Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (34 page)

 
          
Libyans
began firing antiaircraft artillery into the sky, tracers arcing everywhere,
but judging by the wild, random sweep of the tracers across the sky, it didn’t
appear as if they were locked onto any of the Wolverines yet. “What’s it look
like to you?”

 
          
“Why
do you ask me these things, sir? You can see everything I see.” Chris Wohl was
stationed on the south side of the military compound, keeping watch on the main
access road between the military base area and the Jaghbub compound.

 
          
“Relax,
Sarge. It looks quiet out here.”

 
          
“That’s
because you’ve got five hundred mines between you and the bad guys,” Wohl said.
“I’ve got two T-55 tanks less than a hundred meters away from me. This looks
pretty damned suspicious to me, sir—the Libyans look like they’re on full
alert.”

 
          
“I
don’t blame them—we’re only fifteen miles from the Egyptian border.” Just then
they heard three beeps come over their communications network. “Here we go,
guys.”

 
          
Briggs
raised and adjusted a device that looked like a small, fat mortar launcher. He
double-checked the settings on the mount, armed it, and then used his boot
thrusters to jet-jump away from the area. Thirty seconds later, the launcher
activated, shooting a projectile with a one- thousand-foot-long piece of
half-inch-thick rope behind it. As the rope reached its full length, the
projectile detached itself, and the rope sailed through the sky, eventually
fluttering gently to the sand in a wavy snakelike pattern. Ten seconds later,
the rope—which was actually a detonatorlike cord—automatically exploded.

 
          
The
shock of the explosion caused every mine within a hundred feet either side of
the detonator rope to explode, creating an incredible light show across the
desert as an entire three hundred thousand cubic feet of sand simultaneously
blew into the sky. The vibrations and shock waves rushing across the desert set
off even more mines in a spectacular ripple pattern, like waves from a rock
thrown into a still lake.

 
          
“Yeah,
baby,
yeah!”
Briggs exclaimed as the
rolling explosions washed over him like a brief but violent minihurricane.
“Talk to me, honey!”

           
“Don’t get yourself shot while
you’re patting yourself on the ass, sir,” Wohl said.

 
          
“Hey,
you got the job I wanted—just make sure you don’t miss.”

 
          
“I’ve
got this job for one reason, sir—I
never
miss,” Wohl said. At that, he hefted a huge rifle that looked like a cross
between a big Barrett .50-caliber BMG sniper rifle and something out of a
science-fiction movie. The weapon was plugged into his belt with a short
fiber-optic data cable, and with a simple voice command it was activated and
Wohl started searching for targets.

 
          
It
did not take long. Vehicles started rolling out of a security building inside
the tall fence less than a minute after the explosions in the minefield. The
first out was an armored car with only two men in it, probably officers; Wohl
let it pass. His intended targets: The two ex-Soviet T-55 tanks sitting near
the entrance, both small, fast, and still powerful despite their age, following
closely behind the armored car.

 
          
Wohl
didn’t want to wait until the first one cleared the gate, so he had it in the
electronic sights of the big gun as soon as he saw it move out. About ten
meters before it reached the gate, Wohl pressed the trigger. Silently, with the
recoil electromagnetically dampened out, a sausagesized depleted-uranium
projectile weighing about three pounds shot out from the muzzle of the
electromagnetic rail gun at over twenty thousand feet per second. There were no
explosives in the projectile—its effectiveness was in mass times velocity, pure
momentum. In about a second, the sabot round hit the tank in the right side
just below upper track level. It pierced the thick outer hull and passed completely
through the tank’s diesel engine and transmission and out the other side
without losing more than twenty percent of its velocity. The projectile didn’t
even begin a ballistic flight path for another two miles, and it finally buried
itself thirty feet diagonally in the sand after flying more than five miles.

 
          
For
a few seconds, it appeared as if Wohl had missed—there was nothing at all to
indicate that the tank had been hit except it had stopped suddenly and one
track drive sprocket and drive shaft was sliced into pieces. But inside, the
tank’s engine was disintegrating with incredible speed and destructive force.
It was as if a hundred parts inside the engine, instantly dislodged from their
bearings and mounts, simply decided to fly apart at the same instant. The big
diesel engine simply split apart and became a deadly cloud of shrapnel, killing
the four crewmen inside instantly. The T-55’s gun turret popped off the top of
the tank like a champagne cork, spinning twenty feet in the air before landing
against the fence. Smoke and flames spewed out the opening like an upside-down
rocket engine.

 
          
Wohl
immediately targeted the second T-55, and seconds later it too was a burning
mass of metal, blocking the base entrance. Wohl jet-jumped twenty yards east, retreating
to a spot where he could fire inside the base. He sent one projectile into the
security building through the front door, hoping to take out some
communications equipment. But he was only waiting for his real target.

 
          
It
came less than five minutes later: an Italian-made Agusta A109 VIP transport
helicopter, escorted by a Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter. Their intelligence
information was right on: The Agusta was Libyan president Zuwayy’s personal
helicopter, and the Mi-8 carried his security staff, twelve heavily armed
Republican Guard troopers. Wohl didn’t have to lead either helicopter with the
rail gun at such short range: one shot each, and both helicopters came down
hard.

 
          
But
by now security forces and infantrymen had started streaming out of the base,
and they were even starting to walk automatic weapons fire in his
direction—time to leave. “Nike is evacuating,” he radioed.

