Countdown: H Hour (28 page)

Semmerlin nodded and slipped his night vision goggles over his face, waiting to turn the device on until it was well seated and none of the greenish glow from the amplification tubes could escape.

Free climbing was not quite the same thing as free soloing, the latter being a deliberately risk-taking venture, done without a partner and, broadly speaking, without safety equipment. Instead, free climbing involved the use of a safety rope, the kinds of devices on the sling across Graft’s shoulder, and, most importantly, a belay man at the ground level to stop a fall, if required.

Under the circumstances, taking an unnecessary risk would have been, in the first place, potentially disastrous to their mission; and there were seventy million dollars riding on the successful retrieval of Louis Ayala, after all, and quite a bit more for the elimination of the group that had taken him. Moreover, Ayala’s wife, Paloma, had offered that substantial bonus for inflicting some sheer frightfulness on his kidnappers.

Those bonuses were secondary, of course, payable only if Welch’s crew could also return her husband to her. On the other hand, if it did turn out that Mr. Ayala was dead, or if he were killed in the rescue, Welch fully intended to make Mrs. Ayala an offer for revenge at the original price, anyway,

But, in the second place, needless risk was just box-o-rocks stupid, mission or no.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The moral here is to never trust equipment, but oneself.

—Fiona Always

Caban Island, Pilas Group, Basilan Province,

Republic of the Philippines

I’m not a big fan of stupid risks, either
, thought Graft, standing directly at the base of the cliff. He rotated his night vision goggles down over his eyes, then adjust the focus for very close. He could, perhaps, have tried the thing by feel alone.
The problem is, though, that feel won’t help you plan very far ahead.
Even so, he began by putting both hands flat against the surface, just getting a feel for the rock.
Not that I think this little ritual matters half a shit, but the guy who taught me always did it, and who am I to fuck with tradition
?

Removing his hands from flat against the rock, Graft began to squat down, tapping the cliff face lightly with his finger while he searched for an initial foothold. He found it, about three and a half feet above where sand and gravel met rock.
It isn’t much, but it’ll do.

Satisfied with that, he stood again, reaching upward. There was only one good handhold within reach, a small ledge about eighteen inches overhead. Unfortunately, it was to the right of the foothold, so he’d have to use his ungloved right hand. At some point in time, if the pattern repeated, that would begin to wear and, worse, tire out his shooting hand.

Placing the toe of his left boot in the foothold and the stiffened fingers of his right hand on the tiny ledge, Graft hoisted himself up. After pausing briefly, he next sent his left hand questing for the next little ledge.

Graft’s heart was beating fast, not so much with fear—though that may have been part of it—as with the exertion of forcing his nearly fifty-year-old body straight up a cliff.

I am
so
getting too old for this shit. And, speaking of shit . . .

Vainly, Graft’s free hand sought another handhold. There was nothing within reach, either to left, or right, or straight up.

 . . . I
knew
this would happen
.

There was a crevice, of sorts, at about waist level. He examined it through the goggles, though they couldn’t tell him all that much. Taking a camming device from the sling around his body, Graft unlocked the device with his thumb and two fingers, then tucked it into the crevice, as high as he could fit it in. Releasing his thumb, the device lodged itself in the crack. He gave it a long tug, to ensure it was set.

“Gimme a little slack,” he radioed in a whisper to Semmerlin, on belay, below. Feeling the rope about his waist and running through the carabiners he’d already set loosen, he snapped another carabiner around it, then lifted carabiner and rope, then connected the carabiner to the last cam he’d set.

“Take up all the slack. I’m going to need to use the rope to bear me while I inch up for a better hold.”

“Roger,” Semmerlin answered. After a few seconds, he added, “I’ve got you.”

“Roger.” Graft felt along the sling until he came to a mechanical prusiking device, an ascender, with a loop of rope already attached to it. This he clipped onto the camming device, setting the bottom of the loop about two and half feet above his right foot. After tugging the ascender to ensure it would hold, he set his foot in the loop and pushed his leg down, lifting himself that extra two and a half feet upward. From there . . .

