Cutting Edge pp-6 Read online

  “Chief—”

  Up, up, Nimec told himself. Sit up.

  He managed it without knowing how, his glance briefly meeting DeMarco’s across the seat. And then, somehow, past DeMarco’s head, through his side window, he spotted Loren in the grass on the opposite side of the Rover, probably thrown there by the blast wave, rolling in a patch of shoulder-high grass to smother the last of the flames that had eaten away at his clothes, flailing his limbs in pain.

  At the same moment, he heard a loud pop-pop-pop somewhere at the rear of the stalled convoy. Whooshing, whistling noises in the air. Nimec spun his head around and saw smoke tailing upward from the euphorbia grove, followed by three distinct orange-red bursts behind the last vehicle, the Rover shepherded by Conners and Hollinger. They were getting shelled back there, too. By what sounded to him like light mortars.

  Then the unmistakable rattle of semiauto fire from the woods up ahead of him, and the thicket on either side, and the barrels of VVRS III’s that had been thrust from gunports on the doors and tailgates of the cherried Rovers amid the confusion, their exterior concealment panels having sprung down as the compact subs were fitted into them from within. The Sword ops who’d already gotten out of their Rovers on Nimec’s instruction had dived between bumpers and fenders and tailgates and were also opening up, exchanging volleys with their unseen attackers out in the brush.

  Nimec gathered his wits and looked around into the Rover’s backseat. Some of its passengers were still screaming. Others had gone still, very still, not making a sound. All their faces wore confused, shocked expressions that probably weren’t dissimilar to his own.

  DeMarco. Concentrate on giving DeMarco his orders.

  “Loren’s alive,” he said. “I’m going to try and get him.”

  “You’re bleeding—”

  “It’s just a cut.”

  “Chief, let me do it.”

  Nimec shook his head. There were more popping mortar discharges. Then whistles, blasts.

  “I’ll be okay, listen,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell kind of setup this is, but they’ve got us blocked, front and rear. Radio back down the line. Get everybody piled into the armored Rovers. Might not mean anything if they take direct hits, but the rest of the vehicles might as well be tin cans, including the trucks.” He thought furiously. “They’ll need cover when they move, you decide what’s best. Then lock all the Rovers’ doors and stay put. Try and keep the passengers cool.”

  “You run out in the open alone—”

  Nimec cut short his protest with a slice of his hand.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Contact the base… we’ve got scrambled voice communications, right?”

  An acquiescent nod. “Right.”

  “Tell them to send up the Skyhawk — I just wish we had more than one of those choppers on base. Make sure the crew’s warned to expect heavy incoming. Tell them about those mortars. And whatever caught us with that blast of flame… some kind of RPGs. I don’t know. Also, we’ve got to have a microwave vidlink with the bird. Can’t be of much use to its crew down here till we know the attackers’ positions.”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “All right.” Nimec could still see Loren through the window. “That guide, Steve. I need to get over to him.”

  DeMarco held up a finger, snapped open a compartment on his door, and fished hurriedly inside.

  “You should take this,” he said, producing a small medkit. “There’s a morphine autoinjector inside. It’ll help. And watch out for those cactus plants, or whatever the hell they are. The shit that oozes from them’s poison.”

  Nimec took the medkit and gave DeMarco a purposeful nod.

  Then he shut the door with a hard push and dashed back around the rear of the vehicle.

  * * *

  In the expanse of sedge and euphorbia, the bandits had deployed into teams of two, each man laying his mortar about twenty yards apart from his teammate’s, and a hundred yards back from the girdled trail.

  Crouched beside one member of the gang, their headman watched him feed a high-explosive fragmentation round into his tube, set for drop fire to allow faster discharge than manual triggering with the lever. The round slid down the barrel and hit the firing pin at its base cap. Its primer cartridge detonated at once, igniting propellent charges slotted into the fin blades.

  An instant later the projectile launched from the muzzle in a gout of flame and smoke. It rocketed across the sky and thudded into the ground at the convoy’s rear, chewing a hole in the trail to hamper its retreat.

