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  “Like the old days, huh, Dillon?” Schaefer replied, not sorry for the recognition in front of his superior officer. Anything to give him more freedom of movement. “Like the man says, no news is good news.”

  “Yeah. We also heard you passed on that little job in Libya.” Dillon added.

  Schaefer studied the man who’d left his Washington office to return to the jungle, his eyes narrowing again. “Wasn’t my style,” he explained curtly as if giving Dillon a brief lesson in protocol, “We’re a rescue unit.” He smiled. “Like the fuckin’ Red Cross. Besides, you got all the assassins you need at Langley, don’t you?”

  “So they say.”

  Schaefer turned to the general, who was following them back and forth like a racquetball game, not sure exactly how to break in.

  “This must be good,” Schaefer said, “Big shot from the CIA splits from his paneled walls to come back to the bush. Has to leave his nice little pork chop secretary, prob’ly dickin’ her on the side. So what’s so important?”

  “Those cabinet members are crucial to our scope of operations in this part of the world,” Dillon explained carefully.

  “How much you payin’ em?” asked Schaefer. “Couple hundred grand a year? They make more than the fuckin’ President, don’t they?”

  Dillon ignored the taunt. He went on gravely. “The point is, they’re about to get squeezed. We can’t let that happen. I need someone who can get in and get out, quick and quiet—no screwups,” he emphasized. “I need the best. So I pulled a few strings at State and here we are.” There was a certain edge of a boast in his voice, or was it perhaps a dare?

  “Go on,” Schaefer nodded.

  Dillon walked to the wall map. “The setup is simple, Dutch,” he said. “One-day job. We pick up their trail at the chopper, run ’em down, grab the hostages, and bounce back over the border before anyone knows we were there. You’ve done it a hundred times. Nothing out of the ordinary,” he stressed. “You and your men can have a nice three-day weekend after. Tie one on in Mexico City. On us,” he added with a thin smile.

  Schaefer thought a minute, studying the strangely featureless map, the wide dense green shot through with a dozen rivers. “And nothing we can’t handle alone,” he said pointedly, still bristling at the thought of combining his unit with anybody.

  Phillips, who’d been standing to the side observing silently, took the opportunity to intercede. “I’m afraid those are your orders, Major,” he said evenly to Schaefer. His air of formality was as thick as a huddle of diplomats. “Once you reach your objective, Colonel Dillon will evaluate the situation and take charge.”

  Schaefer, looking coolly from one to the other, clearly didn’t like the arrangement, not even a little bit.

  Dillon endeavored once more to smooth the tension. “Not to worry, Dutch,” he said calmly. “Hey, I haven’t lost my edge. They’ve got a head start on us in some real tough country, but otherwise, pardner, it’s a piece of cake.”

  Phillips stepped in again, abrupt as a referee, impatient to move the operation along. “Gentlemen, we’re losing time,” he said, speaking from his rank.

  “That’s okay, sir,” Schaefer replied. “I been working overtime as long as I can remember.”

  Phillips went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You’d better get your men ready now.” Then, pausing a moment as if for effect, he added, “Good luck, Major.”

  Schaefer grinned. “Luck’s got nothin’ to do with it, General. I gave up luck in high school. I prefer a little deadly force myself.”

  He saluted and turned and strode out of the hut, Dillon following close at his heels. The general did not look quite so relieved.

  T W O

  “Redbird Two Two. Bearing south, three-five-zero, one o’clock on the saddle ridge. Over.”

  The pilot of one of the assault choppers was shouting into the radio to his brother pilot about a mile and a half behind. They were sailing through a winding canyon, zigzagging up a stream to the site of the crippled craft. Half a moon lit up the barest contours of the jungle terrain, silvering the stream, but there wasn’t a single human light anywhere out here. The canyon ended at a sheer cliff with a stream spilling down, and the two choppers rose up and over like drunken birds, leveling off, now racing just above the treetops.

