Birth of the Wolf (Wahaya) (4 page)

Chapter 4

Jerking himself back to the present, Nick began to make his way slowly and carefully down the slope to the beaten path below them.  The patrol was still quite a distance below them as he slipped behind a Cherimoya tree, its many branches obscuring his body in the darkness.  Dave took up a position across the path about a meter in front of him.

They did not have to wait long.  The patrol was soon making its way to their hiding place.

There were three of them.  The man in front had the flashlight and the two fellow guards followed him with AK-47s slung over their shoulders.  They made plenty of noise -- this was, after all, a routine security patrol.  The noise they were making generally kept the larger jungle animals away. The last man was smoking a cheap local cigarette.

Without taking time to think about it, Nick and Dave quietly unholstered their silenced .22 caliber Glocks.  They could not risk any unnecessary noise.  A shout from this high would no doubt alert the compound. 

Dave threw a large stone down on the path when the third man passed him.  The man whipped around, scrambling to get the AK off his shoulder.  The last thing he saw was the grinning camouflaged face of Dave McGraw.  The tiny hole between his eyes looked as if someone had taken measurements to center it exactly. 

Dave caught the body before it could fall to the ground and lowered it quietly.  A quick glance around showed him Nick was doing the same with the second man.  By the time Nick lowered his man to the ground Dave had cupped a hand around the patrol leader’s mouth and manhandled him to the ground. 

“Keep silent or die,” Nick said in Spanish, "the choice is yours."

The man’s eyes widened in horror when he looked at Nick’s camouflaged face.  Nick looked like some avenging alien god to him.

The man had enough presence of mind to pretend he did not understand Spanish, and Nick quickly switched to the local dialect of Quechua (
Lamista
), and gave his instructions again.  The man nodded his head. 

His fear was plain -- ordinary gringos, even the ones who spoke perfect Spanish, didn’t even know
Lamista
existed, and this demon of the night spoke it as if he had been born to it. 

The man’s eyes widened again as Nick’s features began to take shape beneath the camouflage paint.  Even when he was old and gray, he would tell the tale of the night the Inca rose from the past and warned him to work for Conde no more.

Nick and Dave lifted the man bodily from the trail and carried him well into the trees above the path.  Nick used dark green hundred mile an hour tape (a green fabric tape similar to duct tape in its uses, stickiness, and versatility and used to secure equipment to soldiers and vehicles during airborne operations) to truss the man to a conveniently shaped Cherimoya tree. 

Dave slipped back down to the path to conceal the two dead men.  When he was through, he carefully brushed away all signs of their struggle or even normal activity on the beaten path spiraling down the inside of the caldera.

It only took a few moments to determine where the two women were and what their condition was like.  Their queries about troop strength, locations, armament, schedules and the layout of the villa took a good deal longer. 

The injection of Rohypnol did not change affect the prisoner’s ability to answer the questions, but when he awakened later he would have spotty memories of the two men at best.  Nick had a small sketch pad in his hands.  He occasionally showed the sketch to his prisoner and made small corrections when necessary. 

When they were through with him, Dave gave him shot of liquid Valium to send him to sleep.  There was some concern for what this might do to his respiratory system, but it was considerably less hazardous than a .22 round into the frontal lobe of his brain, which was the alternative.

“This is going to take longer than we thought,” Nick said. "We’re going to have to take out more personnel than I expected.  A regular P.O.W. snatch isn’t going to work here.”

“No sense cryin’ about it.  We don’t have time to go back and get more troops, even if we had some.  We’ll just have to hit ‘em as hard as we can and make a run for it when we have the women.” 

Dave seemed alright with the idea, but Nick had more experience in Peru, and he was not so sure.  He made a mental note that civilian ops were going to have to be planned and carried out like military ops if he was going to stay alive to cash the paychecks. At the moment, he wasn’t sure at all that he was going to be alive to cash the first one. 

In spite of his reluctance, he knew Dave was right.  In an hour or two this patrol would be missed -- and when the bodies were found, the whole inside of the caldera would be crawling with Conde’s peasants.

They gagged the prisoner and left him taped to the tree.  They made their way further down inside the wooded inner slope of the caldera.  Nick eased out his binoculars as did Dave, and they conducted a long, thorough, and exacting visual reconnaissance. 

If it had not been for the babbling cooperation of their captive, they might well have missed the barracks.  It was marked only by a small building no larger than an outhouse.  It did not look like much, but it was covering a large cavern in the wall of the caldera.

Their captive had indicated there were thirty men inside the cave barracks at any given time, while there always were fifteen more on guard duty outside. The women were not locked up inside the house as they had expected, and this was going to cause them the most difficulty.

The barracks was actually going to be the easiest problem to solve.  The narrow doorway was the only way out.  One of them could toss several grenades through the opened door and empty a couple of magazines from the old M16-M203 combination inside and the barracks would be effectively compromised. 

The other fifteen men (less the three they had taken out on patrol) would be scattered about the house and grounds. Nick and Dave both knew that their only solution was to get closer, and find out where the roving guards were located.  Just before their all-out assault they would take out as many as they could with the silenced .22s. The fly in the ointment was that they still had no knowledge of the building the women were housed in…their primary mission.

* * * * *

Nick hated the situation, but as Dave had pointed out, time was something they were all out of. With the decision made for him, he set out to make the most of it.

When Nick felt he was about three hundred meters from their objective, he pointed out a large and distinctively shaped tree that was much taller than the surrounding trees, and drew an imaginary circle in the air above his head.  The hand signal was the one normally used by soldiers to designate a rally point, a place to come back to if things fouled up, or in this case, to come back to after the final reconnaissance. 

