FLASHBACK
Western Burma Jungle
21 October, 1985, 1045 hours
Vulture Two led Karl through the jungle. From the ancient monastery, they made their way up a steep hill. The tropical rainforest was a dense tangle of dark green brush and gnarled tree roots. They had to duck under thick rope-like vines and heavily-laden branches with leaves as broad as Karl’s chest. The considerable watering of the months-long rain season, which ended only a few weeks earlier, had fed the vegetation, which subsequently grew so thick that visibility was ten feet or less.
Karl had a hard time keeping up with Vulture Two. The sniper’s camouflage allowed him to blend in with the surrounding plant life almost completely. Karl could not make out the edges of the commando’s body against the backdrop of the thick forest. He wasn’t so much following the man as he was following the motion in front of him. He did not want to get lost in this massive woodland.
Salty sweat dripped into his eyes. It stung and blurred his vision. He continued at the fast pace Vulture Two had set, panting from the exertion of the uphill run. The rifle and ammunition added nearly twenty-five pounds to his body. His knees and arms felt the full effect of the extra weight. They ached from the effort of keeping up.
As a Marine, Karl was more physically fit than probably ninety percent of the men his age back home. This special operations warrior he was following, though, was more fit than the ten percent that Karl was in. Even as they pushed on up this steep incline at a near jogging pace, Vulture Two’s breathing pattern stayed smooth and rhythmic. He didn’t sweat profusely in spite of the heavy ghillie suit that wrapped his body. To Karl, he seemed almost inhuman.
Karl nearly tripped over a thick root that rose unexpectedly from the jungle floor. He glanced down as he fought to regain his balance. When he looked back up, he saw the sniper clamber over a ridge a few meters in front of him. The ledge was just above his head. Following, Karl slung his rifle over his shoulder, grabbed hold of a thick root that jutted from the ground, and pulled himself up. As he lifted his head over the top of the rise, he looked ahead to mark Vulture Two’s direction. Glancing back and forth into the brush in front of him, he saw no movement. There was no sign of Vulture Two. The other man wasn’t there. He had vanished.
Karl panicked as he pulled himself over. The tangle of roots, vines, and branches pushed back at him as if trying to resist his advance. The sweat that had been dripping in his eyes suddenly felt cold, and his stomach knotted with fear. He paused in a crouch at the top and looked around. There was no sign of Vulture Two. Not a trace. Not even a footprint, a snapped twig, or broken leaf, no trail of any kind that Karl could see. He stood frozen in place. Fear of being lost in this massive jungle environment welled up inside of him. Then he heard a whispered voice.
“Eagle. Where are you?”
“I’m at the ridge you went over, but I can’t see you,” he quietly replied.
“Eagle. Do you copy?”
“Yes I hear you...” Karl realized that Vulture Two couldn’t hear him. He had forgotten to key the mike on his neck. He reached up to the box strapped around his throat and squeezed it between his finger and thumb. He felt an inaudible click as the button on the side depressed and activated the transmitter.
“Vulture Two, I copy. I am at the ridge you went over. Where are you?”
“Stay there, hide yourself and wait. I’ll be right back.”
“Copy that.”
The pilot crouched low into the tangle of brush and leaves around him and waited. Small animals scurried through the trees, their feet clicking and scraping against the bark above his head. Birds screeched in the distance. He tried to relax his racing heart and fast breathing by concentrating on listening intently to the forest around him, trying to use his hearing to locate Vulture Two. There was a gentle rustle on the ground behind him and a voice hissed softly in his headset.
“Don’t move,” whispered Vulture Two. “I’m right behind you. Bogies to the left, eight meters. Just sit perfectly still and quiet.”
Karl froze. Without moving his head, he rolled his eyes to the left. Leaves and vines were all he could see. A barely discernible movement caught his gaze. A light pressure against his left shin focused his attention and caused him to turn his eyes down towards his legs. His gut rippled and this throat tightened as his brain processed what he was looking at. A massive spider had crawled up from the undergrowth and crept onto his trouser leg. It was huge, a wicked-looking creature. Its leg span almost as wide as his hand, it was the biggest spider he had ever seen. His eyes stretched wide open as the hideous arachnid slowly crawled up his thigh and began a tortuous ascent towards his abdomen.
Karl hated spiders.
In the silence of his terror, he heard something larger approaching in the brush of the jungle. Barely audible voices whispered nearby. He couldn’t make out words, but the guttural sound of the language was vaguely familiar. Russian. They were trapped by the Spetsnaz troops who had killed Vulture Three.
The spider came to rest on Karl’s chest. It stared up at him as if planning where it would start its feast. He recalled from training that most large spiders like this were not poisonous. All but a few species were perfectly safe for humans, and, of course, those members of the few species that were poisonous were very poisonous. He had learned how to identify them when he went through Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, SERE, Training. But no matter how hard he tried to conjure the image of the textbook graphics, that entire section of the course was blank in his memory. He stared down at the spider and hoped it was a friendly one who was just enjoying his body heat.
The voices stopped. The sound of cloth brushing up against vegetation floated on the still air, drifting with sinister intent around him as if using echolocation to root him out. He heard a muffled whisper again, less than three meters away.
A hot puff brushed against his lower back. Karl felt something solid move past him so fast that he had no time to register what it was. The spider twitched in its perch on his chest. A second later, another heated puff blasted his back and there was a soft grunt to his left.
“All clear Eagle. Let’s move.”
