‘Nowhere for the bastards to go now,’ Loader said eagerly.
Mallet said, ‘Patrick, do you see the bloke with the RPG? The guy in the trapper hat?’
‘Got him,’ Webb said.
‘Wait for my signal. As soon as I give the word, take him out. Then the two Gimpys can get to work.’
Bowman locked his sights on the Boys. They were as strangely dressed as the men he’d seen outside the presidential palace. One rebel wore a zebra-print jacket. Another had a rusted steel chain wrapped around his neck, like some oversized necklace. The guy to his left wore an animal headdress. A fourth man had a pair of ivory tusks draped over his shoulders. Their bodies were festooned with amulets and pouches containing their good luck charms.
The Boys were five metres inside the estate now, shuttling down the front drive in a disorganised rabble as they stole past the weeds and the burned-down trees. One rebel drew his machete and raised it above his head, encouraging his mates forward, like an officer on the Western Front.
Six metres beyond the entrance.
Eight.
‘Now,’ Mallet said.
Bowman heard a splintering hollow crack as Webb fired a single shot from the AWC. He didn’t see the guy in the trapper hat drop. Bowman was focused on the main cluster of rebels. But he knew Webb had hit the target because Mallet was suddenly shouting, ‘That’s it! Let them have it!’
Bowman gave the rebels a five-round squirt from the Gimpy. Loader unleashed a burst at his targets in the same beat. The machine guns roared, chewing up the enemy. Bowman saw the guy in the zebra-print shirt go down, and the Boy with the headdress, the guy with the steel chain. They went down one after the other, like pins in a bowling alley. The rebels didn’t stand a chance. Not against the combined firepower of the GPMGs.
A handful of rebels managed to survive the initial killing frenzy. Some of them broke to the left and right, fleeing across the open ground, diving behind any scraps of cover they could find. Two guys in matching red headscarves dropped to the grass and let off a couple of quick bursts at the rooftop. But it wasn’t accurate fire. They were reacting on instinct, firing in the vague direction of the opposition. Shooting because they felt they needed to, because they were confused and afraid. Bullets slapped into the parapet somewhere off to Bowman’s right. The bee-like buzz of a bullet several inches above his head. He fixed his cross hairs on the headscarf twins and hit them with a blast from the Gimpy. They disappeared in a spray of blood and guts.
Bowman was dimly aware of several muzzle flashes from the gun pit beside the pagoda. The Karatandan soldiers were getting ahead of themselves, putting down rounds on the rebels.
‘Cease fire!’ Mallet thundered over the radio. ‘Tell your men to cease fire, Major! You’re wasting rounds. Leave them to us!’
By now, five seconds into the skirmish, at least twenty of the attackers were dead. Bowman and Loader swept their GPMGs from left to right, tearing up any surviving rebels, the mechanical patter of the machine guns punctuated by the sounds of the .50 cal and the AWC rifle. Webb and Mallet focused their fire on the archway, killing those few rebels attempting to escape back to the clearing. The remaining Boys fell back from the entrance and tacked left or right, looking for another way out. They ran straight into the hail of murderous gunfire from the two Gimpys.
Mallet called out across the roof, directing the GPMGs towards a section of the fence to the right of the arch. Bowman slid his weapon across, saw three figures trying to scale the chain-link fence in a futile effort to escape the massacre. Before he could open fire the earth suddenly exploded around the rebels as Loader cut them down with two controlled bursts. They dropped to a bloodied heap at the foot of the fence.
‘Two more rebels in dead ground,’ Webb shouted over the cacophony. ‘Three posts to the left of the archway.’
Bowman arced the Gimpy back across to the spot Webb had identified and fixed his sights at the swale a few metres south of the fence. He waited a beat. Two heads popped up from the grassy trough, like meerkats looking out from their burrows. Bowman fired. Flames burped out of the muzzle. Spent brass dinked against the cement floor. The rounds thumped into the rebels. Their jolting bodies fell back into the swale.
‘Got them,’ Bowman said.
Ten seconds in. Four rebels left. Four panicked silhouettes. Loader plugged two of them as they crawled towards a dip in the ground in front of the fence. One rebel was hit in the neck by the AWC as he attempted to climb over the technical blocking the archway. A Boy in a white string vest bolted past his mate as he ran for the gap between the truck and the archway pillar. Another boom erupted as Mallet aimed the .50 cal at the fleeing figure. The back of the rebel’s head exploded in a red mist. He fell forward and face-planted on the ground beside the technical, kissing the blacktop.
The firefight had lasted twelve seconds.
Bowman scanned the killing ground. The grass was thickly carpeted with the mangled dead. Thirty slotted rebels. None of the bodies showed any signs of life. He wasn’t surprised. The GPMG had a rate of fire of 650 rounds per minute. No one could survive an onslaught from two well-aimed Gimpys.
Loader lifted his gaze from his weapon. He stared across the parapet at the archway and shook his head in astonishment.
‘Jesus. Now I know what people mean when they talk about a turkey shoot.’
‘So much for the Machete Boys being rock hard,’ Webb said.
‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ Bowman said.
‘These Boys ain’t gonna lay a glove on us fighting like this.’ Loader sniffed. ‘If they keep this up, we’ve got
