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  Nimec inhaled. He wasn’t about to fool anybody here, leaving him to pull rank.

  “No,” he said. “You’ve got any sudden ideas in your head, you damn well better shake them.”

  DeMarco was silent again.

  “Steve—”

  “Your signal’s breaking up, chief. Couldn’t hear you.”

  “What do you mean you couldn’t hear me?”

  “Getting worse, I’m losing you—”

  “Don’t pull this on me, Steve…”

  “Lost you,” DeMarco said very clearly over their comlink. “Proceeding at my own discretion. Over.”

  * * *

  The headman had determined he’d waited long enough. An ambush must have surprise and speed; lose either, allow the situation to become static, and it would fail.

  Lowering his glasses so they hung over his chest on their strap, he brought his palm-size tactical radio to his mouth and sent out his command to the men he’d divided up on both sides of the trail. His voice was level and controlled.

  In the brush at the convoy’s rear, in the forest up ahead, the bandits left their stationary positions and started to converge on the vehicles according to plan.

  * * *

  Moments after breaking contact with Nimec — hanging up the phone on him, figuratively speaking — DeMarco resumed his countdown where he’d left off, twelve seconds minus. He’d moved his finger away from the Type-IV release button on his touch pad to another about an eighth of an inch over to its right.

  The lighted button he was now ready to push was marked SGF2, for petroleum smoke-generator fog formulation two, which, in truth, was hardly different from the diesel-and-oil smoke pot formula that had been used on battlefields since World War II. And while it created a quick, dense visual screen and did a good job muddling near infrared signals, giving it a considerable degree of efficacy in certain evasive situations to the present day, it didn’t work nearly as well as Type IV in degrading the functionality of thermal imagers sensitive to far end IR wavelengths.

  That limitation was precisely what DeMarco wanted — no, needed — to put him on more or less equal terms with his opposite number in the treetop.

  “Eleven, ten, nine, I want everybody set to go…”

  An eye on his digital dashboard clock, DeMarco was also getting set, practicing what he preached as he ticked off the seconds over his comlink — only he would be going very much his own way.

  “… eight, seven, send up the smoke!”

  DeMarco hit his console button and white SGF2 vapor began pouring from his Rover’s tail pipe, Wade and Hollinger releasing it from the exhausts of their respective vehicles at the same instant, the two of them acting on his direct order.

  DeMarco looked down at the weapon he’d taken from a hidden underseat compartment, resting all sixteen pounds of it comfortably across his lap even as he’d been having his little clash of opinion with Nimec. UpLink arms designers called it a Big Daddy VVRS, their own version of what master planners with the Pentagon’s Future Land Warrior program were dubbing an “objective individual combat weapon,” or OICW, which was itself a variant of the modular French FAMAS rifles that terrorists had used with grievously damaging results against an UpLink facility in Brazil two years earlier.

  Ninety percent of the time, Sword’s munitions designers were way ahead of the curve, but every so often they found themselves playing catch up. When that happened, they always compensated by pulling into first place.

  The Big Daddy was a single-trigger, dual-barreled, integrated firing system, its lower barrel chambered for 5.56-mm VVRS lethal/nonlethal sabot rounds, and its upper barrel a 20-mm fused multipurpose munitions launcher; a microcomputer-assisted, thermal image/laser dot range-finder targeting scope on top. This was quite the whole package rolled into one.

  Hoping it would do the trick for him, DeMarco continued to read the numbers on his dash clock aloud, getting there now, getting there, three, two, one…

  “… Commence evac!” he yelled.

  And gripped the Big Daddy in both hands as he pushed out his door into the churning smoke.

  In the 4×4’s rear compartment, all four of its terrified passengers sat watching everything beyond their windows dissolve into a blank white void, as if the world were simply being erased before their eyes. Without exchanging a word, they had linked hands on the seat between them, bowed their heads, and begun moving their lips in spontaneous, silent prayer — each according to his or her individual belief, desire to believe, or willing abandonment to the possibility that a higher power might be stirred into turning an ear in their direction.