Karl remained motionless. The massive spider still sat on his chest near the bare flesh of his neck. The spider’s body was at least ten centimeters long and four or five wide. Its long, thick legs spread to a total size that was larger than one of his hands with the fingers stretched out. The details of its face were sharp and clear as it stared up, hungrily gazing at him with huge eyes. Powerful mandibles slid open and closed rhythmically as if it were showing him how it intended to chew his flesh up. Karl was frozen to the spot, unable to move, unable to take his eyes off the terrifying beast. A hand suddenly flashed across his face and his body, knocking the spider into the bushes. The unexpected motion startled him and Karl let out a yelp.
“Don’t worry, it wasn’t poisonous, at least not to humans. Although people have been known to die of a fright-induced heart attack from looking at those hideous little beasties, it couldn’t have killed you on its own.”
“All clear? That’s good to know,” said the exasperated pilot as Vulture Two helped him to his feet. “Who were those guys? Spetsnaz?”
“I think so. They were Russian. That much I know. And they were trained snipers as well. They knew we were here and were stalking your position. Luckily, I sensed them as soon as I came over the rise and got in position just before you got over it. They didn’t shoot you right away because they thought someone else was coming behind you. We need to get moving to the rendezvous point right away so we can get that package back and get you home.”
They moved out again, taking the hill at a faster pace. Karl had less difficulty keeping up with Vulture Two this time. The fear of being shot by a Soviet commando or of being eaten by giant spiders seemed to aid in keeping his energy level up and his mind focused.
Ten minutes later, the ground leveled out. The mountain opened to a level place that seemed to be the top. The jungle was still thick and the high tree cover blocked the view of the surrounding valley.
Vulture Two clicked on his throat mike and whispered, “Cobra Prime, this is Vulture Two, sitrep.”
The reply come in a series of clicks, like Morse code. Two clicks, space, six clicks, space, three clicks, space, one click.
“What does that mean?” Karl asked.
“The first two clicks indicate he has the enemy in sight and cannot speak at the moment. The second set of clicks, six in this case, indicate how many enemy soldiers they can see. The three clicks say they will contact us in three minutes. The last single click is the sign off.”
“So, what do we do until then? For the next three minutes, that is.”
“We sit tight. I don’t know exactly where they are just yet, so we can’t run out into the jungle expecting to find them. We will sit here until they give us the next report. If we don’t hear from them in five minutes, we are on our own.”
“So then, is this the ‘Red Fortress’ you talked about?” Karl asked. He gestured towards the trees around them. They completely obscured everything more than five meters away from their view. “Because this certainly doesn’t look like much of a fortress to me.”
“No. This isn’t Red Fortress, at least not in the physical sense you probably expected. Red Fortress is not a place at all, actually. It is a sequence of events. There are three navigable trails that lead from the monastery where your plane is parked. All of them are fairly quickly accessible from this spot. Red Fortress is a sequence we planned for this type of scenario; in other words it is our ‘Plan B,’” Vulture Two explained. “In the event we get beaten or lose the package down there, survivors of Team Cobra are to track the bad guys and radio back which trail they are taking, then Team Vulture will advance to a preset location above the specific trail to snipe them and allow Team Cobra to recover the package. Then, we return the package to you and run it back to your jet, which is hopefully still in one piece and operational. Otherwise, if we lose it totally, and you live to get back to your plane, you can go home empty-handed and tell them we did our best but died trying.”
Karl contemplated the scenario in which he found himself. He had never imagined in his role as a pilot being stuck on the ground and forced into infantry work, let alone special operations infantry. The only infantry combat training he had been through was during Officers Basic School at Quantico, and that was only a few weeks of fieldwork more than two years ago. While he stayed expert-qualified with several standard Marine weapons, he was by no means trained as a Scout Sniper like Vulture Two was. In some regards, it was not totally unlike being a fighter pilot. In the air, enemies could come at you from any angle, even firing on you from a hundred miles away. But in a fighter jet, you had radar to detect those enemies before they fired, and to warn you when they had pulled the trigger. You also had missile defense systems to deflect or destroy their shots. And, if all else failed, there was an ejection seat, kind of a get out of jail free card. There were no such luxuries here on the ground.
“But there are only three of you left, and one of me, a fighter pilot, not a sniper or a commando. How are we going to get that thing back from them? It seemed like those Mujahideen had a whole army down there. Not to mention the Russians lurking around the jungle.”
“It isn’t as bad as you might think. We took out more than twenty of the Mujahideen at the monastery and areas nearby. Our count of them before that contact was about thirty-two. So they probably have ten or less left. We can easily take them if we plan right. As far as the Russians, that may be a different story. So far, I counted at least two and maybe more of theirs down, but they were mainly staying out of the fight so far and I don’t know how many of them there are. They’re probably about the same strength as our two teams, maybe more, but they are professionals, so if they get into it, things could get really hairy.”
His radio headset clicked four times, then a voice came on in a barely audible whisper, “Vulture Two, this is Cobra Prime. We have six Mujahideen moving slowly down Charlie Trail. They are about one click to your northwest and diddy-bopping quite confidently. They must think they got us all, no noise discipline at all. Team Cobra is on the east side of the trail, so don’t hit us.”
“Cobra Prime, this is Vulture Two. Eagle One and I are en route now to the Charlie roost.”
“Vulture Two, be advised. We’ve had sign of at least two Russians lurking in the woods opposite us. Spetsnaz is on the trail of these guys too. Watch your back and ours before and after.”
“Copy that, Cobra Prime, Russians in the area. We will watch our back and yours.”
“They’ve seen sign of two professionals?” Karl asked.
“They have seen tracks or scuff marks that indicate there are two other snipers in the area who are also tracking the Mujahideen. They’re probably teammates of the ones who were tracking us at that ridge. Follow me and keep your eyes open; they could be anywhere.”
At that, he turned and headed off down the slope to the northwest, silently slinking through the jungle, the foliage still clinging to his back as if he were part of the forest, a lethal jungle plant.