  Schaefer studied the rainforest whipping by below, noting how the tangled jungle would suddenly drop off into treacherous canyons and stream beds gorged with watershed, churning up rapids and undermining the massy roots of the rubber trees. Following a ridge he caught a glimpse of a partially exposed Mayan ruin, overgrown with the relentless jungle, its crumbling temple steps reaching for the sky as if to offer one last sacrifice. Altogether a raw and primal place—chaotic, untouched, unyielding—yet Schaefer seemed to take it all in impassively. He’d been through chaos before. There was something almost casual about him, as if he was shrugging his shoulders at the wildness unfurling beneath. The hooded look of his eyes seemed to say: So what else is new?

  “Roger, Redbird,” sputtered a voice through the radio. “Three-five-zero, on your move. Over.”

  The Redbird pilot confirmed the coordinates as the two craft raced the night, perfectly synchronized, as if they were guided by one central control.

  Ten feet away in the belly of the chopper squatted five men dressed in jungle camouflage, black grease streaked across their faces like Aztec warriors. Though nobody talked, nobody was resting. They were methodically checking their weapons, making last-minute adjustments to their gear. Each had been selected for his expertise in a specialized area of combat, and each man knew he was on his own for the doublecheck. You had to pick up your own slack. You got blown up by your own mistakes.

  The hull of the craft reverberated with the roar of the engines and the blades spinning above. A little air blew in from the cockpit, but it was close in here like a guerrilla prison, without an inch to maneuver in. The men sat knee to knee, tensed like a brace of caged tigers.

  The biggest of the five, Blain Cooper, looked like two hundred and forty pounds of human warhead. Tattooed up and down both arms, a mean five-inch scar across his thick forehead, Cooper was acting as weapons and ordinance specialist for the mission. He removed a thick plug of tobacco from his shirt pocket and gazed across the cabin at Mac Eliot, who was equally huge if a bit cleaner, his large head sitting squarely on his freight-car shoulders, looking as if he had no neck. He held his baby, an M-60 machine gun, cradled in his arms. Blain offered Mac a chew of tobacco, but the latter declined with a slow shake of his head.

  They were all set to replay a game they went through at least once a day. Blain loved to perform and needle the rest of them. Holding the plug between teeth stained snot-yellow with years of sucking the vile stuff, he reached across his chest and yanked free a ten-inch combat knife from his shoulder scabbard. Placing the razor sharp blade next to his lips, he sliced through the plug as if it were butter. Then he slurped it into the side of his mouth and chewed thoughtfully.

  Sitting beside Blain next to the doorway into the cockpit was Jorge Ramirez, a headstrong, agitated Chicano troublemaker from the Houston barrio. He was all absorbed just now in adding a final piece of camouflage tape to his pack harness. Ramirez was fanatic about details. When at last he’d gotten the tape exactly right, he looked up and smiled. Faking a throw he bulleted the tape to Rick Hawkins, the operations radioman and medic. Hawkins, a freckled and blue-eyed Irish kid from South Boston, was lost in a beat-up copy of Hustler, disconnected as a rush-hour commuter. But always alert, he snagged the tape as it flew by with an instinctive snap of the wrist, continuing to read for a moment before looking up.

  He grinned at Ramirez; they always made a point of testing each other’s reflexes before battle. Hawkins’s impish, eager face belied the rugged professional soldier who never thought twice about his own skin. He had saved the ass of every man in the circle at least once.

  Ramirez called him “Puddytat” for the nine lives that Hawkins had squeaked throu
gh, all the near misses and reckless escapes. Hawkins was the team’s lucky charm.

  Next to Hawkins sat Billy Sole, the Kit Carson scout. His shiny coal-black hair was two inches longer than regulation, which went to show what regulations Major Schaefer put his money on. Billy was half Sioux and half Italian, and his two natures maintained a hostile peace, like a dog and a cat tied up at the same stake. He was lean and incredibly fast, but he sat against the bulkhead now with total poise as he quietly replaced the firing mechanism of his M-203, repeatedly testing its action. The steady click of the hammer seemed to have a hypnotic effect on him, but you didn’t want to move too quick when Billy was around. Even when he was relaxed he was like a snake under a rock.

  Hawkins moved to stir Billy’s calm demeanor. “Hey. Billy, how many marines does it take to eat a squirrel?” Billy gave him a blank unblinking stare. Hawkins quickly added: “Two. One to eat it and one to watch for cars.” He guffawed heartily at his own joke.

