all.

Once he cleared the mangrove swamp, Nick cleared his head and calculated the direction of the prominent ridge and the terrain features leading towards it.  He loped off in the direction he needed to travel in the ground eating, loping stride of Wahaya, the wolf.

* * * * *

Dave shepherded the woman towards the ridgeline Nick had selected, hurriedly glancing at his chronometer every hundred meters or so.  The six hour contact time, or phase line in military talk, the General had specified was fast approaching. He needed to be certain he had a good place selected for the women to rest. 

The last few days had been rough on them.  He needed to find a place where they could eat and rest while he got their movement order from the General.  He looked over at Abbie, who was gamely trying to keep up, but she was limping badly. He was going to have to tend to her foot shortly or there was going to be serious trouble with her.

He found a spot near the bottom of the ridgeline Nick had selected with what appeared to be ancient Incan ruins, an almost intact wall of stone about four feet high and assorted rubble inside that they would use as seats and props to rest against.  It was a better place than he had expected to find.

“
Sit rep,” the general ordered as soon as the connection went through. A ‘sit rep’ is a brief situation report as you understand it, and when issued as a command from a superior to a subordinate in the military it means the commander wants all available knowledge you have of your situation from beginning to end, your location, status of all personnel, and your best estimate of what you are expected to do. In other words, he wants you to condense everything you know into a few manageable sentences so that he can base his decisions on what is happening on the ground. 

Dave had expected this and he had worked out his response in his head before he called. He was a little surprised that the General was suddenly not using names any longer, and he sensed that the General was no longer alone.  Even though the phone was encrypted; someone, somewhere that the General did not wish to reveal Dave’s name to was listening. 

When it came time to report Nick’s actions, he used the code name Wahaya to refer to his leader -- the General would understand.  The General had been the Colonel from the story about the sniper school he had told the ladies earlier.  His report to the General was terse and concise.  His instructions had been as terse and concise.

“
Proceed to cache point and wait for Wahaya,” the General said.  “Inbound support is an "A" team from the company and will not arrive in your area of operation until twenty two hundred hours. Submit sit rep eighteen hundred hours to include locations for possible LZ within five klicks your position. Copy?”

“
Copy!” Dave responded.  The General shut down the satellite phone and Dave wrote down the GPS coordinates of his own location to check against the map.

He kept his mouth shut as he used everything he had left in his butt pack to make some semblance of a meal for the women.  He gathered such fruits and nuts as were available in the jungle around him and divided them up among the women. It was important to keep their strength up as much as possible, all three were flagging.

He turned to Abbie last and encouraged her to eat.  The hundred mile an hour tape had held up amazingly well, but the skin above it was reddened and swollen.  As much as he hated to, Dave opened the foot binding.  Abbie’s foot was swollen and the beginnings of infection were visible. He used the last of the tiny can of spray local anesthetic in his first aid kit, and then as gently as he could, he opened the cut on her foot with his last sealed surgical razor blade. 

He gently debrided the reddened flesh and flushed it with the last of his hydrogen peroxide.  The triple antibiotic ointment tube was nearly empty as well, but he applied the last of it and tied a field compress around it.  There was plenty of time before they would have to move, so he elevated her foot and advised the ladies to take a rest in place.

The top of the draw was only about four hundred meters uphill, and Dave figured to make his recon for possible LZs (landing zone, a reasonably flat area clear for a fifty meter circle with a less than seven degree slope) later in the day.

He never should have allowed himself to sit down after taking care of Abbie.  He was not a bad enough soldier to let himself fall asleep but he was in enough of a daze that when the Indians approached, he didn’t notice them until they were on him. 

Dave never saw the warrior who hit him from behind with the thick wooden club, he only saw the lights go out.

Chapter 7

The Aguaruna (they call themselves Awajun, or, “the people”) Indians of Peru are a proud race. The Incas, the Spanish, and all the ruling classes since had tried to subdue them and had failed miserably.

It was a tradition among the young warriors upon coming of age to visit the ruins at the foot of the draw and take aja'waska, a pychotropic drug manufactured from the caapi vine.  The purpose of the drug use was to give them visions which would help them to determine their path in life.

It was an event of great importance.  They were very uncertain what type of omen it might be to have found four whites at their sacred site. Their first urge was to kill the whites and drag their bodies into the forest, but the Shaman, whose name was Zeev, insisted that they simply be taken outside the ruins and guarded until he could consult the spirits. 