  No sooner did it strike than the bandit was dropping another round into the tube.

  The headman raised his binoculars to his eyes and looked toward the front of the column. Still out of his vehicle, the UpLink security chief had begun shuffling his way back along its side. He held his firearm in one hand, carried something else in the other, a box or case of some sort…

  The headman produced a curious grunt. Then he noticed the man writhing in the grass beyond the 4×4. It wasn’t possible to get a clear view of him in the patchy thicket, but he believed it might be the guide.

  His curiosity became satisfaction, a smile touching his lips. The UpLink security man was rushing toward the guide, exposing himself to try to aid him.

  It was almost too good to be true, he thought. His entire reason for stalling the convoy farther up the road had been to bring the security man closer to the trees, into easy range of the sniper who waited with explicit orders to take him out. Indeed, all the orders he’d given his men were clear and explicit, following guidelines of similar specificity from the Congolese warlord Fela Geteye, with whom they were in league. Whom warlord Geteye dealt with on the next level up the chain was none of the men’s affair. Such linkages were intricate, preserved in secrecy, and shared only as necessary. What mattered most to the headman’s coupeurs de route was collecting their portion of the bounty.

  It did not mean the headman himself was ignorant of likely connections. His choice of livelihood bore a great many perils, capture or betrayal high on the index, and experience had taught him one should always have a reserve of information worth dealing. He had no qualms accepting jobs on a need-to-know basis. But if those at the top were mindful of their safety, why not he? The trick was to strike a balance — too much knowledge could be dangerous, too little shortsighted and foolish.

  The headman knew warlord Geteye had ties to a Cameroonian dealer of stolen arms and technology who had bought favor with many lawmen throughout the region, among them, a police commander in Port-Gentil. The headman knew this commander owed his appointment to an even more highly ranked member of the Police Gabonaise, no lesser than a division chief said to be the puppet of an influential government minister. And although he did not know the minister’s name, the headman had heard credible rumors that his strings were, in turn, pulled by a blanc of fearsome repute whose name and broad designs were more deeply mysterious than any of the rest… and better left that way.

  However tempting it was to speculate about the parties’ identities, the headman thought it smarter to resist.

  He neither knew, nor would have cared to know, that the Gabonese minister was Etienne Begela, that the divisional police boss Begela had called upon to arrange the Sette Cama ambush was an immediate superior of Commander Bertrand Kilana, and that Kilana had been the one to secure warlord Fela Geteye’s participation as middleman between the illicit trader and the headman’s own band.

  Some information was a good thing, yes. But too much knowledge could weigh one down, tip the scale the wrong way. The headman would never wish to become a potential liability to those exceedingly powerful and dangerous individuals who might have concerns about what he could reveal about them under interrogation.

  His main interests had been how his gang of killers and thieves played into the scheme, and what was to be gained from their involvement. In that respect, he did not stand above those he led.

  Should all continue to
go well, their earnings looked to be tremendous. The arrangement with Geteye was one of incentives, each stage of the operation they successfully pulled off boosting their profits. The convoy’s interception already guaranteed them a nice sum, with another agreed-upon bonus due if UpLink’s head of security was sniped out — a hit the headman believed was about to be accomplished. Were his men able to get away with hijacking the truckloads of multimillion-dollar cargo, they would stand to make a certain fortune, receiving a cut of the loot from warlord Geteye after its turnover by the Cameroonian black marketeer. No restraints had been placed on their taking of casualties… as far as that went, the headman had gotten the distinct sense that a high body count might be preferred. on the other hand, damage to the precious freight must be avoided, or at least kept to a minimum. And in that regard, things were about to get tough.

