The Viper Squad (23 page)

Joe Nolan crouched, and held up a hand for them to stop. One by one, the men dived for cover and lay ready with their weapons.
Joe beckoned Mike forward to join him.

“Listen,” he said when Mike crept up alongside him.

Mike heard nothing.

Joe shook his head after a minute. “I could’ve sworn I heard something.”

“We’ll wait,” Mike said.

They stayed put and listened in the forest stillness.

A guffaw. They both heard it. Directly ahead, on the path they were traveling.

Mike turned about and signaled to the others to hold their
positions. Then he nodded to Joe, who crept forward with Mike two paces behind him. Joe slowed at a twist in the trail and
peered around a massive trunk. He pulled his head back fast and gesticulated to Mike.

“How many?” Mike whispered.

Joe peeked again. “Four. All together.”

“Can you take them?”

’’I’11 try.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” Mike guaranteed.

They both checked, for maybe the twentieth time, that their M16s were switched to full automatic.

Joe nodded to Mike.

As Joe stepped forward from behind the tree trunk to confront the four guerrillas, Mike kept by his side. The rebels sat on
their backpacks in the middle of the trail, talking and smoking with their rifles across their knees.

With a rapid zigzag of his rifle barrel, Joe toppled all four of them in a single burst of fire, using only about half of
the thirty-round magazine. Mike didn’t fire a shot. They both waited and watched for a moment.

“I’ll go back for the others,” Mike said.

He had them drag the four bodies away from the path into the trees and slung a hand-held radio transmitter after them.

Mike said to Joe, “They’ll be alerted by the lack of radio response if they didn’t hear your burst of fire. Keep up a fast
pace from here on. I’ll be right behind you.”

Mike lost no time in moving them out. If they were going to lose the element of surprise, perhaps speed would make up for
it.

If any of them had ever doubted the value of what they had done every day on Assateague Island, running endless mile after
mile up and down the beach, they found out its benefit now. The going was all uphill, and the higher they climbed, the steeper
it became. The path tacked from side to side up the mountain like a sailboat against the wind.

Joe Nolan spun about, wildly gestured for them to take
cover and dived into some thick prickly bushes. Moments later, a platoon of twelve men came down the trail in single file,
spaced apart, rifles at the ready. The mercs, hardly breathing where they lay hidden only a few yards away on both sides of
the trail, listened to each of the guerrillas pass: his footfalls on the litter of the forest floor, the way each of them
brushed against the branch of a bush, one man’s belch, another’s sniffle. Each one of the mercs had wondered for a panic-stricken
instant if he had forgotten to conceal some part of himself or his equipment, leaving a foreign object visible in the bushes
upon which a guerrilla’s eye might chance to fall. But there was nothing for the guerrillas to see, and they continued downhill
along the trail.

Mike waited a couple of minutes before he stood and hissed to the others, “They’ve gone back to see what happened to the rearguard.
We gotta move forward fast now and hit the main group while we can. Remember, from this point on we got to watch our ass with
that platoon behind us.”

Joe hit the trail even faster than before. The others wound along behind him, confident in Mike Campbell’s leadership—all
except Mike, who wished he knew what the hell to expect and had some contingency plans, or even a plan, he could rely on.
Sometimes a soldier had to jump in with both feet, and at such times it was better to act than worry.

After a steep climb, they came to the top of the wooded hill. The trail bore to the right, following the highest ground, which
had only a thin cover of trees. Huge slabs of rock jutted from the soft cover of vegetation. Joe motioned that he was going
ahead alone to reconnoiter.

He came back in a few minutes. “They’ve left another four guards on the trail to cover their rear. These ones are a lot more
alert than the first four.”

“They’ve probably heard that the others are missing,” Mike said. “But they’ll think it’s just a foul-up unless that
platoon finds the bodies. Any sign of the main group of guerrillas?”

“I didn’t hear anything. But they can’t be far ahead of us.”

Mike slung his M16 on his back and drew his machete. He pointed its blade at Nolan, Murphy and Waller. They drew theirs.

“No shooting” was all he said.

