Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  “It’s okay, easy does it, try to stay still,” Nimec said, knowing the guide’s convulsive thrashing would only do more damage, thinking he might be in far too much pain to pay attention, possibly didn’t even speak enough English to know what he was saying. Sure, why not, there had to be a goddamn language problem for him to contend with, on top of everything else.

  Nimec squatted down on his haunches, got the morphine autoinjector out of the kit, and pressed the end of the tube to his outer thigh, ejecting the spring-cocked needle that would dispense the painkiller directly through his ruined clothing. He was still urging Loren to hold still in the calmest voice he could manage, It’s okay, Loren, we can make it, I promise, we can, only you’ve got to work with me here, got to hold still. He could smell the man’s seared hair, his flesh, a sickening, terrible assault on his senses.

  And then, suddenly, Loren settled down. He lay groaning—alive, at least—but almost motionless. Nimec couldn’t tell why. Maybe he’d understood him after all. Or maybe he was slipping into shock. Nimec simply couldn’t tell, guessed it might not be a good sign in the larger scheme of things. But staying here wouldn’t prolong his life. He wasn’t tossing around, flopping his arms and legs every which way, so it would be easier to bring him back to the Rover, where they’d at least have some protection. The Tom Ricci credo again . . . small steps.

  Okay. Next stop, the Rover. He needed to get both of them into it. Throw Loren over his shoulder, drag him, whatev—

  There was the crack of a gunshot, the sniper firing another round from the treetop.

  Nimec spilled over into the tall grass.

  Steve DeMarco knew how to follow orders without having them spelled out to the letter. Under most circumstances he wouldn’t have considered disobeying them.

  These weren’t most circumstances, though. Which left him to rely on another of the strengths that had gotten him assigned to Nimec’s SanJo A-team: the ability to make tough judgments in a hurry.

  Get everybody piled into the armored Rovers . . . they’ll need cover when they move, you decide what’s best.

  They had been Pete Nimec’s words, not his. You decide what’s best. Okay, fine, ready and willing to oblige. And moments before DeMarco saw Nimec tumble into the thicket, he’d decided, radioing out to the Sword ops inside and outside the Rovers, preparing them for a synched up release of Type IV thermal obscurant from the tail pipes of the armored vehicles. A recent UpLink agent developed for military use, the micropulverized aluminum alloy particles would swirl upward in a buoyant white cloud that provided a thick visual/thermal—or bispectral—fog, shrouding their people from sight as they all transferred to the armoreds. At the same time, the fog would scatter the infrared emissions of whatever it enveloped, everything from the twelve- to fourteen-micron heat signatures of human beings to those radiated by the vehicles, which would be intense even with their engines off after they’d been running for hours in the hot sun. Use ordinary white or red phosphorus, you’d get even wider spectrum wavelength scatter, DeMarco knew. But the stuff burned at five thousand degrees, hot, and running through that smoke was liable to blister your flesh and airways on contact. With the Type IV, any thermal gun scopes or heat-seeking rockets the opposition might be using would be totally fouled, while the individuals it was shielding from detection could tolerate short-duration exposure without adverse effects.

  DeMarco had decided on his crisp little plan and sent out word over the comlink. One, he would launch a thirty-second countdown. Two, the armoreds would release their bispectral obscurant. And three, the vulnerable UpLink personnel, road guides, and truckers would make their break, go hustling toward the safer vehicles.

  DeMarco was at minus twelve seconds, counting aloud into his microphone, ready to push the Type IV fog-release button on the rapid-defense touch pad console beside his left armrest, when he heard the big-bore rifle up in the trees crack for a third time, and saw Nimec drop completely out of sight in the brush.

  Stunned, DeMarco called an urgent hold command.

  In the Rover behind him, Wade jerked his finger away from his control console.

  At the tail end of the convoy, Hollinger did the same. “Chief, you all right out there?” DeMarco said tensely over the shared communications channel.

  Silence from Nimec.

  DeMarco felt his stomach knot.

