No one spoke as Cody and his men left Bakous’s vehicle, not slamming the doors after them but relatching them as quietly as possible.
The determined coursing of the river and the icy, night mountain wind sighing through the trees were all that could be heard.
Cody motioned silently which direction he wanted each of his men to take, and each nodded and tell back from the four-wheel-drive, taking up points several yards away, each man having what amounted to one corner of a squared perimeter around the vehicle while Milos went to work unpacking the raft and a bicycle pump t’nat he used to pump air into the raft with alacrity.
From the river’s edge the ground eased up in lazy inclines in separate directions.
Hawkins crouched behind a natural formation of boulders. He found himself thinking for a brief moment of long ago when he and his kid brother used to go exploring after dark in the panhandle backcountry of their family’s ranch. Hawkeye’s brother had died in Vietnam.
He heard what he thought was the snap of a twig from somewhat higher ground, perhaps fifty feet away, to his left. He could not be sure for a second, what with the river sounds behind and below. He started to stage-whisper a warning to the others when he caught a momentary shift of the shadows from the direction in which he thought he’d heard the sound, and just above a ridge there he made outthe forms of men hurrying along that ridge; men who must have thought they were staying down enough to avoid detection, creeping through the night fast enough to leave no doubt in Hawkeye’s mind that they were moving into place for only one reason. The hell with whispering.
“Ambush!”
He opened fire with his Uzi in the direction where skulking figures had already disappeared from sight. The Uzi bucked in his grip, the flashes of the long burst lighting up the night like a surreal strobe light, the stuttering machine gun ejecting dozens of hot shell casings, zapping the night with bullets. It did occur to Hawkins that those could be just curious locals spying on them from up there, but at this hour in the A.M. he did not think so. He was not about to take the chance, and a beat later he knew he was right when the night above and around them opened up to a chorus of weapons fire, mostly single-shot, some automatic, lighting up the night, pouring down on the clearing, the air around the four-wheel-drive vehicle snapping and crackling with the incoming fire.
Hawkeye scrunched down behind the clump of boulders. Ricochets whined like lost souls in the darkness. He leaned around the rocks and snapped off another burst at where he had sighted two winking flashes of enemy fire and was rewarded with death gasps and the frantic rustle of shrubbery from up there as two bodies sprawled backward into hell.
Murphy, like Caine and Cody, responded instantly to Hawkeye’s shouted warning.
Murphy had no cover around him, so he fell forward, hugging the ground, when the enemy fire opened up. He saw Cody grab ground behind an oak tree. Caine caught cover behind the four-wheel-drive.
The incoming fire raged.
Milos Bakous had just finished pumping up the raft. He glanced up in surprise as the gunfire opened up on them, and he was hit three times from different directions, the impact of the projectiles wheeling him around like a whirling dervish, slamming him back into the side of the vehicle. He slid down into a sitting position and toppled over onto his side, dead.
Murphy rolled over onto his back and hammered off half a dozen rounds at where he had pinpointed some of the gun flashes.
Someone over there screamed shrilly, once, as if castrated. The scream clipped itself off, and Rule knew that the enemy’s ranks had been reduced by at least one.
He rolled back onto his belly and threw a glance at Cody.
The ambush fire continued, projectiles stinging the icy night, spanging noisily off rocks. The windshield of the four-wheel-drive disintegrated.
They don’t know what the hell they’re shooting at. Murphy realized with some relief. They can’t see in the dark any better than we can. Which isn’t to say that a couple of lucky rounds wouldn’t make every one of us as dead as Milosl
Cody motioned, signaling Murphy to move out away from the river, and as soon as he saw Murphy read his signal, Cody darted, keeping close to the ground, angling at a run toward the river’s edge.
Hawkeye maintained his position behind the boulders that afforded the Texan cover from the incoming fire. Hawkins blazed away with a steady, nonstop barrage of automatic fire in both directions, pausing only long enough to feed fresh magazines into his busy Uzi.
Caine scurried beneath the four-wheel-drive. He leaned out from beneath the front, pegging off rounds when he wasn’t ducking ricochets from the ground near the truck.
Murphy belly-crawled then, behind some shrubs, got to his feet, and from there started climbing the incline, dodging his hefty bulk from rock to rock. A projectile sang so close to his left ear that he felt its bite and lifted a hand to see if he’d been hit. No, but close. Then he was up on the higher ground and knew that he had made it from the clearing.
He knew what Cody had in mind: outflank the enemy while Caine and Hawkins kept them occupied with answering fire.
The rifle fire from the higher ground tapered off when someone shouted something in Greek. Rufe figured that the ambushers would be momentarily taking stock of their losses, possibly planning out a new strategy. He somehow did not think they were about to give up and go away.