They watched the four guerrillas from the cover of bushes.

Mike whispered, “We could never get closer than this without them spotting us. I’m going to draw them to us. Ready?” He looked
them over quickly, then shouted to the four guerrillas, “Companeros! Aqui!”

The rebels looked startled and stood undecided.

“Aqui!” Mike shouted again, invisible in the bushes.

They came running, assault rifles at the ready.

Mike popped up right next to one, using his motion to deliver a short, sharp chop with the machete. The steel blade buried
itself in the guerrilla’s skull with a whack—the same sound it had made on the unripe coconuts Mike had practiced on. He had
to put one foot on the lifeless man’s shoulder in order to yank the blade out of the splintered bone.

To his right, he saw Joe Nolan deliver a series of chops to his struggling, groaning victim on the ground. The man clutched
at the blade of the machete with his bare hands till their flesh was cut to ribbons from the bones. Joe dug at him with the
long blade till he lay still.

Harvey stood over his dead rebel, who was sliced open across the chest, and the merc smiled like a family butcher over a showpiece
of prime ribs.

Bob Murphy missed with his first swing at his guerrilla. The man saw the blade descending on him and pulled back. The terrorist
took another backward step as Bob’s brawn followed through on his swing. The rebel directed
the barrel of his M16 at Bob’s gut and went to squeeze the trigger.

Before his brain managed to send the message to his trigger finger, Harvey gave him a sideways cut to the upper arm that severed
the nerve.

The guerrilla stood there shocked, as in a still from a movie, while Harvey moved next to him, jaws working frantically on
a wad of gum. Harvey held his machete in a two-handed grip, with the blade balanced on his left shoulder, and he took a mighty
swipe that made the blade scream through the air.

He cut the guerrilla’s head clean from his shoulders.

Harvey looked after the head as it flew through the air and disappeared into some bushes. He grinned his sick grin and said
to the others, “If this was Fenway Park, that would have been a home run.”

Lance, Cesar and Andre tried not to blanch as they saw their four comrades return smeared in blood and carrying dripping machetes.

Elated now, with a manic smile Harvey smeared blood with his hand onto Lance’s clean fatigues and yelled at him, “Come on
in! It’s warm! It only seems cold when you’re standing out there!”

Lance gagged.

“Enough!” Mike barked and faced Harvey down.

“Crazy fucker,” Bob Murphy muttered at Harvey in Lance’s defense.

Harvey retorted, “That’s not what you were saying a few minutes ago when I saved your bacon.”

Bob nodded. “That’s true, Harvey. But calm down now.”

“You be calm, Murphy,” Harvey sneered. “I’ll save your ass while you look cool.”

Mike let them talk themselves out and mutter curses for a while, then he led all of them deliberately slow past the four hacked-up
corpses and beyond. That brought everyone
back to reality, especially the fact that they were in unknown territory again, that they were no longer king of the hill
and could easily end looking just like the four recently deceased on the trail behind them.

“The main group of rebels. has got to be near,” Mike said. “As soon as we see them, take cover in a line at right angles to
this path. I want ten feet at least between each man.”

He nodded to Joe Nolan to take the lead again. Mike followed in number two position after telling Andre to cover their rear.

At one bend in the path that was easy to recognize, Andre hung back to lay a trip wire. He attached the wire to a rectangular
polystyrene Claymore antipersonnel mine which he had placed out of sight next to the path. Then he removed the safety pin
and covered the mine with forest litter. When Andre caught up with the others, he passed the word along about the location
of the trip wire. That was the trouble with a mine—it could cause as much damage to the side that carelessly laid it as to
the enemy. It was impersonal about whom it killed.

The main body of guerrillas were eating C rations in a forest clearing when Mike and the team came upon them. The mercs were
immediately spotted by lookouts and had to dive to the ground to avoid being raked by automatic fire. The bullets ripped through
the leaves of the under—growth and smacked off tree trunks. The twenty-five or thirty men dropped their spoons and cans and
grabbed their Ml6s, AK-47s, M2s and Mini-14s.

