DeMarco regarded him. The four company honchos aboard their Rovers were talking among themselves in back.
“You sure you don’t smell trouble?” he said, his voice also too low for them to overhear now.
Nimec shrugged.
“Not so far,” he said.
Then he shouldered open the door to exit the vehicle.
Weapons of war are by obvious definition intended to have ugly effects.
Thermobarics — a military nomenclature for devices producing intense heat-pressure bursts — are uglier than most.
Whether dropped by an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet or fired from a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, a thermobaric warhead will cause vastly more sustained and extensive destruction to its target than a conventional explosive munition. There are numerous designs floating about the open and black international markets, many battle tested, some under development, their payload formulas and delivery systems guarded with varying degrees of secrecy. In its basic configuration a fuel-air warhead has three separate compartments, two with high explosive charges, a third containing an incendiary fluid, gaseous, or particulate mixture. Though Russian arms builders will not confirm it, the RPO-Bumblebee warhead’s flammable mix is a volatile combination of petroleum-derived fuels such as ethylene or propylene oxide, and tetranitromethane-a liquid relative of PETN, the combustible ingredient used in many plastic explosives.
As the primary HE charge is air detonated, the incendiary compartment bursts open like a metal eggshell to scatter its contents over a wide area. A second explosive charge then ignites the dispersed aerosol cloud to produce a tremendous churning fireball that can reach a temperature of between forty-five and fifty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, burning away the oxygen at its center, a vacuum filled in a fraction of a second by a rush of pressurized air approaching 430 pounds per square inch — almost thirty times that which is normally exerted on an object or human body at sea level. Anyone exposed to its full force will be at once crushed to something less than a pulp, if not entirely vaporized. As the blast wave races outward, many at the nearest periphery of the detonation will die of suffocation, the breath sucked from their collapsing lungs. The casualties may also suffer extensive internal injuries such as venous and arterial embolisms, organ hemorrhages, and actual severing of bodily organs from the flesh and muscle tissues that hold them in place, including having their eyes torn from their sockets.
Pete Nimec had gotten only one leg out of the Rover when the RPO-A warhead erupted at the head of the convoy, and along with his fast reflexes, that was probably what saved his life.
There was a loud eruption from the mass of trees up ahead of him, then a roaring, rushing chute of heat and flame. The concussion struck the Rover’s partially open door, slamming it up against him and throwing him back into his seat with his fingers still clutching its handle. He had a chance to glimpse the vehicle Loren had exited just moments before bounce several feet off the ground, then drop back down on its left flank, crumpled and blazing, its windows blown out, completely disintegrated by the blast.
Nimec had seen enough action in his day to realize the six men still inside it would have been killed instantly. Almost without conscious thought about how to save himself, without time to think, he dove behind the Land Rover’s open passenger door, knelt behind its level VI armor as the blast wave swept over the 6×6, jolting it backward into the Rover’s ram bumpers. Debris flew in every direction. Some of it rained down heavily on Nimec. Some drifted in the air around him, burning around him. There were scraps of clothing, foliage, seat covers, lord knew what else. Nimec heard screams in the sucking, broiling wind — from the truckers who’d gotten out of the hauler’s cab, from the panicked executives inside the Rover, all their terrible cries intermingled. And DeMarco, shouting at him across the front seat, “Chief, chief, can you hear me, chief are you okay…?”
Breathless, dazed, Nimec couldn’t answer at first. His left eye stung, something dripping into it, blurring it. The warm wetness streamed down his face. He wiped the back of his hand across his brow and it came away slick and red.
Nimec blinked twice to clear his vision, then found himself almost wishing he could have remained blind to the scene before him. The truckers had been immolated. One of them lay still on the ground, his clothes burned away, his charred body consumed with fire. Near him the scattered remains of another man, or perhaps more than a single man, were also ablaze.
“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.”