The motor snarled and sputtered but refused to catch.
“Come on,” Eddie cajoled.
Cabrillo wasn’t paying the drama at the front of the bus any heed. His eyes were glued out the rear window, searching for signs of pursuit. A figure burst from a narrow alley between two houses. Juan had the REC7 to his shoulder and triggered a three-round burst. Glass cascaded to the floor of the bus in a shower of fine chips while the bullets chewed up the ground at the man’s feet. Three eruptions of dust stopped the man in his tracks, and he lost his balance and fell to the ground.
Juan noticed in passing that the man hadn’t taken the time to arm himself before rushing to investigate the engine noise. He could have shot him dead but instead let him scramble back undercover.
“Eddie?” Cabrillo shouted over his shoulder, certain that the echo of gunfire had awoken every jihadist in a half-mile radius.
“Just a sec,” Seng called back, though there was no sense of tension in his voice. That was Eddie—cool under any circumstances.
Cabrillo scanned the streets as best he could. He saw lamps being lit behind a few windows. The entire village was going to be coming after them in moments. Though the bus would make a pretty good defensive position, the team didn’t have the ammo for a protracted gun battle. If they didn’t get out in the next few seconds, they never would.
The engine fired, and Eddie didn’t give it time to warm up before wrestling it into gear and hitting the gas. The old bus lurched like a startled rhinoceros, kicking gravel from under its bald tires.
A pair of guards emerged from the same alley as the first man and cut loose with their assault rifles, firing wildly from the hip in continuous bursts of unaimed fury. Not a single round hit the bus, but the fusillade kept Juan pinned to the floor, and the men had vanished around the corner by the time he was up and had a sight picture. He put three rounds downrange to keep them back.
The bus had the acceleration of an anemic snail, so as they slowly pulled from the square they were open to more gunfire from hidden alleys and behind stone walls. One burst raked across the row of windows, blowing out the glass and raining shards on the people inside. That particular assault inexplicably cut off, but more bullets pinged against the roof and sparked off the engine cover.
And then they were free, pulling past the mosque where the gray-bearded imam regarded them stoically as they roared by. Juan continued to watch out the rear window to see if anyone was chasing them. Several fighters were out on the main street, their rifles raised over their heads as if they’d won a great victory.
Let ’em think what they want, Juan thought as he slumped onto one of the hard bench seats. The padding had long since vanished, and he could feel a metal support beam digging into his flesh. That little bit of discomfort reminded him of the greater problem they might still be facing. The bus belonged to a senior Taliban officer, someone Cabrillo was now certain he recognized but couldn’t name. The odds were good that he was under observation by the U.S. military. While the powers that be might not understand what had just happened back in the village, if they wanted this guy dead, now was the time to unleash the drone’s missile.
He scooted back to the shattered rear window and watched the sky. Eddie saw him in the cracked mirror over the driver’s seat and called out, “Anything back there?”
“Not on the ground, but I thought I heard a Predator when we were waiting to go in, and, if my hunch is right, this bus has a big old target on its roof.”
For the first couple miles out of the town, the road followed the valley floor, with wide, open crop fields on either side. But from studying topographical maps before the mission, Juan knew it would enter a steeper grade and snake through about a dozen hairpin turns. To the left of the road was the canyon wall while to the right the landscape fell away in a frighteningly steep grade. Once on that section of dirt tract, they would have no maneuverability whatsoever.
If he was calling the shots back at Creech, he’d wait until they were halfway down and then put the Hellfire up their tailpipe. With that in mind, he shouted over the beat of the knocking engine, “Hey, soldier?”
“Me?” the blond man asked.
“I know everyone else’s name on the bus, so yeah. Are you in any condition to hoof it for about fifteen miles?”
Cabrillo appreciated that the guy took a moment to think through his answer. “No, sir. Ah’m sorry, but Ah’ve been through the meat grinder since they grabbed me. Nothing’s broken, but a whole lot’s sprained.” He lifted his shirt to show a sea of dark bruises across his chest and stomach to go with the shiner around his left eye. “Ah can do maybe five miles over flat ground, but in these mountains Ah won’t make it one.”
“Why are you asking?” Linda wanted to know.
“The canyon up ahead could be a death trap if I’m right about the Predator. I’m thinking about ditching the bus and going back to our original plan.”
It would be asking too much of Linc to carry the guy out, though Juan knew the big man would give it one hell of a try. He considered making the trek in stages, but the longer they remained in the region, the greater the risk of being discovered by the countless roving Taliban patrols.
“Chairman, we’ve got a problem,” Eddie said suddenly. “I see headlights approaching.”
Cabrillo cursed under his breath. Thinking it made it happen. The only people out on the roads at night were the Talibs or their al-Qaeda allies.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Play it cool. Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
The twin beams of light lancing out from the darkness bounced along about a half mile farther down the road. Then they swung broadside to the lumbering bus and went still. The approaching driver had angled their vehicle into a roadblock.
The good luck they’d had escaping the village had run out.
“Now what?”
“Give me a sec,” Juan replied in that same cool tone Eddie had used earlier. “What kind of vehicle do they have?”
“By the time I’ll be able to tell it’ll be too late,” Seng replied.
“Good point,” Juan said grimly. Though Juan spoke Arabic like a Riyadh native, he doubted he would be able to bluff their way past a checkpoint, not with an ethnic Chinese, a black guy, a blond one, an Indonesian kid, and the all-American girl next door.
“Go around them, and pray there isn’t a minefield next to the road. Guns at the ready.”
“Mr. Chairman,” the stranger said. “My shooting finger’s just fine.”
Juan paced forward and handed him his FN Five-seveN. “What’s your name?”
“Lawless,” he said. “MacD Lawless. Ah was a Ranger before turning to the private sector.”
“MacD?”
“Short for MacDougal. My middle name, which is only marginally better than my first.”
“Which is?”
The guy was handsome, and when he smiled he looked like a recruiting poster or a Calvin Klein model. “Ah’ll tell you when I know you better.”
“Deal,” Juan said, peering out through the windshield.
In the feeble glow cast by the bus’s headlamps he could see it was a dark pickup truck that had pulled across to block the single lane. Three men stood in front of it, their heads sheathed in turbans, their weapons trained on the bus. Two more fighters were in the open bed, one hunched over a heavy machine gun, the other ready to feed it a belt of ammunition that he cradled like an infant.
“They get us with that chatter gun,” Linc warned, “and it’s all over but the crying.”
“Looks like these guys didn’t get the memo about this being Tommy Taliban’s Magical Mystery Tour bus,” MacD quipped. Cabrillo’s measure of the man went up a notch. Anyone who could make bad jokes before combat was okay by him.
“I’m going to break left,” Eddie said, “to put the pickup’s cab between us and that old Russian PKB.”
Juan had already known which way Eddie was going to turn because it made the most tactical sense, so he was already hunkered under a window on the right side of the bus, his rifle barrel just showing above the pitted chrome sill. His mouth had gone metallic as a fresh burst of adrenaline shot into his system.
