I got behind the hood of his Humvee. Rested my gun hand on the warm metal. The camouflage paint was rough. It felt like it had sand mixed in with it. I aimed up at the hut. I was down in a slight dip now and it was above me. I fired again, high on the other side of the window reveal.
“Marshall?” I called. “You want suicide by cop, that’s OK with me.”
No reply. I was three rounds down. Twelve rounds to go. A smart guy might just lie on the floor and let me blast away. All my trajectories would be upward in relation to him because I was down in a dip. And because of the windowsills. I could try banking rounds off the ceiling and the far wall but ricochets didn’t necessarily work like billiards. They weren’t predictable and they weren’t reliable.
I saw movement at the window.
He was armed.
And not with a handgun either. I saw a big wide shotgun barrel come out at me. Black. It looked about the size of a rainwater pipe. I figured it for an Ithaca Mag-10. A handsome piece. If you wanted a shotgun, the Mag-10 was about as good as it got. It was nicknamed the Roadblocker because it was effective against soft-skinned vehicles. I ducked backward and put the Humvee’s engine block between myself and the hut. Made myself as small as I could get.
Then I heard the radio again. Inside the hut. It was a very short transmission and faint and full of static and I couldn’t make out any actual words but the rhythm and the inflection of the burst came across like a three-syllable question. Maybe Say again? It was what you heard after you issued a confusing order.
I heard a repeat transmission. Say again? Then I heard Marshall’s voice. Barely audible. Four syllables. Fluffy consonants at the beginning. Affirmative, maybe.
Who was he talking to and what was he ordering?
“Give it up, Marshall,” I called. “How much shit do you want to be in?”
It was what a hostage negotiator would have called a pressure question. It was supposed to have a negative psychological effect. But it made no legal sense. If he shot me, he would go to Leavenworth for four hundred years. If he didn’t, he would go for three hundred years. No practical difference. A rational man would ignore it.
He ignored it. He was plenty rational. He ignored it and he fired the big Ithaca instead, which is exactly what I would have done.
In theory it was the moment I was waiting for. Firing a long gun that requires a physical input before it can be fired again leaves the shooter vulnerable after pulling the trigger. I should have come out from cover immediately and returned lethal aimed fire. But the sheer stunning impact of the ten-gauge cartridge slowed me down by half a second. I wasn’t hit. The spray pattern was low and tight and it caught the Humvee’s front wheel. I felt the tire blow and the truck dropped its front corner ten inches into the sand. There was smoke and dust everywhere. When I looked half a second later the shotgun barrel was gone. I fired up at the top of the window reveal. I wanted a tight ricochet that came down vertically and drilled through his head.
I didn’t get one. He called out to me.
“I’m reloading,” he said.
I paused. He probably wasn’t. A Mag-10 holds three rounds. He had only fired one. He probably wanted me to come out of cover and charge his position. Whereupon he would rear up and smile and blow me away. I stayed where I was. I didn’t have the luxury of reloading. I was four down, eleven to go.
I heard the radio again. Brief static, four syllables, a descending scale. Acknowledged, out. Fast and casual, like a piano trill.
Marshall fired again. I saw the black barrel move in the window and there was another loud explosion and the far back corner of the Humvee dropped ten inches. Just dumped itself straight down. I flattened in the dirt for a second and squinted underneath. He was shooting the tires out. A Humvee can run on flat tires. That was part of the design demand. But it can’t run on no tires. And a ten-gauge shotgun doesn’t just flatten a tire. It removes a tire. It tears the rubber right off the rim and leaves little tiny shreds of it all over a twenty-foot radius.
He was disabling his own Humvee and he was going to make a break for mine.
I got up on my knees again and crouched behind the hood. Now I was actually safer than I had been before. The big vehicle was canted right down on the passenger side so that there was a solid angled wedge of metal between me and him all the way to the desert floor. I pressed up against the front fender. Lined myself up with the engine block. Put six hundred pounds of cast iron between me and the gun. I could smell diesel. A fuel line had been hit. It was leaking fast. No tires, nothing in the tank. And no percentage in soaking my shirt with diesel and lighting it and tossing it in the hut. I had no matches. And diesel isn’t flammable the way gasoline is. It’s just a greasy liquid. It needs to be vaporized and put under intense pressure before it explodes. That was why the Humvee was designed with a diesel engine. Safety.