  The headman held his glasses steady, watching the besieged line of vehicles through the double circles of their lenses. The Land Rover in front had been marked for destruction, and he’d factored in a significant loss to the cargo aboard the truck at its rear — the RPO-A shoulder launcher was a ravaging weapon. But he would take no chances damaging any more of his coveted bounty, and the nearness of the rest of the conveyances to one another — the last two trucks flanked front and back by what he now saw to be armored vehicles, something he hadn’t been warned to expect — meant a direct hit on any of the Rovers would have exactly that inescapable, unacceptable result.

  The controlled barrage could be sustained only a bit longer, then. Keeping the convoy paralyzed, and further softening its defenses by taking out the handful of UpLink security men that had left their 4×4s.

  The headman nodded to himself, thinking.

  Soon, he would have to bring his men out onto the trail for the decisive strike.

  * * *

  Hunkered low between his Rover and the truck behind it, Nimec swiped more blood off his forehead, and then propelled himself across the trail.

  He drew fire at once. A wild shower out of the trees that he figured for a subgun volley, then a single heavier-caliber round whapping the ground inches to his left, too close, throwing up divots of soil. That one had come from above. From a treetop. A shooter was perched up there, trying to take him out. The realization brought DeMarco’s question back to mind, what the hell kind of setup was this?

  He snipped off the thought. No time to worry about it now. The guide was yards ahead of him, down in the sedge, moving, thrashing in agony.

  Nimec plunged into the thicket, the folded blanket in his right hand, his unharnessed VVRS gripped in the other, its barrel tilted upward. He squeezed its trigger, sprayed the bubinga grove with fire, covering himself, or doing his best, impossible to take decent aim when you’re running full tilt.

  Another shot whizzed from above, close again. Closer than it ought to have been. Nimec was a moving target in a tangle of foliage reaching a foot or two higher than his head, and the guy’d gotten off two near hits from several hundred yards. Nobody was that sharp, not unless he had X-ray vision, or was using more than an ordinary telescopic. And Nimec was betting it wasn’t Superman up there.

  Behind him now, more mortar blasts and subgun volleys. But Loren’s screams, those piercing inchoate screams, were the loudest sounds of all, impossible to ignore. They tunneled his awareness, called to it like a maddening beacon. A human being might by dying there before his eyes and was suffering almost beyond comprehension. He had to get over to him, do something to stop those horrible cries of pain.

  Nimec scrambled through a cluster of euphorbia, the spiny limbs reaching above his head, twisting up around him, scratching his arms despite his attempt to avoid them. Still, they offered momentary cover from the treetop sniper. He ran on, hit some more grass, reached his man, and snapped open the medkit DeMarco had given him. Loren was thrashing, rolling, hands slapping his own body. It was as though he were unaware he’d already doused the flames that had eaten at his flesh, and was still trying to beat them out.

  “It’s okay, easy does it, try to stay still,” Nimec said, knowing the guide’s convulsive thrashing would only do more damage, thinking he might be in far too much pain to pay attention, possibly didn’t even speak enough English to know what he was saying. Sure, why not, there had to be a goddamn language problem for him to contend with, on top of everything else.

  Nimec squatted down on his haunches, got the morphine autoinjector out of the kit, and pressed the end of the tube to his outer thigh, ejecting the spring-cocked needle that would dispense the painkiller directly through his ruined clothing. He was still urging Loren to hold still in the calmest voice he could manage, It’s okay, Loren, we can make it, I promise, we can, only you’ve got to work with me here, got to hold still. He could smell the man’s seared hair, his flesh, a sickening, terrible assault on his senses.

  And then, suddenly, Loren settled down. He lay groaning — alive, at least — but almost motionless. Nimec couldn’t tell why. Maybe he’d understood him after all. Or maybe he was slipping into shock. Nimec simply couldn’t tell, guessed it might not be a good sign in the larger scheme of things. But staying here wouldn’t prolong his life. He wasn’t tossing around, flopping his arms and legs every which way, so it would be easier to bring him back to the Rover, where they’d at least have some protection. The Tom Ricci credo again… small steps.

  Okay. Next stop, the Rover. He needed to get both of them into it. Throw Loren over his shoulder, drag him, whatev—

  There was the crack of a gunshot, the sniper firing another round from the treetop.

