“If the American is still there, he is very well hidden.”
Dai nodded. “Old Man! Give us cover and check the body for booby traps!”
Corporal “Old Man” Cao was the team’s grandfather. He was pushing field retirement and was a long veteran of China’s misbehaviors on the Vietnamese border. He did his best work with a knife and was an inveterate lurker. He was a head taller than everyone else in the team, blade thin, and assiduously cultivated his wispy mustache and beard. Cao pulled a pair of smoke grenades and hurled them out onto the escarpment. Thick white smoke began occluding the cliff and a good bit of the hillside. Cao ran out and disappeared into the smoke. He quickly came back grinning and holding up a ghoulish prize. “No traps, Captain. But I found this.” Cao handed Dai a bloody bullet. “Do you see? American .308. But heavy. Round nose rather than pointed. The American fired through a silencer. That is why we did not hear the shot.”
“And you think the enemy having a silenced sniper rifle is good news?”
“No, Captain.” Cao continued smiling. “But in a sniper battle, Private Su will outrange him by three hundred meters. Perhaps four.”
Private Su smiled without looking up from his optic. “I believe the corporal is correct, and further I do not believe the American has a real sniper rifle. It would not be appropriate to his mission. I just think he is a very good shot.”
Dai looked back and forth between his two grinning men. “And if the American is clever enough to have brought along a few full-powered shells?”
“Full-power ammunition will destroy his silencer, and lose him the one real advantage he has,” Cao concluded smugly. “Any offensive action he takes now will be a terrible choice of alternatives, all fraught with danger.”
Special forces operators were the same the world over. Even in the most regimented armies they knew they were better than everybody else, and discipline within the ranks became somewhat lax. Officers throughout China’s two-million-man army could expect blind obedience out of their soldiers. In the special forces, respect had to be earned, and rise in rank came on ability and merit far more often than party and family connections or bribery. Dai did not reprimand his men for speaking out of turn. Private Su was one of the best shots to ever come out army sniper school, and Old Man Cao was a decorated veteran whose tactical opinion was worth its weight in gold.
“Sergeant, get the Naga moving. Corporal Cao, get the men across the escarpment before the smoke thins. We have hunting to do.”
BOLAN LOWERED his binoculars. It wasn’t good. Physically, it was hard to distinguish the Chinese from the Burmese auxiliaries, but since they were on a combat mission rather than infiltrating enemy territory they displayed it in the superior air they showed their flunkies, as well as their superior armament. That they weren’t even trying to hide. They had the latest PRC and Russian equipment. Two men had backpacks with very suspicious looking, large-diameter tubes sticking up out of them. Bolan counted at least one sniper among them, and he had been debating taking the shot on the man here and now when the enemy had popped smoke and begun moving. Bolan counted a twelve-man Chinese team, backed up by Maung and another fifteen of U Than’s goons, as well the three remaining trackers.
Bolan worked his way back up the hillside and began loping down the trail. He quickly caught up with Nyin and Lily. The Taiwanese intelligence agent wasn’t limping, but she was obviously in pain. “How’re you doing?”
Lily kept her eyes on the ground ahead, keeping an eye out for rocks and trotting on soft soil. It was saving her pain, but she was also leaving very clear footprints. “I was supposed to be on a beach in Costa Rica by now.” Her green eyes lifted for a moment and stared into the middle distance. “I am told the sand is pink.”
“It is. Don’t worry, we’ll get your toes in the sand and piña colada in hand yet.”
Lily smiled wanly and returned her gaze to the trail. “The thought of it is the only thing that keeps me moving.”
Nyin was puffing along, but his smile stayed painted on. “How many?”
“Call it half a platoon. Maung and U Than’s men I could probably cut up and scatter, but the Chinese team is going to give them backbone and prop it up with hard cash. They also have light support weapons and a sniper. They outrange everything we’ve got.”
“What we do?”
“I was hoping you might have an idea.”
Nyin pointed toward a range of hills to the southeast and laid out a plan as they ran. Bolan felt a headache coming on.
It wasn’t necessarily a bad plan.
But it sure as hell wasn’t good.
And unfortunately Bolan couldn’t think of a better one.
6
Lily was clearly appalled. “This is not a good plan.” She had to draw her knees to hip height with each sucking step she took through the abandoned paddy. Normally wet-rice farmers also farmed ducks and crayfish in the same fields, and between them they kept the fields fertilized and free of pests. Leeches covered Lily’s bare legs, and the biting flies fearlessly buzzed through the blighted, overgrown rice plants and weeds and drew blood at an eye blink of inattention. Bolan had no attention to spare for the parasites.
They were literally walking through a minefield. Bolan mucked through the knee-deep swamp an inch at a time, using a five-foot pointed stick for a probe.
The problem for the Burmese military was that up in the highlands, with just a little bit of warning, rebels could melt away into the forests before an attack. However, almost all the rebels were farmers, and sooner or later they returned to their villages once the soldiers left. Like a number of governments, ruling junta had figured out there were few better ways to sow apprehension and dissension among farmers than to sow their fields with land mines. After the first few men and water buffalo lost their legs, the fields were abandoned and without a crop, so were the villages. Rebel strongholds became ghost towns, and the rebels and their families became masses of starving, migrant refugees. The Burmese army’s weapon of choice was a locally produced copy of the U.S. M-14 antipersonnel mine. It carried just enough explosive to take a man’s leg off at the knee, and was nicknamed the “toe-popper” for fairly obvious reasons.
So far, Bolan had found three of them.
Ostensibly the Burmese military kept charts of the minefields so that someday they could come and reclaim the farmland. Nyin, through various means, had acquired maps charting a number of the minefields in his area of operation. However, wet-rice farming was dependent on controlled flooding, and after a year or two without anyone manning the dykes the river had assumed its natural course.
Things had shifted a bit.
“They come soon!” Nyin stated.
Bolan moved inch by inch through the muck and worked his probe while ignoring mosquitoes the size of ballpoint pens that probed every inch of his exposed flesh and completely ignored the insect repellent he’d applied earlier.
“Soon!” Nyin grinned. His gleaming, sweaty head and bare arms seemed impervious to local insects. “Very soon!”
Bolan was trying to concentrate on the swamp in front of him. “Nyin, best for you to be quiet now.”
Nyin
