The van jerked hard to the right, hitting what felt like back-to-back speed bumps before the road leveled off and they cleared the debris, the piles of stone now shielding them from more incoming fire.
Pepper watched as Kozak gaped at the drone’s remote, now piping in a wide view of the city. The rapid-fire thunder of mortars was increasing. ‘Hey, boss, mortars have hit the bank, police station, even the clock tower, which is now blown to shit,’ he reported. ‘They’re starting shift fires to the north, while the troops down near the bank are engaging rebels at the roadblocks. If they keep shelling Queen Arwa Road, they’ll tear it up so much that nothing will get through. We’ll be hiking over the mountain, and we’ll never reach the port in time. Not on foot anyway.’
‘Naseem?’ called Ross. ‘Slight detour. We need to take out those mortars. Get us down to the cemetery.’
Between the dust caked on the driver’s side window and the shattered passenger’s side, Ross wondered how Naseem could see anything at all. Ross shoved himself forward, balancing his elbow on the dashboard, and reached out through the hole in the glass to begin wiping it off with his sleeve, but then Naseem cut the wheel hard left, throwing Ross back and taking them down another alley. Naseem cursed and bit his lip.
Two more buildings up the road had been shelled, the rubble blocking their path, the air filled with the scent of leaking natural gas and shattered concrete while women and children were evacuating the buildings, screaming and crying, running along the sidewalk.
Naseem threw the truck in reverse –
Just as another explosion erupted from the ground ahead and Ross didn’t need an engineering degree to know that the leaking gas had ignited.
His ears rang as Naseem swung around, rolling the wheel like a stunt driver, the van listing badly, tires squealing and burning as he hung a right at the next corner.
Allowing the man to drive had been a calculated risk — and a test. Naseem knew the city better than any of them, and if he wanted to prove his loyalty, he could do it right now, and the rebels provided plenty of opportunities to do that.
Ross shifted his attention to his Cross-Com, where the drone’s feed had been updated to show a wider overhead image of the cemetery, the mortar teams hard at work, dropping shells into the launch tubes and rolling back, the tubes flashing brilliantly like a formation of lightning bugs as the rounds arced skyward. It was an indirect fire operation as deadly as they came, turning corners of the city into piles of debris and half-buried corpses. Typical fire missions included forwarded observers who made calls for and adjusted fire on the enemy, and Ross realized now that all those ‘snipers’ they’d seen on the rooftops were actually serving double duty as FOs. There was usually a fire direction center that computed range, trajectory, and shell use info to the gunners, but Ross suspected that the teams were speaking directly to their FOs and putting fires on grid coordinates northeast, directly north, and northwest of their positions.
‘I want to come in behind them, so take us west of the mosque, get around it, then get us as close to the wall as possible. After that, we’ll move in on foot,’ Ross told Naseem.
Naseem shook his head in disbelief. ‘How will you take out ten mortar positions with just four men?’
‘What do you mean four?’ asked Ross. ‘I’m going to do it with just one.’ Ross glanced to the back seat. ‘30K? You in?’
30K grinned like a werewolf.
FORTY-FOUR
Kozak imagined the gravestones as pillars carved with hieroglyphics that told stories of how space travelers arrived on Earth millions of years ago to seed the human race. All right, his nerves had, admittedly, allowed his imagination to run wild. Time to buckle down and get to work. He ran his fingers along the headstone behind which he hid, then held his breath and peered out.
About fifteen meters ahead was the line of two-man mortar teams, positioned about twenty or thirty meters apart, standing before cases of ordnance and working like well-oiled machines, rounds dropped and fired, the chaotic explosions so loud that Kozak had shoved a plug in his exposed ear, the other filled with the Cross-Com’s receiver.
The cemetery’s perimeter wall was about two meters high, and the teams all stood within a few meters of it, utilizing the heavy barrier to shield them from any interference — gunfire or otherwise — from the road outside.
‘Kozak, how we looking?’ called Ross, his voice barely discernible above the din.
‘Stand by, boss,’ he answered, then consulted the drone’s remote. He thumbed a button, and his HUD lit with a data box showing the drone’s overhead point of view, a wireframe grid superimposed over the cemetery and marking the positions of each mortar team, along with a ruler overlay showing the length and width of the wall.
‘Okay, Ghost Lead, good to go from here,’ Kozak said. ‘I’ve got positions and the overlay.’
‘Pepper, SITREP?’ ordered Ross.
The chest pains were just indigestion, Pepper thought. Famous last words of all heart attack victims, right?
His love affair with food had to end. He couldn’t ride the roller coaster anymore. He was kicking out that bitch, and no, he didn’t care to know her name. Just leave — and take all your calories and bad health with you.
He swallowed hard and balanced his elbows on the edge of the balcony. He’d traded out the AK for his trusted M24A2 Remington and now clutched the sniper rifle, hoping the wood and smooth metal would help calm him. He’d found the mosque empty, the locks easy to hammer off, the staircase leading up to the minaret and balcony a bit too steep for his liking. Now the damned pizza was waging war with his gut, his breath shortening, his ribs feeling as though they were caving in.
‘Pepper, are you there? SITREP?’
‘Ghost Lead, Pepper here. I’m in position.’
As vantage points/sniper positions went, this little nest was first class, giving him a clean shot of any member of any mortar team. He was overlooking the entire graveyard, and if he blurred his vision, the stones resembled the spirits of infantrymen forming up for battle. If his colleagues did their jobs correctly, Pepper would not need to fire a single shot. He was just the All-State man. The team was in good hands.
A flash from just outside the cemetery caught his attention, and there, at the far end of the road, where Al-Aydarus intersected with another barely pronounceable street to the east, came a BTR-40, a Soviet-made wheeled armored personnel carrier — two operators up front, six troops in the back ready to dismount. The light Pepper had spotted had come from the BTR’s roof-mounted 7.62mm machine gun, winking fire as it had crossed the intersection.
And then, a squad of troops came running up behind the BTR, attacking the vehicle from the rear, one man pausing in the middle of the road to shoulder and fire his rocket-propelled grenade, the back blast filling the intersection with smoke. A second explosion obscured by the buildings flickered like lightning a second before a mushroom cloud lit from below broke above the rooftops.
‘Got some action down the street,’ Pepper said. ‘Better hold up for a minute.’
‘We see it,’ said Ross.
Pepper grimaced and clutched his chest. Now he was just getting paranoid, the chest pains coming on because he was worried about chest pains coming on: stress begetting stress.
He should never have gone for that stupid physical. All that doc had done was make him paranoid.
‘There is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell,’ Johnny Cash had once said. ‘Only a deep, wide gulf, a chasm that is no place for any man —’