Rapp finished with the last buckle and dragged the litter out from behind the boulder. “They’re all in! Go!”

Mason didn’t need to be told twice. The overfilled litter slid toward the cliff and then went over it, swinging wildly as its occupants screamed in terror. The chopper had gained maybe fifty feet of altitude when a contrail appeared from the jungle.

“Rocket!” Rapp shouted reflexively as Mason took evasive action. The projectile missed by a good fifty yards and the aircraft continued to climb as another helicopter—this one containing Bruno McGraw—came into view. They’d retrofitted his rig with a minigun, and he began firing from the open door, hosing down the area where the rocket had originated. Accuracy wasn’t great, but it was hard to blame the marksman. The chopper wasn’t designed for the recoil and it was getting pushed all over the place.

Mason’s erratic climb had set the litter to spinning out of control, but it was high enough now that Rapp had to squint to make out detail. Another contrail appeared, missing by a good five hundred yards before plummeting back into the jungle and failing to detonate. If the black-market SAMs Auma’s army used had ever had guidance systems, they’d rusted away long ago.

McGraw redirected his fire on the second rocket’s launch point just as a series of rounds stitched the rock wall ten feet over Rapp’s head.

“It’s too hot for me to go down,” he said over his throat mike. “I’m gonna have to climb up and over. I’ll contact you when I get to a viable extraction point.”

15

THE sound of distant automatic fire became audible again, but Rapp ignored it. He suspected that he knew its origin and it had nothing to do with him. He had his own problems.

He’d made it over the mountain and managed to skid, climb, and occasionally roll down the other side. Now he was crouched in a particularly dense thicket a few hundred yards from the base.

A tactical knife had been sufficient to shave off his beard and he was in the process of further darkening his skin with dirt. A bit politically incorrect in the current world, but it would give him a brief edge in the unlikely event he was spotted. Combined with the ratty fatigues and even rattier Yosemite Sam T-shirt beneath, Auma’s men would likely take him for one of their own in the visual chaos created by the forest.

While he couldn’t see the sky through the canopy, the relative silence suggested it was free of choppers. Unless something had gone very wrong, Chism was safe, and Coleman was already tearing down their temporary command post. Rapp’s extraction would be the last detail in a mission that despite leaving him isolated in enemy territory had gone a hell of a lot better than expected.