Without remorse - Tom Clancy [208]
'A lot safer that way, James,' Maxwell pointed out.
They stood behind an earthen berm, the official military term for a pile of dirt, two hundred yards from the camp. It made watching difficult, but two of the five had aviator's eyes, and they knew where to look.
'How long have they been moving in?'
'About an hour. Any time now,' Young breathed.
'I can't hear a thing,' Admiral Maxwell whispered.
It was hard enough to see the site. The buildings were visible only because of their straight lines, something which nature abhors for one reason or another. Further concentration revealed the dark rectangles of windows. The guard towers, erected only that day, were hard to spot as well.
'There's a few tricks we play,' Marty Young noted. 'Everybody gets vitamin-A supplements for night vision... Maybe a few percentage points of improvement in night vision. You play every card in the deck, right?' All they heard was the wind whispering through the treetops. There was a surreal element to being in the woods like this. Maxwell and Young were accustomed to the hum of an aircraft engine and the faint glow of instrument lights that their eyes scanned automatically between outward sweeps for hostile aircraft, and the gentle floating sensation of an aircraft moving through the night sky. Being rooted to the land gave the feeling of motion that didn't exist as they waited to see something they had never experienced.
'There!'
'Bad news if you saw him move,' Maxwell observed.
'Sir, sender green doesn't have a parking lot with white cars on it,' the voice pointed out. The fleeting shadow had been silhouetted against it, and only Kelly had seen it in any case.
'I guess that's right, Mr Clark.'
The radio sitting on the berm had been transmitting only the noise of static. That changed now, with four long dashes. They were answered at intervals by one, then two, then three, then four dots.
'Teams in place,' Kelly whispered. 'Hold your ears. The senior grenadier takes the first shot when he's ready, and that's the kickoff.'
'Shit,' Greer sneered. He soon regretted it.
The first thing they heard was a distant mutter of twin-bladed helicopter rotors. Designed to make heads turn, and even though every man at the berm knew the plan in intimate detail, it still worked, which pleased Kelly no end. He'd drawn up much of the plan, after all. All heads turned but his.
Kelly thought he might have caught a glimpse of the tritium-painted M-79 sights of one grenadier, but it might as easily have been the blink of a lonely lightning bug. He saw the muted flash of a single launch, and not a second later the blinding white-red-black flash of a fragmentation grenade against the floor of one of the towers. The sudden, sharp bark made the men at his side jump, but Kelly wasn't paying attention to that. The tower where men and guns would have been disintegrated. The echo had not yet dispersed through the theater of pines when the other three were similarly destroyed. Five seconds later the gunships came skimming in over the treetops, not fifty feet separating their rotors as minigune ripped into the barracks building, two long neon fingers reaching in. The grenadiers were already pumping white-phosphorus rounds into the windows, and any semblance of night vision was lost in an instant.
'Jesus!' The way that the spreading fountains of burning phosphorus were concealed inside the building made the spectacle only more horrid, while the miniguns concentrated on the exits.
'Yeah,' Kelly said, loudly to make himself heard. 'Anybody inside is a crispy critter. The smart ones who try to run come right into the mini fire. Slick.'
The fire element of the Marine assault force continued to pour fire into the barracks and admin buildings while the snatch team raced to the prison block. Now the rescue choppers came in, behind the AH-1 Huey Cobras, landing noisily close to the main gate. The fire element split, with half deploying around the choppers while the other half continued to hose the barracks. One of the gunships began circling the area now, like an anxious