The two men began to move slowly down the step wooded slope of the caldera. The last hundred and fifty meters before they got to the final wood line before the house, they moved on their bellies.

As they had agreed to earlier, Dave scooted out on his belly to observe the barracks and Nick crawled closer to the house.  It was 0100 hours.

They met under the tree again at 0230.  “There’s only one inside the house,” Nick said, “and I just heard him send three more up the trail to look for the three we took out.  I’ve got one roving and two stationary guards on the house itself.”

“I found three at the barracks, one inside the door and two roving. There’s three on the guesthouse in the garden where the women are being held,” Dave said.

“Great, we’ve got two loose nimrods running around out here somewhere and we don’t know where they are -- provided Jose back up there could count.”  Nick flicked an irritated glance up the caldera where their captive was taped to a tree.  The light from the new patrol was less than a third the way up the trail. 

“We’re just going to have to assume they have two inside the house with the ladies,” Dave said, “we don’t have any choice and we’re just 'bout out of time. We may be lucky though, I didn’t see a single vehicle here.  Maybe the other guards are in the vehicles.”

“We’ve been doing this a long time, Dave, and we both know ‘maybe’ can get you killed.”

“Oh hell, thunder and lightning was always my style anyway,” Dave said with a grin.  “I don’t see that we have any choice other than to give up, an’ that ain’t happenin’ .”

“Thunder and lightning it is then,” Nick said. 

* * * * *

The important decisions having been made, the two men began to prepare for battle with easy, economical moves that were silent and wasted no energy.  There was no time now for changes, each man would have to depend on his own resources, and his ability to deploy them.

Nick crawled into the deep grass in front of the house, about sixty meters out.  His primary firepower was the grenade launcher on his M-203…the grenades had to travel forty meters before they armed themselves. 

Silently, Nick taped his thirty round magazines together so he could reload quickly.  He put one doubled magazine in each of the cargo pockets in his pants, and quietly taped one to the magazine already seated in the gun as well.  With the Glock .22 out and close at hand, Nick had only to wait until after 0330 hours. 

He would signal the commencement of the attack with a burst from his rifle.  What he really wanted was to catch the nimrod from inside the house checking the guards outside and having himself a smoke.  At 0330, Nick took out the first of the stationary sentries with the Glock.  The second sentry was asleep and never heard the muffled sound of his partner being shot -- nor did he waken to the sound of the next round penetrating just below his right ear. 

At 0337 Nick’s silent prayer was answered, and a tall lean man in white cotton pants and shirt came out on the porch, looked around, stretched, and scratched himself. 

The flare of a zippo lighter exposed his face just before Nick took him out with a three round burst from his rifle.  Nick began to pump round after round of forty millimeter grenades into the main house.

Before the first of the grenades had lit off, Dave had taken out the three sentries and was busy lobbing fragmentation grenades into the barracks as far inside as he could throw them.  The four second delay fuses allowed him to toss several inside before the first one went off. 

Dave began to spray the inside of the barracks with rounds from the light machine gun he carried.  The rock walls of the barracks made the place an inferno of explosion and murderous metal.

Explosions to their left and right confused the guards on the guesthouse.  The three of them were firing their AK-47s indiscriminately into the darkness.  They never saw anyone at all, even though the two who survived swore later to Armando Conde that there were at least fifty uniformed men who had made the assault. A third man, the roving guard from the house, ran off into the woods with the two survivors.

With no more explosions blasting or bullets flying, Dave hit the guesthouse door with a muscular shoulder and rolled into the front room with his Glock out and ready.  Nick was right behind him, M-16 at the ready.

There was one man in the living room that died before his weapon cleared its holster.  The other guard came stumbling from the bathroom with his pants around his knees and a Beretta 92F in his hand.  He died trying to pull his pants up. 

Nick looked down at his watch; it was 0339, a little less than one hundred twenty seconds into the attack. They rushed the bedroom where they found three women huddled together on a king sized bed rather than the two they had expected.  They were all dressed in the white work clothes favored by the peasants, and they were barefoot.

Nick and Dave herded them across the yard and into the tree line, Amanda babbling about not having her shoes and other assorted nonsense.  Nick knew she was in shock, and he also knew it was more important to get some distance between them and the grounds than it was to shut her up right away. 

The sounds of the fire and the sporadic gunfire coming from the burning house assured them at least a few minutes of free travel before they would have to quiet down.

He looked back and noticed that Cynthia was assisting a pretty blonde teenaged girl who was hobbling along on one good leg.  Nick handed his rifle to Cynthia.  “Your bio said you know how to handle one of these,” Nick growled, “do you?” 

Cynthia nodded. 

Nick reached down and lifted the teenager, throwing her over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.  “Watch your face,” he whispered hoarsely, “we’re going to be travelling through some pretty dense forest for the next little while.” 

Without another word he turned and started to walk up the steep side of the caldera as if he was out for a swift Sunday stroll.  It was all Cynthia could do to keep up with him.

Dave was about twenty meters ahead of them, dragging a still muttering Amanda Dunn behind him. In moments there was nothing to indicate they had moved through the forest.  Even the insects that had hushed at their passing had begun to make their normal nighttime noises again.

Nick insisted that they move at least halfway up the steep slope before they stopped to rest and check on the women.  Cynthia helped Amanda to calm down and the teenager sat and sniffed quietly.

Nick knelt at the teenager’s feet and inspected the leg she had been limping on.  It wasn’t bad, she had cut her foot on some broken glass when they had left the house.