“Roger,” Juan replied, and swallowed hard, his throat suddenly as dry as the desert sand. He looked across the driver’s seat to Mark Murphy. The success or failure of Juan’s plan hinged on Murph’s virtuosity with the Pig’s weapons systems. “Ready?”
Mark nodded.
“Tallyho!” Juan said.
Mark keyed up the Pig’s roof-mounted mortars. They had already been sighted in with Linc’s help, using a laser range finder. They fired simultaneously, and the weapon’s autoloader had a second round dropped into each of the four tubes before the first rounds had traveled a hundred yards on their high, arcing parabolas.
The second fusillade launched with a comically hollow sound, and Mark shouted, “Go!”
Juan already had the Pig’s engine revved, so that when he dropped it into gear, all four tires spun. They roared over a ridge, and the camp came into view. As he’d planned, no one had heard the mortars fire. Ragged prisoners were lining up for their pitifully small breakfast while guards casually harassed them. He saw one guard use a baton on a man, crashing it into the man’s kidneys so hard his back bent like a bow at full stretch and he collapsed in the dust.
The mortar rounds hit the apex of their flight and started barreling earthward, each packed with a kilo of high explosives. Mark had spent part of the drive to the camp removing most of the shrapnel from each round to minimize the chance of hitting any of the detainees.
Linc laid the crosshairs of his REC7 on the guard who’d just clubbed the prisoner, let out half a breath, and squeezed the trigger. “We have pink mist,” he reported when the guard’s head exploded.
He took out another pair of guards before the first ripple of concern passed through the security contingent. The captain of the guards appeared from a tent. His chest was bare, and he wore his uniform pants bloused into his combat boots. Linc noted the radio antennae sticking up through a hole in the tent’s roof and moved his aim onto another target.
Four mortar rounds struck the ground at precisely the same instant. The path leading down to the floor of the open-pit mine erupted in geysers of dirt and greasy fire. A moment later, more rounds hit even closer to the camp.
Both guards and prisoners alike pulled back, moving toward the large wooden buildings, while Linc continued to thin the ranks of terrorists, one shot—one kill—at a time. He made the ones carrying weapons his priority.
Cabrillo raced the Pig down on the camp like a rally driver dashing for the finish line. Next to him, Murph fought to keep the aiming reticle of the Pig’s onboard missiles locked on one of the terrorists’ trucks. He got tone and fired.
The rocket screamed off the rails, carving an erratic path through the air, and exploded against the truck’s cab, snapping its chassis in half so it rose up like a ship that had been torpedoed.
The blast further corralled the frightened prisoners closer to the building, while the guards were rushing back to their tents where many had left their automatic weapons.
The Pig was a hundred yards from the camp when the freshly armed terrorists started running from the tents, brandishing their AKs and firing long strings of rounds in random directions. Up in the Pig’s cupola, Linda watched them over the sights of her M60 machine gun. The weapon bucked in her arms, slamming into her shoulder like the business end of a jackhammer, but her aim never wavered.
The ground around the running gunmen came alive as rounds blew into their midst. Men fell, clutching at horrendous wounds, some struck by their own comrades who had whirled at this new threat and opened fire indiscriminately.
“He’s had enough time,” Juan yelled over the snarling engine. “Take out the command tent.”
Cabrillo’s plan had two goals. The first was to rescue as many of the prisoners as he could because he wasn’t sure if the Libyan military would take the time to discern friend from foe. He wasn’t even sure of their definition of those terms at this point. The second objective was to get as many terrorists as possible away from their training camp before the main attack. If Fiona Katamora was really there, then every gunman engaged at the mine was one less gunman trying to kill her before she was rescued.
This was why Linc had been told specifically to let the mine’s garrison commander contact the training camp on the radio. They needed him to raise the alarm. But now that he had . . .
Mark put a missile through the command tent’s front flap at just the right angle for it to hit the ground before it flew through the far side. The canvas rose up on a blossoming column of flame, and the piles of military gear stacked outside were blown flat by the concussion. The tent caught fire like flash paper and turned to ash that fell to the ground like dirty snow.
They were deep into the camp now. Above Juan and Murph, Linda continued to work the M60, taking out clusters of guards and using the tracer rounds to keep the prisoners moving toward the stockyard where the terrorists stored their railcars and train engines.
Cabrillo could tell that the guards’ will had been broken by the sudden and furious assault. Many of them were running down into the mine or over the ridge and into the desert. Fifty or more prisoners were huddled against the side of the old mine office building. A gunman suddenly reared up from behind a bulldozer. He had a perfect bead on the defenseless men and women and an RPG-7 lifted to his shoulder.
Murph flipped the controls from missiles to gun, and the .30 cal under the Pig’s snout chattered. The terrorist went down, but not before he fired his rocket-propelled grenade. The five-pound missile made it less than ten feet from the tube before it inexplicably exploded in midair.
“Damn, Linc,” Juan said in awe, “was that you?”
“It’s all a matter of knowing how to read them,” Linc replied. He would later admit that he was shooting at the terrorist and the rocket flew into his bullet.
Juan whipped the Pig around the side of the building, braking hard so the big truck slid onto a set of tracks, its tail resting just a couple of feet from a boxcar with a handwheel on its roof for brakemen to mechanically slow the antique rolling stock. The track was a good foot narrower than the Pig’s tires. Juan searched the dash for a second and found the control that could alter the vehicle’s ground clearance by pulling in the wheels on articulated suspension joints.
He had to jockey the truck back and forth, as the wheels drew inward, until they were resting directly on the rails, and there was a full two feet of open space between the chassis and the crushed-rock ballast on the ground.
With another button, Juan deactivated the automatic tire-inflation system and then jumped from the cab. “Mark, Linda, get busy,” he called over the tactical radio. “Linc, cover them. Fodl, with me.”
He grabbed up a REC7 assault rifle, and had the FN Five-seveN pistol in his hand when he hit the ground. He fired at the left-side tires. The truck’s weight made them go flat instantly, and, just like that, the steel rims were cradled around the rails, with the rubber acting as extra grip. He couldn’t prevent a satisfied smile. Mating the Pig to the railroad tracks had been the cornerstone of his plan.
He ran for the corner of the building as his new Libyan friend clambered out of the Pig still wearing his prisoner’s rags. Across the compound, he could see a few guards hunting for targets, but for the moment no one was paying the detainees any attention.
A couple of them who were pressed against the building looked at Juan fearfully when they saw his weapon. Then Fodl appeared at his side.
“Come with us,” Fodl told them with an aura of command that didn’t surprise the Chairman. “These people are here to help.”
A few of the emaciated prisoners stared back at him uncertainly. “Go. That is an order.”
Like a breached levee, the few heading toward the railcar that Linda held open turned into a flood. Cabrillo stood at the corner, sweeping the compound for any interested guards. If any looked their way, he put them down, while next to him Fodl waved in more of his people. A group of women appeared from under the overturned serving tables and raced for the building, only to have someone open fire at them from their flank. One of the women went down before Juan could counterfire, hammering home a steady burst into a pyramid of crates from where the shots had originated.