DeMarco was at minus twelve seconds, counting aloud into his microphone, ready to push the Type IV fog- release button on the rapid-defense touch pad console beside his left armrest, when he heard the big-bore rifle up in the trees crack for a third time, and saw Nimec drop completely out of sight in the brush.
Stunned, DeMarco called an urgent hold command.
In the Rover behind him, Wade jerked his finger away from
At the tail end of the convoy, Hollinger did the same. “Chief, you all right out there?” DeMarco said tensely over the shared communications channel.
Silence from Nimec.
DeMarco felt his stomach knot.
“I’m okay,” Nimec answered. Flat on his stomach in the grass, his mouth full of dirt, he’d been hauling Loren up beside him as DeMarco’s tense radio call went out, too busy to respond at once. “Have to stay low. That son of a bitch in the tree almost took me out with that last shot. I think he’s using a thermal sight.”
There was momentary silence in his earpiece.
“Hang on, chief,” DeMarco said. “I’ll get you back in here—”
Nimec cut him short. “Forget me,” he said. “I told you to evac those sitting duck vehicles.”
“I was about make the call. Use the Type Four mist for cover—”
“So use it.”
“That sharpshooter’s got you pinned. You start moving again, trying to lug a wounded man with you, the fucker’ll nail you in a second.”
Nimec inhaled, wiped blood from his forehead. He’d gotten some juice from a broken euphorbia stem into the cut, and it burned as though on fire.
“If I’m being scoped through a thermal, Type Four’s what I need,” he said, lying through his teeth.
“That stuff won’t disperse fast enough to screen you—”
“I’ll keep hugging the ground, find the Rover once the smoke starts to lift.”
DeMarco waited several heartbeats before answering him.
“You’ll never make it that way,” he said at last. “I can use fog oil instead…”
Nimec inhaled. He wasn’t about to fool anybody here, leaving him to pull rank.
“No,” he said. “You’ve got any sudden ideas in your head, you damn well better shake them.”
DeMarco was silent again.
“Steve—”
“Your signal’s breaking up, chief. Couldn’t hear you.”
“What do you
“Getting worse, I’m losing you—”
“Don’t pull this on me, Steve…”
“Lost you,” DeMarco said very clearly over their comlink. “Proceeding at my own discretion. Over.”
The headman had determined he’d waited long enough. An ambush must have surprise and speed; lose either, allow the situation to become static, and it would fail.
Lowering his glasses so they hung over his chest on their strap, he brought his palm-size tactical radio to his mouth and sent out his command to the men he’d divided up on both sides of the trail. His voice was level and controlled.
In the brush at the convoy’s rear, in the forest up ahead, the bandits left their stationary positions and started to converge on the vehicles according to plan.
Moments after breaking contact with Nimec — hanging up the phone on him, figuratively speaking — DeMarco resumed his countdown where he’d left off, twelve seconds minus. He’d moved his finger away from the Type-IV release button on his touch pad to another about an eighth of an inch over to its right.
The lighted button he was now ready to push was marked SGF2, for petroleum smoke-generator fog formulation two, which, in truth, was hardly different from the diesel-and-oil smoke pot formula that had been used on battlefields since World War II. And while it created a quick, dense visual screen and did a good job muddling
That limitation was precisely what DeMarco wanted — no, needed — to put him on more or less equal terms with his opposite number in the treetop.
“Eleven, ten, nine, I want everybody set to go…”
An eye on his digital dashboard clock, DeMarco was also getting set, practicing what he preached as he ticked off the seconds over his comlink — only he would be going very much his own way.
“… eight, seven, send up the smoke!”
DeMarco hit his console button and white SGF2 vapor began pouring from his Rover’s tail pipe, Wade and Hollinger releasing it from the exhausts of their respective vehicles at the same instant, the two of them acting on his direct order.
DeMarco looked down at the weapon he’d taken from a hidden underseat compartment, resting all sixteen pounds of it comfortably across his lap even as he’d been having his little clash of opinion with Nimec. UpLink arms designers called it a Big Daddy VVRS, their own version of what master planners with the Pentagon’s Future Land Warrior program were dubbing an “objective individual combat weapon,” or OICW, which was
Ninety percent of the time, Sword’s munitions designers were way ahead of the curve, but every so often they found themselves playing catch up. When that happened, they always compensated by pulling into first place.
The Big Daddy was a single-trigger, dual-barreled, integrated firing system, its lower barrel chambered for 5.56-mm VVRS lethal/nonlethal sabot rounds, and its upper barrel a 20-mm fused multipurpose munitions launcher; a microcomputer-assisted, thermal image/laser dot range-finder targeting scope on top. This was quite the whole package rolled into one.
Hoping it would do the trick for him, DeMarco continued to read the numbers on his dash clock aloud, getting there now, getting there, three, two, one…
And gripped the Big Daddy in both hands as he pushed out his door into the churning smoke.
In the 4?4’s rear compartment, all four of its terrified passengers sat watching everything beyond their windows dissolve into a blank white void, as if the world were simply being erased before their eyes. Without exchanging a word, they had linked hands on the seat between them, bowed their heads, and begun moving their lips in spontaneous, silent prayer — each according to his or her individual belief, desire to believe, or willing abandonment to the possibility that a higher power might be stirred into turning an ear in their direction.
As one, they petitioned not for their own lives, but for those of DeMarco, Nimec, and the people from the evacuated vehicles somewhere out in the spreading whiteness—
Out there in the hell they could no longer see.
Out, out, and out.
They emptied from the death-trap trucks and 4?4s, a flood of over twenty executives, engineers, and local hands. Their Sword escort closed ranks around them even as they rushed onto the trail, guiding them through billows of turbine-blown oil fog in two groups of different sizes — the larger one running toward the pair of armored Rovers at the head of the convoy, a much smaller number turning the other way, dashing for the single armored vehicle at their rear.
The passengers were not the only ones in need of immediate evac. Three of the Sword ops who’d exited their vehicles for a look-see in the seconds before the raid commenced had taken serious hits — two of them sliced up