  As the men prepped for the mission at hand—which they all knew could amount to anything from a quick pickup to a bloody battle—the helicopters cleared another high ridge and plunged into a steep descent, turning sharply into a deep-walled canyon. The cabin tilted suddenly, and the screaming turbines shifted into a lower key. The men in the circle pitched forward with the motion, but restraining harnesses kept them in place, even though they were nearly upside down as the chopper made the radical descent.

  When they were righted again Blain held out the plug of tobacco to Ramirez, who swatted at the offensive object as if it were alive.

  “Get that stinkin’ thing outa my face, Blain!”

  Grinning now from ear to ear Blain made the rounds, offering the plug to each man. All refused ritualistically. They’d been through this a hundred times. Nobody took any real offense. It was a reassuring dose of reality and a sign of how closely they knew one another. In the rituals lay their bonding and mutual respect, the kind of tightness that developed from spotting each other in the teeth of death. Their honor was all bound up in being united. They had no friends or brothers back home. To all intents and purposes there was no back home. They were only alive in action, and they needed one another the way they needed guns.

  “Bunch of slack-jawed faggots.” Blain feigned disgust as he spat between his legs. “This stuff’ll put hair on your hogleg,” he bragged, waving the sticky plug to make his point. “It’ll make you a goddam sexual ty-ran-toe-sore-ass just like me!” And he howled as loud as the engine while the others clapped and booed and whistled.

  The chopper made another sharp turn. Up in the cockpit the agenda was a little more focused. Schaefer and Dillon, headsets linked to the pilot’s, were poring over an infrared map with pencil lights.

  Dillon pointed to the northwest quadrant. “Rendezvous points and radio frequencies indicated and fixed,” he said. “AWACS contact on four-hour intervals. Signal hasn’t changed since the craft went down. We can’t figure why the guerrillas didn’t just smash the radio.”

  “Who’s backup on this?” Schaefer asked.

  Dillon shook his head. “Doesn’t exist on this one, old buddy,” Dillon replied. “Once we cross that border we’re on our own.”

  “I don’t mean backup here,” retorted Schaefer disdainfully, as if any added support would be a show of weakness. “I’m talkin’ backup there,” he said, reaching over to nudge Dillon’s briefcase. The briefcase seemed to represent all of Washington, from the Pentagon to the White House.

  “Negative,” Dillon replied. “Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody wants to know.”

  “This gets better by the minute,” Schaefer said slyly, eyes brightening perceptibly in the glinting light of his pencil flash. Nothing Dutch Schaefer liked better than everyone acting like he didn’t exist.

  The pilots of the two helicopters were communicating their point positions: “Roger Bird Double Two. Reconfirm insertion at Tango, Charlie, Delta one-zero, niner on the grid at zero-two-two, mark four by zero. Over.”

  The string of numbers coursed through the static like an alien tongue. The Redbird cockpit began to pulse with a green glow as the stabilizer gauge was activated to the landing mode.

  In front of the pilot was a radar sweep and an infrared display terminal on which the two helicopters appeared as heat sources, yellow on a gray ground. At about four o’clock on the terminal appeared a third lozenge of yellow, dimmer than the others and not moving. The downed chopper was east/southeast, somewhere in a five-mile quadrant. It was impossible to pin down any closer, since the terrain was so steep and thickly covered. The team would just have to be dropped so they could close in on it at ground level.

  The coordinates confirmed, the pilot announced a landing time of two minutes. Then he threw a switch on the panel just beside the steering column, and a blue light flashed on the chopper’s nose, another by the forward bulkhead. The pilot turned and handed Dillon a clipboard with the landing numbers penciled in, requesting approval. Dillon nodded, initialing the landing plan as fastidiously as if he were sitting at his desk at Langley.

  Blue light flared over the thick jungle, the black wall of night swallowing it as it combed the tangled trees. The support helicopter held almost motionless in a protective position above Redbird. It had been obvious for some time that they weren’t going to find a clearing to touch down in. The men were going to have to rappel down cables. The best the pilot could do was find a patch of undergrowth that would keep them free of the trees.

