A state of disobedience

Camp Pendleton, California

Marines can be very practical folk. Faced with a lockdown of a fenced camp, said lockdown conflicting with either the desire not to be on the camp or the fact that one is on the other side of a fence—perhaps without permission—and wanting to be on the camp, a Marine will usually find a practical solution.

Nine times out of ten, he'll cut the fence.

The fence around Camp Pendleton had been cut so many times, by so many Marines, for so many excellent reasons, that more than one 1^st Division commander had contemplated simply leaving the holes there.

Others had spent precious installation maintenance funds keeping the fence in constant repair.

Fulton had adopted a different approach. He had, true, repaired the fence upon his arrival. But then, somewhat unusually, he had had the likely cutting points guarded and ambushed.

For some weeks after his arrival, as a Marine cut the fence and was duly caught, Fulton had called out the battalion of the offender for a no-notice and rather strenuous roadmarch with full—rather overfull, actually—packs. The march was invariably followed by one or more weeks of pulling guard in full battle uniform, by companies, at the breach.

This worked at least to the extent that a) the Marines' breaching grew craftier and b) they tended to repair the cuts they made behind them.

The cuts were still there, of course, but harder to see, find, and use.

The PGSS knew nothing about the breaches, though Crenshaw might have told them had he not been in a hospital somewhere in Kansas.

The First Marine Division Reconnaissance Battalion knew everything there was to know about the breaches.

* * *

Captain Emanuel Diaz, 1^st Recon Battalion, lying in a shallow drainage ditch that led through the fence and into the camp understood all about the breaches. He understood full well, also, why he could not go to see his wife's shattered body where she lay in the hospital. Her mind wasn't there anyway, not for the nonce . . . not, perhaps, in the future.

She'd been beaten—badly—by thugs, before being raped.

* * *

Diaz twisted his neck, pulled down a shoulder and risked a single brown eyeball to look over the lip of the ditch. Standing to either side of a side entrance door, facing the ditch, stood—rather, slouched, and slouched in a manner that seemed tired unto exhaustion—two apparent members of the Presidential Guard.

The moon fell behind a cloud, darkening the landscape and, especially, the gymnasium that was the target for Diaz's crew. He tapped two men with a very softly whispered, "Go."

Sudden grins were as suddenly suppressed. Faces blackened, browned and greened; knives in hand, the men slithered from the drainage ditch that had run under the chain-link fence surrounding the camp.

"Swift, silent, deadly," whispered—prayed—Diaz. Celer, Silens, Mortalis—the motto of Marine Recon.

Diaz could neither see nor hear the snakelike approach or the action, in itself a good sign. But less than a dozen minutes later the glowing red of an issue filtered flashlight shone three times.

"Pass it on; follow me," he whispered before slithering out himself to join his point men.

From other places, along other avenues, the Marines of 1^st Recon slipped onto Camp Pendleton . . . swiftly, silently and—based on the number of black battle-dressed, bleeding, bashed, strangled, dismembered and throat-slashed corpses they left behind them—in a fashion most deadly.

* * *