Corsair of-6

by Clive Cussler

  Something sticking up from the otherwise barren desert caught Linc’s attention. It was less than a quarter mile off to their left. He wasn’t sure what it was. From a distance and in the uncertain light, it appeared to be pulsating. He pointed it out to Linda and Mark. Neither knew what to make of it. They were a mile from the abandoned truck, but Linc felt it was worth a look, so he parked the Pig behind a low dune and killed the engine.

  “Mark, grab me my REC7, will you?” Linc asked. Next to him, Linda drew a Glock 19, the compact version of the 17, one of the most popular combat pistols in the world.

  Mark opened the door to the rear compartment and handed Linc his assault rifle. Not as proficient with small arms as he was with the Oregon’s state-of-the-art arsenal, Murph tucked an antique Model 1911 .45 caliber pistol into the small of his back when he unlimbered his lanky frame from the truck.

  The three of them kept in a crouch and used natural cover to approach the unknown object thrust up from the ground. When they were fifty yards off, they heard an obscene crying sound, something that wasn’t human but still reminded them all of an infant’s scream.

  “What the hell is that thing?” Mark asked with superstitious dread.

  Linc was just ahead of the other two, his rifle tucked high against his shoulder, as he peered intently, trying to understand what he was seeing. The object looked like an inverted cross, but there were two dark shapes moving on either side of the cross, shuffling around in an ungainly motion.

  Then one of the shapes spread a pair of wide black wings, and Linc knew immediately what he was seeing. A man had been crucified with his head pointed toward the ground, and a pair of bald-necked vultures was sitting on the crux of his underarms. The feathers around their heads were matted with gore, as they feasted upon the corpse. One had torn off a strip of flesh that now hung in its beak. It jerked its head back and forth to force the meat down its gullet.

  Linc knew from an experience in central Africa when he was with the SEALs that no warning shot in the world would chase the repugnant birds from their favored carrion. He fired for effect, putting two rounds downrange, and the vultures were blown off their unholy perch. A couple of feathers drifted lazily on the slight breeze and settled a few feet away from their bodies.

  “Oh, God . . . Oh, God . . . Oh, God,” Mark Murphy kept repeating, but, to his credit, he stayed with Linc and Linda as they drew nearer.

  The birds had inflicted unspeakable wounds to the body. They’d had days to tear and rip into the man’s flesh, but there was enough recognizable to see he was Caucasian and he’d died from a single bullet to the head. Because of the blood that had soaked into the ground below the crucifix, it was impossible to tell if he’d been shot before or after he’d been strung up. Being only a mile from the drill truck, it wasn’t a leap in logic to assume that this was what remained of one of the State Department people.

  In Linc’s mind he could concede that the terrorists might have felt that killing the man had been an operational necessity. But the desecration of his body in an intentional perversion of Christ’s death had been done merely for the fun of it.

  Without a word, Linc started back to the Pig to get a shovel.

  The grisly task took twenty minutes in the soft soil, and when he was finished only a thin sheen of sweat greased his torso and shaved head. While he worked, Linda and Mark cast ahead for the truck only to discover it had been moved since the satellite flyby. They found clearly defined tire tracks leading off to the west. They also saw a second set of tracks from a vehicle lighter than the drill truck. Between the two sets of tracks was a single brass shell casing that still smelled of gunpowder, and a red-black stain in the earth that was being painstakingly cleared away one sand grain at a time by columns of ants.

  When they told Linc what they’d seen, all agreed that the State Department team had inadvertently crossed the border into Libya, where they had been discovered by a patrol. For some reason, one of their party had been shot in the head and the others taken prisoner. The body had been driven a short distance and crucified.

  “It’s possible they saw Katamora’s plane fly overhead,” Mark suggested. “Realizing it was in trouble, they might have decided to investigate.”

  “And they just happened to run into a border patrol?” Linda’s comment was more a dubious statement than a question.

  “Not a border patrol,” Linc countered, sensing where Linda was heading. “The terrorists sent out teams along the projected flight path to eliminate anyone who saw the plane.”

