The Weapon (25 page)

Dan fired till his magazine ran dry, spun, and sprinted down the trail. Gasoline-stinking fires crackled along it. Red stringy things hung from the burning palms. He vaulted a woman's smoking body, her back laid open like a split hog at a barbecue, clothes aflame. Ahead he caught Henrickson's diminutive figure, bowed in an all-out sprint. He sucked air, trying to keep his legs moving.

The jungle fell away. There were the vertical rocks, the gritty sand, and the boat. The rumble of engines. Wenck, standing to toss a line free, then spinning the wheel, bringing her stern to as Dan and the others hit the water and waded in, holding their rifles high. The smoke blew off the land low and dark. Dan hoped it would screen them. “Cast off!” he screamed, voice squeaky in a smoke-blistered throat. “Cast the fuck off, Donnie!”

A machine gun, a fifty by the sound of it, riveted slugs over their heads. Dan reached the stern, threw his rifle in, and pulled himself over the gunwale. He fell on top of someone else, wheezing, as the big Hondas snarled up to full throttle. When he recognized his own hand in front of his eyes it was black with soot and coated with blood and dirt.

The islands were surprisingly high for such small specks of land, so far from anywhere. Dark green, sheathed with thick jungle and built on white foundations of surf. Parrots, at least he thought they were parrots, trailed long yellow tails, wheeling in noisy flocks. Surf seethed along the rocks at the base of the smallest, supposedly—according to the
China Sea Pilot
—uninhabited.

Dan lowered the binoculars and squeegeed his hand down his face. The heat rose in clouds around and under his clothes. It melted his face and ran down his cheeks. His eyeballs were liquefying. He worked his dry mouth and spat a slimy paste over the side, where it slowly uncoiled in the clear faintly rocking water.

He couldn't enjoy the sun. Not as short of water, sunburned, and hungry as they were. He wondered if there were any wild pigs, anything edible, in that coarse green verdure. Didn't really matter, they couldn't take the risk, but he still wondered. He leaned back, rubbing what was now a respectable beard. But he was careful to keep his gaze averted from the other eyes staring at him.

He wondered if he was really safe turning his back on them.

It had been a long voyage down. Five days, all in all, though they hadn't spent that entire time under way.

That first afternoon out, fleeing, he'd kept the boat close inshore, under cover of the smoke-pall from the burning huts and jungle; then, as it thinned, turned sharp and angled out to sea. He kept their speed down to minimize their wake. Five miles out he angled again, to join a half-mile circle of fishing craft drawing a net tight. He pulled up alongside one of the fishermen. The boat was weatherbeaten, handmade, strewn with nets, cooking pots, and clothes hanging on lines to dry; the family stared open-mouthed, like the children back in the village. Who were probably, he thought, being shot and burned even now . . . Kaulukukui and Oberg grabbed the net with boathooks and hauled a corner aboard.

They watched the jungle burn. And the fishermen watched them, but made no move either to welcome or shoo them off. Maybe their rifles had something to do with that. And their masquerade must have worked, because although the A-10s howled back and worked the rebel hamlet over again, with high explosive this time, they didn't seem to notice the boat.

Around nine o'clock, as the sun started to get really intense, the fishermen pulled in their nets. He kept the one they had hold of, and again, no one objected. The little fleet cranked up their put-puts and nosed west in a loose gaggle, some leading, others trailing, drawing wide glittering vees across the calm sea. Dan started one Honda and ran with them, staying in the centroid of the group, neither one of the leaders nor the tail end charlie.

All that day they headed west, across the Strait and through a narrow unmarked channel of clear shallow green water, reddish-brown coral heads, and white sand bottom between what the chart called Sangboy and Teinga Islands, out into the Sulu Sea. He kept a close eye on the coral heads, but mainly just stayed in the wake of the fishermen. They cleared the channel as the sun started to dip, and turned north. Dan made a sweep of the horizon, clicking all the way around ten degrees at a time; then another, checking the
sky. Clear. He pointed for Kaulukukui, at the helm, to keep the bow headed west.

“We keep poking along like this?”

“You can nudge her up to ten. That speedometer's working, right?”

“Ten? That's all?”

“Long way to go, Sumo. Let's keep it slow till we see if we've got the fuel to make it.”

The other boats sank slowly beneath towering white clouds, leaving them alone on a sea like an old mirror. After half an hour Dan took his binoculars, which he'd managed to save, and checked the horizon again. Once he was sure there were no boats, no aircraft, and as far as he could tell, no drones tracking them, he took out his nav kit and the rest of the charts and went forward, behind the windshield, and began planning their route.

He'd expected to do this before they got underway, but now he perched on the gunwale and tried to do it on a folded chart with a pencil. He worked at it for an hour, checking and rechecking his intended course and fuel consumption figures. Then put it aside and stared down into the slowly passing sea, the purr of the four-stroke resonating across the flat water.

He figured the total distance to the intercept point at a little under a thousand nautical miles. Running at just below hull speed, they'd make about 230 nautical miles a day, which would make it 4.3 days in transit.

Unfortunately, when he compared that to the fuel/mile curves Oberg had worked up, it meant they'd run their tanks dry three days out. The Philippine Army attack had forced them to cast off with low fuel, hardly any food, and nowhere near enough water.

On the other hand, they were underway two days early. So there was no hurry, but there was a real danger of running out of everything, fuel first, leaving them rocking and baking in the South China Sea till they died of dehydration and sun poisoning.

He scratched in his beard again, combed it with his fingers.
He went through the charts, then the
Pilot
, then his other references, looking for a favorable current or a bright idea, but came out empty-handed. He had no wind, no sails, and no oars, so that ruled out any assist.

“Crap,” he whispered. He sucked on the divider-points and thought.

