Authors: Robert Cain
He wondered what Rod was thinking.
Rod had an easier time on land than underwater. There were plans on the drawing board, he knew, for units that would give him superb undersea mobility, but those would not be ready for some time yet. For now, once he left the SDV, he was limited to moving clumsily along the bottom like an old-time, hard-hat salvage diver. It was with something closely akin to relief that he raised his armored head above the water and scanned the beach, now only a few meters ahead.
The night-vision light-intensifier electronics of his combat helmet were working perfectly. Under LI, the strip of beach seemed as distinct and as brightly lit to the robot as it would have appeared to a human at high noon. As he carefully swept the landing area, readouts overlaid the image relayed to his visual processing centers, giving range, bearing, and a set of targeting crosshairs.
Momentarily, he switched to infrared, and a thermal view replaced the LI image. Water and sky turned black, while cliff face and sand showed in mingled shades of gray and green. Two hot spots fifty meters to the left marked SM/3 Ben Saylor and TM/3 Nathan Isaacson, the two SEALs charged with going ashore first to check out the beach. Under IR imaging, Rod could see them crouched among the sea-wet rocks. Twin trails of yellow-warm patches leading up from the water’s edge showed where they’d crossed the beach.
Except for them, the bridge was deserted. Isaacson was flashing a hooded penlight toward the sea, signaling the other SEALs to come ashore.
It would have made more sense to send Rod ahead as the point, of course. His senses were far sharper than those of men, even when they carried LI scopes and thermal viewers. Rod accepted with his usual equanimity the decision to stick with standard procedure in this case. Rod was aware that his human comrades still had a lot to learn about his capabilities.
They were, after all, only human.
Like the sea monster of a late-night movie, Rod rose dripping from the surf. Ahead, the cliff rose thirty feet above the beach, a tumble of fallen boulders and sheer rock. Tilting his head back, the movement somewhat clumsy under the added weight of the armored helmet, he scanned the cliff top. The seaward wall of the Salazar hacienda was just visible a kilometer to the east.
There were no sentries in sight.
The other SEALs emerged from the sea at Rod’s back, but he was aware of their movements, of the slight break in the ocean’s rhythms, and of the sucking, liquid sounds of their bare feet on wet sand. Leaving deep prints, Rod moved toward the boulder spill where Isaacson and Saylor were crouching.
"Yo, Rambot!” Saylor whispered. "Snap it up!”
Rod did not comment as he unhooked his harness and lowered the equipment load to the sand. The soft
slap-slap-slap
of running feet carried above the rumble and hiss of the surf, and the other SEALs dropped to their bellies in the darkness around them, facing out, weapons at the ready.
As was usual on this type of mission, the weapons represented the personal choice of individual SEALs. Saylor, Carter, and Isaacson carried H&K MP5SD3s with their heavy, distinctive sound-suppressor barrels. Drake’s weapon of choice was an Uzi SMG. Gordon, Hoskins, and Zitterman all carried M-16s, while Chief Campano preferred the ruggedness and drop-it-in-the- mud reliability of a Soviet-made AK-47. TM/2 Jake Yancey, the sniper of the group, was already unpacking the case that held his broken-down Model 500 Long Range Weapon, a monster sniper’s rifle that fired a .50 caliber Browning cartridge and was accurate at ranges of over a kilometer.
All of the SEALs carried the SEAL-special Mark 22 Model 0 9mm Hush Puppies. The holsters on their hips had been modified to accommodate the pistols complete with their outsized sound suppressors.
Like Drake, Rod carried an Uzi. Drake’s preference for the Israeli-made SMG seemed to have carried through to the robot in the PARET training sessions back at the Farm.
Quickly, silently, they broke out the rest of their equipment. Their tanks, fins, and masks went into a cache among the boulders, to be picked up later by another team or abandoned, depending on the situation. From their sealed gear bags they produced heavy boots fit for climbing, meter upon meter of rope, boonie hats and camo jackets, and combat harnesses with full ammo pouches.
Saylor and Isaacson, serving as guides, would wear BM 8208 light-intensifier goggles for the hike to the objective. The rest of the men would rely on their own eyes, since the one-kilo goggles sharply restricted the wearer’s field of view, a serious liability in this sort of operation. Each SEAL wore a radio headset with a voice-activated lip mike and an earplug speaker. Though range was limited to a few kilometers, the radios would provide tactical communications for the entire team.