Okay . . . if the crevice runs upward some, and opens and bit . . . and . . . yes! Sadly, it does me no good unless I can find a handhold or footrest to take the weight off the rope. Well . . . find one or make one. And I don’t know that I’ll find one, so . . .

Letting himself down that same two and a half feet, Graft’s foot hunted for the previously used rest. Finding it, he let his weight all go to that foot. Then he pulled another camming device from the sling. To this he attached an independent loop of cord—not even quite rope, though strong enough—from his pocket. Once the loop was joined to the cam, he set that in the crevice, just below where he’d set the earlier cam. His free foot went into the loop.

“Slack the rope,” he told Semmerlin over the short-range radio.

“You’ve got it.”

Lifting himself, as he had before, by his precarious finger hold and the new loop, Graft took yet another cam in his free hand. When he’d raised himself as far as the loop would take him, he sought the upper extension of the crevice. Again, he thrust a cam into the crack and locked it down. Then, weight entirely supported by the loop and the fingers of one hand, he reached down, grasped the rope, and pulled it upward to hook it through the last used cam’s attached carabiner.

“Take up the slack.”

“Roger.”

Graft lifted his NVG’s for a moment, then looked down and saw nothing but blackness. He was high enough that the sound of surf had become a bit distant, as if heard through a wall. His best guess was that, of the eighty-odd feet he’d had to climb, sixty, perhaps sixty-five, of them were behind him.

Well . . . below me, anyway.

Worse than the height he’d reached, that more distant sound of the surf would no longer cover the sounds of his climbing quite so well.

On the plus side, though, I’ve got a marginally better chance of hearing it if they’ve actually got a roving patrol up above, and it comes close to my objective at some time when the RPV is elsewhere. Course, they’ve got an even better chance of hearing
me
than I do them.

I am
so
getting too old for this.

Flipping the goggles back down, he confirmed that he had a pretty fair position at the moment, with both feet, heel to heel, solidly set on a rather narrow ledge and one fist formed into a ball to lock it into a crevice. He’d already found several likely footholds over the next half dozen or so feet.

The rope around his waist, in multiple loops, was slack for the nonce. Once again he drew a camming device from the rope sling with his free hand. That went into the crevice, was locked down, and then the main rope was fed through the attached carabiner.

Raising one foot and planting it on a tiny toehold, Graft pulled with his fist-formed hand, lifting himself upward.

It was at that point that the rock around his fist gave way on one side. One second, his clenched first seemed firmly held. The next, and it had sprung free in a spray of decayed rock. Graft automatically threw his head back to protect his face and the goggles from the rough cliff side, zipping in a greenish blur past his eyes. As he fell, the rope around his waist whirred as it whipped the safety line through the carabiner on the camming device. As the slack ran out, he felt a sharp pull on his midsection. That pull was altogether too brief, however, as the now taut rope ripped the camming device right from the rock face.

MV
Richard Bland
, Sulu Sea

A radio operator, seated on the bridge, clutched one hand to his right earphone. Still looking down, he announced, “Graft reports, ‘Pelican’.”

“Bring her around,” Pearson ordered, then gave a heading.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” the helmsman responded, repeating back the heading. Ponderously, the ship began to respond to the wheel, veering though about one hundred and eighty degrees until pointing south again.

“Ahead slow,” the captain ordered. He rechecked the operations matrix, did a few quick calculations in his head, and let that order stand.

Amphibious operations
always
have command and control issues. Normally and routinely, these were solved, to the extent they could be, by the simple expedient of leaving the naval side in charge of everything until half the landing force was ashore, at which point the ground component commander took over everything, including, broadly, the dispositions and tasks of the navy.

It was both simpler and more complex, in this case. It was simpler because there was only the one ship, though it would be sending out a number of lesser craft and boats. It was more complex because regiment had placed Terry in overall charge.

That was where mechanical, formulaic solutions had to give way to human ones. Yes, Terry was in overall charge. That didn’t mean he knew jack about the ship-side aspects of it. So he left Pearson in charge, maintaining for himself only the option of taking control—or, more tactfully, giving advice—if he thought it was needed. Pearson, meanwhile, understood fully that his ship didn’t matter to the mission nearly as much as actions on the ground, so he conformed his actions to the needs of the ground commander—who was also Welch.

