by Tom Clancy
“Ce mal?” DeMarco asked.
One of the execs riding in back leaned forward in his seat, trying to make out the guide’s response, unable to understand his French.
“What is it?” he said.
“We’ve got some downed trees across the trail,” DeMarco replied. “Our guide says these things happen sometimes. A tree rots, goes over, hits another, and that one crashes into another.”
The exec frowned, but sat back to relay the news to his companions.
“How big a holdup can we expect?” Nimec said to DeMarco.
DeMarco held up a finger, had another brief exchange with the guide in French, then shrugged.
“Depends,” he replied after a moment. “There can be two, three, or a dozen trees that need clearing. Loren, a couple guys from his Rover, and the truckers are going have a closer look at the fall, and he wants us to check it out with them so we know the score. He says it doesn’t seem too bad from here. If a few of us pitch in to help, we should be able to move soon.”
Nimec gazed out in front of him but was unable to see past the 6×6’s broad rear end. After a second he turned back to DeMarco.
“Tell Loren I’ll be right with him,” he said.
DeMarco nodded. “Guess I’d may as well tag along.”
“No,” Nimec said. “You sit tight.”
DeMarco looked at him.
“Any particular reason?”
“Like I told you before, nobody ever gets hurt by being careful.” Nimec pushed his molded radio earplug into place and adjusted the lavalier mike on his collar. He thought a moment and then resumed in a hushed tone, “Call back for some of our boys to get out of their Rovers and keep their eyes open to what’s around us. But I want them sticking close . . . nobody off the trail. At least one man should stay in every vehicle with the execs.”
DeMarco regarded him. The four company honchos aboard their Rovers were talking among themselves in back.
“You sure you don’t smell trouble?” he said, his voice also too low for them to overhear now.
Nimec shrugged.
“Not so far,” he said.
Then he shouldered open the door to exit the vehicle.
Weapons of war are by obvious definition intended to have ugly effects.
Thermobarics—a military nomenclature for devices producing intense heat-pressure bursts—are uglier than most.
Whether dropped by an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet or fired from a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, a thermobaric warhead will cause vastly more sustained and extensive destruction to its target than a conventional explosive munition. There are numerous designs floating about the open and black international markets, many battle tested, some under development, their payload formulas and delivery systems guarded with varying degrees of secrecy. In its basic configuration a fuel-air warhead has three separate compartments, two with high explosive charges, a third containing an incendiary fluid, gaseous, or particulate mixture. Though Russian arms builders will not confirm it, the RPO-Bumblebee warhead’s flammable mix is a volatile combination of petroleum-derived fuels such as ethylene or propylene oxide, and tetranitromethane-a liquid relative of PETN, the combustible ingredient used in many plastic explosives.
As the primary HE charge is air detonated, the incendiary compartment bursts open like a metal eggshell to scatter its contents over a wide area. A second explosive charge then ignites the dispersed aerosol cloud to produce a tremendous churning fireball that can reach a temperature of between forty-five and fifty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, burning away the oxygen at its center, a vacuum filled in a fraction of a second by a rush of pressurized air approaching 430 pounds per square inch—almost thirty times that which is normally exerted on an object or human body at sea level. Anyone exposed to its full force will be at once crushed to something less than a pulp, if not entirely vaporized. As the blast wave races outward, many at the nearest periphery of the detonation will die of suffocation, the breath sucked from their collapsing lungs. The casualties may also suffer extensive internal injuries such as venous and arterial embolisms, organ hemorrhages, and actual severing of bodily organs from the flesh and muscle tissues that hold them in place, including having their eyes torn from their sockets.
Pete Nimec had gotten only one leg out of the Rover when the RPO-A warhead erupted at the head of the convoy, and along with his fast reflexes, that was probably what saved his life.