RN/3 Wyatt Carter, meanwhile, assembled the team’s backpack radio and broadcast their first message. "Snowdance. Snowdance. Snowdance,” he called, whispering into the mike.
Seconds later, the response came through his headset, loud enough for Rod’s sensitive hearing to pick up the words. At the same time, he heard the words through his own internal radio circuits. "Blue Ranger . . . Warpath. Warpath. Warpath.”
"Mission is go,” Carter told the others.
Drake was studying the top of the cliff. "Let’s do it.” The climb was an easy one. Ten minutes later, the team was crouching among the coconut palms at the top, one hundred meters from the west wall of the hacienda. The coast road ran through the jungle to their
right, and beyond was the night-black bulk of the jungle-carpeted mountains. On their left, the cliff dropped to the sea, ten meters below.
Rod studied the objective. There were lights on, but the walls were not lit, and most of the interior grounds were dark. With thermal imaging, he could see several sentries patrolling inside the wall in military-looking camo fatigues, carrying automatic weapons.
"Right,” Drake said. "Let’s make for the hide.” The plan called for using
snowdrop’s
OP site as a staging point for the raid. Silently, the SEALs began moving through the trees, the hulking black robot bringing up the rear.
The security guard adjusted a knob on the television monitor, brightening the image. The IR camera was working perfectly, turning the night beyond the hacienda perimeter into day. Nine man-sized shapes were moving through the trees one hundred meters to the east. A tenth shape, larger, a bit fuzzier than the others, was with them. The guard tried to resolve the picture, then gave up. Probably the tenth man’s uniform was heavy enough to block his body heat, fuzzing his image on the scanner.
He picked up a telephone and stabbed the intercom button.
"Alo . . . Jefe?”
he said. He listened a moment, then identified himself. "This is Security. They are here.
Si, si. . .
in the jungle. I see nine or ten of them, no more. You’d better tell Luis and Don Roberto.”
It was happening exactly as his bosses had told him it would.
©
Chapter Twelve
They left three men
at the hillside OP above the hacienda: Carter with the radio, Yancey with the .50 caliber sniper’s rifle, and Chief Campano as spotter and command backup. The rest of the team, six men plus Rod, moved down the slope toward the front entrance to
La Fortaleza Salazar.
Their plan was simple and direct. They would enter the Salazar compound by going over the wall, neutralizing any sentries they came across, then find and force someone to tell them where within the compound Delgado was staying. After that, they would find, grab, and drug their target, then sneak out the way they’d come with their prisoner unconscious and slung across Rod’s broad, armored back.
The mission, Drake thought as the team sprinted across the coast road at a spot where trees blocked the view from the hacienda walls, would have been impossible without the robot. The SEALs were depending on his superior senses to alert them to danger, and on his strength to haul their prisoner away afterward without slowing them down.
He dropped into a drainage ditch at the far side of
the road, then checked the area. There was still no sign that the enemy had spotted them.
Drake looked at Rod. The robot was scanning with eerie, mechanically precise movements of his helmet, the Uzi SMG clutched in one hand as casually as a pistol.
"Anything?” Drake whispered.
"No.”
Drake gestured toward the compound wall. "Check it out.”
The robot was gone, moving so silently that he scarcely seemed to disturb the thick vegetation.
As he crouched in the darkness with the other SEALs Drake decided that it would do no good to wonder about whether the robot was going to screw up on this mission. Whatever mistakes he might make, the team would have to deal with them exactly as if he’d been a human soldier.
Cybernarc.
He was the unknown component of the mission now.
The range to the compound wall was eighty meters. The trees and vegetation had been cleared to create a killing zone extending for half that distance from the hacienda wall, but Rod crossed the open ground without incident. Reaching the base of the wall near the southwest corner, he crouched in the shadows for a moment, listening as no human possibly could.
The loudest sounds were those of the jungle at night, the high-pitched, continuous peeping and chirping of tree frogs, crickets, and other nocturnal fauna. One by one, Rod recorded the sounds, analyzed them, then let his computer aural processors filter them out. From his point of view—or in this case, listening—the chirping sounds vanished.
The sounds of wind and surf were next, white noise easily filtered.
What was left was a silence almost absolute. Increasing his aural sensitivity, Rod could hear the faintest of stirrings among the ferns eighty meters behind him, the scratch of fabric on skin as one of the SEALs shifted his position slightly in the ditch. Blanking out those sounds, he kept listening, trying to catch traces of movement inside the hacienda wall.