“Now I’m reloading,” Marshall called.
I waited. Was he or wasn’t he? He probably was. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to rush him. I had a better idea. I crawled along the Humvee’s tilted flank and stopped at the rear bumper. Looked past it and scoped out my view. To the south I could see my own Humvee. To the north I could see almost all the way to the hut. There was an open space twenty-five yards wide in between. No-man’s-land. Marshall would have to traverse twenty-five continuous yards of open ground to get from the hut to my Humvee. Right through my field of fire. He would probably run backward, shooting as he went. But his weapon packed only three rounds fully loaded. If he spaced them out, he would be firing once every eight yards. If he loosed them all off at the start full blast and unaimed, he would be naked all the rest of the way to the truck. Either option, he was going down. That was for damn sure. I had eleven Parabellums and an accurate pistol and a steel bumper to rest my wrist on.
I smiled.
I waited.
Then the Sheridan came apart behind me.
I heard a hum in the air like a shell the size of a Volkswagen was incoming and I turned in time to see the old tank smashed to pieces like it had been hit by a train. It jumped a whole foot off the ground and the fake plywood skirts splintered and spun away and the turret came off its ring and turned over slowly in the air and thumped down in the sand ten feet from me.
There was no explosion. Just a huge bass metal-to-metal thump. And then nothing but eerie silence.
I turned back. Watched the open ground. Marshall was still in the hut. Then a shadow passed over my head and I saw a shell in the air with that weird slow-motion optical illusion you get with long-range artillery. It flew right over me in a perfect arc and hit the desert floor fifty yards farther on. It kicked up a huge plume of dust and sand and buried itself deep.
No explosion.
They were firing practice rounds at me.
I heard the whine of turbines in the far distance. The faint clatter of drive sprockets and idlers and track-return rollers. The muffled roar of engines as tanks raced toward me. I heard a faint boom as a big gun fired. Then nothing. Then a hum in the air. Then more smashing and tearing of metal as the Sheridan was hit again. No explosion. A practice round is the same as a regular shell, the same size, the same weight, with a full load of propellant, but no explosive in the nose cone. It’s just a lump of dumb metal. Like a handgun bullet, except it’s five inches wide and more than a foot long.
Marshall had switched their training target.
That was what all the radio chatter had been about. Marshall had ordered them away from whatever they were doing five miles to the west. He had ordered them to move in toward him and put rounds down on his own position. They had been incredulous. Say again? Say again? Marshall had replied: Affirmative.
He had switched their training target to cover his escape.
How many tanks were out there? How long did I have? If twenty tank guns quartered the area they would hit a man-sized target before very long. Within minutes. That was clear. The law of averages absolutely guaranteed it. And to be hit by a bullet five
inches wide and more than a foot long would be no fun at all. A near-miss would be just as bad. A fifty-pound chunk of metal hitting the Humvee I was hiding behind would shred it to supersonic pieces as small and sharp as K-bar blades. Even without an explosive charge the sheer kinetic energy alone would make that happen. It would be like a grenade going off right next to me.
I heard a ragged boom, boom north and west of me. Low, dull sounds. Two guns firing in a tight sequence. Closer than they had been before. The air hissed. One shell went long but the other came in low on a flat trajectory and hit the Sheridan square in the side. It went in and it came out, straight through the aluminum hull like a .38 through a tin can. If Lieutenant Colonel Simon had been there to see it, he might have changed his mind about the future.