It worked reasonably well, really, though it might not have for a larger and more complex organization, one where the sheer size meant it was impossible for any large percentage of people to know, hence be able to trust one another.

The whole ship tingled. Both helicopters sat, covered but fully armed and waiting for the word to go. Both CH-750’s, also armed, though much more lightly, idled at low just ahead of the superstructure. The nets were already rolled over the side, with the landing craft, bearing both armored cars, sitting just inward from the gunwales and long cables leading from their shackled to the crane, overhead. Forward of the landing craft, three rubber boats sufficient for the special operations portion of the landing force sat on deck. They’d be hoisted over at a signal. The special floating platform from which Graft and Semmerlin had departed swung overhead.

Even below, the people from Bajuni felt the excitement in the air. They were free to come and go but, since they weren’t actually part of the regiment and there hadn’t been time or space to train them to be, they’d been politely requested to keep out of the way. Being a polite folk, themselves, they did.

The humanitarians, on the other hand, were locked up in two groups. One of these was composed of the highly trained medical types, the doctors and the nurses, whose services just might, and probably would, be needed. The others—including Duke, Zink, and Bourke—were the human dunnage, the administrators; those, and the propagandists who may have been necessary to the making of the advertisements and briefings that would bring their organization money, but were completely unnecessary for an organization that got its funding from sources besides private contributions and government grants.

Stocker had observed, as they were marched off, “Eh? If the ship sinks, fuck ’em.”

Terry was out on deck, doing a bit of LBWO—leadership by walking around. This involved letting the troops see you, talking to them in a confident tone of voice, asking questions—as much to let them know you were on top of things as to see if they were on top of things and ready.

Pearson still stood the bridge, monitoring the occasional traffic from Graft. That last was worrisome, because it had been a few minutes longer than expected since the last message.

A printer began to hum down in the commo shack. The rating on duty waited until it had finished, then read it. With an excited “Wow!” the sailor ran out of the shack, and up two sets of ladders, to the bridge. There he handed the message over to the captain.

Pearson, too, read the short message. Then he started to laugh, more or less like the man on a gurney who gets notice of a governor’s reprieve, just as they’re getting ready to stick a needle in his arm.

“Jesus!” Pearson shouted, between bouts of hilarity. “Jesus, they fucking did it.” His fist pounded the padded arm of his chair for a few minutes. Then he read the rest of the message and said, softly, “Damn.”

Hmmm . . . announcements? They deserve to know. But . . .

“Radar? Anybody significant very close?”

“No skipper. I can’t vouch for a small boat, of course; this equipment’s just not that good. But nothing as big as a patrol boat, no.”

“Hmmm . . . we’re too far away for there to be any little warning craft from the target. We’re also too far away, for the next hour or so, for them to make any connection between us and the island. So, yeah. Okay.” Pearson’s finger hit the intercom button.

“Now hear this,” he announced, in his best captain’s voice. “All hands, now hear this. This is the captain speaking. Hold your cheering to a minimum. But the war in Guyana is over. Regiment won. Hugo Chavez is dead. And the Venezuelans have sued for peace. There are many,
many
prisoners. Your families are safe.”

Orders or not, the ship, all decks, except for the humanitarians’ cells and the Marehan, who mostly didn’t understand English, just
erupted
in cheers. The aid workers, many of them, sat silent and stunned. Hugo Chavez had been something of a hero in certain circles.

“And now for the bad news. You grunts from Charlie Company . . . your battalion made history. But casualties are heavy. Likewise, you guys from the spec ops company; your battalion took out Chavez to force the peace. But casualties were also heavy. Aviation; your squadron didn’t lose many people, but it’s interesting that a majority of the regiment’s serviceable, uninterned aircraft are currently sitting on the deck of the
Bland.
Navy got off lightly, but we also have about thirty-three percent of the landing craft the regiment now owns, also sitting on deck.

“A last thing for the people who knew him; Colonel Riley of First Battalion was killed in action.

“Regiment sends to us, ‘Good luck and God speed.’ That is all.”