Early in the morning, 5 a.m.
Near Camp K1, in the swamp area.
Song Heping had been crouching behind a rotting log for a full two hours already.
It was an annoying position.
But it was also the best launching point for an attack on Camp K1.
Selecting an attack position was a real science.
You had to consider the terrain and the enemy camp's patrol patterns and defensive placements.
Generally, one needed to enter the position in advance and then wait for the attack to commence.
This place was on the edge of a swamp just outside Camp K1.
As it was the rainy season, the area was all wet, with some parts deep enough to reach one's waist.
Last night, Song Heping had crawled here from two hundred meters away.
Crawling was always better than walking.
For one, it was less likely to be detected; for another, it was not easy to get stuck in the quagmire.
Currently, lying next to Song Heping was Grey Wolf, covered in mud, and he himself was plastered in mud too, all over his head and face, with only a pair of eyes rolling white.
But this was good; it blended them completely into the environment.
Mud, when you're waging war, is quite useful, though it does have a somewhat unfriendly odor, carrying a whiff of decaying animal carcasses.
Song Heping glanced at his watch.
It was about time.
He then looked at the sky, which was now a dim gray light, the right time to launch an attack.
The distant Camp K1 was still quiet, except for a few sentries dozing beside trees and a lookout in a simple watchtower, there was no sign of any living person.
When he arrived here at past one in the night, Song Heping had been observing ever since he entered the attack position, trying to identify the house where the hostage was hidden.
There were eight buildings in Camp K1, all wooden huts, very rudimentary.
After a long observation, he couldn't tell which house held the hostage.
It was a very helpless situation.
Actually, locating where the hostage was hidden wasn't too difficult.
The hostage would have to eat, and someone must bring food; at mealtime, there would certainly be custodial staff delivering food, and that would be the best time to judge.
Unfortunately, there was no time to wait for mealtime.
The difficulty of the operation would increase exponentially once everyone in the camp was awake at daylight.
So they had to estimate based on the location and where the guards were.
Unexpectedly, after a long watch, all the houses' defenses were the same.
No custodial staff in sight.
This left Song Heping puzzled.
He could hardly determine which house was the place where the hostage was held.
Such a situation was very fatal.
On his side, the assault team effectively had only four people — himself, Cook, Grey Wolf, Hunter.
If you talked about forming combat teams, at most they could split into two pairs.
This was already the minimum configuration for an attack; it was impossible to simultaneously strike multiple buildings, and the limit was to attack two at the same time.
If both choices were wrong, the entire operation could almost be declared a failure.
The custodial staff might either kill the hostage or use the hostage as a human shield; either scenario would put the operation in a desperate situation.
Luckily, Song Heping was fortunate.
Just when he was frustrated that he couldn't determine the hostage's location, a crying voice suddenly came from the camp, piercingly loud in the quiet night, like the wail of a ghost.
Then Song Heping and his team saw an armed combatant walk out of one of the huts, coming to the open space in the center of the camp and shouting at the ground, cursing something.
After cursing, he even took out his tool and urinated on the ground.
Only then did Song Heping realize that there were structures on the ground like wooden fences; at first sight, he had thought they were excess fences thrown there unwanted.
Not until this moment did he discover they were not discarded fences; they were the exits to dungeons!
With that, everything clicked into place.
Dungeons.
These were perfect places to hold hostages.
Sometimes it was safer to keep someone in a dungeon than in a house. No wonder there were no guards around the buildings; the nearby sentries were the actual guards. The area around the dungeon was flat pavement, clearly visible, where sentries could see, and the watchtower's lookout could also glimpse. Any noise, even if the people in the dungeon managed to break through the fence to escape, they would be killed by lookouts from the tower or the patrolling sentries on the ground.
"Shh-shh—"