earth he could, lay down, and rechecked the sensor data. Sure enough, one of the oncoming vehicles looked like it had veered east, not quite leaving the formation but definitely moving toward him. He immediately withdrew a gray-silver blanket from a hip pouch and threw it over himself.
“Ray?” Ariadna asked.
“I’m good,” Jefferson responded. That call made him feel very good—that meant that the Goose drone’s infrared sensors had lost him. The blanket he draped over himself was a cover designed to absorb and trap heat from his body so enemy soldiers with infrared scopes couldn’t detect him, and its dark color would screen him somewhat from anyone using night-vision optics as well.
“Second vehicle heading your way, Ray,” Ari warned him.
The first vehicle must’ve lost him and he called on a second to help locate him, Jefferson surmised—the first one was still the main threat. Jefferson loaded an M433 high-explosive dual-purpose grenade into his M203 grenade launcher mounted under his M-16 rifle. With his left eye displaying sensor data to the oncoming vehicle, he waited until the vehicle was about a hundred meters away, fired, and immediately rolled to his left several meters before leaping to his feet and running south. The grenade round armed after flying a few meters and landed squarely on the front armored windscreen of the armored personnel carrier. Although most of the grenade’s energy was deflected up and away, the explosion was enough to blow in the bulletproof windows and blind the crew members inside.
As soon as Jefferson rolled he lost the cover of his infrared-absorbing blanket, and the machine gunner on the second APC opened fire at the spot where he saw the grenade launcher’s muzzle flash. Still on the run, Jefferson loaded the first grenade round he could grab from his bandolier. The machine gun bursts thudded the ground with heavy raps, but they hadn’t caught up with him yet. He waited for the gunner to pause, threw himself down to the hard-baked earth, took quick aim, and fired. The grenade exploded several meters in front of the second APC—clean miss, but the distraction factor was enormous. Jefferson immediately dodged west, reloading again as he ran.
It took several seconds for the machine gunner on the APC to spot him, but once he did the carrier raced after him, less than one hundred meters behind. Jefferson realized he was running out of breath and time—one dismount had little chance against an armored personnel carrier, no matter how good a shot he was with an M203. The machine gunner opened fire, and the rounds were now whizzing all around him, close enough to feel the air pressure. Bits of limestone were kicking up in his face after hitting the ground right in front of him. No more running—this was it.
He dropped to the earth again, lined up on the approaching APC, aimed carefully, and fired. The APC dodged left when the driver saw the muzzle flash, and the round exploded just a few meters away from the right rear tire. The APC looked like it was going to flip over, but it didn’t. It skidded to a stop, unable to move—but it wasn’t out of the fight yet. The gunner straightened himself in his cupola, reloaded, drew a bead on Ray Jefferson, and fired from about sixty meters away. At this range, it would only be a matter of seconds before…
Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion right on the machine gunner himself. When the fire and smoke cleared, Jefferson saw that the entire cupola had been blown off the APC. An armored door opened up and a couple of soldiers stumbled out of the smoking interior, dropping to the ground and crawling away from the thick oily smoke billowing from inside. A few rounds cooked off inside as the heat intensified. That APC was definitely out of business.
“You okay, Ray?” Jefferson heard Jason Richter call on his radio. He looked at his datalink display and saw a green icon moving about forty kilometers an hour from the south toward the refinery.
“Roger that, sir,” Jefferson said, getting to his feet and checking his equipment. “Thanks for the assist.”
“I’m going to cover Rat Six, Ray,” Jason said.
“I’ll catch up, sir. Don’t worry about me.” Jefferson found a cigar in a pouch on his body armor and lit up as he headed toward the refinery. He was in no hurry now—the CID units of Task Force TALON were on the job. They could fight for a while without him.
The other six “Rat Patrol” dune buggies were doing the exact same thing to every one of the approaching hijacked Central Security Force vehicles: one buggy looked like easy pickings, so the APCs were just driving right up to them ready for the ambush, while a CID unit or dismounted TALON commando sneaked up behind it and attacked. With the Goose drones overhead, it was simple for the CID units—piloted by Jason Richter, Carl Bolton, and the third by none other than Captain Frank Falcone, who volunteered to take Doug Moore’s place in a new CID unit just delivered to the task force—to sneak up on them from a blind side in the darkness and nail them.
