Sam ran off the southeastern side of the road, slid into a ditch containing two feet of cold, swiftly moving water, and began firing his AK at the soldiers who were still pouring out of the two burning trucks.
All along the wet, grassy hillside on Caruso’s right, barking undisciplined rifle fire pierced the air. Dominic fired his rocket launcher three times. Two rockets hit high on the far side of the road, and the third made a glancing blow on an SUV, causing it to wreck into another vehicle but by no means destroy it. Dom grabbed a rifle off a dead rebel and, in contrast to his frantic comrades on the hill, carefully put his front blade sight on a running man seventy yards distant. He tracked him a few yards from right to left, then carefully pressed his rifle’s trigger. It popped in his hand, and the man seventy-five yards away fell down dead.
He repeated the process with a soldier running north from one of the burning trucks.
And next to him fifteen other shooters, little Yin Yin included, poured inaccurate but energetic fire up and down the motorcade.
Domingo Chavez scanned the sedans in the middle of the motorcade, looking for officers. Giving up for the moment, he settled on a plain-clothed security guard who fled a wrecked SUV and then ran to the dividing barrier for cover. Ding shot the man in the lower torso while he ran, and then he took his eye off the scope while he changed out the spent magazine in his hot and smoking Dragunov. He took a half-second for a wide view of the battle space. To his left, the troop transport trucks were engulfed in rolling flames, and pouring black smoke rose into the sleet-gray sky. Bodies — from this distance they were just tiny forms on the ground — lay strewn near the truck.
The black SUVs and sedans were in front of the troop trucks and behind the two burning vehicles at the front. They had stopped in the road in an accordion fashion, and a half-dozen or more men in black suits and green uniforms lay prone behind the tires or crouched on the near side of the engine block. Many others from these three vehicles Ding had already shot dead.
Everyone had bailed out of the vehicles by now because the rocket-propelled grenades and the anti-tank weapons flying through the air showed them that a stationary vehicle was the last place to be at the moment.
Ding tucked his eye back behind his scope and scanned quickly, right to left, searching for Su. He estimated there were still at least thirty soldiers and security men on the road or on the shoulder. Those firing their weapons all seemed to be shooting off to the east, away from Chavez.
He swept his scope over the firing position of Dom and the rebels, about three hundred fifty yards from his position. He saw several bodies lying in the grass, and an impressive amount of mud, grass, brush, and other foliage was getting kicked up into the rain by the incoming fire from the Chinese in the road.
Domingo knew the tiny position of poorly trained fighters would be wiped out in another minute if he did not pick up the pace, so he lowered his scoped rifle back to the road and centered his crosshairs on the mid-back of a security man in a black raincoat.
The Dragunov spit fire, and the man pitched forward, tumbling across the hood of an SUV.
Caruso shouted over the sound of gunfire, “Yin Yin is dead! I can’t communicate with these people.”
“Keep pouring fire!” shouted Chavez.
Driscoll called over now, “We’ve got police cars coming up the shoulder from the southwest!”
Ding said, “Deal with them, Sam!”
“Roger that, but I’m going to run low on ammo in about a minute.”
Ding shouted back, his words punctuated by his sniper rifle, “If we aren’t moving in a minute”—boom! — “then we aren’t moving!” Boom!
“Roger that,” shouted Driscoll.
General Su Ke Qiang crawled away from the cover of his sedan, and behind the row of men firing on the hillside to the west. To his left and right vehicles burned and bodies lay in the heavy rain, with blood running in long rivulets of rainwater off the road.
He could not believe this was happening. A few feet ahead of him he saw the slumped form of General Xia, his second-in-command. Su could not see his face; he did not know if he was dead or alive, but he clearly was not moving.
Su screamed as broken safety glass on the street ground into his hands and wrists as he crawled forward.
Chattering automatic fire came from the south, from the hills along the opposing lanes of traffic.
Two hundred fifty yards away, Domingo Chavez caught a quick flash of movement by the side of the road near the fourth vehicle. He centered his rifle’s scope on a uniformed man crawling there, and without hesitation he pressed the taut trigger of the weapon.
The bullet left the barrel of the rifle, raced over the chaos of the motorcade attack, and slammed into the left scapula of Chairman Su Ke Qiang. The copper-jacketed round tore through his back, spun through his left lung, and exited into the asphalt below where he lay. With a plaintive cry of shock and pain, the most dangerous man in the world died on the roadside, facedown, next to young soldiers who poured hundreds of rounds in all directions in a desparate attempt to push back the attack.
Chavez did not know that the last man he targeted in the motorcade was Su; he only knew they had done their best and now it was time to get the fuck out of the area. He shouted into his radio, “Exfiltrate! Everybody move! Go! Go! Go!” His command would be translated by those who understood for the benefit of those who did not, but anyone with radio contact could easily put together the message he was trying to convey.
Clark and his minder picked Chavez and his minders up four minutes later. Driscoll and three surviving men with him crossed all eight lanes of traffic and ran up the hill on the west side, met up with two of the Pathway of Liberty rebels who had run south instead of west, and they found Dom and two more surviving Chinese desperately trying to pull all the bodies off the hillside while staying in a gully that kept them clear of the sporadic fire from the road. Together they collected all the dead, and one man retrieved the minibus.
The thunderstorm helped with the escape. There were helicopters in the air, Chavez could hear them churning the black, soupy sky as they drove to the northwest, but their view of the ground was limited and there was so much carnage and congestion at the scene, just figuring out what the hell had happened took most of an hour.
The Americans and the ten surviving Chinese were back in the barn before noon. There were some wounds — Sam had a broken hand that he had not even felt when he was hit. Caruso had taken a ricochet off a rock that grazed his hip and bled heavily but wasn’t serious, and one of the surviving Chinese had been shot in the forearm.
Together they all treated their wounds and hoped like hell neither PLA nor the police would find them before nightfall.
SEVENTY-NINE
President of the United States Jack Ryan sat at his desk in the Oval Office, looked down to his prepared text, and cleared his throat.
To the right of the camera, just ten feet in front of his face, the director said, “Five, four, three…” He held up two fingers, then one finger, and then he pointed to Jack.
Ryan did not smile for the camera; there was a perfect tone to hit, and the longer he played this damn game the more he recognized that the rules, while still annoying as hell, sometimes were there for a reason. He did not want to show outrage, relief, satisfaction, or anything else other than measured confidence.