Van Lewen immediately saw the white Bell Jet Ranger chopper sitting of the deck before hem, with its pilot standing beside it,
The commando saw them instantly, reached for his gun. Van Lewen dropped him, turned rights—just in time to see a squad of Nazi commandos come charging out from the interior of the catamaran, their G-11s up and firing.
Supermachinegun fire raked the deck all around them, splintered the wooden handrail behind them.
Van Lewen had to dive back behind the corner they had come from,
He, however, was too far gone.
He looked back at the Nazis coming towards him—they were about fifteen yards away. With their futuristic machine-guns spewing forth a shocking wave of bullets and in the face of their onslaught; with absolutely nothing else to call on, Leo Van Lewen did the only thing he could think to—
He leapt over the side.
From the helm of his Rigid Raider Speeding along the river behind the command boat, Karl Schroeder watched in horror as he saw Van Lewen go sailing off the side of the big catamaran.
But Sehroeder didn't have time to gawk,
At that moment, a hailstorm of G-ii fire came his way as two Nazi Rigid Raiders swooped in on him from either side, assailing his boat's flanks with gunfire, forcing him to dive for cover.
He hit the deck hard, and immediately scanned the floor of the boat for something he could e to fight off Che two Nazi Rigid Raiders.
The first thing he saw was a G-11 lying on he deck next to a kevlar box of some sort. Good.
But then, beyond the G-11, he saw something and he frowned.
Van Lewen flew through the air, waited for the impact with the speeding river beneath him.
It never came.
Rather he landed on something hard—something solid— something that felt like plastic or fibreglass.
He looked about himself and found that he was lying on the deck of the Scarab speedboat that was secured to the rear right-hand rail of the command boat.
Not a second later, three Nazi commandos snapped their G-11s over the command boat's rail and drew a bead on the bridge of his nose and in that moment, as he looked up into their eyes Van Lewen knew that his battle was over.
The three Nazis jammed down on the triggers of their guns...
* * *
At first, Schroeder hadn't realized what it was.
It was an odd-looking, backpack-sized device— roughly rectangular in shape, with a series of digital gauges on it, variously measured in kilohertz, megahertz and gigahertz.
Frequency measurements…
And then it had dawned on him.
it was the Nazis' jag device -the device that they had used to neutralise the Americans' communications systems when they had arrived at Vilcafor.
Stuck to the front of the device was a strip of grey electrician's tape, on which was written in German the words:
WARNING!
DO NOT SET EMP LEVELS ABOVE 1.2 gHg.
Schroeder's eyes had gone wide at the sight of the word:
'EMP'.
Jesus.
A pulse generator.
The Nazis had an electromagnetic pulse generator.
But why would they set a limit on the level of the pulse at 1.2 gigahertz?
And then it had hit him.
Schroeder immediately snatched up the G-11 next to him and looked at the specifications marked on its body.
HECKLER &: KOCH DEUTSCHLAND
- 50 V.3.5 MY: 920 CPU.“ i.S gHZ
In the nanoseconds of time in which the mind operates, he quickly recalled the theory of electromagnetic pulses: EMP nullified anything with a microprocessor in it—computers, radio transmitters, television.
And also, Schroeder realized, G-11 assault rifles, since the G-11 was the only gun in the world to Use a microprocessor-the only gun complex enough to require one.
The Nazis didn't want their men to Set the levels on their EMP generator too high, because if they did, the
