“I think maybe they’re the key to this whole thing.”
Linc gave a little nod. “All right.”
“If you ask me,” Mark said and started to add, “I’ve got a bad feeling about—”
Cabrillo cut him off with a look.
Forty-eight minutes, by Juan’s watch, ticked by before he judged they were ready. Barely. He had seen the quality of the guards looking after the prisoners and knew they weren’t a serious threat in small numbers, but there were forty or so of them, and if his timing was off the two hundred more he hoped to lure from the training camp would reach the mine before everyone had made good their escape.
On their approach to the mine, they had left Linc to make his way to higher ground overlooking the stockyard behind the old administration buildings. With a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, the ex-SEAL could have accurately hit targets from well over a mile away. His effective range with the smaller REC7 assault rifle was still an impressive seven hundred yards, and for what Juan had planned Linc would be taking significantly shorter shots than that. The Pig was just out of sight of the mining camp, atop the narrow trail where the day before the desert patrol had returned with the body of the escapee.
Dawn was a brushstroke in the distance, so darkness filled the hollows and gullies around them, and the air carried the chill of the distant sea.
Juan wished there was a way he could leave Alana and their new companion, Fodl, out of the fight, but he couldn’t risk leaving them in the desert in case he and his team couldn’t return. He had explained his plan to them, made sure they understood the dangers involved, and both were ready to do whatever he asked of them.
“Just so you fit in with all the other archaeologist-adventurers out there, I’ll get you a fedora,” he said, and smiled at Alana when she had told him she was game.
“And a whip?” she’d joked back.
“Kinky,” he’d admonished with another grin.
“Comm check,” Linc called over the tactical net.
“I’ve got you five by five, big man.”
“I’m on top of the old ore-loading structure,” the sniper reported. “The guards are starting to roust the prisoners for breakfast. It’s now or never.”
“Roger,” Juan replied, and swallowed hard, his throat suddenly as dry as the desert sand. He looked across the driver’s seat to Mark Murphy. The success or failure of Juan’s plan hinged on Murph’s virtuosity with the Pig’s weapons systems. “Ready?”
Mark nodded.
“Tallyho!” Juan said.
Mark keyed up the Pig’s roof-mounted mortars. They had already been sighted in with Linc’s help, using a laser range finder. They fired simultaneously, and the weapon’s autoloader had a second round dropped into each of the four tubes before the first rounds had traveled a hundred yards on their high, arcing parabolas.
The second fusillade launched with a comically hollow sound, and Mark shouted, “Go!”
Juan already had the Pig’s engine revved, so that when he dropped it into gear, all four tires spun. They roared over a ridge, and the camp came into view. As he’d planned, no one had heard the mortars fire. Ragged prisoners were lining up for their pitifully small breakfast while guards casually harassed them. He saw one guard use a baton on a man, crashing it into the man’s kidneys so hard his back bent like a bow at full stretch and he collapsed in the dust.
The mortar rounds hit the apex of their flight and started barreling earthward, each packed with a kilo of high explosives. Mark had spent part of the drive to the camp removing most of the shrapnel from each round to minimize the chance of hitting any of the detainees.
Linc laid the crosshairs of his REC7 on the guard who’d just clubbed the prisoner, let out half a breath, and squeezed the trigger. “We have pink mist,” he reported when the guard’s head exploded.
He took out another pair of guards before the first ripple of concern passed through the security contingent. The captain of the guards appeared from a tent. His chest was bare, and he wore his uniform pants bloused into his combat boots. Linc noted the radio antennae sticking up through a hole in the tent’s roof and moved his aim onto another target.
Four mortar rounds struck the ground at precisely the same instant. The path leading down to the floor of the open-pit mine erupted in geysers of dirt and greasy fire. A moment later, more rounds hit even closer to the camp.
Both guards and prisoners alike pulled back, moving toward the large wooden buildings, while Linc continued to thin the ranks of terrorists, one shot—one kill—at a time. He made the ones carrying weapons his priority.
Cabrillo raced the Pig down on the camp like a rally driver dashing for the finish line. Next to him, Murph fought to keep the aiming reticle of the Pig’s onboard missiles locked on one of the terrorists’ trucks. He got tone and fired.
The rocket screamed off the rails, carving an erratic path through the air, and exploded against the truck’s cab, snapping its chassis in half so it rose up like a ship that had been torpedoed.
The blast further corralled the frightened prisoners closer to the building, while the guards were rushing back to their tents where many had left their automatic weapons.
The Pig was a hundred yards from the camp when the freshly armed terrorists started running from the tents, brandishing their AKs and firing long strings of rounds in random directions. Up in the Pig’s cupola, Linda watched them over the sights of her M60 machine gun. The weapon bucked in her arms, slamming into her shoulder like the business end of a jackhammer, but her aim never wavered.
The ground around the running gunmen came alive as rounds blew into their midst. Men fell, clutching at horrendous wounds, some struck by their own comrades who had whirled at this new threat and opened fire indiscriminately.
“He’s had enough time,” Juan yelled over the snarling engine. “Take out the command tent.”
Cabrillo’s plan had two goals. The first was to rescue as many of the prisoners as he could because he wasn’t sure if the Libyan military would take the time to discern friend from foe. He wasn’t even sure of their definition of those terms at this point. The second objective was to get as many terrorists as possible away from their training camp before the main attack. If Fiona Katamora was really there, then every gunman engaged at the mine was one less gunman trying to kill her before she was rescued.
This was why Linc had been told specifically to let the mine’s garrison commander contact the training camp on the radio. They needed him to raise the alarm. But now that he had . . .
Mark put a missile through the command tent’s front flap at just the right angle for it to hit the ground before it flew through the far side. The canvas rose up on a blossoming column of flame, and the piles of military gear stacked outside were blown flat by the concussion. The tent caught fire like flash paper and turned to ash that fell to the ground like dirty snow.
They were deep into the camp now. Above Juan and Murph, Linda continued to work the M60, taking out clusters of guards and using the tracer rounds to keep the prisoners moving toward the stockyard where the terrorists stored their railcars and train engines.
Cabrillo could tell that the guards’ will had been broken by the sudden and furious assault. Many of them were running down into the mine or over the ridge and into the desert. Fifty or more prisoners were huddled against the side of the old mine office building. A gunman suddenly reared up from behind a bulldozer. He had a perfect bead on the defenseless men and women and an RPG-7 lifted to his shoulder.
Murph flipped the controls from missiles to gun, and the .30 cal under the Pig’s snout chattered. The terrorist went down, but not before he fired his rocket-propelled grenade. The five-pound missile made it less than ten feet from the tube before it inexplicably exploded in midair.