almost instantly with solid foam. Now that foam was evaporating or deliquescing or whatever it was doing, one loud pop at a time.
Nick hit the big release button at the center of his harnesses and they snapped back even as his sarcophagus of a crash-couch hissed and pulled back. Nick fell headfirst onto the ceiling and almost broke his neck as his helmet met hot steel with a loud bang.
The Oshkosh was upside down at an angle. The driver’s side seemed to be buried in the dirt. Some sort of metal fire panel had slammed down behind his and Sato’s seats and now that panel was glowing cherry red with bright white spots. The heat threatened to make Nick swoon. The fire behind that panel, Nick knew, must be terrible. Unless Joe the top-gunner had gotten out another way, he was dead.
Remembering Sato’s advice, Nick unclipped his suit’s O-two and comm channels, removed the PEAP— Personal Egress Air Pack—bundle from the console, took two tries to clip it into place on his helmet and oxygen mask, and plugged the mobile PEAP comm links in.
“Sato?”
No response.
Heaps of loose items and metal debris had tumbled onto the truck’s ceiling where Nick now crouched, sliding down under Sato’s hanging body, but when he leaned over to look up at Sato in the driver’s seat he still couldn’t be sure if the security chief was alive or dead.
Sato’s eyes were closed; he looked dead. His body hung from the straps. The blast from behind had ripped most of the red samurai armor off Sato’s right arm and Nick could see with a single glance that the arm was broken. Some of Sato’s blood had spattered the dark windshield panels and other video monitors and more blood was now dripping from the arm onto the ceiling-turned-floor.
Nick tried to remember the names of the men in the second truck.
“Willy?” he called on comm. “Toby? Bill?”
No response. Not even static. Maybe the PEAP comm unit wasn’t working. Or maybe the second truck had also been hit and destroyed.
After making sure that his 9mm Glock was still clipped on the belt on his armored hip, Nick crawled across the seat, grabbed his heavy duffel bag from where it had dropped onto the ceiling, and kicked the passenger-side door open.
He threw the weapons-duffel out first and then followed. The right side of the Oshkosh was raised about four feet above sandy soil, a trickle of river, and a line of burning willow bushes. Nick wedged himself over the edge and dropped the four feet, grunting with pain when he hit. He didn’t think anything was broken, but his entire body felt bruised as if after a good beating. Sweat dripped out of the eye sockets of his mask.
He took a deep breath to get some fresh air, but he was still on the thirty-minute PEAP air supply. He left it in place.
Nick grabbed the duffel bag before the flames got to it and dragged it and himself twenty feet away from the burning Oshkosh along the steep, sandy riverbank. He saw now that the huge M-ATV had done a corkscrew off the bridge above, tumbled flaming across the floor of the riverbed, and dug its heavy snout and right side into the heaps of soft sand just short of the riverbank on this side. Whether “this side” was the north or south bank of the river, Nick had no idea.
Nick pulled the Glock from his hip, unzipped the duffel, and looked at the weapons he’d brought. They seemed all right. He looked back at the burning Oshkosh.
The rear of the big truck was totally engulfed in flames and those flames were working their way forward along the shattered outside of the vehicle. The steel tires were melting. Ammunition from somewhere, probably next to the absent top gun bubble, was cooking off at random and rounds were impacting in every direction.
“Well, fuck,” breathed Nick.
He staggered back to the truck.
This side was too damned high to get up onto while he was in armor so he scrambled as high as he could on the twelve-or fifteen-foot-high riverbank, clambered up onto a shattered, steaming wheel, and crawled along the passenger side of the truck. The door was open but he still had a clumsy time of it as he wedged himself into the black, smoking hole and let himself drop until his feet were on the center console.
“Sato!!”
No answer. He called for the others in the second truck: no response. Maybe he just didn’t know how to reset the comm frequency.
Sato still hung upside down from the straps, his body leaning a little toward the driver’s-side door. The heat in the front part of the cabin was much worse than it had been just a minute earlier and Nick could see white parts of the fire bulkhead beginning to melt.
He pulled himself under Sato’s hanging body, tried to keep the naked and broken arm to one side, braced himself and his shoulders and upper body under Sato like a crouching if underweight sumo-wrestler, and hit Sato’s harness release with his Kevlared fist.
The big man’s body fell on him, the dead weight of Sato’s three hundred pounds crushing Nick against the ceiling, breaking at least one of Nick’s ribs, and driving the air out of him.
“Oh… Jesus… fuck,” breathed Nick. “You… fat…”
He didn’t finish the thought. If Sato was as dead as he felt, limp as a slaughtered heifer, he didn’t want to speak ill of the dead. “Fat… fuck,” he breathed out despite himself.
Then he was shoving with his boots, grabbing with his gloves, putting all his energy into moving Sato’s huge, inert, unhelpful form up and toward the open door. Smoke had filled the cockpit. Sato’s body quit moving and Nick noticed various leads and wires running from the man’s blood-red samurai helmet back to the crash chair.
“Oh, PEAP, shit,” gasped Nick.
He had to brace Sato’s body in place while he crouched again and found the red-symboled section of the dashboard console in front of the driver’s seat. He hit the right spot and the PEAP unit came out. It took Nick forty- five seconds of cursing and struggling and uselessly trying to wipe sweat and blood out of his eyes to get the PEAP unit in place and sending oxygen to Sato’s almost certainly dead brain. It took even longer to get the old comm leads unplugged and the new ones attached.
“Sato? Sato?”
No answer.
And no time to wait for one. Flames were licking through the partially melted blast shield and igniting the backs of both couches. Nick could smell something cooking and realized it was Sato’s bare and broken right arm.
“Ugghh!” screamed Nick and deadlifted the three hundred pounds and more of red-armored Jap. He felt like he was holding the whole armored mass over his head as he shoved Sato up through the smoke-obscured open door and left him balancing precariously on the edge of the Oshkosh.
Nick clambered up next to the body, gasping and blinking away sweat. If he hadn’t put his own PEAP on, he knew, he’d be unconscious from smoke inhalation and burning up below.
“Sorry.” Nick used both boots to push the red mass of Sato over the edge of the overturned truck. Sato fell the four feet and landed on his broken forearm without a word or sound through the earphones.
A round whizzed by Nick’s left earphone. The ammo on the lockers was cooking off now and it sounded like a firefight with automatic weapons. Nick knew that there were TOW missiles and other serious ordnance down there, waiting to go.
Nick jumped down, grabbed Sato by the armor handclasp set between his shoulders, and began dragging the body facedown through the sand and gravel and burning willows. When he got to the duffel, Nick lifted the heavy bag with his left hand and kept dragging Sato with his right.
Another hundred and fifty feet or so along the riverbank and he thought they might be safe when the truck exploded. They had come around a slight bend in the riverbank—more of a little alcove here—out of direct sight and range of the burning vehicle and igniting ammunition. Nick had no idea if the “radioactive-element-powered” fuel cells that drove the seven-hundred-horsepower Oshkosh turbines would explode when burned enough, but he assumed they would. Most things that powered big trucks would and did when set afire.
The thought of those “radioactive elements” beneath them in the breached and battered truck made Nick wonder if he’d already received a fatal or sterilizing dose of radiation. Or if he would as the truck kept burning or