Within minutes, the battle around the periphery of the refinery was over. Gennadyi Boroshev didn’t have to wait for the sentry reports to come in—he could hear the fear, confusion, and cries of surrender on the radio as the hijacked General Security Force vehicles were taken down one by one. He also didn’t need a report from his lieutenant that the turncoat GSF fighters still inside the refinery complex were starting to get nervous: their job was to simply desert their posts and let the terrorists inside, not get trapped inside the place after hundreds of kilos of high explosives were set right behind them. But soon he got the report anyway: “Sir, the lousy bl’ats are running!” he said.
“Let them run—those zalupas are just as likely to turn on us if we didn’t let them go,” Boroshev said. “The Egyptians will certainly be waiting to arrest them—or gun them down—as they run out. We need a distraction.” He pulled out an arming panel from a satchel on his shoulder, turned a key to power up the panel, twisted a selector knob, opened two red-covered switches, held one switch up with his left hand, then flicked the other one up with his right. Nothing happened. He twisted the knob again and activated the switches—still nothing.
“I thought you said connectivity was good!” he screamed at the lieutenant. “Did you even bother to check it?” The lieutenant’s eyes filled with fear and he remained silent. That wouldn’t be too surprising—if you weren’t trained in demolitions, it would be damned tough for anyone to turn that key knowing it was set to blow several hundred kilos of high explosives just a few steps away. But this was not the time to find out it didn’t work. “Damn you! The radio signal’s not getting out. The Americans might be jamming us.” To the lieutenant, he said, “Go to the detonators in the computer room and set them to go off in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?” the lieutenant exclaimed. “That’s not enough time for me to get out!”
“It’s all the time you’ll have,” Boroshev said. “Order all the men to slip out with the hostages and CSF guards when the explosives go off. They’ll never be able to capture all of us, and while they’re trying, this place will start going up in flames. At least we’ll take out the most important location in this place. I trust you’ll run faster than you ever have before after setting those detonators. Go!” Reluctantly, the lieutenant dashed back into the headquarters building.
“More people coming out,” Ariadna reported, studying the GUOS images. “The GSF officers and Egyptian military are picking them up.”
“Good,” Kelsey DeLaine said. She was seated beside Vega in the temporary command center they had set up at Almaza airport. She pointed to one of the screens. “But this is interesting: one man running into the headquarters building, while everyone else is running out.” She hit the Transmit button on her control panel: “Carl, I need you to check something out for me.”
“Wait, Kelsey—we’ll get some TALON units to look in there,” Ari said. “The CID units aren’t really designed to operate indoors without a lot of training. He’ll feel like a bull in a china shop in there.”
“There’s not enough time, and all of the ‘Rat Patrol’ guys are on the perimeter,” Kelsey replied. “Carl is out there doing nothing right now. I’ll send him in.” Ari was worried, but she fell silent.
A few minutes later, Carl Bolton piloting the third CID unit carefully made his way down a set of stairs from the main floor at the rear of the headquarters building to the second subfloor. That short trip down those stairs was one of the most frustrating he’d ever had inside a CID unit. Being inside the Cybernetic Infantry Device didn’t feel one bit like being inside a three-meter-tall robot; the haptic interfaces kept arms, legs, fingers, and other body parts moving normally in relation to one ` But nothing prepared Bolton for taking the big robot through normal man-sized spaces. He was constantly bumping into furniture and walls, hitting his head on the ceiling when he wasn’t crouched over enough, and even tripped down the last flight of stairs on his way down. Plus, all the training he had ever done in the CID unit—one day actually piloting the device, plus lengthy and usually boring lectures—had been outdoors. The smallest building he had ever been inside while piloting the CID was an aircraft hangar.
He finally made it downstairs and went down a long hallway, breaking open locked doors and using his scanners to locate any sign of danger, until he came to the computer room. Maneuvering inside there would be even more difficult than going down the stairs—the place was chock-full of workstations, server racks, printers, monitors,
