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 used 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.
Juan wondered if this was being delivered to the village for Seti and concluded it probably was. Rage boiled up in him with an acid burn that tightened his throat and tensed up his shoulders so they were as rigid as steel trusses.
“Whatever you’re going to do,” Eddie shouted over the winds that whipped through the bullet-riddled bus, “make it fast. There’s another turn coming.”
Cabrillo and Lawless locked eyes for just a moment, the same thought running through their minds.
“How long, you reckon?” MacD asked.
“Forty-five seconds ought to do it.” Juan manipulated the timer to set it but didn’t activate it until they were almost at the hairpin turn.
Cabrillo hit the button to set the clock in motion and tossed the bomb out a window. Eddie braked hard, fighting the wheel with all his strength since the bus lacked power steering. As before, the road fell away in a sharp S-turn and twisted back on itself.
Gravel spit from under the tires when the bus slewed around the corner, becoming light on its inside wheels from the centripetal force of Seng’s reckless driving. It settled back on its suspension, and he gunned it again.
Just like at the first switchback, the Taliban pickup had slid to a halt so its machine gun could open fire on the bus’s exposed roof. The gunner had just depressed the weapon on its pintle mount so that the barrel was pointed at the bus, and his fingers began exerting the necessary pressure on the trigger, when the bomb, which had landed on the side of the road, unseen in the darkness not four feet away, went up in a mushroom ball of smoke, fire, and steel scrap.
The old Toyota was blown off the road entirely and started sliding down the rocky embankment toward the road below. The gunner had vanished in the blast, while the driver and one of the passengers in the cab were thrown through an open window as the vehicle tumbled onto its roof.
That’s when MacD Lawless either saved all their lives or killed them.
Unlike the others, who were watching the truck to see if it was going to miss the bus as it rolled down the hill, he’d glanced out over the valley and saw an odd ring-shaped flash of light in the sky. The Nintendo Commando back at Creech, behind his computer screen and joysticks, had received authorization to fire his Predator’s Hellfire missile.
Lawless didn’t waste the breath to shout. He raced forward, hurtling past a dazed Franklin Lincoln, and reached the driver’s seat in just over a second. He grabbed the steering wheel before Eddie knew he was even there and cranked it hard over.
The front tire sank into the soft shoulder as the bus left the road, followed quickly by the rear wheels, and then the vehicle rolled onto its side, throwing the occupants onto the right wall. Glass shattered, but before anyone could fall against the hard ground, the bus rolled again onto its roof.
An instant later, the Hellfire, with its eighteen-pound shaped charge, slammed into the mountainside at the exact place the bus would have been. The explosion resembled a miniature volcano, with dust and rubble erupting from the hole it had gouged into the stone.
Like a runaway train, the bus slid down the steep embankment, rattling and jarring its hapless passengers. It crashed into a thicket of bushes just before it was about to fly off the edge of the road where it had been cut into the mountain. Its speed greatly reduced, the bus ponderously rolled onto its side and then crashed to its wheels on the roadbed. After the tumultuous din of the mad slide, the silence was overwhelming.
“Is everyone okay?” Juan called out after getting his wits back. His body ached from head to toe.
“I think I’m dead,” Linc said shakily. “At least that’s the way I feel.”
Cabrillo found a REC7 on the floor and snapped on its powerful tactical light. Linc had a little blood tricking from where his hairline would be if he didn’t keep his head shaved. He spotted Linda emerging from between two of the bench seats. She was massaging her chest.
“I think my B’s are now A’s.”
Juan next turned the light on Seti. The boy had a knot on his head from where he’d banged it against the wall when the bus first overturned, but the harness they had rigged for him had kept him firmly in his seat and the drugs had shielded him from the horror of what had just happened. He envied the teenager.
“Eddie, are you all right?” Cabrillo asked when he reached the front of the bus. Seng was wedged under the seat near the vehicle’s pedals.
“I have a newfound respect for anything that goes into a clothes dryer,” he said as he pulled himself free.
MacD Lawless lay crumpled in the stairwell. Juan bent to check on him, pressing two fingers against his neck to look for a pulse. He found it, strong and steady, and no sooner had Cabrillo moved his hand away than Lawless began to stir.
“So,” Juan said, “we went from us saving your butt to you saving ours in a little over an hour. I think that might be a record.”
“No offense,” Lawless slurred, “but Ah’d take it all back if Ah didn’t hurt so much.”
“You’re fine,” Cabrillo grinned, and grasped the man’s outstretched hand. “And if you’re not, well, it’s your own damned fault.” He turned serious. “How in the hell did you see that? And how did you move so fast?”
“Um, luck.” MacD allowed Juan to pull him to his feet. He smiled back. “And fear.”
“You okay?”
“Ah’m good,” Lawless replied. “Sorry, but grabbing the wheel was all Ah could think of.”
“It was the right call,” Juan assured him. “Insane but right.”
Lawless said, “Marion.”
“What?”
“My first name. You saved my life, Ah saved yours. In my book that makes us tight enough to tell you that my first name is Marion. Marion MacDougal Lawless III.”
The Jungle of-8 Page 5