“My bus will be a target.”
“Let us in!” shouted the man. He smashed the door with the butt end of his rifle.
“No, no, no!” yelled Abul. “Not my bus. Wait! Wait!”
He scrambled forward to the driver’s seat and opened the door. The two mercenaries ran up the steps.
“Where is Commander Boston?” Abul asked.
“Go, just go,” said the man who had pounded on the door. He pointed his rifle at Abul.
“What about the others?”
“Go! Go!”
Abul’s hands began to shake as he struggled to get the key into the ignition. He turned the motor over. It caught but then stalled.
“Out of the seat, you worthless scum,” said the mercenary. He grabbed Abul and threw him down. As Abul struggled to get up, the man’s companion pushed him into the aisle, first with his hand and then with his foot. Abul flew to the floor, tripping over his bedroll and tumbling against the body bag.
The soldier got the bus started and put it into gear. The entire compound was under fire now, from both mortars and machine guns. He pulled the bus out into the open area near the building. Three of his companions were crouched at the edge of the flat, firing toward the blinking guns down the hill.
He threw open the door.
“Get in! Get in!”
As the men jumped onto the bus, Abul got up and yelled at them. “We’re easy targets! Don’t go that way!”
“Shut up, bus driver,” said the mercenary who’d taken the wheel. “We don’t need you.”
The bus jerked into motion. Abul interpreted the soldier’s last sentence as a warning that he could easily be killed. Rather than tempting that fate, he made his way to the back of the bus, sidestepping the dead American’s body with a short prayer asking for forgiveness. He leapt to the door, pushed up the lever, and dove out the back, unsure whether the mercenaries would object to his leaving.
A hundred yards away, Boston zeroed the focus on his night glasses and watched Abul hit the dirt. Things were moving faster than he had planned.
He pulled up the remote detonator and pressed a three-number sequence, detonating a charge on the road about thirty yards in front of the bus. The explosion sent a flash of flames shooting upward—gasoline bombs were always spectacular that way. But the bus driver continued straight along the road, passing through the smoke and staying on the road.
“You better stop that bus, Chief,” said Sugar. “Or we’re gonna be walking outta here.”
“Keep your shirt on,” said Boston.
He lit another explosive, this one in the minefield near the road. More dirt, more flash and smoke. The bus drove on.
Boston had one more charge down the road, but it was obvious that the driver wasn’t stopping for anything that didn’t obliterate the bus. He shoved the detonator into his pocket and picked up his rifle, aiming at the front left tire.
Hitting a tire on a moving bus at 150 yards in the dark is not easy, even with an infrared scope. Which explained why it took him two shots for the first tire and three for the second.
The bus was shaking so much that the driver didn’t realize at first that the tires had been blown. The first hint came when he tried to round the curve. The bus wobbled, then refused to turn. He jerked the wheel hard and the vehicle lurched to its left, the rear wheels skidding forward. He jammed the brakes, which in effect pirouetted the back end of the bus toward the front. It flew over on its side, sliding off the road.
Abul, watching from the roadway, covered his eyes.
Dazed, one of the mercenaries punched out a window and raised himself out of the bus. He emptied his magazine box at some imagined enemy soldiers behind them, then began running down the road.
One by one the others joined him. They ran toward the road for all they were worth, disappearing into the darkness.
Sugar yelled at them from the observation post. “Don’t run away, you bastards! Come back! Come on! Don’t give up!”
They couldn’t hear her over the din, and wouldn’t have stopped if they did.
The gunfire kept up for another ten minutes, mortars lobbing shells and machine guns firing. All were radio-controlled remote units, originally part of the Whiplash defense perimeter. The entire battle had been directed by Boston’s blunt index finger smacking against the buttons of the remote control unit.
“I think you can stop,” said Sugar, watching the mercenaries run off over the hill. “They’re out of sight.”
“Look at my bus!” cried Abul as Boston came down from his lookout post. “Destroyed!”
“It ain’t destroyed,” said Boston. “Why the hell did you jump out?”
“They were going to kill me.”
He pronounced “kill” like “kheel,” dragging out the vowel.
“I hope this don’t mean we’re walkin’,” said Sugar.
“We’ll have to pull it over with the motorcycles,” said Boston.
Sugar was doubtful. The bus lay at the side of a ditch; they would have to fight gravity as well as the bus’s weight.
But gravity turned out to be their friend, indirectly at least.
They had trouble finding a place to attach the ropes, until Boston realized he could simply tie them through open windows. Then he and Sugar—Abul was too depressed—got on the motorcycles and revved them together, starting up the hill. The older bike was too small and weak to do very much; it strained at the rope, but no matter how much gas Sugar gave it, couldn’t budge the bus.
Boston, sitting on the Whiplash bike, had better luck. The big bore V engine had good torque in the lowest gears, a function of a design requirement that called for it to be able to tow a small trailer. But even the Whiplash motorcycle was still just a motorcycle, not a wrecker or a crane. It pulled the bus up about six feet, then refused to go any further.
Boston leaned forward, trying to sweet-talk the bike as if it were a mule.
“Come on now, Bess,” he said, inventing a name. “Just a little more. Almost there, babe. Come on. Come on.”
The bike grunted and groaned. Together they managed to lift the bus another foot and a half. But the strain was too much—the bike’s engine stalled. The bus’s weight pulled it backward. Boston and then Sugar threw themselves to the ground as their motorcycles flew down the hill. The bus slammed down—then, with gravity’s help, rolled over onto its roof, flipped onto its side again, and jerked upward on one set of wheels. It teetered there for a second, its momentum in balance.
Then gravity asserted itself, and it fell forward, landing on its tires.
Abul was practically in tears when he reached it.
“My bus, my beautiful bus,” he said in Arabic. “What have they done to you? What have they done?”
“Suck it up, big boy,” said Sugar, walking down the hill. “Get inside and see if you can start it up.”
The engine had flooded when it turned on its side. Abul tried the key, pumped the gas, then got out and went to the hood. The front end of the bus was so banged up he had to bend the hood to the right to get it open. He fiddled with the air filter and carburetor, then went back into the cab. It started on the second turn.
The next problem were the flat tires. Abul drove it a few yards to a flat spot straddling the roadway and a sharper drop to the left. Then he and Boston went to the back of the bus and wrestled the spares out from their carriage underneath the chassis.
The first was fine. The second was a bit soft.
“Not a problem,” said Abul, pulling it toward the front. “Come on.”
Sugar called Boston over as he pulled down the jack.
“There’s somebody near that ridge,” she told him, pointing with her rifle. “I think our friends decided to come back.”
Boston picked up the gun and peered through the scope. He couldn’t see anything.
“Hey, Abul, how long will it take you to change that tire?”
“Ten minutes. You help me with the jack.”
They had just pulled the last nut off when the gunfire started.