To distract himself from something he had no control over he asked Linda, “Any problems?”
“Piece of cake,” she replied with a cocky grin. “We released the knockout gas, waited for it to take effect, and just waltzed in and grabbed the kid. I left a window open a crack so the gas will dissipate. They’ll wake up with monster headaches and no idea what happened to their young would-be martyr.”
“How many in the house?”
“Parents, two of their own children, plus Seti and his cousin.” A troubled look crossed Cabrillo’s face. Linda added, “I thought that was strange too. No guards, right? But the two Indonesians are here because they volunteered. No need to guard them at all.”
“Yeah,” Juan said slowly, “you’re probably right.”
“I’m ready,” Eddie announced from under the driver’s seat, an exposed nest of wires in his hand. All he needed to do was twist two leads together and the big diesel would rumble to life.
The engine noise was certain to attract attention, so once the bus was hot-wired, they had to get out of Dodge as fast as they could.
Setiawan was strapped into a seat using one of their combat harnesses. The prisoner, whose name they hadn’t bothered to ask, was in a row behind him. Linc and Linda had the first two seats, so Cabrillo took up a position in the back so he could cover their rear.
It was just then that all hell broke loose.
A shouted cry rose over the sleeping town from the direction of where they’d kept the captured soldier. One of the guards they’d knocked out had come to.
“Eddie, go!” Juan yelled. They had a minute, or less, before the tribesmen got organized.
Seng touched the two wires, creating a tiny arc of electricity, and then twisted them to keep the starter engaged. The engine shuddered but wouldn’t fire. It sounded like a washing machine with an unbalanced load. He feathered the gas pedal, trying to finesse the engine, but it still wouldn’t start. Before he flooded it, Eddie separated the wires, gave it a couple of heartbeats, and tried again.
The motor snarled and sputtered but refused to catch.
“Come on,” Eddie cajoled.
Cabrillo wasn’t paying the drama at the front of the bus any heed. His eyes were glued out the rear window, searching for signs of pursuit. A figure burst from a narrow alley between two houses. Juan had the REC7 to his shoulder and triggered a three-round burst. Glass cascaded to the floor of the bus in a shower of fine chips while the bullets chewed up the ground at the man’s feet. Three eruptions of dust stopped the man in his tracks, and he lost his balance and fell to the ground.
Juan noticed in passing that the man hadn’t taken the time to arm himself before rushing to investigate the engine noise. He could have shot him dead but instead let him scramble back undercover.
“Eddie?” Cabrillo shouted over his shoulder, certain that the echo of gunfire had awoken every jihadist in a half-mile radius.
“Just a sec,” Seng called back, though there was no sense of tension in his voice. That was Eddie—cool under any circumstances.
Cabrillo scanned the streets as best he could. He saw lamps being lit behind a few windows. The entire village was going to be coming after them in moments. Though the bus would make a pretty good defensive position, the team didn’t have the ammo for a protracted gun battle. If they didn’t get out in the next few seconds, they never would.
The engine fired, and Eddie didn’t give it time to warm up before wrestling it into gear and hitting the gas. The old bus lurched like a startled rhinoceros, kicking gravel from under its bald tires.
A pair of guards emerged from the same alley as the first man and cut loose with their assault rifles, firing wildly from the hip in continuous bursts of unaimed fury. Not a single round hit the bus, but the fusillade kept Juan pinned to the floor, and the men had vanished around the corner by the time he was up and had a sight picture. He put three rounds downrange to keep them back.
The bus had the acceleration of an anemic snail, so as they slowly pulled from the square they were open to more gunfire from hidden alleys and behind stone walls. One burst raked across the row of windows, blowing out the glass and raining shards on the people inside. That particular assault inexplicably cut off, but more bullets pinged against the roof and sparked off the engine cover.
And then they were free, pulling past the mosque where the gray-bearded imam regarded them stoically as they roared by. Juan continued to watch out the rear window to see if anyone was chasing them. Several fighters were out on the main street, their rifles raised over their heads as if they’d won a great victory.