  Nimec spilled over into the tall grass.

  Steve DeMarco knew how to follow orders without having them spelled out to the letter. Under most circumstances he wouldn’t have considered disobeying them.

  These weren’t most circumstances, though. Which left him to rely on another of the strengths that had gotten him assigned to Nimec’s SanJo A-team: the ability to make tough judgments in a hurry.

  Get everybody piled into the armored Rovers… they’ll need cover when they move, you decide what’s best.

  They had been Pete Nimec’s words, not his. You decide what’s best. Okay, fine, ready and willing to oblige. And moments before DeMarco saw Nimec tumble into the thicket, he’d decided, radioing out to the Sword ops inside and outside the Rovers, preparing them for a synched up release of Type IV thermal obscurant from the tail pipes of the armored vehicles. A recent UpLink agent developed for military use, the micropulverized aluminum alloy particles would swirl upward in a buoyant white cloud that provided a thick visual/thermal — or bispectral — fog, shrouding their people from sight as they all transferred to the armoreds. At the same time, the fog would scatter the infrared emissions of whatever it enveloped, everything from the twelve- to fourteen-micron heat signatures of human beings to those radiated by the vehicles, which would be intense even with their engines off after they’d been running for hours in the hot sun. Use ordinary white or red phosphorus, you’d get even wider spectrum wavelength scatter, DeMarco knew. But the stuff burned at five thousand degrees, hot, and running through that smoke was liable to blister your flesh and airways on contact. With the Type IV, any thermal gun scopes or heat-seeking rockets the opposition might be using would be totally fouled, while the individuals it was shielding from detection could tolerate short-duration exposure without adverse effects.

  DeMarco had decided on his crisp little plan and sent out word over the comlink. One, he would launch a thirty-second countdown. Two, the armoreds would release their bispectral obscurant. And three, the vulnerable UpLink personnel, road guides, and truckers would make their break, go hustling toward the safer vehicles.

  DeMarco was at minus twelve seconds, counting aloud into his microphone, ready to push the Type IV fog-release button on the rapid-defense touch pad console beside his left armrest, when he heard the big-bore rifle up in the trees crack for a third time, and saw Nimec drop completely out of sight in the brush.

&nbs
p; Stunned, DeMarco called an urgent hold command.

  In the Rover behind him, Wade jerked his finger away from his control console.

  At the tail end of the convoy, Hollinger did the same. “Chief, you all right out there?” DeMarco said tensely over the shared communications channel.

  Silence from Nimec.

  DeMarco felt his stomach knot.

  “Chief!” He was almost shouting into the mike now. “Come on, Pete, goddamn it, are you—?”

  “I’m okay,” Nimec answered. Flat on his stomach in the grass, his mouth full of dirt, he’d been hauling Loren up beside him as DeMarco’s tense radio call went out, too busy to respond at once. “Have to stay low. That son of a bitch in the tree almost took me out with that last shot. I think he’s using a thermal sight.”

  There was momentary silence in his earpiece.

  “Hang on, chief,” DeMarco said. “I’ll get you back in here—”

  Nimec cut him short. “Forget me,” he said. “I told you to evac those sitting duck vehicles.”

  “I was about make the call. Use the Type Four mist for cover—”

  “So use it.”

  “That sharpshooter’s got you pinned. You start moving again, trying to lug a wounded man with you, the fucker’ll nail you in a second.”

  Nimec inhaled, wiped blood from his forehead. He’d gotten some juice from a broken euphorbia stem into the cut, and it burned as though on fire.

  “If I’m being scoped through a thermal, Type Four’s what I need,” he said, lying through his teeth.

  “That stuff won’t disperse fast enough to screen you—”

  “I’ll keep hugging the ground, find the Rover once the smoke starts to lift.”

  DeMarco waited several heartbeats before answering him.

  “You’ll never make it that way,” he said at last. “I can use fog oil instead…”