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. PDMs.”
Murdock heard it in his earpiece. “Get out soon.”
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 cartraps, 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.
19
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 were all 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.