Hostage Zero

Perhaps Boxers was right. Maybe it had been a huge mistake to invite Harvey along on this mission.

They caught a break at the gasoline shed. This structure had a front door and a back door, and Boxers was able to get in and out quickly while Jonathan and Harvey covered him without incident. While they waited, Jonathan used a ten-power monocular to examine the hut where they believed Evan Guinn to be imprisoned. He took in the blocked windows, and the single door that appeared to be secured with a sliding bolt and a garden-variety padlock that should be easy fodder for Boxers’ bolt cutters.

Far more troubling than the lock were the two guards who flanked the door holding their rifles at a loose port arms that telegraphed readiness to engage the enemy that they knew was on the way.

“I hope those guards take the bait when we start blowing things up,” he whispered to Harvey.

The other man made an odd grunting sound.

Jonathan pivoted his body to face him. “You okay?”

Harvey seemed to have aged a couple of years. “It’s just been a while.”

Jonathan nodded, showing none of the concern he felt for what he saw. “Just do your job,” he said. “You’re more about fixing people than breaking things, and that’s fine. Any luck at all, you won’t have to do anything but a lot of running.”

The door to the shed reopened, and Boxers emerged with a big grin. “I used five GPCs,” he reported. Jonathan recognized the acronym as general-purpose charges, Unit-speak for half-pound blobs of C4 explosives with a tail of detonating cord. “There’s three on the drums of gas and two on the building itself to make sure we get the most fire. I armed them all with initiators, but then I also daisy-chained the charges on the drums. We should get one hell of a show.” Daisy-chaining meant running a hefty length of det cord between the GPCs to form a train. The det cord would transmit the explosion from one charge to the other at a speed exceeding five thousand feet per second, with the result being a pressure wave that would significantly exceed the overpressure that the charges could produce individually.

“The bigger the fireworks, the better our chances,” Jonathan said. He smiled at his team. “Everybody ready?” He phrased the question for both of them, but the target was Harvey.

The medic nodded.

“Remember the girl they raped,” Boxers said. “The people they killed. Nothing we do can beat that.”

Jonathan gawped at his friend. That was as close as he’d ever heard the Big Guy get to being sensitive. And he seemed to mean it. How about that?

Jonathan led the way back into the cover of the shadows. Staying inside the dark perimeter, they circled clockwise around the compound, over the northern end on their way to Evan’s hut. Animated voices rolled out of the hut at the very northern edge of the perimeter-Building Delta. From what Jonathan picked up, it was the idle chatter of men off duty-a combination of good-natured insults and sexual innuendos.

Boxers placed a hand on his shoulder to get his attention, then poked a thumb at the barracks and mimed an explosion with his hands. Jonathan shook his head and gave him a thumbs-down. As tempting as it was to place a charge on the barracks building just for the hell of it, there was a lot of ground to cover between here and the exfil point, and it made no sense to squander resources.

As always happened with modern planning tools like satellite imagery and computer mapping, Jonathan felt as if he’d already been here. The layout of the compound was exactly as he’d anticipated. Distances were a bit deceiving-in this case, the place was bigger than he’d expected it to be-but once you got accustomed to the scale, the relative position of the buildings and the nature of the terrain came to feel very familiar.

Finally, they’d worked their way around to Evan’s hut, the one they’d designated as Building Golf (letter G in the military alphabet). From the black side like this, the compound was invisible to them, and they were blind to the positioning of the soldiers. Jonathan placed a gloved hand on the wooden siding of the hut and leaned on it. Pretty stout construction, overall.

Jonathan beckoned Harvey close enough so that his words were more breath than whisper. “Remember, as soon as we cut the power, snap your NVGs in place and don’t look at the fire.”

When he looked at Boxers, the Big Guy already had his cell phone open and ready to send the signal to his detonators. Jonathan slipped his own out of its narrow pocket on his thigh, thumbed the three-digit code, and hovered his thumb over the send button.

“On three,” Jonathan said, and then he bounced his arm with the phone as if they were playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. “One, two…”

CHAPTER FORTY