Pepe Luria turned toward Coke. “Now tell me what spalling charge means,” he said in a deadly voice. His hands gripped the edges of his controller. “Instantly!”
“It means a quantity of inhibited plasticized explosive,” Sten Moden said calmly, “which is spread in a thin layer over the target surface by a precursor charge and detonated from the open face a microsecond later.”
Moden ran his fingers carefully across the inner surface of the hole. The ceramic was rippled in a series of surflike conchoidal fractures.
“The shock waves,” Moden continued, “reflect within the plate. A ceramic of this sort has virtually no elasticity. When the stresses peak, the material itself crumbles.”
He raised a handful of the glittering black residue and let it dribble down through his fingers.
Niko Daun eased up beside Coke and whispered directly into the major’s ear. Coke’s eyes blanked. He carefully looked away from Johann Vierziger.
“I don’t believe it,” Suterbilt said. “The house is a fortress, a fortress.”
“You should have hired the FDF sooner,” Vierziger said coolly. “Or perhaps Master Suterbilt and I should have stayed longer when we visited earlier tonight.”
“What would a few more men have mattered?” shouted Pepe Luria. “There must have been twenty Astras, more even! Look there!”
The house’s interior lights were on. The guards’ sprawled bodies looked more like cast-off clothes and lumber than they did a scene of carnage.
Pepe’s hands twitched. One of the fireflies above him suddenly pirouetted, firing its powergun as it spun. One bolt glared from the roof coping. Three more blazed out into the uncleared forest, lighting small fires. The last round snapped back toward Potosi.
Raul put a shaky hand on his grandson’s shoulder to calm him. “Not that,” the Old Man said. “We don’t want Madame Yarnell coming down on us.”
Raul looked at Sten Moden. “If the bomb was outside the house,” he said, “why didn’t it blow the wall in instead of out?”
“It didn’t blow in either direction,” the logistics officer explained. “The structure vibrated itself apart.”
He pointed. “The fragments fell in both directions, you see?”
As Moden said, as much of the shattered wall was in the slope across the living area floor as was outside the wall.
Daun drifted away. Coke motioned Vierziger over by crooking his finger.
“Is there something you want to tell me, Johann?” Coke asked in a low voice.
“No,” said Vierziger, “there isn’t. But thank you for asking, Matthew.”
“All right, they’ve had their game,” Pepe Luria cried. “Now we shall take the set. Tijuca! Tijuca! Where’s the drunken bastard Tijuca!”
Pepe’s expression was as furious as that of a weasel in a trap. “That’s it, I’ll—”
Mary Margulies stepped forward. “I told Angel I’d cover for him tonight,” she said calmly. “We got used to trading off like that in the old days.”
Pepe started to shout a curse in the Frisian’s face. He looked at her more closely before the words came out. He settled back on his heels, then said, “Will you? All right then. We’ll take eight men only, and two patrol cars.”
“What are you going to do, Pepe?” Ramon asked nervously. He touched his son’s wrist to draw the youth’s attention. “We daren’t anger the cartel.”
Pepe’s snarl melted into a smile even more cruel and terrifying. “In and out, gone before anyone knows there’s been an attack, hey?” he said in a husky whisper. “That’s the way the Astras do it, and they’ve had no trouble. We’ll do the same.”
“Their warehouse?” Raul asked, frowning.
“No, we’ll kidnap Peres!” his grandson said. “And the price to get him back alive will be for him and the Widow to leave Cantilucca forever!”
Cantilucca: Day Seven
A jitney filled with gunmen—Margulies thought they were L’Escorials, but the muted gang colors of the present didn’t show up at night—rolled down the nearly empty street. The vehicle swayed from side to side. The passengers cursed and flung bottles. Before Madame Yarnell arrived on Cantilucca, they would have been shooting.
The L’Escorial acting as communications officer, still holding the radio handset to his ear, turned to face Pepe in the back seat with Margulies. “They’ve taken in another case of liquor. There’s no chance she’ll be moving before noon.”
“Yarnell parties every night,” Luria muttered angrily. “Imported food, wines from Earth to drink. And we pay for it! She acts like she’s a queen.”
“On Cantilucca,” Margulies said, “she is a queen.”
A pair of jitneys drove out of the garage beneath the building opposite. The structure’s lower three stories were an Astra recreational center of varied capability. None of the men aboard noticed the pair of patrol cars in the alleys across the street.
“He’ll be coming soon,” Pepe said. He peered down at the firefly controller.
“No,” Margulies said.
Pepe reached for the power switch anyway. The Frisian caught his hand.
“No,” she said. “Fireflies are good for an area target—”
A lie as far as she was concerned, but the politic thing to say just now.
“—but this has to be precise. Let me handle the shooting.”
Pepe’s faced blanked in white fury, then relaxed again in a smile. The change was as sudden as a pair of eyeblinks. Margulies put her left hand back on the fore-end of the 2-cm weapon she’d brought for this operation.
“Area target,” Pepe said. “Yes. But I’ve set them to attack blue, you see? They’ll kill the guards, but Peres doesn’t wear blue himself!”
“Peres usually doesn’t wear blue,” Margulies corrected. “You’re betting that he won’t come out of that whorehouse with his new girlfriend’s blue bra around his neck.”
She shrugged. “Likely so. But why risk it?”
The radio set crackled. “He’s coming!” warned the commo officer.
Margulies stepped out of the car and took her position at the mouth of the alley. The wall against which she stood blurred her outline, but she had no real concealment beyond the darkness. She held her heavy shoulder weapon diagonally across the front of her body.
The garage’s automatic door rose with a series of rhythmic bangs. The gigolo’s newly repaired aircar howled up the ramp.
Peres himself was driving. He misjudged the slope and struck the street lip. The plastic landing skids flexed and bounced the nose high.
Margulies fired. Her 2-cm bolt stabbed the right front fan nacelle. The blue flash sent blades and fragments of the shorted windings in all directions, like shrapnel from a bomb burst.
The vehicle yawed right, hit the pavement at 30 kph, and cartwheeled.
The armored garage door started to close automatically. While the aircar was still spinning, flinging off bits of body panel, Margulies fired at where the edge of the door mated with the track along the jamb. The plasma bolt vaporized a section of the track and hammered the door panel like a collision with a speeding truck.
The door skewed in its frame and stuck. Nobody was going to get out of the garage to aid Peres unless they wanted to crawl through the twenty-five-centimeter gap beneath the lower edge of the jammed panel.
Both L’Escorial four-wheelers accelerated from their ambush positions. Pepe Luria stood, clinging to the back of the commo officer’s seat. He held an automatic carbine in his free hand.
The aircar landed upside down. It continued to rotate slowly, driven by the vibration of the two fan nacelles still spinning at full revs. The right rear installation had torn itself apart when that corner of the vehicle slammed down violently and drove the side of the housing into the blade arc.