  As one, they petitioned not for their own lives, but for those of DeMarco, Nimec, and the people from the evacuated vehicles somewhere out in the spreading whiteness—

  Out there in the hell they could no longer see.

  * * *

  Out, out, and out.

  They emptied from the death-trap trucks and 4×4s, a flood of over twenty executives, engineers, and local hands. Their Sword escort closed ranks around them even as they rushed onto the trail, guiding them through billows of turbine-blown oil fog in two groups of different sizes — the larger one running toward the pair of armored Rovers at the head of the convoy, a much smaller number turning the other way, dashing for the single armored vehicle at their rear.

  The passengers were not the only ones in need of immediate evac. Three of the Sword ops who’d exited their vehicles for a look-see in the seconds before the raid commenced had taken serious hits — two of them sliced up from shrapnel discharged by exploding mortar rounds, the third bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound to his leg. All had either found or been pulled into temporary cover between the vehicles, all had to be moved out, and in no case was it easy. But while the man who’d taken the slug and one of the shelling casualties were walking wounded, able to stay on their own feet with some assistance, the other was in far worse shape. Semiconscious, the left side of his head deeply gashed, a portion his left cheek torn away in a horrible flap, he had to be brought toward the armoreds in a fireman’s carry.

  The ops ferried their charges through the mist as hastily as possible. They wore stereoscopic thermal goggles equipped with low-probability intercept, spread-spectrum digital video transmitters, their color-enhanced LPI images appearing on dashboard receiver displays in the trio of armored vehicles. These allowed the security personnel inside the suped Rovers to see everything their exposed teammates saw through the TI goggles, creating a kind of multidimensional collage perspective of their intensely hostile surroundings.

  Inside and out, the Sword personnel were laying patterns of defensive fire. Careful not to fan the area where Nimec was bellied down in the grass, those on the trail were using the baby VVRS guns with which they’d left their vehicles. At the same time, the men aboard the Rovers were spraying the brush with rounds from their Big Daddies, waiting with their doors partially open for the evacuees, doing what they could to provide fire support as they made their way over from the cleared out vehicles.

  For the ops involved in the evac, the SGF2 was proving a tremendous asset.

  A matter of seconds after they started hustling the men and women in their care toward the armoreds, they had seen their attackers closing in, advancing on them like Indian warriors around an encircled Old West wagon train. They crept forward through the thicket, rushing with their bodies bent low, dropping, firing, then creeping forward again, their forms radiant in the TI lenses, the hot-spot discharges from their gun barrels appearing as winks of yellow-orange brightness against a gray field.

  The rising blanket of fog vastly turned things around. As Pete Nimec had observed only minutes earlier, it was hard to be accurate with a rifle while you were scrambling and doubtful of your enemy’s position. But knowing right where your enemy was made it easier. A lot easer when you were fading before his very eyes.

  Unable to see the convoy through the smokescreen, the attackers had stopped coming, their arrested movem
ent suddenly turning them into blind and confused targets — and the Sword ops were quick to exploit the role reversal. Directing their fire at the IR images outside the blanket of mist, the gunners in the armored Rovers knocked one after another down into the thicket. As the evacuees continued their run toward shelter, their escorts managed to rattle off tight bursts of their own, breaking the ring of ambushers into a scatter of ducking, falling bodies.

  Moments later the evacuees were hurrying into the armoreds. They got the wounded in first, the occupants of the vehicles coming out to help them through the open doors, clearing as much room as possible for them in the cargo sections, then assisting the rest, squeezing them inside, slamming and locking the doors behind them.

  The transfer accomplished, they were, mercifully and at last, safer.

  None of them was at all sure it meant they were saved.

  * * *

  Crouched on one knee outside the Rover, DeMarco was desperately scanning the treetops when he heard the flap of chopper rotors in the distance.

  He felt a wash of relief, then took a breath to settle himself. No sense getting too overjoyed. The Skyhawk was coming, okay, but it wasn’t here yet. He needed to keep his mind on what he was doing, keep his finger on his trigger.