  “Judging from where the ambush took place, the State people were well south of their own base camp,” Mark pointed out. “They were in the right place only it was the wrong time.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Linc asked Linda Ross.

  As the Corporation’s vice president of operations, she was the ranking member on the team. She considered calling Max and leaving the decision up to him, but Hanley hadn’t seen the condition of the body, couldn’t feel what she’d felt at that moment when she realized what it was. When it came to tactical matters, Linda rarely allowed her emotions to interfere with her decisions. No good commander does. However, this time, looking at her companions, she knew the right call was to go after the butchers who did this. With luck, they would take one alive. It was doubtful a foot soldier would know the overall plans these people had for the Secretary of State, but any intelligence was better than nothing.

  “They’ve got a hell of a head start,” she said, her jaw barely moving because of her anger.

  “Don’t matter to me,” Linc said.

  “If it makes it easier,” Mark said, “there’s a fifty-fifty chance the two other Americans were taken prisoner when the Libyans took their truck.”

  Linda hadn’t thought of that, and it was the last piece of information to cement her decision. “Mount up.”

  Tracking the drill truck’s tire tracks across the desert was as easy as following the dotted lines on a country road. The vehicle was heavy enough that the marks hadn’t yet succumbed to the constant scouring of the wind. And when the sun sank over some distant mountains, Mark activated the Pig’s FLIR system. Designed for attack helicopters, the Forward Looking Infrared system could detect ambient heat sources and would give them a warning many miles off if they approached the warm engine of the truck.

  Linc strapped a pair of night vision goggles over his head. Using both passive and active near-infrared illuminators, he could drive comfortably in total darkness if necessary. However, the quarter moon rising behind them gave the third-generation system more than enough light.

  No one spoke as they drove across the wasteland. There was no need. All three of them shared the same thoughts, the same concerns, and also the same desire to avenge the dead man. None of them cared about the bumps and ruts that the powerful truck bulled through. What the massive shock absorbers couldn’t take, their bodies would.

  “How far are we from the Tunisian border?” Linda asked after a couple of hours.

  Mark checked their position on his computer. “About eight miles.”

  “Keep sharp. I doubt they’ll cross it.”

  The ghostly shadows cast by the risen moon suddenly winked out as a curtain of clouds crossed in front of it. Linc’s NVGs didn’t have enough light to process, so he keyed the active illuminators, sending out wavelengths in the near-infrared spectrum that were undetectable to human vision but which showed clearly in his goggles.

  They drove like that for another mile. Mark Murphy was well aware that the active signal from Linc’s goggles could be seen by anyone else equipped with a night vision device, so he never took his eyes off the FLIR. So far, the desert ahead remained completely dark on the thermal scans.

  And then a tiny blip showed itself. It was too small to be a man, he thought, and he dismissed it as some nocturnal animal when suddenly a burst of light exploded in the truck’s cabin across nearly every wavelength.

  The hot exhaust from an RPG showed like a st
reak of white lightning on Mark’s screen while Linc’s NVGs were nearly overwhelmed by the blast of the rocket motor. They had stumbled into a perfectly laid ambush, and had the man with the grenade launcher fired a moment sooner they would have been blown apart in the opening salvo.

  FIFTEEN

  THE PIG WAS AT THE CREST OF A HILL, SO THEY COMMANDED the high ground, but without cover it did them no good. Their forward momentum didn’t give Linc enough time to jam the transmission into reverse, so he took the only option open to him. As the rocket came at them on its unguided, flat trajectory, the former SEAL mashed the accelerator and charged down the slope. He pressed a button on the dash to activate the hydraulic suspension, lowering the vehicle’s center of gravity by pushing the wheels out well beyond the fenders.

  Murph no longer had the ground clearance to engage the .30 caliber machine gun mounted under the front bumper, but Linc’s move had given the truck enough stability to race across the face of the dune without tipping. Linc hit another switch to lower the curtain of chains behind the rear tires to cover their tracks. At the speeds he was hitting, the heavy lengths of chain hurled up a dense cloud of billowing dust, something their FLIR could see through but which the grenadier’s NVGs could not.