  As the blue light revealed a likely target ground beside a stream the two pilots began to maneuver into position. Dillon stood up and made his way past the forward bulkhead and entered the belly where the five men hunkered in a circle. He held up both thumbs to give them the signal to get prepared, but nobody moved right away. They didn’t need a full two minutes to evacuate a craft . The whole team could explode out of there in fifteen seconds flat. There seemed to be a point of pride in showing Dillon how they did things their way. Unstated of course, perhaps not even conscious, but these guys were always proving something. You didn’t drink a pint of whiskey if somebody else was packing away a fifth.

  In any case, Dillon was keenly aware of his outsider status. He stood in the doorway uneasily, aware that the men were watching him, mostly without expression. Absently Dillon pulled from his pocket a battered cigarette lighter. On it was the crest of the snarling panther, emblem of the famed commando unit he’d served in in Thailand with Schaefer. Casually he held it out to show it to Ramirez, who was closest to him.

  But the gesture didn’t work, perhaps because the Redbird team didn’t give two shits about the Army, past or present. Dillon’s attempt to share a personal moment came across as merely self-serving, and Ramirez and the others knew it. The Chicano bent closer over his pack harness, leaving the black man in the lurch. Dillon simply had to accept the fact that they saw him as a desk man and an opportunist who couldn’t hide his status in those starched fatigues.

  Mac, observing this interchange, looked over at his buddy Blain, his beady eyes narrowing as he nodded in Dillon’s direction. Blain continued to roll his jaw, masticating the tobacco. He paused, eyes on the floor, then hocked a thick vile stream of juice directly between Dillon’s legs and onto the floor of the cabin. A thin gelatinous skein of the stuff laced across the toe of one of Dillon’s combat boots.

  Dillon looked up, his face stone cold and menacing. “Man, that’s a real bad habit you got,” he said icily. He didn’t seem quite so unsure of himself now. If they were going to play hard to get, well, two could play that game too.

  Dillon turned back into the cockpit as Mac and Blain grinned at each other in triumph. They’d just won a small guerrilla skirmish, further confirming their opinion of Dillon as a spineless character. To these guys at least, Dillon couldn’t win for losing; he had Washington. D.C., written all over him. The five commandos were active-duty lifers. They even disdained R and R, unless it was a three-day drunk. To them Dillon was a pussy and a cop-out till he pro
ved otherwise.

  A moment later the pilot’s voice broke in over Schaefer’s headset. “LZ comin’ up thirty degrees,” he announced. “Stand by the rappel lines.”

  Schaefer, acknowledging the message with a hand signal, leaned back and ducked his head through the doorway, nodding to his men. They sprang into action, as if to acknowledge the presence of their real commanding officer. Ramirez and Blain gathered up the landing gear, four steel conical devices hooked to canvas bags filled with coils of rope. Hawkins stationed himself at the door and tossed them out, the lines hurling through the air, crashing through thick layers of underbrush and slamming into the jungle floor below.

  As the landing proceeded to active the blue light changed to green, signaling the go-ahead for disembarking. Mac shouted to Hawkins: “What’s it look like down there, Irish?”

  “Pile o’ dogshit!”

  “Hey, fabulous! Next stop, Beverly Hills!”

  They all stood up and pushed forward like they were coming out of a huddle, nudging one another as they moved toward the door, grunting with anticipation. They were not the kind of men who crossed themselves before they jumped.

  Mac went first, then Blain, scrambling onto the ropes with gloved hands. They disappeared together down into the darkness, Blain sending up a hoot like he was riding a bucking bronc.

  Next Billy, then Ramirez. Hawkins held back as Schaefer and Dillon pulled off their headsets and came back from the cockpit. Schaefer nodded to Hawkins to go ahead, and the Irishman pulled on his gloves, grabbed the cable, and swung out the door and down. There was the slightest pause as Dillon and Schaefer stepped to the doorway. Schaefer normally bailed out last, but here again the protocol intervened. Dillon knew Dutch Schaefer too well not to know how it galled him to yield to a higher rank, especially in the field. Schaefer was a great commando and a lousy soldier. But he betrayed no ruffled feelings as he drew on his gloves and reached for the cable.