  His gunsight shifted from normal daylight to TI mode at the flip of a switch, DeMarco could see clearly through the smoke gushing from the 4×4’s tailpipe. Knowing he’d be able to see in the whiteout was his entire reason for having chosen the oil fog. Type IV’s ability to screw up thermal imaging would have hidden the shooter from him, and him from the shooter, but left Nimec visible to the sniper out beyond the edges of the mist, a dead duck without assistance. Nimec had realized this as well as DeMarco, hence their tiff over the comlink. He had not wanted DeMarco to make a target of himself for his sake. And DeMarco supposed he might have felt the same in Nimec’s place. Too many heroes here, that was the problem.

  DeMarco peered through his eyecup, his cheek to the gunstock, sweeping the rifle from side to side, trying to scope out the shooter.

  A special agent with the Chicago FBI for over a decade before hooking up with Sword, he knew how to use a gun. He’d earned high qualifications for sidearm technique, better-than-average rifle certs, and a couple of commendations for situational and judgmental skills. But he was still no expert shot with a submachine gun and, for that matter, had never used deadly force on a human being or anything larger than a cockroach — shit, he even bought humane traps to catch the mice that wriggled into his basement every spring. Only twice in Chi had he been compelled to draw a weapon off the training course, both times getting a hands-in-the-air surrender. There were no dramatic takedowns or feats of marksmanship for him to tell war stories about over beers somewhere; if he was going to help the chief out of his jam, and maybe see another tomorrow himself, he would need to score his first right now.

  Perspiration trickling down his face, DeMarco swept the rifle across the trees, a damn lot of them for that bastard to be hiding in, where the hell was he up there—?

  He abruptly checked the weapon’s motion. Through the electronic reticle of its sight, he’d spotted the treetop shooter saddled in the crook of a foliage-swaddled limb, his IR phantom form absolutely still.

  It took perhaps a millisecond to realize the sighting was mutual.

  His eye to the scope, DeMarco had enough time to see the bore of the sonofabitch’s rifle swing toward him in the treetop, just enough, the sniper absolutely still and steady up in the treetop except for that one conspicuous movement.

  DeMarco could hear his pulse somewhere between his ears as he squeezed back Big Daddy’s trigger and felt the recoil against his shoulder, a 20-mm smart round flying from the rifle’s titanium upper barrel, the micro-computerized sight processing range and position, automatically calculating the round’s best point of detonation for target acquisition, setting it for airburst rather than on-impact explosion. And then an earsplitting blast, the treetop igniting into an orange bouquet of flame, its trunk blowing apart, spewing everywhere, obliterated into countless fiery chunks, shaves, and splinters of wood.

  DeMarco felt his heart stroking. Later he would recall his half-surprised glance down at himself as if to confirm it really was still beating inside him, that he really hadn’t gotten slugged in the chest — here, unbeknownst, was the crowd grabber of War Story Number One for the books.

  He returned his eye to the rifle sight, looked through the smoke into the thicket. The gunfire around him had gotten more sporadic. He could hear the whap of copter blades closer overhead. Good signs. Very good signs.

  “Chief!” Scanning the vegetation, scanning. His back pressed against the side of the Rover, his comlink channel to Nimec was open again. “Chief, come in, I’m trying to get a visual—”

  “I hear you,” Nimec said. “Can’t see a damned thing, though. Smoke’s too thick. Best estimate, I’m ten yards back of the Rover, twenty yards or so deep in the brush.”

  DeMarco swung his rifle barrel to the left, picked up a pair of low TIs — one man propped on his arms, the other flat on the ground.

  “Think I’ve got a visual on you, chief, hold up a hand…”

  It rose ghostly and shimmering in his scope’s eyecup.

  DeMarco breathed.

  “Okay, it’s you all right,” he said. “Hang tight, I’m on my way over.”

  “Remind me to kick you down for insubordination when you get here.”

