morphine to ease his pain, but his chances weren’t good. Being bumped and thumped around in the back of a truck rolling at eighty down the highway wasn’t helping the wounded man any.
To Hill, Carruth said, “Break one out.”
He was talking about the toys they had just swiped, four M-47 wire-guided, semiautomatic missile launchers, with rockets. Called the Dragon, the M-47, aka the FGM-77, was a portable antivehicle weapon from McDonnell- Douglas consisting of a launcher, missile, and wire-guidance system. Pretty much obsolete and on the books as surplus, having been replaced by the FGM-148 wireless Javelin, there were still a bunch of them in military armories and they still worked just fine. The Dragon was simple to use: Set the crosshairs on the target and squeeze the trigger. As long as you kept the sight steady, that’s where the rocket would hit. Good for twelve, fifteen hundred meters, and able to pierce 400 mm of armor, it was a great tank-buster.
“We can’t shoot it in here, Boss,” Hill said. “The backwash will scour the inside of the truck down to the metal and roast us all.”
True. The old system didn’t have a low-gee, soft-launch motor and wasn’t IR-guided like the newer Javelins, which were fire-and-forget. You could reload one of those instantly from inside a house or truck, you didn’t have to wait and use the guidance wire. “I know that. Get it ready. Drop a couple grenades to back ’em off some and next time we round a curve, we’ll slow it down enough for me to bail out.”
“That’s crazy,” Hill said.
“Better than spending the rest of your life in Leavenworth—or winding up on a slab.”
Hill nodded. He pulled an M-61 fragger, olive green with the yellow stripe up top, yanked the pin, waited a second, and underhanded it out through the rear. The grenade was an antipersonnel weapon, it wasn’t designed to stop vehicles, but it would make a big noise and flash and maybe pepper the chaser with a bit of shrapnel. Slow them down a hair.
The grenade bounced on the road—Carruth saw the spark where it hit the pavement—and shortly thereafter blew up.
The headlights of the Hummer dipped as they hit the brakes.
Stateside Hummers weren’t armored well, if at all. A grenade could punch holes in the sucker and maybe kill a rider. They would know that better than anybody.
“Curve coming up, Boss. We have a couple hundred meters.”
“Slow it down once you are around it. Find me a soft spot!”
Carruth grabbed the Dragon. The package weighed twenty, twenty-two kilos or so. He hoped he wouldn’t drop it, or have it fall apart when he hit the ground.
Hoped
Hill threw another grenade, this one timed to go off in the air.
The truck slowed. Carruth bailed, hit the ground next to the road, tumbled, rolled, came up, fell again, the wind knocked out of him. Man!
The truck sped up.
Carruth crabbed further away from the road, then dropped prone.
The headlights of the Hummer swept around the curve. The vehicle roared past. A soldier leaned out of the passenger window, aiming his M-16 at the truck ahead of them.
Carruth sat up, lit the electronics, lined the crosshairs of the sight on the rear of the Hummer. It was a hundred yards away. Too close, he didn’t want to be eating shrapnel. . . .
Two hundred yards . . . two-fifty . . .
He squeezed off the round. There was a big
The rocket hit the back of the Hummer. The rocket and the Hummer went up together, a terrible flash, and the noise washed over him a second later. . . .
It seemed like a long time before the truck came back to collect him, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. They drove past the burning remains of the Hummer, and the soldiers who had manned it.
“Sorry,” Carruth said as they went by.
“Stark’s dead,” somebody said.
Carruth nodded. “We’ll have to ditch the truck, fast. Get to the exchange point.”
The exchange point was behind an old gas station; there were two pickup trucks waiting. They piled out of the bigger truck, loaded the Dragons into them, covered them with tarps.
Carruth siphoned a couple gallons of gas out of the big truck’s tank and soaked Stark’s body and the inside of the vehicle pretty good. He climbed into one of the pickups, leaned out, and lit a flare. As they drove past the big truck he tossed the flare. There was no ID in the vehicle, nothing to tie Stark to them, and by the time anybody got there, he’d be a crispy critter.
“Go!”
The two smaller trucks peeled out.
The big truck erupted into an orange fireball as the gasoline caught.
“Adios, amigo,” Carruth said. He saluted the outside rearview mirror. At least they gave Stark a Viking funeral, sort of.
The light from the burning truck was visible for a long way behind them as they drove off.
It was a night to burn stuff up, for sure.
Lewis wasn’t gonna be happy about this.
This time, General Hadden had Thorn come to his office. And he wasn’t a man to beat around the bush.
“I’m not happy with your unit’s progress on this, Thorn. Last night, somebody stole four surplus rocket launchers from one of my bases and killed some of my soldiers—we lost six men when they cooked a vehicle full of MPs!”
“I’m sorry. We’ve got the best people in the world working on it as fast as they can go. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
“So you say, but I’m not seeing results and I’ve got a body count!”
“With all due respect, sir, we’re not making burgers and fries here. Sometimes you don’t get it your way. We’re dealing with a bad guy who is clever and who doesn’t want to get caught. Our people are on his trail, they are making progress, that’s how it works.”
Hadden said, “There is always something that can make things go faster—the trick is to figure out what. Maybe your computer geeks need some more motivation. Some . . . direct supervision. From what I’m able to tell, you give them something and turn them loose—you aren’t there keeping their noses to the grindstone.”
Thorn shook his head. “Sir, I came to this job by way of the computer industry. I worked with ‘computer geeks’ all the time. Hell, sir, I was one myself. They deal well with time pressure, most of them, but standing over them and micromanaging their actions is worse than trying to herd cats. The best players here are like artists; you lean on them, they will stop what they are doing and cross their arms. This isn’t paint-by-numbers.”
“I’m not talking about a guy with a bullwhip, Thorn, I’m talking about maybe giving you an . . . assistant. An efficiency expert, office manager, somebody who might be able to make things run a little smoother.”
Thorn laughed.
“I’m not used to people laughing at my ideas, son.”
“You aren’t used to dealing with this kind of civilian, General. You can’t fool my people into thinking I’m still running things if you send some hard-ass in to whip them into shape. They are smart enough to know I wouldn’t hire somebody like that. If one shows up, they’ll know who sent him, and they will know why. Any of our top operatives could quit this afternoon and have a better job lined up by supper time—more money, more perks, no direct supervision at all, and they could work from home if they wanted. You might be able to draft them and keep them, but without their fullest cooperation, you won’t ever get what you want from them.”
He paused, maintaining eye contact with Hadden. Then he added, “And if you want to fire me, sir, that’s fine,