  “Chief!” He was almost shouting into the mike now. “Come on, Pete, goddamn it, are you—?”

  “I’m okay,” Nimec answered. Flat on his stomach in the grass, his mouth full of dirt, he’d been hauling Loren up beside him as DeMarco’s tense radio call went out, too busy to respond at once. “Have to stay low. That son of a bitch in the tree almost took me out with that last shot. I think he’s using a thermal sight.”

  There was momentary silence in his earpiece.

  “Hang on, chief,” DeMarco said. “I’ll get you back in here—”

  Nimec cut him short. “Forget me,” he said. “I told you to evac those sitting duck vehicles.”

  “I was about make the call. Use the Type Four mist for cover—”

  “So use it.”

  “That sharpshooter’s got you pinned. You start moving again, trying to lug a wounded man with you, the fucker’ll nail you in a second.”

  Nimec inhaled, wiped blood from his forehead. He’d gotten some juice from a broken euphorbia stem into the cut, and it burned as though on fire.

  “If I’m being scoped through a thermal, Type Four’s what I need,” he said, lying through his teeth.

  “That stuff won’t disperse fast enough to screen you—”

  “I’ll keep hugging the ground, find the Rover once the smoke starts to lift.”

  DeMarco waited several heartbeats before answering him.

  “You’ll never make it that way,” he said at last. “I can use fog oil instead . . .”

  Nimec inhaled. He wasn’t about to fool anybody here, leaving him to pull rank.

  “No,” he said. “You’ve got any sudden ideas in your head, you damn well better shake them.”

  DeMarco was silent again.

  “Steve—”

  “Your signal’s breaking up, chief. Couldn’t hear you.”

  “What do you mean you couldn’t hear me?”

  “Getting worse, I’m losing you—”

  “Don’t pull this on me, Steve . . .”

  “Lost you,” DeMarco said very clearly over their comlink. “Proceeding at my own discretion. Over.”

  The headman had determined he’d waited long enough. An ambush must have surprise and speed; lose either, allow the situation to become static, and it would fail.

  Lowering his glasses so they hung over his chest on their strap, he brought his palm-size tactical radio to his mouth and sent out his command to the men he’d divided up on both sides of the trail. His voice was level and controlled.

  In the brush at the convoy’s rear, in the forest up ahead, the bandits left their stationary positions and started to converge on the vehicles according to plan.

  Moments after breaking contact with Nimec—hanging up the phone on him, figuratively speaking—DeMarco resumed his countdown where he’d left off, twelve seconds minus. He’d moved his finger away from the Type-IV release button on his touch pad to another about an eighth of an inch over to its right.

  The lighted button he was now ready to push was marked SGF2, for petroleum smoke-generator fog formulation two, which, in truth, was hardly different from the diesel-and-oil smoke pot formula that had been used on battlefields since World War II. And while it created a quick, dense visual screen and did a good job muddling near infrared signals, giving it a considerable degree of efficacy in certain evasive situations to the present day, it didn’t work nearly as well as Type IV in degrading the functionality of thermal imagers sensitive to far end IR wavelengths.

  That limitation was precisely what DeMarco wanted—no, needed—to put him on more or less equal terms with his opposite number in the treeto
p.

  “Eleven, ten, nine, I want everybody set to go . . .”

  An eye on his digital dashboard clock, DeMarco was also getting set, practicing what he preached as he ticked off the seconds over his comlink—only he would be going very much his own way.

  “. . . eight, seven, send up the smoke!”

  DeMarco hit his console button and white SGF2 vapor began pouring from his Rover’s tail pipe, Wade and Hollinger releasing it from the exhausts of their respective vehicles at the same instant, the two of them acting on his direct order.

  DeMarco looked down at the weapon he’d taken from a hidden underseat compartment, resting all sixteen pounds of it comfortably across his lap even as he’d been having his little clash of opinion with Nimec. UpLink arms designers called it a Big Daddy VVRS, their own version of what master planners with the Pentagon’s Future Land Warrior program were dubbing an “objective individual combat weapon,” or OICW, which was itself a variant of the modular French FAMAS rifles that terrorists had used with grievously damaging results against an UpLink facility in Brazil two years earlier.

