“We’ll have to come back and check it,” he told her. “Help me with the desk.”
They turned the desk on its side and slid it over the hole. Then Danny posted a pair of small video cams, one on the desk and the other at the side of the room, and had MY-PID monitor them for any movement. He also added a pair of charges near the hole so they could blow up anyone trying to escape by remote control.
MY-PID had apparently not discerned the tunnel because of the building structure and angle, which either by design or accident obscured the image on standard radar techniques. The computer calculated—with a 43.5 percent certainty, an admission that it was just guessing—that the tunnel was connected to a mine shaft some two hundred yards away, which had been seen by the radar.
“Target the mine shaft opening,” Danny told the Ospreys. “See if you can bomb it closed.”
In the meantime, the rest of Danny’s team cleared the second building, a one-story structure where three fighters attempted to hold out. Armed with AK-47s, all three were quickly overcome.
“Running out of buildings,” said Flash, reporting that his team had cleared its next objective.
“Keep moving,” barked Danny.
Nuri ducked as a sudden burst of gunfire bounced through the rocks just to his right. The bullets themselves were well off the mark, but they shattered the nearby rock outcropping, sending a fusillade of chips showering in every direction. Several hit his helmet so hard that he fell down. He had an instant headache—but it was far better than what might have occurred had he not given in to Pierce’s “extremelystrongpersonalrecommendation, sir!” that he don a Marine helmet to go with his Whiplash-issued armored vest.
Shaking the blow off, Nuri rose in time to see the Marines he’d been with pump several grenades into the position behind the flattened bus. One of the grenades hit a small store of ammo. This resulted in a cascade of shrapnel even larger than the one that had engulfed him, but it didn’t stop the Brothers who were several yards behind the position from firing.
The Marines countered with a heavy dose of lead from their M-16A4s. Nuri added some rounds from his own SCAR, then saw two of the enemy soldiers running down the hillside on his left. As he swung around to fire, one of the men dropped straight back, taken down by a Marine sniper.
The other tossed a grenade, big and fat, directly at him.
As the rest of his team headed to take down their third and final building, Danny diverted to check on the “spikes” that had been launched and planted just after the start of the mission.
The “spikes”—they had no official name beyond a series of letters and numbers—were a quartet of long metal tubes that were literally rocketed into the ground after being launched from the MC-17. After insertion, a network of small wires shot from the bodies of the spikes, creating a field of electric current—a virtual electric fence, or for the more sci-fi oriented, a force field. Anyone attempting to run through the area protected by the spikes would receive a massive jolt of electricity, roughly the equivalent of three hits from a commercial grade Taser.
The system wasn’t foolproof. A very determined enemy willing to sacrifice a few men could conceivably force his way through. And an enemy that knew what he was dealing with could punch a hole through the defenses by destroying two of the spikes. But in the dark, a confused and unsophisticated enemy would be surprised and stunned by the force of the blow: as evidenced by the two twitching men lying on the other side of the fence Danny saw as he approached.
With the assurance that the spikes were working, he took a quick detour to his left, running in the direction of the citadel cluster where the bots had landed. Here another set of spikes had embedded themselves between the closest ring of defenders and the buildings. Covering a wider ground, the spikes were backed by two of the bots. At least a half-dozen bodies lay on the other side of the virtual fence; from where Danny was, it was impossible to see if they were dead or merely stunned by the shock.
The bots had the buildings under siege. A violent firefight flared at the southeastern corner. Danny considered calling in another round of mini-JDAMs to subdue the resistance, but decided not to—too much damage and they’d never be able to recover the missing UAV parts if they were inside.
By the time he returned to the buildings he’d attacked, both teams were engaged in a gun battle with several Brothers around the last unsearched building.
“I figure this much resistance, it’s a good bet what we want is inside,” said Flash, who was huddled behind the corner of the building across the way. “What do you want to do?”
“Put some grenades through the window,” said Danny. “Lives are more important.”
Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true—everyone on Whiplash was expendable, and they knew it—but Flash complied. He loaded a round into the snap-on launcher beneath his SCAR’s gun barrel, sighted on the window the Brothers were firing from, and pulled the trigger.
An ordinary grenade fired by a skilled fighter would have a fair chance of getting through the window, but even a novice could have succeeded with Flash’s setup. The grenade was a guided munition, designed to follow the beam projected by the laser at the top of Flash’s gun. The round flew through the window and exploded inside, instantly killing all three fighters.
The gun battle continued. There were four men up on the roof of the building. Two had machine guns, and with constant fire they were able to keep the team at bay. Flash had sent two troopers around the side, and he was reluctant to fire any grenades near them, fearing they would be crushed by the wall if it collapsed. Their positions were marked out on his screen by MY-PID, which kept track of the members by reading the location of the transponders in bracelets each wore.
Danny finally decided the best solution was to call in a laser strike.
“Team, stand by,” he told the others before connecting with the laser plane.
“Alert,” said MY-PID, interrupting his transmission. “Four subjects are exiting from Mine Entrance X-ray Dog one five.”
The attack by the minibombs had failed to close the entrance. Danny told the laser ship to stand by, then called up to the Osprey, where his four-member team of reserves, including Melissa, were waiting for their part in the assault.
“We have a slight change in plans,” he told them. “We have people coming out of the mine.”
“We’re just talking about it now,” said Shorty, handling the team communications. “We’ll get them.”
“Melissa, are you all right with this?” Danny.
“I’m anxious to get going.”
“Roger that. Whiplash Six out.”
Nuri cursed as the grenade exploded a few yards away. By then he was facedown in the dirt, the rest of his body hunched flat. The concussion slammed him flat so hard he blanked out. He came to a moment later, feeling as if the back of his skull had been blown straight off. But only his helmet had been forced away, the chin strap sheared off.
He’d also lost his right earplug. He fished around for it—the plug had his radio headset embedded in it—but couldn’t find the wire. It had been severed in the explosion.
Amazing I wasn’t hit, he said to himself.
He glanced at his right arm and realized that wasn’t true—blood was running down the front of his bicep, soaking into the skin.
Shit.
“Sir! Sir! You OK?” yelled a corpsman, running to his position.
Nuri flexed his fingers.
“I’m OK,” he told him. “Help some of those guys.”
“Where?”
Nuri looked in the direction of the Marines who’d been with him earlier, expecting to see them lying on the ground. Instead, they were charging the gate position.
“I’m fine,” he yelled to the corpsman, hustling after them.
Melissa gripped the assault rifle and tried to steady her breathing as the Osprey sailed toward the hill where the men were escaping from the mine. Despite her best efforts, she was hyperventilating, gulping huge wads of air into her lungs.