There . . .
another scratch of cloth on skin. And another sound, the slow
swish-swish-swish
of fatigues interspersed with the tread of rubber-soled boots on hard earth. The
chink
of metal. A man was walking on the other side of the wall.
More sounds . . . the clink and jingle of a chain, the snuffling sounds of an animal, more footsteps. A dog on a leash, accompanied by a sentry on his rounds. Rod plotted the sounds, points of light appearing on a window map overlaying his visual field. The map, generated from spy-satellite shots taken only a few days ago, showed the sprawling, U-shaped hacienda, several outlying buildings including a garage and a stable, and the swimming pool and hedge-barricaded patio off the southeast corner of the house. The only sounds of movement he could detect within the wall came from the guards just on the other side of the wall. Others were probably on the grounds, but too distant for him to pick up.
Still scanning, he blanked out the human sounds and listened further, checking for the low-frequency hum of an electron flow. Nothing . . . nothing close by, at least. The objective was not guarded by an electronic alarm system, then.
He opened his radio communications line, adjusting the frequency to correspond with one of the two available channels used by the SEAL personal comm sets.
Blue Ranger, RAMROD.
A watcher would not have realized he was communicating at all, for there was no sound. Since Rod’s vocalizations were produced by a digital vodor, there was no reason why the words had to be converted first to sound, then reconverted to radio waves. Rod simply manufactured the radio waves directly.
RAMROD, Blue Ranger.
Drake’s words sounded internally in the same way, for the same reasons, a kind of electronic telepathy.
Go ahead.
Aural scans indicate two sentries, one with a dog, positioned within fifteen meters of my position.
He had to make the report fast and succinct. Someone in the compound might be listening in with a channel scanner.
No electronic alarms. No sonic alarms.
Rog. We’re moving up.
Rod readjusted his audio levels and waited. Moments later, the SEALS moved in out of the darkness, leapfrogging ahead two at a time.
The fortress remained quiet. . . and apparently unsuspecting.
The SEAL team waited until Rod signaled that the two sentries on the other side of the wall were far enough away that they wouldn’t hear the metallic clanks of thrown grapnels over the
peep-peep-peeping
of nocturnal jungle wildlife. The wall was made of stucco- plastered concrete blocks stacked ten feet high, topped by coils of razor wire and shards of broken glass set in concrete.
Drake watched as Gordon and Zitterman stepped back and gently tossed grappling hooks up and over the wall. Both caught. Weapons slung, Isaacson and Saylor started walking up the wall as their companions braced the climbing ropes at the bottom. Each man carried a canvas sheet that he laid across the razor wire at the top, and extra lengths of rope that he lowered down the far side and secured in place. With no more sound than the metallic rustle of the wire as they rolled across the top, five SEALs slipped over the wall and dropped into the compound at the far side.
Drake and Rod went next, the robot lifting its 420- plus pounds effortlessly up the line hand over hand. Drake, moving more slowly, paused to snap off several jagged shards of glass beneath the canvas padding at the top, then used one of the descent lines to drop to the neatly manicured lawn on the other side.
There were lights on near the pool and in the house. The SEALs crouched among the shadows. There was a sharp, flat thump in the night, then another. Saylor materialized out of the darkness a moment later, a Hush Puppy in his hand, signaling quietly. One sentry and the dog had been taken out. The other sentry was still on the hoof, somewhere off to the northwest.
Using hand signs, Drake deployed the team. Saylor and Isaacson remained at the wall, guarding the lines that were their escape route out of the compound.
Drake, Hoskins, Gordon, Zitterman, and the robot started moving toward the house.
Carlos Filipe Suarez was Mexican, a former soldier in the Mexican Federal Army who had deserted when a cartel recruiter offered him five times the money he’d been making as a sergeant to serve in the small, private army of Roberto Augusto Salazar-Mendoza. He’d brought several useful skills to his new post, including his experience with the Browning .50 caliber M2HB machine gun.
The voice of
El Tiburon,
the Shark, sounded in his radio headset. "All units. They are inside the perimeter. Ready!”