 

Obie was on the wheel the next day when they saw the plane. Teddy caught the first glint far off over the rugged humpy lushness that was the coast of Borneo. Malaysia, over there. Or maybe Brunei—he wasn't sure. He'd been here a couple of times before, but he wasn't sure of the borders. And Lenson didn't seem to want to let the charts out of his hands. Control. Control. Control. There it was.

He glanced back to where they'd rigged a tarp against the blazing sun. The commander was huddled under it in jeans and his dirty shirt, asleep. Or at least, with his eyes closed.

They'd run all night, navigating by sight and guess between Malaysia and Balabac Island and out into the warm open blackness of the South China Sea. Teddy had been surprised there'd been so little traffic. Only two sets of running lights all the way through. As soon as Lenson had figured they were clear they'd come to port and headed down the coast. There were little islands ten or fifteen miles offshore and he wanted to stay inboard of them, stay as close inshore as they could. Teddy didn't see the point. Who knew they were here? Who cared? Lenson kept complaining they didn't have a fathometer. It would have been nice, but they had the spare GPS. They weren't running a fucking destroyer here. Just a piece of shit pirate boat. They were lucky the engines even ran.

Thinking about that, he told Kaulukukui, “Hey, Sumo, that engine sound okay to you?”

“I don't know. Sound good to you?”

“Hear that chatter? Sounds like a timing belt. We ought to pull the cover off, take a look.”

“I say long as it runs, leave it be.”

“Yeah, you'd say that. Fucking puddinghead Hawaiian.”

“Fucking rich boy hao'le.” Kaulukukui dipped his skivvy shirt over the side and wrapped it around his head.

“Hey, a real raghead. I pull on the end of that, does your head spin around?”

“Try it and see, asshole.”

Teddy didn't come back. He kept his attention focused where he'd seen the glint. And pretty soon he saw it again. He looked aft to where the guys off watch were tumbled along the gunwales. The fat one, the submariner, Carpenter, was awake and looking at him. “Rit.”

“Yeah?”

“Shake Lenson up there.”

“He was up all night.”

“Get him up, Carpenter.”

Lenson rolled over, maybe he hadn't been asleep after all, and crawled out from the shade. He rubbed his face. “What you got?”

“Air contact.”

He pointed, and they watched together for some minutes. “Heading our way,” Lenson said at last.

“Airplane,” Teddy yelled, and around the boat figures flinched and started to move. They crawled under the tarp or into the cuddy, with the anchor and line and the crates they'd stowed the weapons and ammo in to keep them out of the salt. Teddy snapped, “Sumo, grab somebody to help and get that fucking net deployed. We're supposed to be fishermen here.”

They grabbed the net and started wrestling it toward the side. It was damp yellow twisted nylon, very heavy, and stank of rotted fish. They had the heavy rolled bundle up on the gunwale when Lenson turned from the plane. He saw what they were doing and recoiled. “Get that back inboard,” he barked.

“We're fishermen, we need a—”

“I said, get it inboard! Cut that engine!”

They looked at Teddy. Who hesitated. Then pushed the throttle to idle and the shift to neutral. “You heard the commander. Get the fucking thing in.”

“Soon as they have it out of the water, put us back in gear. Same course.”

“Fuckhead,” Teddy muttered. But he obeyed.

The plane came in on them. A little high-wing prop job, single engine. It flew over them five hundred feet up and droned off to the north in a straight line. They watched till it was out of sight.

“Monty, take the wheel.” Lenson turned to Teddy. “Come on back here a minute.”

They stood beside the running engine. Teddy noticed again it sounded funny, a sort of chatter. Right now though he had to handle this guy. He crammed fists into pockets. “Beard looks good on you, Commander. Got a problem?”

“You got one, Petty Officer?”

“I'm here to make problems go away.”

“I don't want any question about who's in charge of this team, Oberg.”

“SEALs think for themselves, sir. I thought looking like a fisherman was a good idea. If we're supposed to be a fisherman.”

“How many missions you been on that had two guys in charge, Oberg?”

Under that gray stare he didn't feel as assured as he had before. He took his hands out of his pockets. “Not many.”

“If that plane was looking for us, a smooth sea like this, he had his eyeballs on us miles away. Long before we saw him. It'd be a dead giveaway to slow, alter course, and put out a net. Just the kink in our wake would show him that.”

After a moment Teddy said, “Okay. Copy that.”

“I'd prefer ‘aye aye, sir.' And another thing, I want you to set up a lookout rotation. So if there's another plane, or a surface contact, we see it before it sees us.”

Teddy watched a muscle jump under the commander's eye. The guy was wound tight. Maybe not that far from losing it. “Aye aye, sir.”

Lenson turned away. Oberg contemplated the back of his head, then went back to the wheel. “I got it, Jeff.”

“We gonna have trouble with this guy?” Kaulukukui muttered.

“Just blackshoe bullshit. Setting up watches. Making sure I know who's boss.” He spat over the side, looked at the compass, then back at their wake. “Jesus, man, can't you even steer?”

 

They drank the last of the water the next day. Another blazer and no wind, or to be exact, what little there was blew from directly astern, making the exhaust travel with them for hours. Neither SEAL commented on it, but Wenck and Carpenter complained incessantly, and Henrickson vomited despite the calm seas. He seemed disoriented and lethargic, slumped under the shade of the tarp. Dan figured it was either sunstroke or dehydration, maybe both.

He'd hoped for rain, but there weren't even any clouds. At last he said reluctantly, standing by the wheel, “Okay, we're going to have to get fuel and water. We could use more food too. Come left to 180 and run in toward shore. Look for a village, piers, cell or microwave towers. Run in
slow
. I keep seeing reefs that aren't on the chart. We bend a prop, we're not going to be able to catch that freighter if she comes down the Strait at full speed.”