There was, he observed, a considerable amount available to them, mainly crawler cranes, bulldozers, excavators, wheeled compactors, and other heavy equipment that had been rolled into the area for construction of some new buildings. They were big and stationary, their sheer size making them ideal places to hide behind.
Graham continued to orbit the scene in a weaving pattern. Out beyond the bulking machinery he saw the radial web of access routes that led in toward the installation’s hub, and turning his gaze northward, spotted the burning ruins of two chase cars on the main roadway from the motor pool. An emergency rescue vehicle and additional cars had pulled up nearby. A number of security men were walking up and down the road with long- handled mine sweepers, while others milled around the wreckage in a desperate attempt to extinguish the flames and locate survivors.
Then he saw what had sent the invaders scrambling. Their roof lights flashing, two quick-response squads were speeding toward them on secondary access roads, one on the left, the other on the right, each three-car group escorted by a Skyhawk. They would be on top of the jeep convoy within seconds.
“We sending down pictures yet?” he asked, glancing at Mitch.
Mitch nodded again and gestured at the television screen. It showed a detailed IR image of the gunmen in one of the jeeps.
“Nice shot, real nice,” Graham said. “Now let’s pray the guys on the ground are seeing them clear as we are.”
The pictures were just fine, coming through on the monitors of the chase cars and helicopters exactly as they appeared to Graham and Winter in the air. Moreover, the information relayed by those pictures proved invaluable to the QR squads, giving them an instantaneous heads-up on the number of invaders they would be facing, the positions they held, and the type of weapons they were carrying.
The guns in particular looked formidable, but the men in the cars took some comfort from their own specially modified firearms. The Variable Velocity Rifle System, or VVRS, was an M16 chambered for 5.56mm dual-purpose sabot rounds and fitted with a vented barrel and rotating hand guard. A twist of the hand guard would widen or narrow the vents, increasing or decreasing the amount of blowback gas within the barrel, and thus the velocity at which the rounds were discharged. At a low velocity, the padded plastic sabots would remain around the bullets and cushion their deadly impact. At a high velocity, they would peel apart like shed cocoons, and the bruiser ammunition would turn lethal.
There was little question about whether to use deadly force in the mind of QR squad leader Dan Carlysle as he came up on the convoy’s left flank. The men scrambling from the jeeps had killed without hesitation. Their weapons presented an obvious mortal threat. It had to be met with a willingness to respond in kind.
Still, Carlysle wanted explicit authorization if at all possible. Some political elements in Brazil were already upset by UpLink’s powerful security presence, and would be further incited by a small war occurring on their soil. While Carlysle was ready to make an on-the-spot decision, he was aware of the diplomatic mess that might follow and preferred getting a nod from his immediate higher-up.
Tearing along in the forward chase car, he reached for his dash microphone and hailed Thibodeau on the radio.
“You do what you gotta, Dan, hear me? We catch heat from the locals,
“Yes, sir. Over.”
Thibodeau clipped his radio back onto his belt, lit up a cigarette, and smoked in silence. Far out at the western edge of the compound he could hear a percussive exchange of gunfire, tires screeching, and more overlapping volleys punctuated by loud explosions. Christ, the whole thing was insane. He had not in his wildest imaginings expected to find himself in an engagement of this magnitude outside of the military. Nor did he relish giving orders and instructions from a distance, sending others into action rather than participating in it himself. But tonight the full responsibility of command had fallen upon his shoulders.
Still, he wished he didn’t have to hear that hellish clamor.
He dragged on his cigarette, standing outside a cluster of five low-rise concrete buildings that housed the installation’s key personnel and their families — each four stories high with between eight and ten apartments per floor, lodging a combined total of 237 men, women, and children. Thibodeau had concentrated his manpower around them in the likelihood the invaders had kidnaping or hostage taking as their goal… which was not to say there weren’t other probabilities to consider. Theft of the multimillion-dollar ISS components on base — or their design blueprints — might be an equally powerful motive for the raid, but safeguarding human lives was his foremost concern regardless.
He stood there and thought, tobacco smoke streaming slowly out his nose. Caught shorthanded, he was trying his best to manage the situation and make optimum use of his resources. Toward these ends, all non-security personnel had been restricted to their apartments for the duration of the crisis. Over two thirds of his available operatives had assembled around the residential complex, enclosing it in a defensive ring. He could see them on patrol now, and was confident they would hang tough against any attack.
However, it worried him deeply that bolstering his strength here had required shifting people away from the industrial section of the compound. The detail charged with its protection was too small in number, too thinly dispersed around a large area — a weakness that could be easily exploited by determined raiders with surprise on their side. He continued to know almost nothing about them, but what might
What might they know? Considering the damage they’d already inflicted, it seemed the answer was too much. Could they have used that knowledge to manipulate his decisions?
Thibodeau thought about that a moment, his heart pounding.
His inspection of the scene suddenly concluded, he snapped his half-finished cigarette to the ground and started off toward the warehouse and factory buildings.
Taking cover behind a jeep, Antonio balanced his Barrett.50 across its hood and aimed down its reticulated scope at the lead chase car. With the car coming straight at him, he had made a split-second decision to shoot for one of its front tires, thinking it would be an easier target than the driver, whose head was ducked low behind the windshield.
He pulled the trigger. There was a crack as the gun stock recoiled against his shoulder, then a popping out- rush of air as the tire exploded in a storm of flying rubber. The car’s front end bounced down, then up, then down. But although it slowed a little, it barely veered off course — to Antonio’s utter surprise.
Its wheels holding to the middle of the road, the car kept moving dead-on toward the convoy of jeeps.
Carlysle was racing up on the jeep pulled crosswise ahead of him when he saw the twinkle of partially suppressed muzzle flash above its hood, heard a gunshot, and then was jolted hard in his seat as a bullet blew his right front tire to shreds.
Clenching the steering wheel, he resisted the impulse to slam on his brakes, and instead tapped the pedal lightly and repeatedly with his toe. The car bounced another couple of times and tried slewing toward the right, but he held on tightly and kept it under control. In a moment he got the feel of the runflat roller that had been emplaced within the tire and was now in contact with the road, ragged bits of rubber flapping around it, its shock-absorbent elastomer surface preventing the wheel rim from being damaged, stabilizing the car, and allowing him to keep moving almost as if the shot had never been fired and his tire was still intact.
As the invaders opened up on them, the QR squads reacted according to well-rehearsed tactical procedures. Carlysle’s trio of cars broke sharply to the left and stopped aslant the road, their wheels turned outward. The other group cut to the right shoulder of the access-way on which they were approaching and halted with their tires at a similarly extreme angle. Then the men in both squads poured out the sides of their cars, using their open doors and outturned wheels for protection.
Carlysle had no sooner gotten into a crouch behind his door than bullets came ripping into it from several different directions at once. The man who’d been riding shotgun with him, a recent transfer from the Malaysian