Campbell slipped the safety on his M79 grenade launcher, sighted quickly and shot a grenade cartridge into the main body of
guerrillas.

The explosion tore limbs and flesh from those nearest it, hit others with fragments, knocked down more with the force of its
blast and frightened the wits out of the rest—long enough for the merc team to shower them with automatic fire from their
M16s. The rebels dropped like
flies. Then Mike followed through with a second cartridge shell. But by this time the surviving guerrillas had spread out,
and the grenade only took out some on the left flank.

The hostile force had broken up into pockets of resistance behind good cover and were returning fire now with threatening
accuracy.

“Take cover!” Mike yelled at Hardwick and Waller, who were standing out front, feet apart, blazing away as though they were
at the O.K. Corral.

They obeyed, fortunately for themselves, because a withering hail of fire was now directed at them by the surviving guerrillas,
who had gotten over their initial shock. The rebels were contained in four pockets, and they were coordinating their attacks.
They still outnumbered the mercs by more than two to one—and the question now was, Who had got whom pinned down?

Mike had an answer to that question. His M79. Using the graduated leaf rear sight, he sent in grenade after grenade until
he flushed each pocket of guerrillas from cover. When they realized they were being systematically wiped out, the guerrillas
tried a desperate charge. The survivors now barely outnumbered the mercs, and they came at them with the ferocity of cornered
rats.

Mike kicked off with his M16, and his bullets curled one of the guerrillas in on himself like a worm wriggling on a hook.

Another of his bullets entered a rebel’s chest, the entry wound only a pinpoint of blood on the man’s combat fatigues. But
when he slowly turned around as he fell, Mike saw that the exit wound in his back was big enough to stick his fist in.

They kept coming at the mercs, so crazed with last-ditch tenor they couldn’t shoot straight and hardly knew what they were
doing.

The mercs blew them apart with close-up automatic fire. The last two still on their feet got hit with so many bullets from
so many M16s, their bodies swayed and leaked from
the multiple punctures caused by the high-velocity 5.56 mm projectiles.

Mike checked on the carnage to make sure all had been hit. He had learned the hard way that he could never assume a man was
finished fighting just because he was lying down. But all these men were dead.

The mercs took this time to check their weapons and magazine supply.

Mike walked over to them and pointed. “We have some friends back along the trail 1’d like you to meet. Andre will lead the
way.”

The leader of the guerrilla platoon couldn’t be positive that this was the place he had seen the four-man rearguard placed,
until one of his men found blood drops on some leaves. The blood was fresh, still liquid on the rebel’s fingers. The leader
was about to radio back when they heard the shooting.

“They must have used a different trail to bypass us,” he shouted to his men. “Let’s take them from the rear! On the double!”

The shooting uphill from them continued, along with grenade explosions, as they ran along the path to their friends’ aid.
They had been farther off than they first thought, and the shooting stopped before they even got close. They had no idea who
had gotten the upper hand, but they were coming anyhow. They did not slow their pace, rushing uphill along the winding path,
fast as they could go with heavy boots, rifles and backpacks.

As they ran, they almost trod on the hacked-up corpses of the second rearguard. Although these men had all seen combat before,
this sight—involving comrades they had seen alive such a short time ago—was enough to quench their revolutionary fervor. But
their leader urged them forward, promising that vengeance would be theirs; and in a moment they were charging along the trail
after him to slaughter their enemies.

The rebel leader’s leg caught in the trip wire so hard he fell over it, and the Claymore blew before he hit the ground. Its
C4 explosive projected seven hundred steel balls in a 60-degree array in the direction they were coming from. Lethal to about
forty-five yards, the steel balls missed some members of the platoon who were sheltered by the bodies of others.

Those nearest were chopped to pulp and died instantly. Those farther back were less fortunate and began to die noisily and
painfully from their mortal wounds. Two were injured only in the legs; one was hit in the left arm; and two were completely
untouched and stood there with their mouths hanging open in horrified amazement.

The mercs took them clean away with a burst of M16 automatic fire at gut level. Harvey ran in gleefully with his Colt pistol
to finish off any still moving.