In an instant, the van had disappeared down the street they had just come up. Realizing that the van had to be the one they were pursuing, Wittworth turned to his driver and ordered him to move out and follow the van. The driver, however, did not immediately respond. With his hands frozen to the steering wheel in a death grip, his eyes wide open and his mouth gaping, he was hyperventilating, trying hard to catch his breath and calm down. Wittworth's first attempt to get his attention by yelling elicited no response. The man was shaken. Reaching over, Wittworth grabbed the man's arm and yelled again. The driver, his mouth still gaping, slowly turned his head toward Wittworth and stared at his commander with wide, unblinking eyes. Wittworth shook him and repeated his order. There was a moment's hesitation before a weak, high-pitched
'Okay' issued from the driver's throat.
By the time Kozak had mounted her Bradley and put on her armored crewman's helmet, Wittworth was. back on the radio, issuing orders as he tried desperately to find his location on the street map and hang on at the same time. Briscoe, unable to do anything but hang on, watched the white pizza truck zigzag in and out of traffic. Briscoe thought about putting on his seat belt, but decided against it. To do so would keep him from sticking his head between Wittworth and the driver. But even with his head next to Wittworth's, the only thing he could get through to Wittworth above the noise was that they were on U.S. 83 headed south out of town.
The Humvee driver, having regained his nerve, used the superior mobility of his vehicle to close the distance, running up over sidewalks and across lawns, and scattering pedestrians that stood in their way as they continued their pursuit. He was in the process of negotiating a street corner while Wittworth was looking down at his map when the rear doors of the van flew open. The only warning Wittworth and his driver got was Briscoe's yelling, above the roar of the engine, 'Jesus Christ! Duck!'
Looking up from his map, Wittworth was just in time to see the muzzle flash from an assault rifle aimed right at him. The driver saw the same thing and, as before, reacted by jerking the wheel to the side, running the Humvee into an aluminum street lamppost. For an instant, the Humvee pitched up, as if it were about to climb the post, before its weight brought the lamppost crashing down, impaling the Humvee on the stump of the post and pitching Briscoe forward over the windshield and onto the hood.
The same jarring stop launched Wittworth forward just as he was ducking to avoid the gunfire. The forward movement and stop drove Wittworth's Kevlar helmet into the glass windshield like a battering ram.
When everything finally settled, the driver jumped out of the Humvee and turned to Wittworth, who was in the process of freeing his helmet from the glass windshield and slowly sitting up. 'That's it, Captain.
That's it. Twice in one day is enough for me. Damned sure not gonna try for strike three.'
Shaken by a near collision, being fired at, and piling up on a streetlamp post, and dazed by the impact of his head into the windshield, Wittworth looked to his right at the ground, noticing the front wheels of the Humvee were off of it. Without admitting it, he too realized that he had had enough for one day. But he wasn't ready to give up. As he sat upright and shook himself out, Wittworth's shock was quickly replaced by embarrassment, then, in quick order, by a fit of rage. Grabbing the radio hand mike, he keyed the radio net and ordered all his platoon leaders to pursue and stop a white pizza van with Mexicans in it at all costs. Those bastards, he thought, were not going to embarrass the United States Army and get away with it.
At 3rd Platoon's roadblock, Kozak and her people waited. The 3rd Squad, who had been on duty at the roadblock when the call came in, continued to man it. Their Bradley, with the engine running, the gunner and track commander up and alert, the main gun pointed north toward Laredo, sat blocking the right side of the road. Kozak's Bradley sat on the opposite side of the road, also with its engine running and main gun pointed toward Laredo. The other two squads, with SFC Rivera, were mounted and ready to move out, their Bradleys sitting just off the road fifty meters south of Kozak's and the 3rd Squad's Bradley.
As they waited, watching for any sign of the enemy pizza van, Kozak tried to contact Wittworth, who, for some reason, was not responding.
