electromagnetic pulse would knock out their Galls.
Schroeder smiled.
And then—at exactly the same moment as Van Lewen looked up into the barrels of the Nazis' G-11 assault rifles from his position on the deck of the Scarab—Karl Schroeder had flicked on the pulse generator and turned the gigahertz dial to '1.3'.
Click. Click. Click.
Van Lewen's look of resignation turned to one of complete bewilderment as each of the three G-11s above him failed to fire.
The Nazis seemed even more bewildered. They didn't know what the hell was going on
Van Lewen didn't miss a beat.
In a second, he had his M-16 raised in one hand and his SIG-Sauer in the other. He pulled both triggers at the same time.
Both guns blazed to life.
All three Nazis were hit instantly and they flopped back behind the rail, their heads exploding in identical fountains of blood.
Bullets pinged off the rail itself, ricocheting in every direction, one of them slicing through the rope that held the Scarab to the command boat.
The speedboat immediately fell away from the big catamaran and all the Nazis on the command boat could do was hold their useless G-11s in their hands and stare at the Scarab as it receded into the ash behind them.
On the other side of the river, Doogie Kennedy sat in the swivel chair of his Pibber's forward gun turret, creating all manner of hell with the patrol boat's double-barrelled 20mm cannon.
He spun the turret around and let fly with a hailstorm of fire turning one of the Rigid Raiders speeding across the river to his left into Swiss cheese.
Then he turned his sights onto one of the helipad barges in front of him—the one with a Mosquito helicopter still on it—-and pummelled it with 20mm gunfire, rupturing its fuel tanks, causing, the entire boat-and-chopper combination to erupt into a billowing bail of fire.
'That's right! Take that, you Nazi sunzabitches!'
Three yards behind him, in the wheelhouse of the Pibber, Race drove hard scanning the river as he did so.
just then the third—and last—Mosquito attack chopper made another low pass, its side-mounted cannons blazing.
Race ducked quickly on the forward deck in front of him, Doogie swung the gun turret around and loosed d deafening burst of 20mm gunfire at the chopper, but the Mosquito just backed away sharply as his red-hot tracers hit only air around it.
At that moment, however, Race saw another Pibber gun boat swing in ominously behind them,
No Nazi gen lined its rails, no gunfire spewed forth from its 20mm gun turret,
It just kept its distance cruising silently, hanging well back behind them, at least three hundred yards away.
And then suddenly Race saw a puff of smoke burst out from the square-shaped pod that hung off its side and abruptly something long and white shot out of the pod and splashed down into the water.
'Is that what i think it is?” he said, at exactly the same moment as another Nazi Rigid Raider swung in behind their boat, in between it and the Pibber that had just launched the strange object from its side-mounted pod. Four Nazis stood on the deck of the open-topped Rigid Raider, firing at Race and Doogie with Beretta pistols.
And then suddenly—-so suddenly that it made Race jump—the Rigid Raider in between the two Pibbers just exploded.
There was no warning.
No apparent cause.
The long-bodied aluminium assault boat just shot up into the air in a geyser of smoke, water and twisted metal.
No apparent cause Race thought, except for the object that the other Pibber had just launched into the water from its pod.
The realisation hit him and Doogie at the same time.
“Torpedoes…' they both said, exchanging a look.
As they said it, another wisp of smoke issued out from the pod on the side of the Nazi Pibber and a long white torpedo exploded out from it, splashed down into the water and shot forward at incredible speed, heading directly for their boat.
'Oh, man,' Doogie breathed.
Race pushed forward on the throttle of the Pibber,
The torpedo shot through the water.
Race guided the speeding Pibber away from it, swinging left in the water, toward the rest of fleet, in the hope that he could put another boat between them and the torpedo, but it was no use.
The nearest boats to theirs were the two remaining helipad barges - the one with the Grumman JRF-5 Goose seaplane trailing behind it immediately to their right, and another for ward and to their left.