More guns fired. One after the other. A ragged salvo. There were no explosions. But the brutal calamitous physical noise was maybe worse. It was some kind of primeval clamor. The air hissed. There was deep brainless thudding as dead shells hit the earth. There were shuddering bass peals of metal against metal, like ancient giants clashing with swords. Huge chunks of wreckage from the Sheridan cartwheeled away and clanged and shivered and skidded on the sand. There was dust and dirt everywhere in the air. I was choking on it. Marshall was still in the hut. I stayed down in a low crouch and kept my Beretta aimed at the open ground. Waited. Forced my hand to keep still. Stared at the empty space. Just stared at it, desperately. I didn’t understand. Marshall had to know he couldn’t wait much longer. He had called down a hailstorm of metal. We were being attacked by Abrams tanks. My Humvee was going to get hit any second. His only avenue of escape was going to vanish right before his eyes. It was going to flip up in the air and come down on its roof. The law of averages guaranteed it. Or else the hut would get hit and collapse all around him first. He would be buried in the rubble. One thing or the other would happen. For sure. It had to. So why the hell was he waiting?
Then I got up on my knees and stared at the hut.
Because I knew why.
Suicide.
I had offered him suicide by cop but he had already chosen suicide by tank. He had seen me coming and he had guessed who I was. Like Vassell and Coomer he had been sitting numb day after day just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And finally there it was, at last, the other shoe, coming straight at him through the desert dust in a Humvee. He had thought and he had decided and he had gotten on the radio.
He was going down, and he was taking me with him.
I could hear the tanks pretty close now. Not more than eight or nine hundred yards. I could hear the squeal and clatter of their tracks. They were still moving fast. They would be fanning out, like it said in the field manual. They would be pitching and rolling. They would be kicking up rooster tails of dust. They would be forming a loose mobile semicircle with their big guns pointing inward like the spokes of a wheel.
I crawled back and looked at my Humvee. But if I went for it Marshall would shoot me down from the safety of the hut. No question about that. The twenty-five yards of open ground must have looked as good to him as they looked to me.
I waited.
I heard the boom of a gun and the whump of a shell and I stood up and ran the other way. I heard another boom and another whump and the first shell slammed into the Sheridan and bowled it all the way over and then the second hit Marshall’s Humvee and demolished it completely. I threw myself behind the north corner of the hut and rolled tight against the base of the wall and listened to shards of metal rattling against the cinder blocks and the screeching as the old Sheridan’s armor finally came apart.
The tanks were very close now. I could hear their engine notes rising and falling as they breasted rises and crashed through dips. I could hear their tracks slapping against their skirts. I could hear their hydraulics whining as they traversed their guns.
I got to my feet. Stood up straight. Wiped dust out of my eyes. Stepped over to the iron door. Saw the bright crater my gun had made. I knew Marshall had to be either standing in the south window looking for me running or standing in the west window looking for me dead behind the wreckage. I knew he was tall and I knew he was right-handed. I fixed an abstract target in my mind. Moved my left hand and put it on the doorknob. Waited.
The next shells were fired so close that I heard boom whump boom whump with no pause in between. I pulled the door and stepped inside. Marshall was right there in front of me. He was facing away, looking south, framed by the brightness of the window. I aimed at his right shoulder blade and pulled the trigger and a shell took the roof off the hut. The room was instantly full of dust and I was hit by falling beams and corrugated sheets and stung by fragments of flying concrete. I went down on my knees. Then I collapsed on my front. I was pinned. I couldn’t see Marshall. I heaved myself back up on my knees and flailed my arms to fight off the debris. The dust was sucking upward in a ragged spiral and I could see bright blue sky above me. I could hear tank tracks all around me. Then I heard another boom whump and the front corner of the hut blew away. It was there, and then it wasn’t. It was solid, and then it was a spray of gray dust coming toward me at the speed of sound. A gale of dusty air whipped after it and knocked me off my feet again.
I struggled back up and crawled forward. Just butted my way through fallen beams and lumps of broken concrete. I threw twisted sheets of roofing iron aside. I was like a plow. Like a bulldozer, grinding forward, piling debris to the left and right of me. There was too much dust to see anything except the sunlight. It was right there in front of me. Brightness ahead, darkness behind. I kept on going.
