Direct Action (15 page)

“You gotta be shitting us,” said Magic Brown.

“No shit,” DeWitt assured him. He hoisted Kos up and packed him against the corner of the rear seat. “Anyone got an ammonia capsule?”

There was no response.

“Fuck him, then,” said DeWitt. He made himself comfortable, and they left Kos Kosciuszko to regain consciousness on his own. If you didn’t require some major first aid, you couldn’t expect much sympathy from a bunch of SEALs.

DeWitt keyed his radio. “Kos just got knocked out. He doesn’t have a scratch.”

“Roger,” Murdock radioed back. He’d been pondering whether to stop somewhere and transfer the Doc to the other Mercedes. Now it was one less thing to worry about.

“Checkpoint ahead,” Doc Ellsworth broke in. Then, cocking an eyebrow at Jaybird, he added, “And no, I ain’t slowing down.”

“
Out
standing,” said Murdock.

Jaybird just shook his head.

They came up on the checkpoint with the Mercedes’ police lights flashing and the sirens wailing. Even if there had been radio reports of raiders and a firefight, they looked like they were chasing something—not being chased. Enemy commandos certainly wouldn’t be making all that noise. If not, they at
least looked official enough to raise the same doubts as before.

The noise of the sirens had everyone out and ready at the checkpoint.

“Jiggle the siren switch,” Murdock ordered. “Change the tone and let them know we see them.”

Jaybird did it.

“Flash the lights and go on through,” said Murdock.

The car filled with the metallic clicking of weapon safety catches coming off.

As they sped through the checkpoint Murdock saw one man raise his rifle and another yank it down. Even the visible bullet holes in the vehicles didn’t tip the scales against them. Of course, you couldn’t get that good a look at night and at that speed.

Where they had come up from the south, now they headed northeast. There was a hard-surface secondary road that snaked up into the mountains and all the way back down to Batröun and Tripoli on the coast. Murdock had identified a number of possible helicopter landing zones for the pickup, but he wanted to get as close to the mountains as he could. The valley was gently rolling and almost treeless, and the visibility extended for miles. As the land rose up toward the base of the mountains it became much more forested. Murdock wanted to get inside the screen of those trees, to minimize any exposure to the helicopters. It all depended on the time. The helicopters had to get in and out before daylight. That was definite.

In the second Mercedes, Kos Kosciuszko woke up. And like any good SEAL, he woke up fighting.

Ed DeWitt’s first clue came when an arm the size of a country ham came swinging into his shoulder. DeWitt went sailing against the passenger door.

Magic Brown made a quick appreciation of the situation and dove over the front seat onto Kos. He was joined by DeWitt, and they tried to hold Kosciuszko down, shouting, “Chief, Chief, it’s us, it’s us.”

Kos came to his senses fast, which was good, because Brown and DeWitt were on the verge of losing.

“Wha … what?” Kos stuttered.

“It’s okay, Chief,” said DeWitt, panting hard. “You took a rap on the head. You’re okay.”

Kosciuszko shook his head to clear it, and then grabbed his temples. “Man, my head hurts. Anybody got a couple of aspirin?”

Magic Brown crawled back over the front seat and rummaged around for the first aid kit, grumbling quietly to himself, “Fucking gorilla.”

DeWitt fell back in his seat and took a little breather. He gingerly worked his arm. He thought that if he hadn’t been wearing body armor, Kos’s first shot would have broken his collarbone.

In the first Mercedes, Murdock was looking at his dive watch: 0258 hours. They had two minutes or so before the armored cars blew, and he wanted to be through the next checkpoint
before
that happened.

Then Ed DeWitt noticed headlights coming up behind them. So much for the breather. “We’ve got company in back,” he reported.

Murdock heard it in his earpiece. “Get out some PDMs.”

Ed DeWitt grabbed a bulging nylon bag from the rear seat storage area. Kos Kosciuszko was washing down three aspirins. “Get yourself together,” DeWitt told him. “I’ll take care of this.”

The bag was filled with one-pound canisters about the same size as a nine-volt lantern battery, but with only three sides. The M-86 Pursuit Deterrent Munition had been designed to aid Special Forces teams being chased by larger enemy forces.