Suarez said nothing. It was claustrophobic inside the turret of the Mowag Roland, and the slightest motion might clang some piece of equipment against something else, giving him away. The four-wheeled armored car was parked beside the garage, southeast of the house and some thirty meters from the pool. Although his view was restricted, he had a clear field of fire across the entire southern sweep of the compound. He knew that the other Roland was parked behind the house, against the possibility that the gringo commandos would come straight up the cliff and over the northern wall.
Each of the Rolands mounted a single machine gun in its squat turret, the M2HB known as the "Ma Deuce.” The .50 caliber Ma Deuce round had originally been designed as an antiarmor round, and while it couldn’t stop a modern tank, it was still quite effective against personnel carriers, aircraft, and other thinskinned vehicles. With a maximum range of six thousand meters, it was hard-hitting enough to give a fifty- fifty chance of a hit on a man at seven hundred meters.
And these American commandos were now less than fifty meters away. The ambush would be devastating. His orders were to fire as soon as the compound searchlights came on.
To avoid an accidental firing that might give the ambush away, the machine guns had been half-loaded, the linked ammo belts snapped into the feed block and the retracting slide handle pulled back once. With
El Tibur
o
n’s
warning on the radio, Suarez yanked the retracting handle back again and let it snap forward once more, then unlocked the bolt latch release. The gun would now fire when he pressed the butterfly switch between the twin grips with his thumb.
Peering through his vision slit, he could see the first two American commandos coming into view, stealthy shadows in the night. . . .
Rod checked the area first with LI vision, then switched over to infrared. Except for the SEALs, he could detect no major thermal sources outside of the hacienda. He was aware of the Roland armored car near the garage, but the vehicle appeared inert, its engine cold. Several vague, indistinct thermal traces showed that people were moving around inside the house.
He was fully alert, his vision overlay readout showing COMBAT MODE. He’d sensed a single, nearby radio transmission a few seconds ago, but the signal was scrambled and too brief to be traced. It could have been a routine check of a sentry post, but the timing was suspicious. He took the precaution of turning up his audio sensitivity once more.
Less than a second later, Rod’s computer-enhanced hearing picked up the sharp, metallic clack of a bolt being drawn and released.
His memory included a comprehensive electronic sound library stocked with the sorts of noises he might hear in the field. Within a millisecond of that telltale rasp-clack, he’d identified the sound as most likely coming from a .50 caliber machine gun.
Machine gun!
His radioed warning went to all of the SEALs in the team.
Take cover!
Then the searchlights came on, flooding the yard with dazzling pools of light as the commandos dropped to the ground. The machine gun opened fire in the next instant in thundering, hammering volleys. Fifty-caliber slugs slammed into the grass in front of Rod, pitching up geysers of earth.
He shifted back to LI vision, focusing on the intermittent stab of the muzzle flash. He could see the Roland armored car fifty meters away, and a second later he heard the roar of its Chrysler V-90 engine gunning to life. The drug lord militia had been waiting for them, hidden in ambush.
Drake hit the deck with the other SEALs in the instant of Rod’s warning, a scant second before the machine gun began thundering from the Roland’s squat turret. Rounds snapped and cracked above his head, then thudded into the ground nearby. Streaking red- orange tracers probed through the night sky a yard above his back. Searchlights glared from the upper- floor balconies of the house, and the chatter of small arms fire blended with the deep-throated hammer of an M2HB.
He heard an engine gun to life. Christ, he thought. Now what?
The SEALs were caught in a vicious crossfire. Ten meters away, Hoskins, lying prone on the grass, suddenly flinched in the glare of a searchlight and rolled over. "
I’m hit!”
"Hoss!” Drake started to crawl toward Hoskins, then froze as a vicious one-two-three of heavy rounds brutally slammed into Hoskins where he lay.
PARET sessions dealing with small unit tactics had drilled into Rod the proper course of action. When ambushed, especially by heavy support weapons in enfilade positions, hunkering down and allowing the enemy to pin you means eventual death or capture.
The only way out of a carefully prepared crossfire is to attack, immediately and without hesitation. Uzi in hand, Rod rose from the ground. Small arms fire struck sparks from his torso armor and screamed off into the night. His feet dug into the soft earth as he sprinted forward, angling toward the armored car with its heavy machine gun.
He’d seen Hoskins go down, but there was nothing he could do for the wounded SEAL. By going on the offensive, he might be able to divert enemy attention from the others. In any case, he had to stop that gun.
Something moved on one of the hacienda balconies, silhouetted in light. Rod swung his Uzi up, his targeting cursors locking onto the target as he ran.