  The rocket-propelled grenade impacted the earth where the Pig had been seconds before, blasting a harmless fountain of dirt and debris into the air. Tracer fire began to knife out of the darkness, converging on the rampaging truck like fire hoses.

  “Linda—” Linc started to say, but she cut him off.

  “I’m on it.”

  She opened the door to the rear cargo area and launched herself through feetfirst. She went immediately for the switch that opened the top hatch, and the instant it was opened she pushed the secondary machine gun up and onto its roof mounts. The hatch covers gave her protection from the sides, so she aimed for the gunmen firing at them straight ahead. The .30 caliber roared in her hands, and spent brass arced away from the breach in a shimmering blur. She poured rounds into one particularly dense area of fire. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell what was happening a hundred yards away, but the stream of tracers racing for the Pig withered away to nothing.

  She swung the gun to counter Linc’s erratic driving, ravaging another foxhole. There must have been a grenadier with the men firing assault rifles because the position was blown apart by an explosion that sent shattered bodies high into the sky.

  Another RPG blasted out of the night, but the aim was so far off that Linc could afford to ignore it. He pointed the Pig at a long mound of sand that was giving several attackers perfect cover. He went up its face at an angle, and when he reached the top he threw the heavy truck into a four-wheel drift so that when they reached the bottom on the far side Linda had the entire row of gunmen in her sight’s crosshairs. She walked her rounds up the defile, tearing apart the defensive positions in a fury of destruction.

  “I’ve got a massive thermal image here,” Mark said, staring at his computer.

  “Range?”

  “Five hundred yards. It’s partially obscured by the topography, but there is something big out there, and it’s getting hotter.”

  “Missiles,” Linc ordered.

  Even bouncing over the rough ground, Mark didn’t miss a keystroke as he worked his computer. Hydraulically operated panels opened along the Pig’s sides just enough to reveal the blunt nose cones of four FGM-148 Javelin antitank missiles. Normally a shoulder-fired weapon, the Javelin carried a seventeen-pound warhead, and had proved capable of defeating any armored vehicle it had ever engaged.

  The Javelin was an infrared-guided fire-and-forget weapon, so as soon as Mark locked his computer’s targeting reticle on the unknown heat signature, the missile was ready.

  “Fire in the hole,” he shouted for Linda’s benefit, and launched the rocket.

  It came out of its tube in a gush of hot exhaust and streaked across the desert. Linc turned the wheel so Linda could engage another machine-gun nest that was peppering the Pig’s flank with a steady barrage of fire. It seemed the only active enemy still willing to engage them.

  The Javelin homed in on the heat source with single-minded determination, ignoring the battle raging around it and the futile attempts of a couple of men to shoot it down as it roared into a secret desert base. Fifty feet from its target, its seeker head suddenly lost the signal, though it picked up a cooler, and closer, contact. Still, it ignored the bait and maintained its original course.

  What the missile didn’t know was that a fuel truck had passed between it and its target, the cooler thermal image being its engine. The rocket slammed into the tank just behind the cab. The driver died in an instant as the fuel-air mixture detonated in a blossoming fireball that seemed to lick the heavens. A cluster of nearby tents was torn to shreds by the blast, their guy ropes turned to ribbons, and the poles reduced to split wood. Cargo netting strung up from date palms to hide the compound from satellite photography flared like tinder. Pieces of metal blown from the truck scythed down the ground crew that had been working at the base, but the shrapnel did nothing to the machine the crew had been servicing.

  In the towering flames of the destroyed truck, Linc, Mark, and Linda saw two things at the same time. One was that the drill truck belonging to the State Department team had been blown onto its side by the explosion and its undercarriage was aflame. The second was what the perimeter guards had been protecting.

  Nestled in a sandbag bunker was a Russian-built Mi-24 helicopter gunship, perhaps the most feared battlefield chopper in history. The heat from its twin Isotov turbines spooling up was what Mark had detected on the FLIR. The rotors were a blur as the pilot readied the flying tank killer for takeoff.