She was unsure of her instructions. His last orders, 'to pursue and stop' the pizza van, were, at best, ambiguous. Kozak didn't know if she was required to challenge the people in the pizza van, offering them an opportunity to submit to a search or surrender before she opened fire. If they showed any signs of resistance or flight, was she authorized to use deadly force? What, she wondered, constituted resistance, and how much deadly force was too much? What did Wittworth have in mind, Kozak wondered, when he ordered them to stop the pizza van? A simple physical roadblock? Warning shots from small arms? Or did he expect her to use 25mm high- explosive rounds and simply blow the van away?
All these questions, and more, were racing through Kozak's mind when Tyson yelled into the intercom, 'Here they come! There's a white van heading for us. And he's in a hurry.'
Hoisting her binoculars up to her face, Kozak searched the road to the north. The white van Tyson had spotted was, indeed, headed south toward them as fast as it could go. On top of the van's roof, a red plastic pizza identified the van as the one they were after. This was it. There wasn't any time for questions, no time for clarification. She was on her own. Self-doubt and the uneasy feeling that comes with it were gone. In its place, a nervous rush of anticipation and a tingle of excitement. This was it.
Letting the binoculars fall until the strap around her neck stopped them, Kozak stood up on her seat, bending over until she could see Staff Sergeant John Strange, squad leader of the 3rd Squad. Leaning against the side of his Bradley, Strange was talking to one of his soldiers when he heard Kozak yelling for him to come over closer to her Bradley.
Picking up his rifle, Strange began to trot over toward Kozak.
Kozak didn't wait for Strange to reach her before she began to issue her orders. 'Sergeant Strange. The white van coming down the road, stop it.
But do not, repeat, do not shoot unless fired on. Is that clear?'
Stopping short, with his M-16 in his left hand, Strange waved his right hand and nodded. Without further ado, he turned in place and, in a booming voice, called his squad to action. 'Okay, 3rd Squad. This is it.
Show time. I wanna see everybody up and ready. And no shootin' unless I or the LT say so.' He looked around as his people put on helmets, crouched behind the concrete road barrier, and prepared themselves. Just to be sure, he repeated the last part of his order. 'No shootin' until you hear the order from me or the lieutenant.'
Satisfied that all was ready where she was, Kozak keyed the radio tuned to the platoon frequency. Turning around in the open hatch and looking south toward the other two Bradleys of her platoon, Kozak alerted Rivera that she thought the van they were watching for was coming at them. She instructed Rivera to stand by with the 1st and 2nd squads and be ready to move. Rivera acknowledged her orders with a short, functional
'Wilco, out,' and dropped off the air. With the platoon ready, Kozak next dropped down into the turret and prepared to switch the radio frequency to the company command net when Tyson's voice came over the intercom. 'They've seen us and stopped, LT.'
Forgetting about the company net, Kozak put her head up to the eyepiece of the primary sight. Tyson already had the van in the sight, crosshairs laid on the center mass of the vehicle, which was sitting some five hundred meters north of them on the road. 'Are you sure they saw us, Sergeant Tyson?'
Taking his eyes off his sight, Tyson looked at Kozak, seated to his right, for a second. At a range of five hundred meters, he thought, even if he missed the red and white fifty-five-gallon drums, concrete Jersey barriers, barbed wire, and stop signs of the roadblock, even a blind man would see the two twenty-five-ton, nine-foot-nine- inch-high Bradleys, standing right behind the roadblock. Holding his tongue, he gave a simple, short response. 'Yeah, LT, they saw us.'
'They're backing up.'
Swinging back around to his sight, Tyson caught the image of the van just before it completed a wild U-turn in the middle of the road.
Even before the van finished the turn, Kozak was up out of the hatch and yelling orders to Sergeant Strange. 'Sergeant Strange, you stay here with the 3rd Squad. I'm taking the rest of the platoon and going after the van.'
As she dropped down and ordered Rivera to bring the rest of the platoon up, Strange had his people open a gap in the barrier. Hearing Kozak's order to Strange, Freedman, her driver, anticipated her next order. He let the park brake off, put the Bradley's transmission into gear, and prepared to roll. Without waiting for the rest of the platoon, Kozak told Freedman to move out.
Scurrying out of the way just in time, the men of 3rd Squad watched as Kozak's Bradley whipped around the barrels and wire, knocking one of the barrels over in the process. Its engine whining to a high pitch, then dropping
