All these questions, and more, were racing through Kozak's mind when Tyson yelled into the intercom, "Here they come! There's a white van heading for us. And he's in a hurry."
Hoisting her binoculars up to her face, Kozak searched the road to the north. The white van Tyson had spotted was, indeed, headed south toward them as fast as it could go. On top of the van's roof, a red plastic pizza identified the van as the one they were after. This was it. There wasn't any time for questions, no time for clarification. She was on her own. Self-doubt and the uneasy feeling that comes with it were gone. In its place, a nervous rush of anticipation and a tingle of excitement. This was it.
Letting the binoculars fall until the strap around her neck stopped them, Kozak stood up on her seat, bending over until she could see Staff Sergeant John Strange, squad leader of the 3rd Squad. Leaning against the side of his Bradley, Strange was talking to one of his soldiers when he heard Kozak yelling for him to come over closer to her Bradley.
Picking up his rifle, Strange began to trot over toward Kozak.
Kozak didn't wait for Strange to reach her before she began to issue her orders. "Sergeant Strange. The white van coming down the road, stop it.
But do not, repeat, do not shoot unless fired on. Is that clear?"
Stopping short, with his M-16 in his left hand, Strange waved his right hand and nodded. Without further ado, he turned in place and, in a booming voice, called his squad to action. "Okay, 3rd Squad. This is it.
Show time. I wanna see everybody up and ready. And no shootin' unless I or the LT say so." He looked around as his people put on helmets, crouched behind the concrete road barrier, and prepared themselves. Just to be sure, he repeated the last part of his order. "No shootin' until you hear the order from me or the lieutenant."
Satisfied that all was ready where she was, Kozak keyed the radio tuned to the platoon frequency. Turning around in the open hatch and looking south toward the other two Bradleys of her platoon, Kozak alerted Rivera that she thought the van they were watching for was coming at them. She instructed Rivera to stand by with the 1st and 2nd squads and be ready to move. Rivera acknowledged her orders with a short, functional
"Wilco, out," and dropped off the air. With the platoon ready, Kozak next dropped down into the turret and prepared to switch the radio frequency to the company command net when Tyson's voice came over the intercom. "They've seen us and stopped, LT."
Forgetting about the company net, Kozak put her head up to the eyepiece of the primary sight. Tyson already had the van in the sight, crosshairs laid on the center mass of the vehicle, which was sitting some five hundred meters north of them on the road. "Are you sure they saw us, Sergeant Tyson?"
Taking his eyes off his sight, Tyson looked at Kozak, seated to his right, for a second. At a range of five hundred meters, he thought, even if he missed the red and white fifty-five-gallon drums, concrete Jersey barriers, barbed wire, and stop signs of the roadblock, even a blind man would see the two twenty-five-ton, nine-foot-nine-inch-high Bradleys, standing right behind the roadblock. Holding his tongue, he gave a simple, short response. "Yeah, LT, they saw us."
"They're backing up."
Swinging back around to his sight, Tyson caught the image of the van just before it completed a wild U-turn in the middle of the road.
Even before the van finished the turn, Kozak was up out of the hatch and yelling orders to Sergeant Strange. "Sergeant Strange, you stay here with the 3rd Squad. I'm taking the rest of the platoon and going after the van."
As she dropped down and ordered Rivera to bring the rest of the platoon up, Strange had his people open a gap in the barrier. Hearing Kozak's order to Strange, Freedman, her driver, anticipated her next order. He let the park brake off, put the Bradley's transmission into gear, and prepared to roll. Without waiting for the rest of the platoon, Kozak told Freedman to move out.
Scurrying out of the way just in time, the men of 3rd Squad watched as Kozak's Bradley whipped around the barrels and wire, knocking one of the barrels over in the process. Its engine whining to a high pitch, then dropping as the next higher gear caught, the Bradley cleared the barrier and took off down the road. Seconds later, the other two Bradleys, with Rivera perched high in the commander's hatch of the first, came tearing through. They were already close to reaching top speed and less able to negotiate the twists and turns of the roadblock. It came as no surprise to anyone in the 3rd Squad, now standing on either side of the road at a respectful distance, when Rivera's Bradley ran over and crushed flat the fifty-five-gallon drum Kozak's Bradley had knocked over. The 3rd Platoon was in hot pursuit of a dangerous pizza van and nothing was going to stop them.
As they closed to where the van had disappeared, Kozak watched as three police cars in pursuit of the van went careening around the corner, down the side road where the van had disappeared. Looking down at her map, then at the street sign as they closed on and turned the corner, Kozak noted that they were now on Masterson Road, which ran due west and ended just short of the Rio Grande. Between ducking low branches from trees along the road and working out in her mind exactly what they would do with the van if and when they caught it, Kozak wasn't paying attention when her Bradley came to the end of the road and almost rammed a Laredo police car sitting sideways in the middle of the road.
The driver's door, facing the oncoming Bradley, was open, with a Laredo policeman standing next to it, radio hand mike in one hand, looking west, across the river, when Kozak's Bradley appeared out of nowhere. Both Kozak and the policeman saw each other at the same instant, their eyes flying open in surprise. Freedman, too, saw the danger. Honking the steering wheel over to the left, he felt the Bradley slide forward on the dirt road a few meters before it began a hard left turn. Missing the front of the police car by inches, the Bradley crashed through the brush on the side of the road and down the embankment toward the river where other policemen and sheriff's deputies were standing.
Although Freedman had control and was already in the process of stopping the Bradley, the policemen and deputies didn't know that, and didn't give a hoot about their pride. Like chickens scurrying to get out of the way of the fox in the hen house, the policemen and deputies turned and fled when they saw Kozak's Bradley come crashing down the embankment, throwing dirt, dust, and rocks everywhere.
After Freedman finally did manage to bring the Bradley to a stop, everyone stopped in place and looked at it. Kozak, stunned by the near collision, stood up in her hatch and looked behind her to make sure they hadn't run over anything or anyone of importance, then turned to the nearest policeman. "Where'd the white van go?"
The policeman, still recovering from his close encounter with Kozak's Bradley, just looked up at her for a second. The fact that the commander of the huge combat vehicle was a woman was as much a shock to him as his close brush with sudden death. What in the hell, he thought, was she doing up there? Kozak looked at him for a moment before repeating her question. "Where'd the white van go?"
Realizing that she must be for real, the policeman pointed toward the river. "They tried to ford the river. Van got stuck and they took off, on foot into Mexico."
Looking over into the river, Kozak could see the white van, all its doors wide open, awash in the center of the Rio Grande. Taking a deep breath, she realized that the enemy had evaded them. With nothing else to do, she dropped down and switched the radio frequency over to the company command net. The CO had to be told the bad news.