Let ’em think what they want, Juan thought as he slumped onto one of the hard bench seats. The padding had long since vanished, and he could feel a metal support beam digging into his flesh. That little bit of discomfort reminded him of the greater problem they might still be facing. The bus belonged to a senior Taliban officer, someone Cabrillo was now certain he recognized but couldn’t name. The odds were good that he was under observation by the U.S. military. While the powers that be might not understand what had just happened back in the village, if they wanted this guy dead, now was the time to unleash the drone’s missile.
He scooted back to the shattered rear window and watched the sky. Eddie saw him in the cracked mirror over the driver’s seat and called out, “Anything back there?”
“Not on the ground, but I thought I heard a Predator when we were waiting to go in, and, if my hunch is right, this bus has a big old target on its roof.”
For the first couple miles out of the town, the road followed the valley floor, with wide, open crop fields on either side. But from studying topographical maps before the mission, Juan knew it would enter a steeper grade and snake through about a dozen hairpin turns. To the left of the road was the canyon wall while to the right the landscape fell away in a frighteningly steep grade. Once on that section of dirt tract, they would have no maneuverability whatsoever.
If he was calling the shots back at Creech, he’d wait until they were halfway down and then put the Hellfire up their tailpipe. With that in mind, he shouted over the beat of the knocking engine, “Hey, soldier?”
“Me?” the blond man asked.
“I know everyone else’s name on the bus, so yeah. Are you in any condition to hoof it for about fifteen miles?”
Cabrillo appreciated that the guy took a moment to think through his answer. “No, sir. Ah’m sorry, but Ah’ve been through the meat grinder since they grabbed me. Nothing’s broken, but a whole lot’s sprained.” He lifted his shirt to show a sea of dark bruises across his chest and stomach to go with the shiner around his left eye. “Ah can do maybe five miles over flat ground, but in these mountains Ah won’t make it one.”
“Why are you asking?” Linda wanted to know.
“The canyon up ahead could be a death trap if I’m right about the Predator. I’m thinking about ditching the bus and going back to our original plan.”
It would be asking too much of Linc to carry the guy out, though Juan knew the big man would give it one hell of a try. He considered making the trek in stages, but the longer they remained in the region, the greater the risk of being discovered by the countless roving Taliban patrols.
“Chairman, we’ve got a problem,” Eddie said suddenly. “I see headlights approaching.”
Cabrillo cursed under his breath. Thinking it made it happen. The only people out on the roads at night were the Talibs or their al-Qaeda allies.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Play it cool. Maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
The twin beams of light lancing out from the darkness bounced along about a half mile farther down the road. Then they swung broadside to the lumbering bus and went still. The approaching driver had angled their vehicle into a roadblock.
The good luck they’d had escaping the village had run out.
“Now what?”
“Give me a sec,” Juan replied in that same cool tone Eddie had us
ed earlier. “What kind of vehicle do they have?”
“By the time I’ll be able to tell it’ll be too late,” Seng replied.
“Good point,” Juan said grimly. Though Juan spoke Arabic like a Riyadh native, he doubted he would be able to bluff their way past a checkpoint, not with an ethnic Chinese, a black guy, a blond one, an Indonesian kid, and the all-American girl next door.
“Go around them, and pray there isn’t a minefield next to the road. Guns at the ready.”
“Mr. Chairman,” the stranger said. “My shooting finger’s just fine.”
Juan paced forward and handed him his FN Five-seveN. “What’s your name?”
“Lawless,” he said. “MacD Lawless. Ah was a Ranger before turning to the private sector.”
“MacD?”
“Short for MacDougal. My middle name, which is only marginally better than my first.”
“Which is?”
The guy was handsome, and when he smiled he looked like a recruiting poster or a Calvin Klein model. “Ah’ll tell you when I know you better.”
“Deal,” Juan said, peering out through the windshield.