He negotiated his way up to a higher point of ground, a promontory of rock overlooking the scene below: the four-wheel-drive; the slouched corpse of Milos; and, closer, several yards beneath Rufe, the shape of three men holding rifles near the corpse of the guy he’d already taken out.
He could take the three of them out with a single burst from where he stood right now, but he held his fire.
Cody would be working his way along the river to behind the ambushers on the opposite side of the clearing, if he’d read Cody’s hand signals right, and he knew he had.
He decided to wait for an indication that Cody was going into action, but he had a very strong hunch that these ambushers, were not going to sit around holding their fire for too damn much longer.
Come on, Cody, he thought. Let’s hit ’em!
Cody moved fast, one step at a time along the narrow, uneven ledge of rocks along the racing river, the constant lapping of white foam against the ledge having iced over to make it very treacherous.
He hurried, beneath and concealed from the sight of the higher ground position of the gunmen on this side, his left arm supporting him. His boots again slipped upon the ledge. He almost pitched into the river but maintained his balance. Then he gained an indentation in the wall of rock that formed the river’s edge. He reached up to grab some overhanging, exposed tree roots. He pulled himself up. hand over hand, walking as he pulled, and he reached the top of the shelf of rock behind and above where he had estimated the ambushers’ position to be above this side of the clearing.
The ceaseless thunder of the river made it impossible to tell if there was movement over the next fold of earth where he thought he would find them, if they had not moved.
It had taken him longer to outflank this bunch than it would have taken Rufe, on the other side, who had a more easy climb of it from where he had been when the ambush had broken out, but it appeared that Rufe was waiting on him for the go-ahead.
He realized again how much he had missed working with these men of his team during the years between Nam and when Lund had reorganized this unit in its present status.
He almost reached the crease of land when he sensed more than heard the faintest stirring and shirting to his left. He halted there in place, lowering himself to the ground. He could make out the silhouette of a man with a rifle, his back to Cody; an ambusher who had chosen a slightly higher vantage point than his buddies, who were still out of Cody’s line of vision.
They were calling to each other in Greek across the clearing.
Cody trusted that Hawkins and Caine would hold their positions and their tongues and not yield to the temptation of firing at the sounds of the calling voices.
The ambushers seemed secure in the knowledge that they had Cody and his men hemmed in and pinned down. They held their positions.
Cody stayed down, easing toward the fold in the terrain above and behind the bandits, almost in place when the man he saw sensed his presence and started to turn.
Cody’s fist blurred to unsheath one of his stilettos. He flung it, barely taking time to aim. The slender shiv buried itself in the man’s throat, the handle protruding from his Adam’s apple.
The man tilted soundlessly to his side and did not move.
Zharka’s first reaction, when he heard Apaka call from the other side, was one of relief. Apaka was his sister’s boy. Zharka had raised Apaka from the age of seven.
Two of his men were sprawled in twisted positions upon the ground, the fronts of their jackets pulped away into a raw, meaty mess.
He had not expected the men down by that four-wheel-drive to be fighters, but that is what they were, he realized. Professionals.
Drug smugglers.
“What should we do now?” Apaka had called from across the clearing.
The frigid night wind crackled the branches of the trees overhead, carrying the sounds of gunfire.
“How many have you lost?” Zharka called back. He did not like having to expose his exact position with the sound of his voice. He hunched himself as flat as he could against the formation of boulders behind which he and his men squatted.
“One casualty” came Apaka’s reply. The youth sounded shaky, scared. “What should we do?”
Zharka felt a tremor run up and down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. He did not like the silence around them.
“Kill them!” he screamed, hoping he did not sound frightened, the way he suddenly felt. “Kill them before they kill us!” He opened fire with his Kalashnikov rifle, and the others followed his lead.
The night again prattled to the barrage of rifle fire down on the clearing.
The hammering of weapons filled his ears, and he did not realize that they had been outflanked until the man next to him pitched forward, not backward, under the impact of projectiles that blew his guts out from his chest and sent him toppling.
Zharka whirled around to see the imposing figure of a man standing above him on the higher rocks.
This one looks the size of an oak tree! Zharka thought frantically.
He wheeled his rifle around. He started to shout to the man next to him. Then he saw the winking flash of the big man’s automatic weapon stab in his direction.
A fireball blossomed inside Zharka’s brain, and everything ended for him.
When Caine heard automatic weapons opening up from the darkness far above from where he lay beneath the four-wheel-drive, he knew Cody and Murphy had gone to work. He rolled out from his cover to join in the fun. He heard Hawkeye cut loose with his Uzi from his position.
Caine propelled himself from beneath the vehicle, glad to get away from the only cover he could find. He had been half waiting the whole time he was beneath it for a bullet to explode the gas tank. He came out of the roll in time to see a figure storm away from where Hawkins and Murphy had some of them in a crossfire, but they had missed this one who looked to be no more than a kid to Caine from this distance in the poor light, moving with the grace of a deer to get away from there. But the rifle he toted was clear enough.