  Ninety percent of the time, Sword’s munitions designers were way ahead of the curve, but every so often they found themselves playing catch up. When that happened, they always compensated by pulling into first place.

  The Big Daddy was a single-trigger, dual-barreled, integrated firing system, its lower barrel chambered for 5.56-mm VVRS lethal/nonlethal sabot rounds, and its upper barrel a 20-mm fused multipurpose munitions launcher; a microcomputer-assisted, thermal image/laser dot range-finder targeting scope on top. This was quite the whole package rolled into one.

  Hoping it would do the trick for him, DeMarco continued to read the numbers on his dash clock aloud, getting there now, getting there, three, two, one . . .

  “. . . Commence evac!” he yelled.

  And gripped the Big Daddy in both hands as he pushed out his door into the churning smoke.

  In the 4×4’s rear compartment, all four of its terrified passengers sat watching everything beyond their windows dissolve into a blank white void, as if the world were simply being erased before their eyes. Without exchanging a word, they had linked hands on the seat between them, bowed their heads, and begun moving their lips in spontaneous, silent prayer—each according to his or her individual belief, desire to believe, or willing abandonment to the possibility that a higher power might be stirred into turning an ear in their direction.

  As one, they petitioned not for their own lives, but for those of DeMarco, Nimec, and the people from the evacuated vehicles somewhere out in the spreading whiteness—

  Out there in the hell they could no longer see.

  Out, out, and out.

  They emptied from the death-trap trucks and 4×4s, a flood of over twenty executives, engineers, and local hands. Their Sword escort closed ranks around them even as they rushed onto the trail, guiding them through billows of turbine-blown oil fog in two groups of different sizes—the larger one running toward the pair of armored Rovers at the head of the convoy, a much smaller number turning the other way, dashing for the single armored vehicle at their rear.

  The passengers were not the only ones in need of immediate evac. Three of the Sword ops who’d exited their vehicles for a look-see in the seconds before the raid commenced had taken serious hits—two of them sliced up from shrapnel discharged by exploding mortar rounds, the third bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound to his leg. All had either found or been pulled into temporary cover between the vehicles, all had to be moved out, and in no case was it easy. But while the man who’d taken the slug and one of the shelling casualties were walking wounded, able to stay on their own feet with some assistance, the other was in far worse shape. Semiconscious, the left side of his head deeply gashed, a portion his left cheek torn away in a horrible flap, he had to be brought toward the armoreds in a fireman’s carry.

  The ops ferried their charges through the mist as hastily as possible. They wore stereoscopic thermal goggles equipped with low-probability intercept, spread-spectrum digital video transmitters, their color-enhanced LPI images appearing on dashboard receiver displays in the trio of armored vehicles. These allowed the security personnel inside the suped Rovers to see everything their exposed teammates saw through the TI goggles, creating a kind of multidimensional collage perspective of their intensely hostile surroundings.

  Inside and out, the Sword personnel were laying patterns of defensive fire. Careful not to fan the area where Nimec was bellied down in the grass, those on the trail were using the baby VVRS guns with which they’d left their vehicles. At the same time, the men aboard the Rovers were spraying the brush with rounds from their Big Daddies, waiting with their doors partially open for the evacuees, doing what they could to provide fire support as they made their way over from the cleared out vehicles.

  For the ops involved in the evac, the SGF2 was proving a tremendous asset.

  A matter of seconds after they started hustling the men and women in their care toward the armoreds, they had seen their attackers closing in, advancing on them like Indian warriors around an encircled Old West wagon train. They crept forward through the thicket, rushing with their bodies bent low, dropping, firing, then creeping forward again, their forms radiant in the TI lenses, the hot-spot discharges from their gun barrels appearing as winks of yellow-orange brightness against a gray field.

