Hostage Zero

The PMN-2 anti-personnel mine first arrived in large numbers in Southeast Asia. Smaller and lighter than its predecessors, the weapon was extremely man-portable, and with an explosive load of one hundred grams of a TNT/RDX mixture, it carried a hell of a wallop, guaranteed to rip off the foot that tripped it, and presenting a high likelihood of doing substantially more damage than that. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had seen more than their fair share of these nasty buggers.

On the positive side, because they were so widely carried by so wide a spectrum of soldiers, the trigger mechanism was a forgiving one, thus explaining how so many untrained insurgents survived long enough to get them into the ground.

Jonathan said, “If you want to take a few steps back, I won’t think badly of you.”

“If you blow me up, I’ll beat your ass blue for all eternity,” Boxers said. “Just do what you’ve got to do, and let’s get on with the fun part.”

Smiling around the flashlight he’d returned to his mouth, Jonathan used the first two fingers of both hands to oh-so-gently excavate the loose dirt from around the mine. Fully exposed, it was about the size of his hand.

“I’m lifting it out now,” he said around the flashlight. “Last chance to walk away.”

“A daily ass-whuppin’ for all eternity, boss. Just think about that. Succeed or fail, I figure I win either way.”

Fair enough. Jonathan raised to his haunches and then to a squat, his feet straddling the hole he’d just dug. He reached between his feet, tickled his fingers under the explosive mechanism, and stood. On a different day, if stealth were not a priority, he might have just Frisbee’d the mine into the jungle and let it blow up, but today he didn’t have the luxury. He was reasonably sure that he remembered how to defuse a PMN-2, but reasonably wasn’t sure enough. He settled on carrying the weapon five feet into the jungle and gently setting it down.

He stood tall again, clapped the dirt from his hands, and reassembled his weapons load.

“I guess some spider monkey is in for the surprise of his life, huh?” Boxers joked.

Jonathan smiled and turned off his flashlight, then snapped his NVGs back over his eyes. He keyed his mike. “The booby trap is secure. Have our friends set any more?”

Venice’s voice said, “Negative. I’ll keep watching them and let you know if they stop again.”

Harvey rejoined them. “What was it?” he asked.

Jonathan caught him up on the removal of the mine and its current location.

“They mined a trail that the locals use to travel to and from the compound,” Harvey recapped, his voice heavy with disdain. “These guys are assholes of a whole new order.”

“I don’t know,” Boxers said. “When your business is using kid labor to produce a product that kills kids all over the world, I think you might have already set the asshole bar as high as it can go.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Jonathan saw the aura of the compound in the sky twenty minutes before they reached its outer perimeter. The factory glowed like daytime, thanks to slung arrays of incandescent lightbulbs that gave the place the look of a 1960s Route One used-car lot.

Any remaining doubt that the enemy had been alerted to this raid evaporated the instant Scorpion and his team got to see the compound up close. In addition to the lights, teams of soldiers wandered about in random pairs and trios, most with rifles slung, but enough with them at the ready that it was clear they’d been alerted to something.

But for all their nervousness, they’d forgotten the basic tenets of defense. By turning the center of the compound to day, they no doubt took solace that no one could sneak around the interior; but they’d rendered themselves blind to intruders’ approach from outside their perimeter. Even worse, the noise from the generator they used to create the light masked the intruders’ approach.

Jonathan and his team approached from the southwest corner of the compound, the one nearest the generator. Their location put them on the far side of the compound from the sleeping huts that lined the eastern perimeter. To their left, maybe forty feet away, sat the storage shed for the gasoline, while to their right, only twenty feet away, sat the enormous trailer-mounted electrical generator, which, to Jonathan’s surprise, was enclosed in a sticks-and-chicken-wire fence, the gate for which was on the eastern side. The enclosure contained all kinds of tools and equipment that apparently were of great enough value to warrant extra protection. To gain access through the gate would require Jonathan to expose his presence to the entire compound.

“Who the hell builds a fence around a generator?” Boxers whispered.