There was a loud eruption from the mass of trees up ahead of him, then a roaring, rushing chute of heat and flame. The concussion struck the Rover’s partially open door, slamming it up against him and throwing him back into his seat with his fingers still clutching its handle. He had a chance to glimpse the vehicle Loren had exited just moments before bounce several feet off the ground, then drop back down on its left flank, crumpled and blazing, its windows blown out, completely disintegrated by the blast.
Nimec had seen enough action in his day to realize the six men still inside it would have been killed instantly. Almost without conscious thought about how to save himself, without time to think, he dove behind the Land Rover’s open passenger door, knelt behind its level VI armor as the blast wave swept over the 6×6, jolting it backward into the Rover’s ram bumpers. Debris flew in every direction. Some of it rained down heavily on Nimec. Some drifted in the air around him, burning around him. There were scraps of clothing, foliage, seat covers, lord knew what else. Nimec heard screams in the sucking, broiling wind—from the truckers who’d gotten out of the hauler’s cab, from the panicked executives inside the Rover, all their terrible cries intermingled. And DeMarco, shouting at him across the front seat, “Chief, chief, can you hear me, chief are you okay . . . ?”
Breathless, dazed, Nimec couldn’t answer at first. His left eye stung, something dripping into it, blurring it. The warm wetness streamed down his face. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow and it came away slick and red.
Nimec blinked twice to clear his vision, then found himself almost wishing he could have remained blind to the scene before him. The truckers had been immolated. One of them lay still on the ground, his clothes burned away, his charred body consumed with fire. Near him the scattered remains of another man, or perhaps more than a single man, were also ablaze.
“Chief—”
Up, up, Nimec told himself. Sit up.
He managed it without knowing how, his glance briefly meeting DeMarco’s across the seat. And then, somehow, past DeMarco’s head, through his side window, he spotted Loren in the grass on the opposite side of the Rover, probably thrown there by the blast wave, rolling in a patch of shoulder-high grass to smother the last of the flames that had eaten away at his clothes, flailing his limbs in pain.
At the same moment, he heard a loud pop-pop-pop somewhere at the rear of the stalled convoy. Whooshing, whistling noises in the air. Nimec spun his head around and saw smoke tailing upward from the euphorbia grove, followed by three distinct orange-red bursts behind the last vehicle, the Rover shepherded by Conners and Hollinger. They were getting shelled back there, too. By what sounded to him like light mortars.
Then the unmistakable rattle of semiauto fire from the woods up ahead of him, and the thicket on either side, and the barrels of VVRS III’s that had been thrust from gunports on the doors and tailgates of the cherried Rovers amid the confusion, their exterior concealment panels having sprung down as the compact subs were fitted into them from within. The Sword ops who’d already gotten out of their Rovers on Nimec’s instruction had dived between bumpers and fenders and tailgates and were also opening up, exchanging volleys with their unseen attackers out in the brush.
Nimec gathered his wits and looked around into the Rover’s backseat. Some of its passengers were still screaming. Others had gone still, very still, not making a sound. All their faces wore confused, shocked expressions that probably weren’t dissimilar to his own.
DeMarco. Concentrate on giving DeMarco his orders.
“Loren’s alive
,” he said. “I’m going to try and get him.”
“You’re bleeding—”
“It’s just a cut.”
“Chief, let me do it.”
Nimec shook his head. There were more popping mortar discharges. Then whistles, blasts.
“I’ll be okay, listen,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell kind of setup this is, but they’ve got us blocked, front and rear. Radio back down the line. Get everybody piled into the armored Rovers. Might not mean anything if they take direct hits, but the rest of the vehicles might as well be tin cans, including the trucks.” He thought furiously. “They’ll need cover when they move, you decide what’s best. Then lock all the Rovers’ doors and stay put. Try and keep the passengers cool.”
“You run out in the open alone—”
Nimec cut short his protest with a slice of his hand.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Contact the base . . . we’ve got scrambled voice communications, right?”
An acquiescent nod. “Right.”