  “Will do,” DeMarco said, and tore forward into the vegetation.

  * * *

  Watching the explosion rip through the treetops through his glasses, listening to the sound of a helicopter in the not-too-distant eastern sky, the headman knew it was time to call off his raid, knew irrevocably that it had come to almost total failure. The man marked for assassination was alive, the cargo he’d meant to hijack out of his grasp. Several of his band had been killed or wounded. Any financial compensation he stood to gain from having stopped the vehicles would not offset his losses.

  He had become uneasy about his situation the minute he’d noticed there were armored vehicles in the convoy, a feeling that rapidly turned to anxiousness when their chemical fog was released to shroud the trail, and the security teams aboard the enhanced 4×4s had begun fighting off his men. It was not their impressive firepower alone that opened a fissure in his confidence — as a former Cameroonian military officer, he’d learned that no amount of planning could prepare one for every aspect of an engagement, that there were always gaps in what was known about an adversary. What mystified him was that the capabilities they’d demonstrated were in such total conflict with everything he’d been told about them. To have gotten incomplete information was something he could accept. But it made no sense that sources he had always found reliable could so wholly and startlingly misinform him, not unless…

  The headman’s features stiffened, his fierce brown eyes riveted on the enkindled tree where he had placed his sniper. The helicopter would soon appear over its broken, blazing remnants, and when it did, his opposition would be able to scour the ground for him and his men.

  There was no time left for further supposition, not now. He would find another opportunity to throw himself open to them.

  Trembling with anger, he raised his handset to his lips and called a retreat.

  * * *

  As the copter came flying in overhead, Nimec pressed the TRANSMIT button of his Rover’s ground-to-air.

  “Pilot, this is CSO, you read me?” he said.

  “Roger, sir.”

  “We’ve got a mess here. Fatalities. Several wounded, three seriously. They need immediate medevac. There’s a burn vic, don’t know how long he’ll last without treatment.”

  “Goddamn. The pack of wolves that did this is on the move, I see them heading toward some off-road vehicles—”

  “Let ’em go.” His eyes on the dash display, Nimec was watching his microwave video feed from the chopper’s aerial surveillance pods. “We can’t
chase them and get these people out at the same time.”

  “Yes, sir. Hang on, we’re coming down. Over.”

  Nimec cut the radio, exhausted, holding a cotton pad from a first-aid kit to his forehead. It was soaked red.

  “Man,” DeMarco said beside him. “I feel like I’ve been clubbed by a giant.”

  Nimec snorted. He reclined against his backrest in silence.

  They sat waiting for the helicopter to land. Stretched out behind them in some cargo space cleared by their Rover’s packed-together occupants, Loren released a long, low, wavering moan.

  It made the fine hairs on Nimec’s neck and arms bristle.

  “A few minutes ago”—DeMarco began, then paused to marvel at those very words out of his mouth. He found it hard to believe so little time had elapsed since the windstorm of flame had come raging over the convoy from the mass of trees in front—“When you were out in the thicket, something made me remember Brazil. I couldn’t even tell you what right now, my thoughts were racing along so fast. Still are. But the raid there, those terrorists hitting us by surprise, almost wrecking the Matto Grosso compound… it feels similar to this in a way.”

  Nimec looked at him. “How do you mean?”

  “Damn thing is, I’m not sure.” DeMarco made a groping-at-the-air gesture with his hands. “It’s been ages since I read the Shadow Watch case files. But even before we tied it to that maniac Rollie Thibodeau calls the Wildcat, what stuck out at me about the Brazil raid was that it was done by real pros. A HAHO jump insertion, prototype FAMAS assault guns that are just being put into mass production this year… those guys were seasoned fighters, must’ve had serious underwriting.” He shrugged. “Another thing I could never get was what they were trying to accomplish. Always seemed kind of fuzzy to me, like nothing was what it seemed on its face. And the shit that came down on us now makes me wonder on the same accounts. Motive, tactics, equipment.”

  Nimec added a fresh first-aid pad.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The connection’s not there for me.”