Nimec had seen enough action in his day to realize the six men still inside it would have been killed instantly. Almost without conscious thought about how to save himself, without
Breathless, dazed, Nimec couldn’t answer at first. His left eye stung, something dripping into it, blurring it. The warm wetness streamed down his face. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow and it came away slick and red.
Nimec blinked twice to clear his vision, then found himself almost wishing he could have remained blind to the scene before him. The truckers had been immolated. One of them lay still on the ground, his clothes burned away, his charred body consumed with fire. Near him the scattered remains of another man, or perhaps more than a single man, were also ablaze.
Up, up, Nimec told himself. Sit up.
He managed it without knowing how, his glance briefly meeting DeMarco’s across the seat. And then, somehow, past DeMarco’s head, through his side window, he spotted Loren in the grass on the opposite side of the Rover, probably thrown there by the blast wave, rolling in a patch of shoulder-high grass to smother the last of the flames that had eaten away at his clothes, flailing his limbs in pain.
At the same moment, he heard a loud
Then the unmistakable rattle of semiauto fire from the woods up ahead of him, and the thicket on either side, and the barrels of VVRS III’s that had been thrust from gunports on the doors and tailgates of the cherried Rovers amid the confusion, their exterior concealment panels having sprung down as the compact subs were fitted into them from within. The Sword ops who’d already gotten out of their Rovers on Nimec’s instruction had dived between bumpers and fenders and tailgates and were also opening up, exchanging volleys with their unseen attackers out in the brush.
Nimec gathered his wits and looked around into the Rover’s backseat. Some of its passengers were still screaming. Others had gone still, very still, not making a sound. All their faces wore confused, shocked expressions that probably weren’t dissimilar to his own.
“Loren’s alive,” he said. “I’m going to try and get him.”
“You’re bleeding—”
“It’s just a cut.”
“Chief, let me do it.”
Nimec shook his head. There were more popping mortar discharges. Then whistles, blasts.
“I’ll be okay, listen,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell kind of setup this is, but they’ve got us blocked, front and rear. Radio back down the line. Get everybody piled into the armored Rovers. Might not mean anything if they take direct hits, but the rest of the vehicles might as well be tin cans, including the trucks.” He thought furiously. “They’ll need cover when they move, you decide what’s best. Then lock all the Rovers’ doors and stay put. Try and keep the passengers cool.”
“You run out in the open alone—”
Nimec cut short his protest with a slice of his hand.
An acquiescent nod. “Right.”
“Tell them to send up the Skyhawk — I just wish we had more than one of those choppers on base. Make sure the crew’s warned to expect heavy incoming. Tell them about those mortars. And whatever caught us with that blast of flame… some kind of RPGs. I don’t know. Also, we’ve got to have a microwave vidlink with the bird. Can’t be of much use to its crew down here till we know the attackers’ positions.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“All right.” Nimec could still see Loren through the window. “That guide, Steve. I need to get over to him.”
DeMarco held up a finger, snapped open a compartment on his door, and fished hurriedly inside.
“You should take this,” he said, producing a small medkit. “There’s a morphine autoinjector inside. It’ll help. And watch out for those cactus plants, or whatever the hell they are. The shit that oozes from them’s poison.”
Nimec took the medkit and gave DeMarco a purposeful nod.
Then he shut the door with a hard push and dashed back around the rear of the vehicle.
In the expanse of sedge and euphorbia, the bandits had deployed into teams of two, each man laying his mortar about twenty yards apart from his teammate’s, and a hundred yards back from the girdled trail.
Crouched beside one member of the gang, their headman watched him feed a high-explosive fragmentation round into his tube, set for drop fire to allow faster discharge than manual triggering with the lever. The round slid down the barrel and hit the firing pin at its base cap. Its primer cartridge detonated at once, igniting propellent charges slotted into the fin blades.
An instant later the projectile launched from the muzzle in a gout of flame and smoke. It rocketed across the sky and thudded into the ground at the convoy’s rear, chewing a hole in the trail to hamper its retreat.
No sooner did it strike than the bandit was dropping another round into the tube.
The headman raised his binoculars to his eyes and looked toward the front of the column. Still out of his vehicle, the UpLink security chief had begun shuffling his way back along its side. He held his firearm in one hand, carried something else in the other, a box or case of some sort…
The headman produced a curious grunt. Then he noticed the man writhing in the grass beyond the 4?4. It wasn’t possible to get a clear view of him in the patchy thicket, but he believed it might be the guide.
His curiosity became satisfaction, a smile touching his lips. The UpLink security man was rushing toward the guide, exposing himself to try to aid him.
It was almost too good to be true, he thought. His entire reason for stalling the convoy farther up the road had been to bring the security man closer to the trees, into easy range of the sniper who waited with explicit orders to take him out. Indeed, all the orders he’d given his men were clear and explicit, following guidelines of similar specificity from the Congolese warlord Fela Geteye, with whom they were in league. Whom warlord Geteye dealt with on the next level up the chain was none of the men’s affair. Such linkages were intricate, preserved in secrecy, and shared only as necessary. What mattered most to the headman’s
It did not mean the headman himself was ignorant of likely connections. His choice of livelihood bore a great many perils, capture or betrayal high on the index, and experience had taught him one should always have a reserve of information worth dealing. He had no qualms accepting jobs on a need-to-know basis. But if those at the top were mindful of their safety, why not he? The trick was to strike a balance — too much knowledge could be dangerous, too little shortsighted and foolish.
The headman knew warlord Geteye had ties to a Cameroonian dealer of stolen arms and technology who had bought favor with many lawmen throughout the region, among them, a police commander in Port-Gentil. The headman knew this commander owed his appointment to an even more highly ranked member of the Police Gabonaise, no lesser than a division chief said to be the puppet of an influential government minister. And although he did not know the minister’s name, the headman had heard credible rumors that his strings were, in turn, pulled by a