“Tell them to send up the Skyhawk—I just wish we had more than one of those choppers on base. Make sure the crew’s warned to expect heavy incoming. Tell them about those mortars. And whatever caught us with that blast of flame . . . some kind of RPGs. I don’t know. Also, we’ve got to have a microwave vidlink with the bird. Can’t be of much use to its crew down here till we know the attackers’ positions.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“All right.” Nimec could still see Loren through the window. “That guide, Steve. I need to get over to him.”
DeMarco held up a finger, snapped open a compartment on his door, and fished hurriedly inside.
“You should take this,” he said, producing a small medkit. “There’s a morphine autoinjector inside. It’ll help. And watch out for those cactus plants, or whatever the hell they are. The shit that oozes from them’s poison.”
Nimec took the medkit and gave DeMarco a purposeful nod.
Then he shut the door with a hard push and dashed back around the rear of the vehicle.
In the expanse of sedge and euphorbia, the bandits had deployed into teams of two, each man laying his mortar about twenty yards apart from his teammate’s, and a hundred yards back from the girdled trail.
Crouched beside one member of the gang, their headman watched him feed a high-explosive fragmentation round into his tube, set for drop fire to allow faster discharge than manual triggering with the lever. The round slid down the barrel and hit the firing pin at its base cap. Its primer cartridge detonated at once, igniting propellent charges slotted into the fin blades.
An instant later the projectile launched from the muzzle in a gout of flame and smoke. It rocketed across the sky and thudded into the ground at the convoy’s rear, chewing a hole in the trail to hamper its retreat.
No sooner did it strike than the bandit was dropping another round into the tube.
The headman raised his binoculars to his eyes and looked toward the front of the column. Still out of his vehicle, the UpLink security chief had begun shuffling his way back along its side. He held his firearm in one hand, carried something else in the other, a box or case of some sort. . . .
The headman produced a curious grunt. Then he noticed the man writhing in the grass beyond the 4×4. It wasn’t possible to get a clear view of him in the patchy thicket, but he believed it might be the guide.
His curiosity became satisfaction, a smile touching his lips. The UpLink security man was rushing toward the guide, exposing himself to try to aid him.
It was almost too good to be true, he thought. His entire reason for stalling the convoy farther up the road had been to bring the security man closer to the trees, into easy range of the sniper who waited with explicit orders to take him out. Indeed, all the orders he’d given his men were clear and explicit, following guidelines of similar specificity from the Congolese warlord Fela Geteye, with whom they were in league. Whom warlord Geteye dealt with on the next level up the chain was none of the men’s affair. Such linkages were intricate, preserved in secrecy, and shared only as necessary. What mattered most to the headman’s coupeurs de route was collecting their portion of the bounty.
It did not mean the headman himself was ignorant of likely connections. His choice of livelihood bore a great many perils, capture or betrayal high on the index, and experience had taught him one should always have a reserve of information worth dealing. He had no qualms accepting jobs on a need-to-know basis. But if those at the top were mindful of their safety, why not he? The trick was to strike a balance—too much knowledge could be dangerous, too little shortsighted and foolish.
The headman knew warlord Geteye had ties to a Cameroonian dealer of stolen arms and technology who had bought favor with many lawmen throughout the region, among them, a police commander in Port-Gentil. The headman knew this commander owed his appointment to an even more highly ranked member of the Police Gabonaise, no lesser than a division chief said to be the puppet of an influential government minister. And although he did not know the minister’s name, the headman had heard credible rumors that his strings were, in turn, pulled by a blanc of fearsome repute whose name and broad designs were more deeply mysterious than any of the rest . . . and better left that way.
However tempting it was to speculate about the parties’ identities, the headman thought it smarter to resist.
He neither knew, nor would have cared to know, that the Gabonese minister was Etienne Begela, that the divisional police boss Begela had called upon to arrange the Sette Cama ambush was an immediate superior of Commander Bertrand Kilana, and that Kilana had been the one to secure warlord Fela Geteye’s participation as middleman between the illicit trader and the headman’s own band.
