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“I’d go up the path we came in on,” Cale advised. “But keep your hearing keyed. It’s the only way in and out of this place and Igor Belov is always around.”
“Understood. Should I take my M-4 rifle?” She saw Kilmer shove his pistol into his holster and stand up.
“I’ll take you out and show you,” he grunted. “Get a pair of gloves and then all you need is your pistol.”
Sierra didn’t know whether to be happy or sad Kilmer volunteered to come along. She saw Cale give Nate a grin. What was that about? No one was talking. “Yeah… okay,” she muttered, turning, and heading to her hut.Gloves and hat.She was already wearing her sidearm. Above them the sky was a druzy blue, the sun hot as she hurried from her hut to where Kilmer was standing, looking bored.
Falling into step with him, the path just wide enough for both of them but only barely, Sierra wanted to make sure their hands didn’t accidentally brush against one another’s. The path led up a slight incline. Mace seemed to check his stride for her. She could feel the tension around him, wondering what was going on inside that head of his. Even with the black baseball cap drawn low over his eyes, she felt him invisibly sensing the area. All operators did, more or less. She fell into step with him.
Once the meadow drew out of view behind them, he seemed to relax a little. It wasn’t anything obvious. There was jungle on either side of them and she saw it looked like fairly easy going between the spindly trees that grew everywhere through it. In some places, there were huge Flying Buttress trees, their roots looked like massive wings expanding out from the trunks of them.
“You ever been in jungle before?” Mace asked her.
“African. Does that count?” and she looked up and grinned at him. He scowled. Damn, didn’t this man have a sense of humor? He was all business all the time? Didn’t he ever let down?
“Yeah.” He waved his hand off to the right in front of her. “Peruvian jungle is different. It changes. There’re some spots where the woody vines are so thick, twisted and huge, that you can’t get through the area. You never want to be caught in a situation like that. It’s like a box canyon, strategy-wise.”
“No place to hide or run there? Confined to the trail only?” Sierra guessed. She thought she saw some of the hardness in his face ease a tiny bit. When he cut her a glance, she saw respect in his eyes.
“Right. Accurate assessment, Chastain. Here though, we can get through the jungle. Tomorrow, I’m going to sit down with you, and we’ll go over the trail maps we’ve made of our territory. I’ve been trying to get satellite infrared flyovers to take photos so we can continue to map the area, and as you can see, we have cloud-cover almost twenty-four hours a day. Infrared can pierce it, but the problem is they don’t have any extras they can sit on station and help us.”
Frowning, Sierra looked up. She could see the blue sky, but it was as if there was some semi-opaque gauze between it and them. “That sucks.”
“Tell me about it.”
She smiled a little, starting to relax because he wasn’t being so growly. “So, in those areas where the jungle is like a Chinese puzzle, it’s more dangerous for us? We don’t know if Belov is coming our way?”
“Right.”
“What about a Raven drone? They’re small and light. They could fly just above the triple canopy?” Again, she saw him give her an approving glance. Had Kilmer thought her an empty-headed doll with no military and tactical experience?Must have.She kept her bile to herself. She was going to have to work with this hard, rugged soldier until she brought down Belov through her crosshairs. Maybe he was testing her, probing, finding out what she did and did not know. Just because she was a civilian security contractor didn’t mean she didn’t interface regularly with the military. Maybe he wasn’t sent her personnel record to know about her? That was S.O.P., standard operating procedure. She knew her boss would make damn sure it had been sent to Kilmer. So? He hadn’t gotten it yet? Sierra thought it was the better part of valor NOT to bring this up to him right now. He was growly enough without being brought to task for not reading her file before she started this op.
“We have two Ravens,” he muttered, “but the problem is the triple canopy itself. The camera it carries can’t look down between the leaves to see what’s on a path a hundred feet below it. And,” Mace shook his head, “you’re going to find out pronto how the thunderstorms roll around this jungle. They pop up from mid-afternoon onward and all through the night. The winds, as you probably know, are variable, and a small drone like that can be pushed off course by the winds that accompany those storms, so we lose our acquired target.”
Rubbing her brow, she grimaced. “No eyes in the sky for us, then.”
“Ninety percent of the time, that’s right. It all comes down to us knowing the trails, knowing infil and exfil points. And when we get into those walled-off paths in the vine jungle, it gets dicey. For everyone. I don’t want the four of us meeting the ten men of Belov’s team in one of those alleyways. There’s no place to take cover and dodge bullets.”
“But it would be the same for him and his team.”
“Yes, but they have superior firepower. It’s ten against three.” He halted in a slight swale, throwing his hands on his hips, looking down at her. “The paths are only wide enough for one man. They were created over thousands of years by the wild pigs that made them. Pigs aren’t very wide, so the trails are narrow. And in some places, as you’ll find pretty soon, the walls of the jungle are hemming you in.”
“Crap,” she muttered. “That means if we met Belov in the vine jungle area, then it’s an old-fashion shoot-out and only one man, the guy at the front of the line, can fire his weapon at us.”
“Yeah, until we drop ’em and then the next Russian in line starts opening up on us. Whac-A-Mole. Plus, these trails twist and wind. There’re not any quarter mile straight lengths of path.” He angled his gaze at her. “Which means, for a sniper, it’s so damned hard to find a hide, sit in it, wait to acquire your HVT. Because, even if you did, you might have a hundred yards line of sight at the most, and that’s it.”
Her eyes widened as she considered the information. “That means if I take down the HVT, there’s nine other tangos who are a hundred yards away from me? And they’re going to open up with everything they have.” She saw concern and worry in his hard expression.
“Yeah. This isn’t going to be a picnic for you, Chastain. There’s only so many hide areas where you MIGHT have two to three hundred yards between you and him. Even then, egressing the hell out of there is going to be dicey at best.”
Her mouth compressed. “Makes a rooftop position in Mogidishu look easy.”
He grinned a little, one side of his mouth lifting. “Yeah, that’s the idea. No roof tops here.”
“What about hills? A cliff area? Something high so I could do a look-down-shoot down?”
“No cliffs around here, unless we’re up in the Highland area where you flew in.” He waved his arm around. “This is jungle. It’s got nobs or little hills here and there but nothing like what you’re wanting from a sniper standpoint.”
“Crap.”
