Giordino stood beside the engineer and pulled the air horn cord like a crazy man as the train thundered over the rails toward the fighting. He stared and stared at the fort, hardly recognizing the ravaged structure as it grew larger through the windshield of the locomotive cab. The utter devastation, the pall of black smoke rising in the sky, made him sick at heart. From all appearances the relief force was too late.
Hargrove gazed, fascinated. He couldn't believe that anyone could live through such destruction. Most all the parapets were shot away, the ramparts in unbelievable shambles. The front wall where the main gate once stood was nothing but a small mountain of tangled stone. He was astounded at the number of bodies strewn around the perimeter of the fort and the four burned-out tanks.
"God but they put up a hell of a fight," Hargrove muttered in awe.
Giordino pressed the muzzle of a pistol against the engineer's temple. "Lay on the brakes and stop this thing. Now!"
The engineer, a Frenchman, who had been pirated away from operating the superfast TVG train between Paris and Lyons by double the salary from Massarde Enterprises, applied the brakes, stopping the train directly between the fort and Kazim's field headquarters.
With clock-like precision, Hargrove's special operations warriors poured off the train in both directions simultaneously and hit the ground running. One unit launched an immediate attack on the Malian field headquarters, catching Kazim and his staff by complete surprise. The rest of the force began assaulting the Malian army from the rear. The covers were quickly thrown off the Apache helicopters that were tied down on the flatbed cars. Within two minutes they were lifting into the air, swinging into position to fire their hellfire missiles.
In the sudden panic and confusion, Kazim stood rooted at the realization that the American Special Forces had sneaked across the border under the noses of his air screen. He was sick to his stomach in shock and made no effort to direct a defense or run for cover.
Colonels Mansa and Cheik each grabbed Kazim by an arm and hustled him out of his headquarters' tent into a staff car as Captain Batutta quickly jumped behind the wheel. Ismail Yerli shared their love of self-preservation and climbed in the seat beside Batutta.
"Get out of here!" Mansa shouted at Batutta as he and Cheik climbed in the backseat on each side of Kazim. "In the name of Allah, move before we're all killed""
Batutta had no more wish to die than his superiors. Leaving their men to fight out of the trap on their own, the officers had no second thoughts about fleeing the battlefield to save their own skins. Frightened beyond logical thinking, Batutta raced the engine and threw the staff car in gear. Though the vehicle was a four-wheel-drive, he dug the tires deeply in the soft sand, cutting twin trenches without achieving traction. In panic, Batutta kept his foot jammed on the accelerator. The engine shrieked in protest at the excessive revolutions as he stupidly made matters worse by driving the wheels into the ground up to their axle hubs.
Mouthing soundless words, Kazim abruptly returned to reality, and his face twisted in terror. "Save me!" he screamed. "I order you to save me!"
"You fool!" Mansa yelled at Batutta. "Let off the gas or we'll never get away."
"I'm trying!" Batutta snapped back, sweat bursting from his forehead.
Only Yerli sat calmly and accepted his fate. He stared out the side window silently as he watched death approaching in the shape of a big, purposeful-looking man in American desert combat gear.
Master Sergeant Jason Rasmussen of Paradise Valley, Arizona, had led his team off the train and straight at Kazim's headquarters' tents. Their job was to capture the communications section and prevent the Malians from spreading an alarm that would bring on an attack by Kazim's air force. In and out faster than a vampire pisses blood, as Colonel Hargrove had expressed it so picturesquely during the briefing, or else they were all dead meat if the Malian jet fighters caught them before their helicopters could recross the Mauritanian border.
After his team members had swept aside weak resistance from the stunned Malian soldiers and achieved their goal of cutting off all communications, Rasmussen noticed the staff car out of the corner of his eyes and began running after it. From the rear he could make out three heads in the backseat and two in the front. His first thought, when he saw that the car appeared stuck in the sand, was to take the men inside as prisoners. But then the vehicle suddenly leaped forward and bounced onto firm ground. The driver cautiously increased speed and the car began to pull away.
Rasmussen opened up with his machine gun. His fire peppered the doors and windows. Glass shattered and sparkled in the bright sun as bullets stitched across the car doors. After he emptied two clips, the heavily riddled car slowed and rolled to a halt. As he cautiously approached, Rasmussen saw that the driver had slumped lifeless over the wheel. The body of a senior Malian officer was leaning halfway out one window while another officer had fallen from an open door to his back on the ground and stared vacantly into the sky. A third man sat in the middle of the backseat, eyes wide open as if he was peering at some distant object while under hypnosis. The man in the passenger's seat in front, though, had a strange peaceful look in sightless eyes.
To Rasmussen, the officer in the middle looked like some kind of cartoon field marshal. The coat of his uniform was covered in a maze of gold braid, sashes, ribbons, and medals. Rasmussen could not bring himself to believe this character was the leader of the Malian forces. He leaned through the open door and gave the high-ranking officer a nudge with his gun butt. The body sagged sideways on the seat, revealing two neat bullet holes through the spinal cord at the base of the neck.
Sergeant first-class Rasmussen checked to see if the others were beyond medical help. All had suffered fatal wounds. Rasmussen had no idea that he had accomplished his mission far away and above expectations. Without direct orders from Kazim or his immediate staff, there were no subordinate officers willing to call an air strike on their own. Singlehandedly the sergeant from Arizona had changed the face of a West African nation. In the wake of Kazim's death a new political party supporting democratic reform would sweep out the old leaders of Mali and launch a new government. One that was unfavorable toward the manipulations of scavengers like Yves Massarde.
Unaware he had altered history, Rasmussen reloaded his weapon, dismissed the carnage from his mind, and trotted back to help in mopping up the area.
Nearly ten days would pass before General Kazim was buried in the desert beside his final defeat, unmourned, his grave forever unmarked.
Pitt ran up the steps of the arsenal and joined the surviving members of the tactical team who were making their final stand within a small pocket around the underground entrance. They had thrown up hasty barricades and were raking the parade ground with a steady fire. In the sea of devastation and death they still hung on, fighting with an almost insane ferocity to prevent the enemy from entering the arsenal and slaughtering the civilians and wounded before Giordino and the Special Forces could intervene.
Bewildered by a stubborn defense that refused to die, the decimated flood of Malian attackers crested and stalled as Pitt, Pembroke-Smythe, Hopper, Fairweather, and twelve UN fighters moved not back, but leaped forward. Fourteen men charging nearly a thousand. They rushed at the stunned mass, yelling like underworld demons and shooting at everything that stood in front of them.
The wall of Malians parted like the Red Sea before Moses and fell back before the horrific onslaught that punched into their ranks. They scattered in every direction. But not all had been invaded by crippling paralysis. A few of the braver ones knelt and fired into the flying wedge. Four of the UN fighters fell, but the momentum carried the rest forward and the fighting became hand-to-hand.