Some information was a good thing, yes. But too much knowledge could weigh one down, tip the scale the wrong way. The headman would never wish to become a potential liability to those exceedingly powerful and dangerous individuals who might have concerns about what he could reveal about them under interrogation.
His main interests had been how his gang of killers and thieves played into the scheme, and what was to be gained from their involvement. In that respect, he did not stand above those he led.
Should all continue to go well, their earnings looked to be tremendous. The arrangement with Geteye was one of incentives, each stage of the operation they successfully pulled off boosting their profits. The convoy’s interception already guaranteed them a nice sum, with another agreed-upon bonus due if UpLink’s head of security was sniped out—a hit the headman believed was about to be accomplished. Were his men able to get away with hijacking the truckloads of multimillion-dollar cargo, they would stand to make a certain fortune, receiving a cut of the loot from warlord Geteye after its turnover by the Cameroonian black marketeer. No restraints had been placed on their taking of casualties . . . as far as that went, the headman had gotten the distinct sense that a high body count might be preferred. on the other hand, damage to the precious freight must be avoided, or at least kept to a minimum. And in that regard, things were about to get tough.
The headman held his glasses steady, watching the besieged line of vehicles through the double circles of their lenses. The Land Rover in front had been marked for destruction, and he’d factored in a significant loss to the cargo aboard the truck at its rear—the RPO-A shoulder launcher was a ravaging weapon. But he would take no chances damaging any more of his coveted bounty, and the nearness of the rest of the conveyances to one another—the last two trucks flanked front and back by what he now saw to be armored vehicles, something he hadn’t been warned to expect—meant a direct hit on any of the Rovers would have exactly that inescapable, unacceptable result.
The controlled barrage could be sustained only a bit longer, then. Keeping the convoy paralyzed, and further softening its defenses by taking out the handful of UpLink security men that had left their 4×4s.
The headman nodded to himself, thinking.
Soon, he wou
ld have to bring his men out onto the trail for the decisive strike.
Hunkered low between his Rover and the truck behind it, Nimec swiped more blood off his forehead, and then propelled himself across the trail.
He drew fire at once. A wild shower out of the trees that he figured for a subgun volley, then a single heavier-caliber round whapping the ground inches to his left, too close, throwing up divots of soil. That one had come from above. From a treetop. A shooter was perched up there, trying to take him out. The realization brought DeMarco’s question back to mind, what the hell kind of setup was this?
He snipped off the thought. No time to worry about it now. The guide was yards ahead of him, down in the sedge, moving, thrashing in agony.
Nimec plunged into the thicket, the folded blanket in his right hand, his unharnessed VVRS gripped in the other, its barrel tilted upward. He squeezed its trigger, sprayed the bubinga grove with fire, covering himself, or doing his best, impossible to take decent aim when you’re running full tilt.
Another shot whizzed from above, close again. Closer than it ought to have been. Nimec was a moving target in a tangle of foliage reaching a foot or two higher than his head, and the guy’d gotten off two near hits from several hundred yards. Nobody was that sharp, not unless he had X-ray vision, or was using more than an ordinary telescopic. And Nimec was betting it wasn’t Superman up there.
Behind him now, more mortar blasts and subgun volleys. But Loren’s screams, those piercing inchoate screams, were the loudest sounds of all, impossible to ignore. They tunneled his awareness, called to it like a maddening beacon. A human being might by dying there before his eyes and was suffering almost beyond comprehension. He had to get over to him, do something to stop those horrible cries of pain.
Nimec scrambled through a cluster of euphorbia, the spiny limbs reaching above his head, twisting up around him, scratching his arms despite his attempt to avoid them. Still, they offered momentary cover from the treetop sniper. He ran on, hit some more grass, reached his man, and snapped open the medkit DeMarco had given him. Loren was thrashing, rolling, hands slapping his own body. It was as though he were unaware he’d already doused the flames that had eaten at his flesh, and was still trying to beat them out.
