“Whatever you’re going to do,” Eddie shouted over the winds that whipped through the bullet-riddled bus, “make it fast. There’s another turn coming.”
Cabrillo and Lawless locked eyes for just a moment, the same thought running through their minds.
“How long, you reckon?” MacD asked.
“Forty-five seconds ought to do it.” Juan manipulated the timer to set it but didn’t activate it until they were almost at the hairpin turn.
Cabrillo hit the button to set the clock in motion and tossed the bomb out a window. Eddie braked hard, fighting the wheel with all his strength since the bus lacked power steering. As before, the road fell away in a sharp S-turn and twisted back on itself.
Gravel spit from under the tires when the bus slewed around the corner, becoming light on its inside wheels from the centripetal force of Seng’s reckless driving. It settled back on its suspension, and he gunned it again.
Just like at the first switchback, the Taliban pickup had slid to a halt so its machine gun could open fire on the bus’s exposed roof. The gunner had just depressed the weapon on its pintle mount so that the barrel was pointed at the bus, and his fingers began exerting the necessary pressure on the trigger, when the bomb, which had landed on the side of the road, unseen in the darkness not four feet away, went up in a mushroom ball of smoke, fire, and steel scrap.
The old Toyota was blown off the road entirely and started sliding down the rocky embankment toward the road below. The gunner had vanished in the blast, while the driver and one of the passengers in the cab were thrown through an open window as the vehicle tumbled onto its roof.
That’s when MacD Lawless either saved all their lives or killed them.
Unlike the others, who were watching the truck to see if it was going to miss the bus as it rolled down the hill, he’d glanced out over the valley and saw an odd ring-shaped flash of light in the sky. The Nintendo Commando back at Creech, behind his computer screen and joysticks, had received authorization to fire his Predator’s Hellfire missile.
Lawless didn’t waste the breath to shout. He raced forward, hurtling past a dazed Franklin Lincoln, and reached the driver’s seat in just over a second. He grabbed the steering wheel before Eddie knew he was even there and cranked it hard over.
The front tire sank into the soft shoulder as the bus left the road, followed quickly by the rear wheels, and then the vehicle rolled onto its side, throwing the occupants onto the right wall. Glass shattered, but before anyone could fall against the hard ground, the bus rolled again onto its roof.
An instant later, the Hellfire, with its eighteen-pound shaped charge, slammed into the mountainside at the exact place the bus would have been. The explosion resembled a miniature volcano, with dust and rubble erupting from the hole it had gouged into the stone.
Like a runaway train, the bus slid down the steep embankment, rattling and jarring its hapless passengers. It crashed into a thicket of bushes just before it was about to fly off the edge of the road where it had been cut into the mountain. Its speed greatly reduced, the bus ponderously rolled onto its side and then crashed to its wheels on the roadbed. After the tumultuous din of the mad slide, the silence was overwhelming.
“Is everyone okay?” Juan called out after getting his wits back. His body ached from head to toe.
“I think I’m dead,” Linc said shakily. “At least that’s the way I feel.”
Cabrillo found a REC7 on the floor and snapped on its powerful tactical light. Linc had a little blood tricking from where his hairline would be if he didn’t keep his head shaved. He spotted Linda emerging from between two of the bench seats. She was massaging her chest.
“I think my B’s are now A’s.”
Juan next turned the light on Seti. The boy had a knot on his head from where he’d banged it against the wall when the bus first overturned, but the harness they had rigged for him had kept him firmly in his seat and the drugs had shielded him from the horror of what had just happened. He envied the teenager.
“Eddie, are you all right?” Cabrillo asked when he reached the front of the bus. Seng was wedged under the seat near the vehicle’s pedals.
“I have a newfound respect for anything that goes into a clothes dryer,” he said as he pulled himself free.
MacD Lawless lay crumpled in the stairwell. Juan bent to check on him, pressing two fingers against his neck to look for a pulse. He found it, strong and steady, and no sooner had Cabrillo moved his hand away than Lawless began to stir.
“So,” Juan said, “we went from us saving your butt to you saving ours in a little over an hour. I think that might be a record.”
“No offense,” Lawless slurred, “but Ah’d take it all back if Ah didn’t hurt so much.”
“You’re fine,” Cabrillo grinned, and grasped the man’s outstretched hand. “And if you’re not, well, it’s your own damned fault.” He turned serious. “How in the hell did you see that? And how did you move so fast?”
“Um, luck.” MacD allowed Juan to pull him to his feet. He smiled back. “And fear.”
“You okay?”
“Ah’m good,” Lawless replied. “Sorry, but grabbing the wheel was all Ah could think of.”
“It was the right call,” Juan assured him. “Insane but right.”
Lawless said, “Marion.”
“What?”
“My first name. You saved my life, Ah saved yours. In my book that makes us tight enough to tell you that my first name is Marion. Marion MacDougal Lawless III.”
Cabrillo considered this for a moment. “You’re right. MacD is better.” They shook hands formally. Juan turned back to Eddie. “Is there anything left in this poor girl?”
Seng replied by reconnecting the wires and revving the engine. “They don’t make ’em like they used to.”
A rear axle was bent, giving the bus a wobbling sway like a lame horse, but Eddie assured them it would get them to Islamabad by sunup.
4
BRUNEI
THEY ROSE FROM THE SEA LIKE MODERN-DAY CASTLES, protected by the largest moat in the world. Slab-sided and immense, oil rigs mounted atop massive pilings dotted the ocean, with tall flare stacks belching tongues of greasy flame. One sweep of the horizon revealed two dozen of the monstrosities, while hundreds more were just over the earth’s curve.
The huge oil fields made this tiny sultanate on the north coast of the island of Borneo one of the richest countries in the world and its ruler one of the wealthiest individuals.
Above the rigs, choppers ferried men and material to production and drilling platforms while sturdy workboats plied the seas between them. One such chopper, a little Robinson R22, belonged to the Oil Ministry and was carrying an inspector out to one of the larger rigs for its annual going-over. His name was Abdullah. As was common in this part of the world, he had no last name.
Slight, and just twenty-six years old, he was new to the job, this being only his third such inspection. In truth, he wouldn’t be performing the main search. Another team would be following in a couple of hours. His job was to gather and collate the mountains of paperwork required by the Ministry for each of the rigs in their territorial waters. It was scut work that befitted his rookie status. But he knew he’d be amply rewarded once he’d put in his years—senior inspectors made six-figure salaries and lived in mansions with servants and a driver.
He wore heavy-duty coveralls, despite the fact that he wouldn’t see anything much beyond the rig’s administrative office, and he held a plastic hard hat on his lap. As required, his boots had steel-reinforced toes. Wouldn’t want them crushed in a paper avalanche.
The pilot hadn’t said more than ten words to Abdullah since taking off, so when he heard a sound coming through his radio earmuffs he turned to see if the man was speaking to him.
To his horror he saw the pilot clutching at the side of his head. With no one holding the controls, the two- seat chopper started moving violently downward. For a fleeting instant Abdullah thought the pilot, a veteran by the
