'He's still inside,' Howard said. 'So far. Proceed with caution.'
'Copy that,' the Strike Team leader said.
Ruzhyo looked through the window over the door. The smoke bombs had obscured the trailer from view. In another few seconds, they would finish smoking and explode into white hot flares, which ought to confuse any sensor devices pointed at him.
He looked at the second button. Nodded to himself. He hadn't killed anybody in a while, but this attack was obviously military in origin, and those men and women hiding at the sniper points would be soldiers and prepared to shoot him dead if so ordered. They knew the risks of combat. And if they did not, they were about to find out.
Hidden at nine places where a sniper might conceal himself for a field of fire centered upon the trailer were twenty-seven antipersonnel units buried in large paper cups turned upside down and covered with a thin layer of sand and soil. These were variants on the old Bouncing Betty; a small compressed-gas charge would pop the cigarette-pack-sized APUs up five or six feet, where a second, stronger charge would explode and blast a handful of steel BBs all around itself in a devastating pattern. An unarmored man standing within a few yards of the APU would be cut down, dead or seriously wounded. Even with armor, some of the pellets could find a seam or unprotected spot and cause dangerous or even fatal wounds.
He pushed the button.
Howard's LOSIR com came alive with startled yells and screams, overlaid with the sounds of small explosions, both on-line and then, a second or two later, echoing across the terrain.
'Report!'
'We got a mine here, Colonel, Spalding is hit and bleeding!'
'We got blasted at S2, sir, dusted us pretty good, no injuries!'
'Reader is down, her face is a bloody mess!'
'John — look.'
Howard looked at the smoke, saw bright lights flaring through the haze. What the hell was going on here?
When the first of the smoke bombs burned down to their magnesium pots and flared, Ruzhyo opened the trailer door and stepped out. He had only fifteen yards to travel, but he needed to be in position before his heat sig would be the only one in the area, in case they had sat or high overfly surveillance.
He hurried.
The hidey-hole was disguised by a sheet of plywood, lined all around with heat-reflectives and absorbent deadstrip material. He'd glued dirt and brush on top of the board, and once in place, it was virtually invisible and solid enough to walk on. The chamber was only a meter wide by two meters long, but he wasn't planning on staying there that long.
In the hole, he squeezed a cold chemlume and got enough light so he could see to power up the battery- operated TV monitor. A camera on top of the trailer — also hidden inside the satellite dish — and a second camera in the garbage dump behind the place gave smoke-shrouded, grainy, but serviceable views of the trailer and the area around it, including his Dodge SUV.
The car was loaded with things necessary to make the rest of his plan work.
Give it a few more seconds for the smoke to clear.
'Smoke is clearing,' came the report over Howard's LOSIR.
'Proceed with extreme caution,' Howard replied.
'You still want him alive?'
Howard gritted his teeth. He had four wounded — so far — and, according to the medic, two of them hit hard enough they needed to be gotten to a hospital PDQ. The Guard copter was already on the way.
'Yes. Alive, if possible. But protect yourselves as necessary. I don't want anybody else going down, understand? If you have to shoot, you shoot.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Heads up!' Fernandez said.
Howard looked. A vehicle zoomed out of the smoke, coming up the road. Ruzhyo's SUV.
'He's running for it!'
The chatter of subgun fire echoed. Howard brought his binoculars around to frame the fleeing vehicle. He saw pockmarks appear on the metal where the bullets hit. What an idiot! Did he think he could just hop in his car and drive away?
Ruzhyo pushed the final button.
Before Howard could adjust the focus on his binoculars and get a look at the driver, the car blew up. The ground shook where they stood, and the blast wave rolled over them with a noise like the end of the world. A fireball rose inside a mushroom cloud like a miniature atomic bomb. This wasn't the gas tank going up; the car had been rigged with big explosives.
'Holy shit!' Fernandez said. 'What the hell did he have in there?'
When the smoke cleared a bit, there was nothing left of the car except part of the frame and two flaming, smoking tires. More burning debris was scattered for hundreds of meters all around.
Howard stared. Jesus Christ! What a fuck up!
'Looks like you were right to be worried, Colonel. I stand corrected.'
Howard just shook his head.
Chapter 10
Jay Gridley sat cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in an orange robe, the smell of patchouli incense heavy in the cool air. The thin reed mat under him did little to stop the cold radiating from the flagstones into his backside, and his shaved head was chilly. Through an open window, he saw snow piled ten feet thick, a blanket that shrouded everything in crisp, glistening white. A wordless vocal chant echoed in the background, a low and pulsing drone, and light inside the massive chamber was provided by hundreds of candles.
At the front of the room, seated in full lotus on a short wooden platform that put him only a few inches higher than the monks, was the head monk, Sojan Rinpoche. The man was also bald, probably seventy, and had smile wrinkles that didn't quit. Gridley could see why, after a few minutes of listening to the guru speak. He smiled a lot.
At the moment, the old man was talking about some kind of Buddhist deity:
'… in Sanskrit, he is called Yamantaka. In China, they call him Yen-an-te-chia. In Tibet, we speak of him as Gshin-rji-gshed. Everywhere, we know him as He Who Conquers Death, one of the Eight Terrible Ones, the
'He is terrible to behold, this manifestation of Manjusri bodhisattva. Long ago, during a mighty battle in Tibet, Gshin-rji-gshed took his form to engage and defeat Yama, God of Death. He has nine heads, thirty-four arms, and sixteen feet. He is the Horror to Behold, the Mighty Terror, the Trampler of Demons.
'He is,' the old man said, smiling, 'not somebody you want to fuck with.'
Gridley did a mental double take at the last sentence. That seemed weird, coming from a Tibetan holy man.
He sighed. This was the old man's scenario — if indeed he was an old man and not somebody faking it — and he didn't much care for it. Too austere. And now that he was here, he didn't really understand why he had come. What was it that he had hoped to find?
The nurse. The nurse had told him to look this guy up. After he had ripped the VR set off and thrown it on the floor because he hadn't been able to concentrate without losing it. Oh, he could still use VR, but only in a passive, customer sort of way. He couldn't create it. He couldn't manipulate it. He would begin okay, but after a