 
          
“Taurus
is on the move too,” Hal Briggs reported. “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

 
          
Wohl
turned to leave—but before he could use his thrusters to jump away, suddenly
the sand around him disappeared in a blinding cloud of fire. Out of nowhere, a
third T-55 tank had raced around the two stricken tanks, located Wohl’s hiding
place, and had opened fire with a 101-millimeter round that exploded just a few
feet away—if he had been hit by the round, at this range, it might have killed
him. Wohl was blasted off his feet and thrown twenty feet in the air.

 
          
“Taurus
... Taurus ...” The blast had stunned Wohl— he could make his arms and legs
move, but he couldn’t get his legs under him well enough to run or jump away.
He could hear the T-55 moving closer, and he desperately tried to crawl behind
a sand dune or into a ditch—anything to avoid a direct hit by a tank shell.
Alarms were ringing in his suit—most of the energy in his suit was already
gone.

 
          
No
answer. Briggs was already gone. Even if he heard him, he couldn’t get back in
time.

 
          
Wohl
could now feel the T-55’s treads moving closer. He picked up the
electromagnetic rail gun, hoping to get one last shot off—but it was already a
tangle of broken parts in his hands. The hypervelocity rail gun rounds were
nonexplosive—he couldn’t even fashion a grenade or smoke screen out of the
now-useless rounds. His electronic stun- bolts were useless against a tank, and
even if he was confronted by infantrymen, he might have one or two bolts left
before his power drained out completely.

 
          
Crap.
In his entire military career, he hadn’t gotten more than a scratch or a few
minor cuts and bruises in combat— unless he was dealing with the Tin Man battle
armor. Every time he had anything to do with it, the damned suit had managed to
bite him in the ass. This time, he had relied on it too long. The one weakness
in the suit is that you started to believe you were invulnerable, and that’s
when you got into trouble, getting too cocky and getting into worse and worse
scrapes.

 
          
The
Libyan tank sounded as if it was right beside him. Wohl pulled himself up with
his arms, but he still couldn’t get his legs to work. He commanded his
jump-jets to fire— hopefully they would blast him away from the area, giving
him a precious few moments to hide or get to his feet, but the thrusters
weren’t responding—all he got was a power level warning message. He frantically
tried to issue over-ride commands, to use the last bit of “housekeeping” power
in the suit to fire the thrusters, but the computer ignored his commands. Damn
machine ...

 
          
A
big white searchlight on the tank blinded him. Wohl could now see the muzzle of
the T-55’s big main gun trained on him, less than thirty yards away. Would they
actually use the main gun on him? Wouldn’t they realize it would blow him into
tiny pieces, like a double-barreled shotgun blast a few inches away from a
little bird sitting on a fence? They probably weren’t looking for prisoners at
this point      

 
          
Wohl
saw the bright flash of light from the tank. “Hal...” he muttered weakly, for
the last time. “Hal, help me.”

 
          
Strange,
but he didn’t expect to hear the noise or feel the heat from the blast, but he
did. Would he see the round flying out and striking him as well? Or would they
just use the thirty-millimeter cannon on him, save some ammo? Then there was an
impossibly loud, impossibly bright flash of light and a deafening roar, and it
was all over ...

 
          
...
except it wasn’t over. Wohl realized a few moments later that the burst of
light he saw wasn’t the main gun going off, or even its coaxial machine gun—it
was the tank itself. Then he heard the faint whine overhead, and he knew what
happened: the first burst of light he saw was a sensor- fuzed weapon canister
dropped from a Wolverine attack missile going off, followed moments later by
the T-55 tank exploding as the SFW’s copper slugs blasted it apart.

 
          
A
few moments later, Wohl was able to roll and crawl away from the fierce heat
and flames shooting from the T- 55. He tried again to get to his feet when he
felt his body levitated off the ground as if he suddenly weighed as much as a
handful of sand. What the hell... ?

 
          
“You
all right, Sarge?” Hal Briggs asked. His exoskeleton made it as easy to lift
him up as a child lifting a stuffed toy.

 
          
“Jesus,
sir,” Wohl retorted, “didn’t you ever hear of checking the wounded over before
lifting them up like that? You ever hear of spinal injuries, concussions,
broken bones?”

 
          
“You
were trying to get to your feet already—I figured I couldn’t do any more harm,”
Briggs said. “Sheesh—maybe I should just gently set you down again and let
Zuwayy’s boys give you a hand when you’re feeling better.”

 
          
“Just
shut up and let’s get out of here, sir,” Wohl said. He extended a thin cable
from his backpack and plugged it into Briggs’s backpack, and immediately he
could send and receive datalink information and reactivate his suit’s
environmental controls. The “buddy power” also reactivated Wohl’s exoskeleton,
allowing him to walk on his own again. “Let’s go. This way.”

 
          
“You
needed me,” Hal said.

 
          
“What?”

 
          
“You
needed me. You called my name—my real name, not my rank or ‘sir.’ I think
that’s the first time you ever did that.”

 
          
“Don’t
let it go to your head, sir,” Wohl said. “I thought I was dead—I was desperate.
Now let’s get out of here.” As Wohl reached around Briggs’s shoulder to support
himself as Briggs carried him away, the big ex-Marine patted his partner’s
shoulder with an armored hand. Briggs knew he couldn’t say “thank you” any more
sincerely.

 
         
As
they were instructed and trained, the Republican Guard security forces entered
Zuwayy’s private apartment without knocking—but they did not dare to go more
than a step inside. “Your Highness, there is an emergency,” the officer in
charge shouted.