It’s a good-sized space. There are side windows in the canopy and a skylight four and a half feet above the cargo bed. A thick mat covers the bed and the walls.
Ryan raps his knuckles against the canopy. “Solid,” he announces. “Fucker’s armored.”
Canvas seats and harnesses are anchored to the sidewalls. Nets stretched across the ceiling hold gear. Miles can see these details because red light from the cab wells through an intervening window, providing a baseline illumination. There’s not enough light for him to be sure, but it looks like one net holds spare magazines and another has packs of what could be C-4. One thing he is certain about is a collection of helmets. He pops that net and pulls them out.
Ryan has moved all the way in, taking a seat closest to the cab. He pulls on a harness. Dano straps in next to him.
“Put these on,” Miles says, handing them helmets. Then he straps in too, facing them, shoulder against the cab window.
Six soldiers climb in after them, vague shapes crowding in the near dark. The cargo bed fills with the heat of bodies and the smell of fresh sweat. The tailgate doors slam shut, muting the sound of gunfire. Facemasks come off, helmets go on.
In the cab, more soldiers. Miles watches them through the window. He recognizes Jameson riding shotgun. A leaner guy already strapped in behind the wheel. Two more in the backseat, wrestling with Fatima. She is struggling in her restraints, resisting their efforts to get her strapped safely in. Does she even understand this is a rescue? Or in her mind is she being kidnapped again?
Harnesses are secured. Doors close. The engine revs and the truck surges forward. Somewhere behind them, a muffled explosion. Outside, the shooting starts up again.
A side window close to Miles is shoved open. He ducks, not wanting to catch a stray bullet. Faint red highlights let him identify a KO in the hands of the soldier beside him. The weapon is aimed out the window, but the soldier isn’t shooting. No one in the truck is shooting. The gunfire outside fades into intermittent firecracker pops, barely audible over the rush of air past the open window.
The window gets slammed shut.
A hearty masculine voice rises above the road noise. “Listen up, friends. My name is Rohan and this is a Requisite Operations mission. Things are going to get ugly in the next few minutes, but don’t worry. The air force is looking out for us, and we will get you home. So hold on and don’t get in the way.”
Leaving Town
Khalid is behind the wheel of the DF-21, a rugged, lightly armored truck that the QRF is relying on to get them out of Tadmur. True is squeezed into the backseat. She’s behind Jameson, who’s up front riding shotgun because he’s too damn big to sit anywhere else. Fatima is next to her, with Chris on the far side.
True is braced against the DF-21’s acceleration, holding her KO in a one-handed grip, her other hand poised above the switch that will lower the window if she needs to shoot. She has used her weapon only once over the course of the mission. She hopes she won’t have to use it again. A street battle would guarantee civilian casualties. Not something they want.
They’ll engage only if they are trapped and have no choice.
She leans forward to look at the dash display, where there’s a feed from a rearview camera. She can see muzzle flash and she gets a glimpse of what might be a pursuing truck before Khalid wrenches the DF-21 around a corner.
Damn.
True had hoped to stave off pursuit. When they pulled out, she triggered the kamikazes. The devices, designed to deliver small controlled explosions, would have taken out the electronics in the downstairs office and disabled both trucks in the compound without damaging any neighboring homes.
But Hussam was the head of the Al-Furat Coalition. He had allies and soldiers in the surrounding neighborhood. No way to sabotage all their vehicles.
Fatima too is watching the rearview display, her expression fixed except for her lips which move as she speaks too softly to be heard over the road noise. A prayer, maybe.
Chris had summarized her condition over comms as he worked with True to get her strapped into a safety harness.
“No gross physical injuries,” he said, speaking just loud enough for the mic to pick up his voice, but not so loud that Fatima could hear. “But he’s fucked with her head. When we came in, she tried to protect him. I don’t think she understands why we’re here.”
“She’s in shock,” True said.
“Yeah. And unpredictable. That’s why she’s in restraints. You need to talk her down.”
It isn’t a good time for talking. True grabs a handhold, bracing herself as Khalid whips the DF-21 hard around a traffic circle. He’s riding an adrenaline high, racing to get them out into open desert. “We got fucking Hussam!” he shouts, his voice amplified over comms. “I can’t believe it. We got the self-righteous bastard. And we got him alive.”
Rohan answers over comms, annoyingly matter-of-fact, given the circumstances: “Bounty pays either way.”
True turns to look in the back. The light-amplifying property of her visor reveals the tense faces of the three rescued hostages, and beyond them Juliet, Nate, Nasir, Felice, and Rohan, all strapped into canvas seats and swaying in unison as Khalid uses speed to smooth the bumps in the road. Rohan notices her gaze and flashes a thumbs-up. Shadows hide his smile but she knows it’s there.
Gunfire rips overhead. Her first instinct is to duck. Her second is to trigger the window to open so she can return fire. The thick glass drops out of sight, the roaring of jet engines pours in on the dusty air. Lincoln yells over comms: “No threat! Reseal the truck. That was just RQ-3 discouraging a rooftop shooter.”
“Fuck,” True whispers, all too aware of her booming heart. She triggers the window to close again. Jameson and Chris close their windows too.
RQ-3 is one of a trio of Hai-Lin UF-29s—unmanned fighters—that make up ReqOps’ air force. Lincoln has assigned all three to this mission to provide an escort for the DF-21 and for Blackbird as it carries Hussam away.
True calls up Blackbird’s status on her display. The Kobrin 900-s reports itself at twelve hundred feet and still climbing. Hussam is suspended beneath the little autonomous helicopter, in a Kevlar cargo pouch at the end of a tether. If Blackbird is shot down, Hussam will go down with it. Under no circumstances will he be released alive back into the wild.
RQ-3 continues to shadow the DF-21. True hears its engine even past the armored sanctity of the cab and the blast of its air conditioning. She watches the buildings flash past, but there is no more gunfire. No resistance.
Abruptly they are past the last compound and into open desert. The DF-21’s headlights are off. Khalid is no longer wearing his AltWrld visor. He’s got a MARC instead, to help him see in the dark. True doesn’t envy his task. She can hardly see the road past the streamers of sand that skitter across it—but it’s easy to see where the road is going, because its path is marked in the distance by the fierce silhouettes of the burned-out tanks they passed on the way in.
This desert: ravaged by war and not much left to fight over. There’s petroleum in the ground still, though it’s not worth what it used to be. It’s not worth the hell this region has become. Here, now, the fighting is an end in itself, a way of life, and that cold fact is one reason why PMCs like ReqOps exist.
“Couple of technicals behind us,” Rohan says over comms.
True leans forward to look again at the dash display. The feed from the rearview camera is a kind of night vision, but shifted to display in dull red. It shows two small pickup trucks pursuing them out of Tadmur. Both are running with lights off. Machine guns are mounted in their cargo beds.