  “Holy crap!” Murph cried. “If he gets that thing off the ground, we’re toast.”

  Even as he said it, the chopper, code-named Hind, hauled itself into the sky. The pilot rotated the helo on its axis while still partially covered by the walls of sandbags. Mounted under the nose of the Hind was a four-barreled Gatling gun, and when it cleared the top of the walls it erupted.

  Linda just managed to duck through her hatch when the desert around the Pig came alive with hundreds of .50 caliber rounds. Bullets pounded into the armored windshield with enough force to star the glass, and if the onslaught continued for even a few seconds more the glass would disintegrate.

  Linc dropped a gear and hit the gas, throwing a rooster tail of sand in their wake. The ground just to the left of the Pig exploded as a fresh barrage chased after them. Then came the rockets, a half dozen of them, launched off pods slung under the Hind’s stubby wings. It was like driving through a sandstorm. The unguided missiles tore into the hills all around them. Linc swerved as best he could, zigging and zagging between each impact, hoping to buy a few seconds more. One rocket hit the rear bumper, rocking the Pig on its suspension but doing little damage beyond mangling the hardened steel.

  Linc looked over at Murph. “Ready?”

  “Do it!”

  Linc cranked the wheel and slammed the brakes with every ounce of his considerable strength. The Pig whipped around, sliding on the shifting sands, its wide stance keeping it from flipping. The instant the nose was pointed back toward the Hind, Mark unleashed a pair of Javelins, trusting their heat seekers to find the target because he couldn’t take the time to aim properly.

  The Hind’s pilot lost his target in the swirling maelstrom of dust and held his fire for a moment so the wind would blow the dust away. It was from this impenetrable curtain that the two missiles emerged. The cryonic cooling system of one of them had failed to reach the proper temperature, so it couldn’t acquire the target against the still-warm desert floor. It augered into the ground and exploded well shy of the chopper.

  Pointed nose-on at the incoming rockets, the Hind posed a small thermal cross section because its hull shielded the exhaust from its turbines. The pilot knew this and did nothing, hoping that playing possum could cause the missile to fly past. But the Javelin lock
ed on anyway. To its computer brain, the four glowing tubes hanging below the helicopter’s chin were enticing enough to commit to attack.

  The heat seeker sent minute corrections to the missile’s fins, aiming it straight for the still-hot barrels of the Hind’s Gatling gun. The pilot tried to pull up at the last second, so the Javelin missed the gun but impacted directly under the cockpit. The explosion tore the helicopter in half, its front section nearly disintegrating, while the hull and tail boom reared up from the force of the blast. Because the main rotor was still fully engaged, the chopper lost all stability and began to spin, smoke pouring from the blackened hole that had been the cockpit. When the chopper canted over almost ninety degrees, the blades lost lift, and the ten-ton Hind crashed to earth. Its aluminum rotors tore furrows into the ground until they blasted apart, sending shrapnel careening at near-supersonic speeds. So much grit was sucked into the Isotov turbines that they flared out and seized.

  The chopper’s self-sealing fuel tanks had done their job. There were no secondary explosions, and the flames around the engines’ exhausts quickly starved for gas.

  Mark blew out a long breath.

  “Nice shooting, Tex,” Linc drawled. He then called back to Linda, “You okay back there?”

  “I know what James Bond’s martini feels like.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  She poked her head back into the cabin. “You guys took down the Hind, so it was an observation, not a complaint. What is this place? Some sort of border station?”

  “Probably,” Linc replied.

  “Take us over to the Hind, will you?” Mark asked. He was studying the downed chopper through the FLIR.

  “That isn’t such a good idea. We should clear out while the clearing’s good.”

  “I don’t think this is a border station,” Murph said. “I need a closer look at the helo to be sure. Also, we have to do a sweep for any communications gear left intact. If there are survivors out here, the last thing we need is them calling in reinforcements.”