  The rising blanket of fog vastly turned things around. As Pete Nimec had observed only minutes earlier, it was hard to be accurate with a rifle while you were scrambling and doubtful of your enemy’s position. But knowing right where your enemy was made it easier. A lot easer when you were fading before his very eyes.

  Unable to see the convoy through the smokescreen, the attackers had stopped coming, their arrested movement suddenly turning them into blind and confused targets—and the Sword ops were quick to exploit the role reversal. Directing their fire at the IR images outside the blanket of mist, the gunners in the armored Rovers knocked one after another down into the thicket. As the evacuees continued their run toward shelter, their escorts managed to rattle off tight bursts of their own, breaking the ring of ambushers into a scatter of ducking, falling bodies.

  Moments later the evacuees were hurrying into the armoreds. They got the wounded in first, the occupants of the vehicles coming out to help them through the open doors, clearing as much room as possible for them in the cargo sections, then assisting the rest, squeezing them inside, slamming and locking the doors behind them.

  The transfer accomplished, they were, mercifully and at last, safer.

  None of them was at all sure it meant they were saved.

  Crouched on one knee outside the Rover, DeMarco was desperately scanning the treetops when he heard the flap of chopper rotors in the distance.

  He felt a wash of relief, then took a breath to settle himself. No sense getting too overjoyed. The Skyhawk was coming, okay, but it wasn’t here yet. He needed to keep his mind on what he was doing, keep his finger on his trigger.

  His gunsight shifted from normal daylight to TI mode at the flip of a switch, DeMarco could see clearly through the smoke gushing from the 4×4’s tailpipe. Knowing he’d be able to see in the whiteout was his entire reason for having chosen the oil fog. Type IV’s ability to screw up thermal imaging would have hidden the shooter from him, and him from the shooter, but left Nimec visible to the sniper out beyond the edges of the mist, a dead duck without assistance. Nimec had realized this as well as DeMarco, hence their tiff over the comlink. He had not wanted DeMarco to make a target of himself for his sake. And DeMarco supposed he might have felt the same in Nimec’s place. Too many heroes here, that was the problem.

  DeMarco peered through his eyecup, his cheek to the gunstock, sweeping the rifle from side to side, trying to scope out the shooter.

  A special agent with the Chicago FBI for over a decade before hooking up with Sword, he knew how to use a gun. He’d earned high qualifications for sidearm technique, b
etter-than-average rifle certs, and a couple of commendations for situational and judgmental skills. But he was still no expert shot with a submachine gun and, for that matter, had never used deadly force on a human being or anything larger than a cockroach—shit, he even bought humane traps to catch the mice that wriggled into his basement every spring. Only twice in Chi had he been compelled to draw a weapon off the training course, both times getting a hands-in-the-air surrender. There were no dramatic takedowns or feats of marksmanship for him to tell war stories about over beers somewhere; if he was going to help the chief out of his jam, and maybe see another tomorrow himself, he would need to score his first right now.

  Perspiration trickling down his face, DeMarco swept the rifle across the trees, a damn lot of them for that bastard to be hiding in, where the hell was he up there—?

  He abruptly checked the weapon’s motion. Through the electronic reticle of its sight, he’d spotted the treetop shooter saddled in the crook of a foliage-swaddled limb, his IR phantom form absolutely still.

  It took perhaps a millisecond to realize the sighting was mutual.

  His eye to the scope, DeMarco had enough time to see the bore of the sonofabitch’s rifle swing toward him in the treetop, just enough, the sniper absolutely still and steady up in the treetop except for that one conspicuous movement.

  DeMarco could hear his pulse somewhere between his ears as he squeezed back Big Daddy’s trigger and felt the recoil against his shoulder, a 20-mm smart round flying from the rifle’s titanium upper barrel, the micro-computerized sight processing range and position, automatically calculating the round’s best point of detonation for target acquisition, setting it for airburst rather than on-impact explosion. And then an earsplitting blast, the treetop igniting into an orange bouquet of flame, its trunk blowing apart, spewing everywhere, obliterated into countless fiery chunks, shaves, and splinters of wood.