Reilly brushed aside a small patch of leaf litter, exposing the soil below. With one hand he collected a scrape of dirt and whatever bacteria and parasites it contained, then used the fingers of his opposite hand to smear the soil over his sweat-soaked face until he was reasonably certain it was covered.
Worthy did the same, then looked back to Reilly for approval. If he looked like a mud monster before, now he looked like one that was trying too hard. Reilly gave him a thumbs up, and both men carefully pushed the leaf litter back over their hasty dirt scrapes.
Then Worthy set off, beginning a meticulously slow crawl through the underbrush. Reilly repositioned himself ahead of the abandoned rucksacks, keeping his rifle poised across their backtrail. He felt his heart thudding as he waited—the shuffling sounds of Worthy easing his body face-down across the forest floor had disappeared completely, as had any visual of his departing figure. The wait was, in a way, worse than the entire movement up to this point. Reilly listened to the distant murmur of men’s voices, dreading the sudden cry that would indicate someone had spotted his teammate. If Worthy became compromised, he’d be returning at a sprint, and as soon as he passed Reilly it would be up to him to lay down enough suppressing fire to cover the point man while he donned his ruck, then reversed roles.
And then they’d be fleeing the area in a panicked rush, making their way to a pre-designated emergency linkup point well clear of the MSS while transmitting the total mission compromise.
But the first aberration in the noises of the forest was the rustle of leaves, and Reilly turned to see Worthy’s face appear through the undergrowth, the shifting mass of his ghillie suit sliding across the ground as he returned. This wasn’t good, Reilly knew; he’d been hoping that Worthy would transmit from some successfully attained vantage point, summoning the medic forward to join him.
His return seemed to indicate the worst-case scenario short of compromise, though Reilly didn’t receive his confirmation until Worthy advanced to within a foot of him, then whispered, “There’s a wall of thornbushes blocking any view of the objective. Looks like it extends twenty meters in either direction, at least.”
Reilly felt his spirits deflating as Worthy concluded, “We’re going to have to do another cloverleaf.”
The medic nodded, and together the two men donned their rucksacks and prepared to withdraw the way they’d come. One more semicircle through the forest, Reilly thought, before they could attempt a head-on approach in the hopes of catching any sight of their reconnaissance target.
As they began pulling back into the woods, Reilly considered that it could have been worse—he could be Cancer right now. After all, that poor bastard was operating entirely on his own.
Cancer continued his sniper crawl, pulling his body in measured strokes across the ground.
He proceeded with a metronome-like regularity, keeping each movement slow and fluid enough to go unnoticed by a casual observer. The effort was complicated by weight—he was dragging his rucksack by a four-foot length of webbing secured to his rigger belt—but anything wide enough for his shoulders to pass through would suffice for his equipment as well. The more uncomfortable Cancer felt, after all, the less risk he had of being spotted by the enemy.
Less than a foot over his sniper hood were the savagely sharp thorns that had threatened to shred his skin at the slightest opportunity. He’d been passing between these merciless bushes for the better part of an hour, trading twenty minutes of his life for seven to ten feet of progress. He was undeterred by this lengthy crawl, however—frequent checks of his wrist compass ensured he was staying on azimuth as he approached the target grid, and if he couldn’t pass through this vegetation at a walk, neither could the enemy. That was particularly important when he didn’t have a teammate backing him up, much less a trained spotter obscuring his backtrail.
Dust coated his nostrils as he slithered over the hot ground, betraying every human instinct to lift his head as he clutched the closed bipod of his G28 sniper rifle, its weight hoisted over his prostrate arm. Roughly half of all his sniper training had been dedicated to stalking, and right now, that was proving to be a wise investment.
He paused before a thorny tendril blocking his path and set down his rifle to unsheathe his fighting knife in a laborious, minute-long process of rolling halfway to his side. Once the knife was in hand, he used the blade to slice the vine, then set the severed length to his left. Within a few days it would shrivel to a dead brown remnant that put it at odds with the surrounding vegetation, but no one would see it unless they crawled across the same path he just had—and if that occurred, he was fucked anyway.
Then Cancer resumed his grip on the rifle bipod, shifting the weapon over his forearm and bicep before continuing his slow crawl as he considered the effort ahead. The planning maxim was that two men could effectively rotate surveillance for 24 hours, while three could remain in place as long as their food and water supplies held out. Four men, if you had that luxury, could actually resupply their own position by sending two of them back to the MSS when needed.
But there was no rule of thumb for sending one man off on a surveillance element; a two-man element was the minimum for any part of military operations from recon to room clearing, and for good reason.
Yet here he was, off by himself—and frankly, there was no other way.
This wasn’t a carefully planned and resourced reconnaissance effort; it was a knee-jerk, half-assed response to an emerging crisis, putting his team in harm’s way because the lives of American civilians were suddenly at stake. When it came to surveillance positions, two was one and one was none. No one was getting a God’s-eye view of the objective without getting caught—in reconnaissance, the commander painted an overall picture by piecing together the reports of multiple elements, each with their own sliver of visibility on the target. To combine himself, Worthy, and Reilly into a single element was to doom the recon effort to failure because the objective called for three or four surveillance teams, not one.
So Cancer had made the argument to split the difference and set off on his own. He was a seasoned-enough sniper to assume this risk simply because there were no other options.
He continued his stalk, thinking that he actually preferred this sort of thing during the day—moving close to an objective at night risked watching the sunrise to find his seemingly perfect surveillance position was actually exposed to enemy view, and by then it was too late. But daylight hours allowed him to scan every inch of foliage, a painstaking approach made more so by the knowledge that whatever ground he gained in full sunlight, he could hold for the duration.