When scanning through an aerial map of the area five miles east of Nimpo Lake, Phil spotted one small clearing that was the only open ground within a one-mile radius. If they were going to have a good chance of isolating the helicopter anywhere, then this would be it. By comparing some distinctive curves of a stream bottom, he correlated the aerial photo to the topo map and was pleased to see that the opening was at the edge of a plateau, with a steep descent on one side.

He tapped on the map with a forefinger and said to himself, “Perfect.”

That afternoon he brought the map and aerial photo to present his plan to Ray and Alan, who had just come in from doing some fence work. They sat down across the kitchen table wearing their socks. (Claire was strict about allowing muddy boots in the house.)

Phil began, “I think I’ve found a way to ambush the last functional ALAT Gazelle at the helibase. If we present them with a target that they can’t engage effectively from the air, they’ll probably want to insert airmobile troops or an artillery forward observer. But we’ve seen that the ALATs certainly don’t like fast roping.”

“Mauviettes!” Ray blurted out.

“Yep, they’re wimps. Operationally, they’ve demonstrated that they prefer to pop into open LZs and land briefly or just hover for a few seconds to drop off troops.”

Ray jumped in. “So we create an attractive target and make them want to use a nearby LZ on a promontory terrain feature that we already have covered.”

“So how do we then take out the helicopter? With IEDs?” Alan asked.

“Much simpler than that: We use five-eighth-inch steel cable. There’s miles of it available, with all of the old logging operations around here. A steel cable in the main rotor will ruin your whole day.”

Ray shook his head and chided, “So we string a cable over an opening. Even if we were to paint the cable to make it blend in, depending on the lighting, they’d probably spot the cable and divert at the last minute.”

Phil pointed his forefinger toward the floor and said, “Not if the cable is hidden in the grass.”

Ray cocked his head. “What? How’s that going to work?”

“I’ll explain it all to you when we hike out there for a recon.”

•   •   •

Rigging the LZ for helicopter ambush took some time, but the terrain was advantageous, from the size of the trees to the steep drop-off just east of the clearing. One end of the cable was attached with three cable clamps in a row, twenty-four feet up a large cedar tree on the northwest edge of the opening. The cable was left slack, so that it touched the ground at the base of the tree. It was then threaded as deeply as possible through the knee-high grass, diagonally across the middle of the oblong seventy-yard-wide opening. At the southeast side of the opening there was a large cottonwood tree with a wide fork twenty-five feet off the ground. The cable was tossed over that fork, but again left slack on the side that faced the opening. The far end of the cable was carefully aligned through the trees to a large, dying western larch tree at the edge of the drop-off.

Now came the tricky part. Using a girth strap and a pair of tree-topper’s climbing spikes, Ray quickly climbed thirty-five feet up the larch, hoping that the tree wasn’t rotten at the core.

Watching him climb so deftly, Phil said, “Hey, that’s pretty slick. You climb with a purpose.”

Ray shouted back, “Just a Jedi trick that I learned from my cousin Obi-Wan.”

Phil laughed. Ray often joked about the actor Ewan McGregor, who shared their surname. He kidded about the actor being a first cousin, when he was more likely a fiftieth cousin.

Trailing from his belt was fifty feet of parachute cord. Once he’d reached the desired height, he reset his boot spikes solidly and leaned back in the strap. He felt solid, but the situation still made him nervous. Climbing a dying tree that might be rotted or hollowed out by wood ants was a dicey proposition.

He shouted down to Phil, “Okay, tie on the cable with a sheet bend and a half hitch!”

“Ummm . . . okay. What’s a sheet bend?”

“You’re such a rear-echelon pogue. Just use four or five half-hitches, and then stand well clear in case you screw up, so you don’t put your eye out.”

“Okay.”

Pulling up the paracord hand over hand, Ray pulled up the free end of the cable. After untying the paracord, he flung the cable around the tree. He misjudged the length required, so he had to adjust and try twice more before he was able to grab the free end. When he finally did, the needlelike frayed end of the cable filament drew blood from the meat of his hand. (He wasn’t wearing gloves because he would soon be working with the nuts on the cable clamps.) Ray visibly winced.

Phil shouted up from the ground, “Ooh, that’s gotta hurt.”

“Yeah, thanks for the sympathy, pal.”

He pulled up the slack in the cable so there was just a slight sag in the portion that ran back to the big tree fork. Pinching the cable back on itself took the full strength of one hand, and he knew that positioning the first cable clamp and its pair of nuts would require the use of two more hands, leaving him one hand short. He had come prepared with some plastic cable ties. Pulling one of the ties tightly gave just enough tension to free up his left hand so that he could position the cable clamps. Even so, it was tricky and exhausting. He dropped two of the hexagonal nuts in the process, but fortunately he had brought spares. By the time he was done torqueing down the pair of Nylock nuts on the third cable clamp, sweat was dripping off the end of his nose.

He put the socket wrench back in his tool-belt bag, and shouted, “Okay. Done here. Coming down.”

When he reached the ground, Ray said, “Okay. The North Woods Lumberjack phase is done. Now it’s your turn, Mr. Gee Whiz Explosives Expert.”

Phil shook his head and said, “I’m no expert, but I think I can fake it.”

Phil had already sized up the tree. It was leaning slightly downhill, which was good. Rather than attaching the explosives at the base, he opted to position them six feet up the trunk. Here, the girth of the trunk was 30 percent smaller.

The explosives they had were not ideal for the job—he would have preferred to use C4 plastic explosives—but the dynamite sticks would suffice. Phil started out by reexamining the sticks of DuPont dynamite. They were the 80 percent variety, with diatomaceous earth filler, and brown cases and red warning labels. He checked them for any signs of weeping or leaking. The cases looked dry, and that made him feel less tense.

Phil spent a few minutes whittling a stick to a fine point, smaller than a pencil. He used this to drill transverse holes in the middle of eight of the dynamite sticks. Next, he dug a claw hammer and a handful of eight-penny nails out of his pack. Walking to the uphill side of the tree, he sighted upward and aligned a nail with the cable that was stretched back toward the opening. He reached up, and standing on his backpack, he drove a nail into the trunk at a forty-five-degree angle, at nearly nine feet off the ground. The head of the nail was angled upward.

Then he walked around the tree and did his best to estimate the counterpoint of the nail that he had just driven. He used a nail point to scratch a vertical mark, six feet off the ground. He drove the nail in at that spot with just a couple of light taps of the hammer. Then he stood back to size up the positions of the two nails. He walked around the tree twice, at a distance of five paces. He judged the angle at which the tree was leaning again. Not satisfied with the position of the lower nail, he repositioned it upward four inches and two inches to the right. Then he repeated his inspection walk. Finally, he drove the second nail straight into the tree trunk, leaving just one inch exposed.