The young men obeyed their shaman, and the ones not actively engaged in guarding the prisoners set about purifying the site for the ceremonies, which they would have had to do in any case.

The young men, shirtless, barefoot, and dressed only in the long legged Bermuda type shorts that they wore for daily work, carried heavy traditional spears hand fashioned by themselves to the ceremony. They followed an ancient purification ceremony, even older than the ruins themselves, and they revered the shaman.

The Shaman said his prayers in a loud and confident voice for such an ancient appearing man. None of the young men knew how old the Shaman was, and even Dave would have been shocked to know that
this
Shaman had conducted
this
rite at
this
site more than one hundred times as an adult.  He himself did not remember how many times he had attended as a young man and as an apprentice to the Shaman of his youth.

The Shaman’s prayers stopped, and Dave came back to full consciousness as the Shaman drank from a dipper which had been filled in a cauldron sized gourd set down on a large semi squared stone they were using as an altar. 

The Shaman took powders from various pouches on the belt he was wearing, taking his time measuring and pinching the powders and casting them into the small fire that was burning in front of him. Some of the powders flared or sparked, and some released small clouds of fragrance. 

After several minutes, the Shaman nodded to a young man, younger than the rest and who carried no spear, and the dipper was refilled and brought to him.  The Shaman ceremoniously sipped from the dipper until it was empty. The old man held his arms to his side and began to chant.  He seemed to lose his chain of thought, and he began to bobble and weave, as if he was drunk.  His arms rose straight up and he whispered “Zeev!” hoarsely and keeled over.

Whatever the word meant, the young men became very wary, facing outward from the group, spearheads lowered.  They closed in until they were nearly side by side…and they stayed that way.

* * * * *

Nick cleared the mangrove swamp at just about the time Dave was talking to the General on the satphone, and he picked up his pace.  Something troubled his spirit, and he was aware as he had been many times over his career, that something had gone wrong. 

The feeling was ahead of him rather than behind him, and he began to run in earnest.  He estimated that he was by now a good fifteen kilometers from the ridge, but he was not running on a road or a track.  He estimated that at his present speed, it would take him about two hours to reach the ridge where Dave and the women were waiting. 

He hoped they were still there or had left good directions to the LZ for the chopper…but his spirit was still troubled.

Nick smelled the fragrant smoke from the fire long before he reached the base of the ridge, and he stopped.  A grove of Lucuma trees provided him with the concealment he needed while he slowed his breathing and the blood pounding in his veins.  With the vigorous activity stopped, his endorphins couldn’t quite suppress the pain of the deep cuts he had gotten from the piranha.  He didn’t have to look to see the red streaks coming from the deep cuts to know that they were infected. He could feel the thickness in his legs.

He had to keep moving to keep from stiffening up, and he willed himself to do so.  Nick crawled through the darkened brush, the late afternoon sum casting shadows that he used as naturally as he breathed to conceal his movements.  He didn’t stop until he was close enough that he could have reached out and touched one of the quivering handmade spears of the young men.

Nick’s eyes took in the old shaman and saw the opened pouches on his belt.  It seemed the rituals of the Awajun were very similar to the rituals of the Cherokee. 

Working in the San Martin Province of Peru over a period of years, Nick had not only learned to speak fluent Quechua, he had spent much time with the Awajun.  Nothing was happening, and the young warriors were edgy. 

Nick thought it best that he remain still and in hiding -- sooner or later these men would give him all he needed to dominate them and bend them to his will. These people had been treated badly by every organized government Peru had ever had, and Nick would not compound that error unnecessarily.  He waited.

* * * * *

Within an hour the old man awakened from his drug induced stupor, and the first word to come from his parched mouth was “Yumi (Water.)”  The youngest warrior, his assistant, brought water with the same dipper the drug had been delivered with and the old man drank thirstily.

He looked up a called the circle of warriors, telling the men to face him.  He spoke one word.  “Zeev!” he said, and gestured to the large gourd.  Each of the young men in turn came to kneel in front of the makeshift altar, and drank their cupful of aja'waska. 

They took turns, making repeated trips to the altar until the large cauldron sized gourd was empty. When the gourd was almost empty, the Shaman lifted it and drank the dregs in the bottom, perhaps the most powerful draft of all.  The warriors faced the faint flames of the small fire, and the youngest among them, who had not been permitted the drink, heavy branches and logs into the fire a little at a time.