If you were running like a bastard, all you had to do was pull the pin and toss the mine back over your shoulder. When it hit the ground seven monofilament lines, each six meters long, were ejected from the casing. When anything touched one of
the lines, a small charge kicked the M-86 one meter up into the air, where it exploded. It was guaranteed to make even the most hard-core pursuers lose their appetite for the chase. During the Vietnam War SEALs had improvised claymore mines with thirty-second time fuses for the same purpose.

The vehicles behind them were gaining. DeWitt could make out what looked like a Land Rover, and two more sets of headlights behind it. The winding narrow roads would have limited speed even if the Mercedes hadn’t been carrying all that heavy armor.

DeWitt opened his door and, leaning out, lobbed three PDMs so they would land in the center of the road. For good measure he tossed out a couple of handfuls of caltrops, tiny three-pointed spikes that did the same damage to tires that they’d done to horses’ hooves at the dawn of warfare.

The Land Rover hit one of the lines of an M-86, and the mine exploded in the air right behind it. The PDM also worked on vehicles. The fragmentation perforated the car and touched off the gas tank. The Land Rover exploded in a fireball. The second vehicle spun off the road trying to avoid it. The third hit another PDM.

Jaybird Sterling watched the whole scene in his side-view mirror. “Oh, shit,” he exclaimed unhappily, because it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Everything was within sight of the upcoming checkpoint.

The Mercedes ran into a hail of fire. It sounded like rivets being driven into the car bodies, and so many rounds splattered into the polycarbonate that it was almost impossible to see out the windows. Murdock, Jaybird, and Razor opened up from the gun ports to try to suppress some of it, smoke be damned.

The two right-side tires blew out and the rear end started to swing around. Dancing the wheel lightly back and forth, staying off the brake, Doc managed to regain control. The hours they’d spent practicing at a California racetrack paid off.
The Mercedes kept going on the run-flat wheel inserts, just not as fast.

The Germans made good cars and good armor. Both cars passed through the checkpoint gauntlet, and perhaps there was even a faint expectation that they might make it.

Then, back at the checkpoint, a man stepped out into the road. He shut out the confusion around him and settled the crosshairs of his optical sight on the rear of the fleeing Mercedes, leading it just a shade high. He smoothly squeezed his trigger. There was no sensation of recoil, but a thunderclap of flame and smoke erupted from the rear of the RPG-7V launcher tube on his shoulder.

Everyone at the checkpoint watched the flare on the tail of the rocket as it seemed to float toward the Mercedes.

The road curved up ahead. The only question was whether the rocket or the Mercedes would get there first.

The rocket hit the car with a yellow flash. The checkpoint erupted with guns being fired into the air and shouts of “
Allahu Akbar!
” “God is Great!”

Then someone with their wits about them screamed, “Get them!”

The whole mob seemed to shake themselves awake and ran shrieking down the road.

0301 hours

Vicinity of Baalbek

Lebanon

The Mercedes was just taking the curve when the rocket hit. An RPG shaped-charge warhead was capable of penetrating thirteen inches of solid steel. If it had hit the rear of the car straight on, no one inside would have survived. But as the Mercedes swung into the turn, the rocket hit at an angle near the right rear taillight. The plasma jet cut across the trunk and exited just behind the right rear passenger door. The door blew off, as did the trunk lid. The trunk armor contained most of the blast, but the plates still buckled and a great deal of energy was released.

Kos Kosciuszko was just starting to feel better. The explosion blew the rear seat off its mounting and threw him and Ed DeWitt toward the front of the car.

The Mercedes spun across the road like a top and smashed into a low stone wall. The Halon fire-suppression system activated. That was all well and good; the Halon kept the fuel tank from exploding and the ammunition and explosives from cooking off. But Halon gas, while wonderful on fires, is hard on human lungs.

The driver’s air bag and the steering wheel to hold onto had left Professor Higgins in the best shape. The other side of the car was pinned against the stone wall, but his was clear. He held his breath as the high-pressure gas filled the car and dragged a stunned Magic Brown, and Ed DeWitt, who had ended up in the front seat, out his door. Kos Kosciuszko was already sitting out in the road, fully conscious but with a quizzical look on his face, as if wondering how he had gotten there.

