When he had finished reading them, his eyes went wide
Schroeder's Rigid Raider drifted further and further behind what was left of the fleet, with the two Nazi Pibbers crowding in on either side of it.
Karl Schroeder now lay on his back on the deck of his assault boat, gazing up at the storm clouds that rolled by overhead, darkening the late-afternoon sky, the life slowly draining from his body.
Abruptly, the face of a rather sinister-looking Nazi cut across his view of the sky and Schroeder realized that one of the Pibbers had come alongside him.
But he didn't care.
Indeed, as the Nazi calmly raised his AK-47 to his shoulder, Schroeder just looked up into the barrel of the man's gun, uninterested, resigned to his fate.
And then, strangely, he smiled.
The Nazi hesitated.
Then he looked slightly to the side - at the kevlar box that lay to Schroeder's left.
The box's lid was open.
Inside it, he saw five small chrome-and-plastic vials, each filled with a small amount of shiny amber liquid. Each vial sat snugly inside a foam-lined pocket.
The Nazi knew what they were instantly.
M-22 isotopic charges.
But there was a sixth foam-lined pocket in the box.
It lay empty.
The Nazi's eyes snapped left to see the last vial sitting in Schroeder's bloodsmeared hand.
Schroeder had already broken the rubber seal on top of the charge, had already uncocked the red safety latch that covered its release mechanism.
Now he had his thumb pressed down on the release button. He held it down as he gazed calmly into space.
The Nazi's eyes went wide with horror. 'Oh, fuck…'
Schroeder closed his eyes. It would be up to Renee and the American professor now. He hoped they succeeded. He hoped the two American soldiers were far enough ahead of his boat, out of the blast radius. He hoped…
Schroeder sighed a final time and as he did so he let go of the release button and the M22 isotopic charge went off in all its glory.
The world shook.
Aiiiiiv—massive—white-hot explosion blasted out the unfortunate Nazi and shot out in every direction.
It hit the trees on either side of the river, cinerating them in an instant, blasting them to nothing,
if d the river's surfacea bubbling, frotg iiffhoofing downwards at unimagable speed, oiii 6r on contact, killing anything in its path as it a6flwnards like a speeding comet;
if he sky, high into the sky, flatg white like
th flhbi a camera, an all-consumg monumental fire-wave been visible from space;
wfii the expanding wail of white-hot light shot aiofiives surface, chasing after the remainder of the
Vaen's Scarab and Doogie's Goose skipped across
the tet the head of the fleetout font of the gar-gan of white light eating up the river behind
Toti extent, they'd been lucky. ey had been a go0d trendred yards ahead of Schroeder's gid Raierente M-22 charge had gone off.
Tboatsthe last helipad barge, the two rema - g P the command boat itseifhadn't.
They've been closer. And now the expanding wail of white-hot light just loomed above them like some incense mythology monster, dwarfing them. And then suddenly, in an instant, the gigantic wall of white consumed the helipad barge and the Pibbers, detonating them on contact before swallowing them whole and continuing on its voracious charge forward.
Its next target was the command boat. Like a lumbering rhino trying to outrun a runaway Mack truck, the massive catamaran powered forward in a desperate attempt to get clear of the oncoming wall of searing-hot energy.
But the blast was just too fast, too powerful
As it had done with the barge and the Pibbers before it, the expanding wall of light just reached out and snatched the command boat in its clutches, yanking it into its mass, obliterating the enormous craft in a single fiery instant.
And then as quickly as it had risen, the massive wall of light began to subside and dissipate. Soon it lost all of its forward momentum and sank back into the distance,
“van Lewen took a final look back at the singed and smoking jungle river behind him. He saw a wispy black smoke cloud rising into the sky above the treetops—but it was broken up quickly by the sheets of subtropical rain that had just begun to fall.