Caine triggered off a burst that cut the kid’s legs out from under him and turned his abdomen into scrambled guts, pitching the boy into a face-forward skid.
When the chatter of the Uzi faded off on the wind, Caine realized that the others had stopped firing also. He held his position there in the clearing near Milos Bakous’s sprawled corpse where the Greek’s spilled blood spread across the rocky earth like fattening spiders in the moonlight.
Hawkeye was the first to speak. As usual, Caine thought.
“Looks like we cleaned “em out, Sarge.”
Cody appeared, barely discernible at first on a shrub-strewn incline above and behind where enemy fire had come from.
Cody leaned over and pulled something, probably a stiletto, from the body of ore of the dead men, wiped it of blood on the dead man’s jacket, and sheathed it, starting down as Rufe worked his way down from the other direction.
Hawkeye left his position, and the team formed around what was left of Milos and his vehicle.
“There lies a good man,” Hawkeye said soberly. “Goddamn. Goddamn.’’’
Cody said, “I made a quick check through the personal effects those guys were carrying. They were what Milos thought, it looked like. Bandits.”
Murphy growled, “Ditto on the bunch I took out, Sarge.”
Caine lifted his eyes from Bakous’s corpse to look into the night in the direction of the far side of the river, from here an impenetrable wall of black, as if the river coursed by on the edge of the world.
“If those Bulgars and our NFO connection are waiting for us the way Milos said they would be, they’ve heard every bit of this.”
Hawkeye picked up that thought. “And if anyone else is over there, like one of those patrols Milos told us about, they’ll have heard it too. And they’ll be right curious.”
“The Greek was on the money about everything he said,” Murphy added. “Reckon that means we oughta figure he was right about those border guards too.”
“What about Milos?” Hawkeye asked Cody.
“I hate to hell to leave him, but we have no choice,” Cody grunted. “With all this noise these bodies will be found in the morning.”
“It will look as if Milos was ambushed by the bandits.” Caine surveyed one of the ridges to the other from which the ambush had been sprung. “After they killed him they killed each other over the spoils. Except for the ones who got away.”
“I hate pinning a drug rap on a guy who helped us out,” Hawkeye said, “even if he is dead.”
“We don’t have a choice, Hawkeye,” said Cody. “Milos knew he was signing on for a dirty deal when he signed with the company. Like we all did. Our time hasn’t come yet, that’s all. And our time’s running out if we don’t get a move-on.”
They went to the inflatable raft, shouldering their weapons, slinging backpacks of gear over their shoulders. Each man reached down to grab one of the raft’s rope handles. They moved to the riverbank, lowered the raft to the water, and climbed in.
Caine and Murphy brought their Uzis around, watching behind them. Cody and Hawkins picked up two of the short-handled oars Milos had placed inside the raft, using them to push off from the stony shoreline and into the river.
The furious current sucked the raft away from land, and when they safely cleared, Caine and Murphy lowered their Uzis to pick up oars and begin rowing, fighting the pounding current that battered the raft around like a cork riding a violent ocean, the Bistritza a frigid, pumping artery that tried to sweep them downriver.
For a moment or two Cody thought it would, but they put their shoulders and every ounce of collective strength into the rowing, and while it was impossible not to be swept along somewhat, he estimated that they swirled no more than a hundred yards off a straight-across course.
He felt the spraying mist of the river frost across his eyebrows, the fierce roar thundering in his ears.
Cody had always known, always accepted, that his death would be a violent one in some far-off place; that his passing would go unmarked, unknown, unremembered. It was the nature of the beast that was his life’s work on these front lines where things that mattered were fought for, where the fires of battle and good and evil collided to decide the fate of a world that preferred not to know about dirty deaths in far-off places.
They were now halfway across the river. The current whammed and blammed the bobbing raft to and fro in a raging torrent that could suck a man under and not bring him up again.
Cody had a gut knowledge that they would make it through the veil of opaque black to reach the other shore.
After that would be anyone’s guess.
His gut ached with impotent anger when he thought of how wrong this mission had gone from the beginning.
The awful double murder of Daniel Parker and his daughter, Laura.
Kamal escapes. Still on the loose.
And a good man named Milos Bakous would charm no more ladies with his expansive Zorba-like good nature, and the CIA had lost itself a valuable man in a volatile part of the world.
And ahead: a clandestine penetration into Bulgaria, behind enemy lines.
A blood hunt for a terrorist butcher and the merchants of evil who directed him.
Cody and his team struggled to row the raft deeper into the hostile night—not knowing what waited for them on the nearing shore.