I found the Mag-10. Its barrel was crushed. I threw it aside and plowed on. Found Marshall on the floor. He wasn’t moving. I pulled stuff off him and grabbed his collar and hauled him up into a sitting position. Dragged him forward until I came to the front wall. I put my back against it and slid upright until I felt the window aperture. I was choking and spitting dust. It was in my eyes. I dragged him upward and hauled him over the windowsill and dumped him out. Then I fell out after him. Got up on my hands and knees and grabbed his collar again and dragged him away. Outside the hut the dust was clearing. I could see tanks, maybe three hundred yards to the left and right of us. Lots of tanks. Hot metal in the harsh sunlight. They had outflanked us. They were holding in a perfect circle, engines idling, guns flat, aiming over open sights. I heard boom whump again and saw a bright muzzle flash from one of them and saw it pitch backward from the recoil. I saw its shell pass right over us. I saw it in the air. Heard it break the sound barrier with a crack like a neck snapping. Heard it smash into the remains of the hut. Felt more dust and concrete shower down on my back. I went down on my face and lay still, trapped in no-man’s-land.
Then another tank fired. I saw it jerk backward from the recoil. Seventy tons, smashed back so hard its front end came right up in the air. Its shell screamed overhead. I started moving again. I dragged Marshall behind me and crawled through the dirt like I was swimming. I had no idea what he had said on the radio. No idea what his orders had been. He had to have told them he was moving out. Maybe he had told them to disregard the Humvees. Maybe that explained their Say again? Maybe he had told them the Humvees were fair game. Maybe that was what they had found hard to believe.
But I knew they wouldn’t stop firing now. Because they couldn’t see us. Dust was drifting like smoke and the view out of a buttoned-up Abrams wasn’t great to begin with. It was like looking lengthwise through a grocery bag with a small square hole cut out of the bottom. I paused and batted dust out of the way and coughed and peered forward. We were close to my Humvee.
It looked straight and level.
It looked intact.
So far.
I stood up and raced the last ten feet and hauled Marshall around to the passenger side and opened the door and crammed him into the front. Then I climbed right in over him and dumped myself into the driver’s seat. Hit that big red button and fired it up. Shoved it into gear and stamped on the gas so hard th
e acceleration slammed the door shut. Then I turned the lights full on and put my foot to the floor and charged. Summer would have been proud of me. I drove straight for the line of tanks. Two hundred yards. One hundred yards. I picked my spot and aimed carefully and burst through the gap between two main battle tanks doing more than eighty miles an hour.
I slowed down after a mile. After another mile, I stopped. Marshall was alive. But he was unconscious and he was bleeding all over the place. My aim had been good. His shoulder had a big messy nine-millimeter broken-bone through-and-through gunshot wound in it and he had plenty of other cuts from the hut’s collapse. His blood was all mixed with cement dust like a maroon paste. I got him arranged on the seat and strapped him in tight with the harness. Then I broke out the first-aid kit and put pressure bandages on both sides of his shoulder and jabbed him with morphine. I wrote M on his forehead with a grease pencil like you were supposed to in the field. That way the medics wouldn’t overdose him when he got to the hospital.
Then I walked around in the fresh air for a spell. Just walked up and down the track, aimlessly. I coughed and spat and dusted myself down as well as I could. I was bruised and sore from being pelted with concrete fragments. Two miles behind me I could still hear tanks firing. I guessed they were waiting for a cease-fire order. I guessed they were likely to run out of rounds before they got one.
I kept the 2-40 A/C going all the way back. Halfway there, Marshall woke up. I saw his chin come up off his chest. Saw him glance ahead, and then at me to his left. He was full of morphine and his right arm was useless, but I was still cautious. If he grabbed the wheel with his left he might force us off the track. He might run us over some unexploded debris. Or a tortoise. So I took my right hand off the wheel and reverse-punched him square between the eyes. It was a good solid smack. It put him right back to sleep. Manual anesthetic. He stayed out all the way back to the post.
Lee Child - [Jack Reacher 01-16] Page 338