In the feeble glow cast by the bus’s headlamps he could see it was a dark pickup truck that had pulled across to block the single lane. Three men stood in front of it, their heads sheathed in turbans, their weapons trained on the bus. Two more fighters were in the open bed, one hunched over a heavy machine gun, the other ready to feed it a belt of ammunition that he cradled like an infant.
“They get us with that chatter gun,” Linc warned, “and it’s all over but the crying.”
“Looks like these guys didn’t get the memo about this being Tommy Taliban’s Magical Mystery Tour bus,” MacD quipped. Cabrillo’s measure of the man went up a notch. Anyone who could make bad jokes before combat was okay by him.
“I’m going to break left,” Eddie said, “to put the pickup’s cab between us and that old Russian PKB.”
Juan had already known which way Eddie was going to turn because it made the most tactical sense, so he was already hunkered under a window on the right side of the bus, his rifle barrel just showing above the pitted chrome sill. His mouth had gone metallic as a fresh burst of adrenaline shot into his system.
3
TWENTY YARDS TO GO. EDDIE HAD SLOWED A LITTLE, TO show he was about to comply with the men manning the roadblock, but he kept coming. None of the men arrayed before him looked overly concerned yet, but when they did, one of the soldiers put his hand in the air in a universal gesture to indicate they should pull over.
That was Seng’s cue. He mashed the accelerator and gently heeled the bus over onto the narrow gravel verge. Loose dirt hissed under the heavy vehicle, and a tall plume of dust rose in its wake.
The Taliban paused for less than a second at this affront to its authority. Gunfire erupted from the checkpoint. The heavy engine block absorbed round after round while the windshield starred and spiderwebbed in a dozen places before collapsing entirely. Eddie’s face was soon streaming blood from glass that had nicked his skin.
The Corporation team gave as good as they got, hosing the pickup from bumper to bumper. Had the ride over the uneven terrain been smoother, they might have had better luck picking individual targets, but from a moving vehicle at this tight range it was all spray and pray.
The interior of the bus became a fine haze of gunpowder residue and pulverized glass. At near-point-blank range the two sides exchanged murderous gunfire. The man behind the pintle-mounted machine gun went down when Linc fired off nearly a full clip at him, though miraculously the ammo loader went unscathed. The three men on the ground had dropped flat, and their view was cut off by the underside of their own truck as the bus rattled past them.
They had just gotten clear when the loader replaced his comrade behind the butterfly grips of the machine gun and opened up. With nearly twice the powder charge of a standard AK-47’s, the bullets from the PKB came at them like armor-piercing rounds. The rear of the old school bus was riddled with two dozen sizzling holes, and the bullets had the power to blow through a couple rows of seat before finally losing momentum. A few passed all the way through the bus. Had Eddie not been driving like some old geezer in Florida, with only his hands remaining in view, he would have taken two to the back of the skull.
“Is everyone okay?” Juan shouted, his hearing compromised by the deafening roar of gunfire.
Even as his people acknowledged they were unhurt, Cabrillo was checking on young Setiawan Bahar. The teen remained oblivious in his drug-induced dreamworld. A few chips of glass had fallen on him, but other than that he looked like he could be asleep in his own bed back in Jakarta.
“Are they chasing us?” Eddie asked. “All my mirrors are shot to hell.”
Cabrillo looked back. The checkpoint was just a short distance behind them, but he could see figures cutting in and out of the pickup’s headlights. The men were doubtlessly organizing themselves to track down the fleeing bus and finish what they’d started. Their truck had more speed, maneuverability, and firepower than the bus.
They’d been lucky to get past the checkpoint. Juan knew too well that luck was fickle at best and downright capricious most of the time.
“Oh, they’re coming, all right.”
“Hold on,” Eddie suddenly said.
It felt like the bus had driven onto an express elevator heading straight down. They had reached the spot where the road fell away in a series of punishing switchbacks. Any thought of abandoning the bus before reaching the potential target area was moot in Juan’s mind. They were too late, with a Taliban technical racing up behind them like the guy was gunning for the checkered flag at the Indianapolis 500.