Murdock was watching the whole scene, horrified. “Hit the brakes,” he shouted. They were going back, if only to account for the dead. No SEAL had ever been abandoned on the field of battle, and Blake Murdock was not going to be the first to do so.

Doc Ellsworth threw the Mercedes into reverse and screeched back to the wreck. Murdock, Razor, and Jaybird piled out.

They found Kos still sitting in the road, bloody but blaspheming so fluently it couldn’t be that serious. Magic Brown was puking his guts out onto the road. Ed DeWitt was just coming around. The Professor was dragging what weapons and ammo he could find out of the wreckage. Murdock was first amazed and then overjoyed to find them all alive.

Rounds were cracking overhead. Jaybird opened up with his machine gun to keep their pursuers at a distance. Razor picked up DeWitt while Murdock threw Kos Kosciuszko into the undamaged Mercedes.

Then there was a quick flash in the distance. Murdock counted off in his head: “Thousand-one, thousand-two.” The shock wave and the loud rumble of the blast arrived at the same time.

0303 hours

Baalbek

Lebanon

The Syrian soldiers thought they had driven the raiders off by superior force of arms, causing them to abandon their vehicles.
Once they were sure the intruders were gone, they celebrated their victory in traditional fashion by firing their rifles into the air. Some were striking heroic poses atop the armored cars.

Since he had pulled his fuses a little sooner than DeWitt, Murdock’s armored car went off first. But it didn’t matter; the blast immediately set off the mercury switch in DeWitt’s vehicle.

The power of an explosion is determined by both the mass of the charge and the velocity of the explosive. When black gunpowder is ignited, it changes from a solid to a gas relatively slowly, but few substances on earth do so faster than TNAZ.

The armored cars contained the blast only for microseconds, and then their steel broke into hundreds of thousands of high-speed fragments and added to the devastation.

The insides of the armored cars had been lined with sheets of zirconium, courtesy of the CIA. The same metal was used in cluster-bomb warheads to create an incendiary effect. When the zirconium ignited it added a fireball to the blast.

The warehouse and everything and everyone in it blew apart.

Unbeknownst to the CIA, the Syrians had housed the counterfeiting workers and technicians next to the warehouse, reasoning that it was easier to protect them there than transport them across Baalbek every day. The firefight at the warehouse had woken everyone up and caused all but the least prudent to hug their floors.

Those few who were looking out their windows died first when the shock wave caved in the front of the barracks. Then the building collapsed. Some of the others would eventually be dug out alive.

Pieces of wood, metal, and burning paper fell back to earth. The smoke settled, and the warehouse was just a mound of debris. An eighty-thousand-pound T-62 tank lay upside down. The turret of the BMP that had fired at the SEALs could be seen in the branches of some nearby trees; the body was nowhere to be found.

The houses surrounding the warehouse were flattened to one degree or another, depending on how shielded they were from the blast. The roads were blocked by trees and debris. The shock wave shattered windows in a mile radius around the warehouse.

Needless to say, everyone still living in Baalbek was wide awake. It was going to take quite some time to figure out what had happened, and even more time to get organized.

0304 hours

Vicinity of Baalbek

Lebanon

“Hoo-yah!” Razor Roselli screamed in exultation.

“Get in the car!” Murdock yelled.

“Eat that, motherfuckers!” Razor shouted down the road.

The explosion had temporarily silenced the incoming fire, and Murdock wanted to take advantage of it. “Get in the fucking car! Doc, get in the back and check ’em out. Jaybird, drive.”

Murdock had tailored the assault force so they all could fit into one Mercedes in an emergency. They did, just barely, and it was madness: Jaybird behind the wheel, Murdock and Razor crammed in the front seat, the Doc stretched half over the front seat with a flashlight trying to sort out injuries from the packed mass in back. Magic Brown was fighting to get his head out a window so he could puke some more. The smell of sweat and fear and adrenaline was obscene.

And in the midst of it all, Razor Roselli was as happy as Murdock had ever seen him. “We did it!” he exclaimed. “We fucking did it.”

“Excuse me, Chief,” said Jaybird Sterling. “But if you take a second and look around you’ll see that half our crew is at least half fucked up, and I’m not sure how long this car is going to hold together; most of the warning lights on the dash are lit up.”