Tracer fire arced out from the trailing pickup, pulsing trails of burning phosphorescence that reached for the hurtling bus. They had the range but not the accuracy. The gunner had to be struggling just to stay in the truck, never mind manhandling a heavy machine gun.
At the front of the bus Eddie was fighting the wheel like a madman, not daring to look at what lay beyond the right-side tires. The road clung to the side of the canyon, weaving along its face like something out of an old Road Runner cartoon. What he wouldn’t give for an Acme rocket right about now.
Inches from the left-hand windows the rock wall rushed by in a blur. Out the right was a vista under the sliver of moon that seemed to drop away forever. Juan couldn’t imagine the view from the top of Mount Everest being much broader than this. If he craned his neck, he could see the road below where it had doubled back on itself. MacD Lawless joined him at the mangled rear door. He had Eddie’s REC7, and the thigh pockets of his camo pants bulged with spare magazines.
“Figured your man up there can’t drive and shoot at the same time.” He handed Juan his pistol. “That’s a fine piece, but Ah think the Barrett here is more apropos to this particular situation.”
He had an accent Juan couldn’t place.
When asked, Lawless said, “New Orleans,” pronouncing it N’Orlens.
“The Big Easy.”
“Coincidentally, that also describes my sister.” Lawless flashed that handsome grin of his. “Actually, I don’t have a sister, but I love that joke.”
The respite lasted another second until the pickup rounded a corner behind them, and the gunner once again had a target. Bullets ricocheted off the canyon wall and arced out over the valley, and some even found their mark, punching additional holes into the bus’s rear quarter.
Undaunted, Lawless shot back. His rate of fire was slow and deliberate, and when Linc and Linda joined them, all four were pouring a lot of lead down the dusty road—enough, it seemed, to deter the driver, because he slowed until the bus pulled one gentle bend away.
Without warning, Eddie slammed on the brakes and kicked the steering wheel hard over. The bus seemed to corkscrew into the earth as it rounded the first dipping hairpin turn. The outside tire of the dual rear axle dangled in space momentarily before Eddie could center all the tires on
the road again. The four warriors in back were tossed like rag dolls. Linc slammed his head against a metal pole and lay inert. Linda had blood gushing from her nose from where she’d banged it, and Juan had inadvertently head-butted MacD Lawless so that his breath exploded in a whoosh.
Their gunfire hadn’t slowed the other driver. He’d known there was a hairpin coming and that’s why he’d applied the brakes.
Bullets rained through the bus’s paper-thin roof. The technical had stopped on the precipice above so that the gunner could rain shells down on them. There was no place to hide, no cover. The powerful rounds punched all the way through the floor with barely a check in their speed. It was random chance, and Eddie’s hard acceleration, that got them cleanly away.
Juan immediately checked on Setiawan, who continued to sleep peacefully.
A moment later the pickup’s headlights swept around the switchback, and the race was on once again.
“Are you a betting man, Mr. Chairman?” Lawless asked while gasping to refill his lungs. “Ah know Ah am, and Ah think these odds are starting to suck.”
Juan had to agree. Something was going to have to give soon. At the next hairpin, they weren’t going to be so lucky.
“Look around,” he called out. “See if there’s anything on this heap we can use.”
They scoured under the seats. Juan wrestled an old trunk from under one of the benches. It was sealed with an iron lock that looked as if it had been forged when his ancestor and namesake was discovering California. He drew his pistol, angled it away, and fired. The bullet shattered the wrought-iron lock and ricocheted harmlessly away.
Inside were several women’s burkas, but judging by the size they were made for men who would use them as disguises. To Cabrillo it was a coward’s trick but an effective one. Under the drab clothing was a suicide belt made up of bricks of plastic explosives, sacks full of metal scrap for shrapnel, and a timer that went high up on the back of the vest so the would-be martyr couldn’t deactivate it. The belt was worn in such a way that the bomber couldn’t take it off.