Direct Action

18

“How bad is he hit?” a worried Magic Brown asked Ed DeWitt.

“Give me a second,” DeWitt replied.

The Mercedes was screaming through the streets of Baalbek, and Kos Kosciuszko was laid out across the back seat.

His flashlight held in his teeth, DeWitt began a search for wounds. It was best done by touch, and had to be thorough. Even a very small wound missed could mean a man bleeding to death.

DeWitt started at the feet, for no reason other than that was where he happened to be. He ran his hands up both legs — no blood, no wounds. He ripped open Kos’s jacket and body armor. Nothing. Without moving Kos, he slipped his hands underneath and checked the back. No vertebrae out of place. What the hell?

Then his flashlight fell on Kosciuszko’s helmet. There was a neat round hole in the front left side. DeWitt unsnapped the chin strap and gently eased the helmet off. There were no holes in Kos’s head, but there was another one in the back of the helmet.

The round had hit the helmet, skipped off one of the kevlar layers, and gone back out at an angle. All it had done was knock Kos Kosciuszko cold.

DeWitt checked, but there was no blood in the ears or nose that would indicate a serious concussion. He opened Kos’s eyes and flashed the light at them. Both pupils were responsive and symmetrical.

Kos gave off a low moan when the light hit his eyes.

“He took a round in the helmet and got knocked out,” DeWitt announced. “The son of a bitch doesn’t even have a bruise.”

“You gotta be shitting us,” said Magic Brown.

“No shit,” DeWitt assured him. He hoisted Kos up and packed him against the corner of the rear seat. “Anyone got an ammonia capsule?”

There was no response.

“Fuck him, then,” said DeWitt. He made himself comfortable, and they left Kos Kosciuszko to regain consciousness on his own. If you didn’t require some major first aid, you couldn’t expect much sympathy from a bunch of SEALS.

DeWitt keyed his radio. “Kos just got knocked out. He doesn’t have a scratch.”

“Roger,” Murdock radioed back. He’d been pondering whether to stop somewhere and transfer the Doc to the other Mercedes. Now it was one less thing to worry about.

“Checkpoint ahead,” Doc Ellsworth broke in. Then, cocking an eyebrow at Jaybird, he added, “And no, I ain’t slowing down.”

“Outstanding,” said Murdock.

Jaybird just shook his head.

They came up on the checkpoint with the Mercedes’ police lights flashing and the sirens wailing. Even if there had been radio reports of raiders and a firefight, they looked like they were chasing something — not being chased. Enemy commandos certainly wouldn’t be making all that noise. If not, they at least looked official enough to raise the same doubts as before.

The noise of the sirens had everyone out and ready at the checkpoint.

“Jiggle the siren switch,” Murdock ordered. “Change the tone and let them know we see them.”

Jaybird did it.

“Flash the lights and go on through,” said Murdock.

The car filled with the metallic clicking of weapon safety catches coming off.

As they sped through the checkpoint Murdock saw one man raise his rifle and another yank it down. Even the visible bullet holes in the vehicles didn’t tip the scales against them. Of course, you couldn’t get that good a look at night and at that speed.

Where they had come up from the south, now they headed northeast. There was a hard-surface secondary road that snaked up into the mountains and all the way back down to Batreun and Tripoli on the coast. Murdock had identified a number of possible helicopter landing zones for the pickup, but he wanted to get as close to the mountains as he could. The valley was gently rolling and almost treeless, and the visibility extended for miles. As the land rose up toward the base of the mountains it became much more forested. Murdock wanted to get inside the screen of those trees, to minimize any exposure to the helicopters. It all depended on the time. The helicopters had to get in and out before daylight. That was definite.

In the second Mercedes, Kos Kosciuszko woke up. And like any good SEAL, he woke up fighting.

Ed DeWitt’s first clue came when an arm the size of a country ham came swinging into his shoulder. DeWitt went sailing against the passenger door.

Magic Brown made a quick appreciation of the situation and dove over the front seat onto Kos. He was joined by DeWitt, and they tried to hold Kosciuszko down, shouting, “Chief, Chief, it’s us, it’s us.”

Kos came to his senses fast, which was good, because Brown and DeWitt were on the verge of losing. “Wha … what?” Kos stuttered.

“It’s okay, Chief,” said DeWitt, panting hard. “You took a rap on the head. You’re okay.”

Kosciuszko shook his head to clear it, and then grabbed his temples. “Man, my head hurts. Anybody got a couple of aspirin?”

Magic Brown crawled back over the front seat and rummaged around for the first aid kit, grumbling quietly to himself, “Fucking gorilla.”

DeWitt fell back in his seat and took a little breather. He gingerly worked his arm. He thought that if he hadn’t been wearing body armor, Kos’s first shot would have broken his collarbone.

In the first Mercedes, Murdock was looking at his dive watch: 0258 hours. They had two minutes or so before the armored cars blew, and he wanted to be through the next checkpoint before that happened.

Then Ed DeWitt noticed headlights coming up behind them. So much for the breather. “We’ve got company in back,” he reported. PDMs.”

Murdock heard it in his earpiece. “Get out soon.”

Ed DeWitt grabbed a bulging nylon bag from the rear seat storage area. Kos Kosciuszko was washing down three aspirins. “Get yourself together,” DeWitt told him. “I’ll take care of this.”

The bag was filled with one-pound canisters about the same size as a nine-volt lantern battery, but with only three sides. The M-86 Pursuit Deterrent Munition had been designed to aid Special Forces teams being chased by larger enemy forces.

If you were running like a bastard, all you had to do was pull the pin and toss the mine back over your shoulder. When it hit the ground seven monofilament lines, each six meters long were ejected from the casing. When anything touched one of the lines, a small charge kicked the M-86 one meter up into the air, where it exploded. It was guaranteed to make even the most hard-core pursuers lose their appetite for the chase. During the Vietnam War SEALs had improvised claymore mines with thirty-second time fuses for the same purpose.

The vehicles behind them were gaining. DeWitt could make out what looked like a Land Rover, and two more sets of headlights behind it. The winding narrow roads would have limited speed even if the Mercedes hadn’t been carrying all that heavy armor.

DeWitt opened his door and, leaning out, lobbed three PDMs so they would land in the center of the road. For good measure he tossed out a couple of handfuls of cartraps, tiny three-pointed spikes that did the same damage to tires that they’d done to horses’ hooves at the dawn of warfare.

The Land Rover hit one of the lines of an M-86, and the mine exploded in the air right behind it. The PDM also worked on vehicles. The fragmentation perforated the car and touched off the gas tank. The Land Rover exploded in a fireball. The second vehicle spun off the road trying to avoid it. The third hit another PDM.

Jaybird Sterling watched the whole scene in his side-view mirror. “Oh, shit,” he exclaimed unhappily, because it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Everything was within sight of the upcoming checkpoint.

The Mercedes ran into a hail of fire. It sounded like rivets being driven into the car bodies, and so many rounds splattered into the polycarbonate that it was almost impossible to see out the windows. Murdock, Jaybird, and Razor opened up from the gun ports to try to suppress some of it, smoke be damned.

The two right-side tires blew out and the rear end started to swing around. Dancing the wheel lightly back and forth, staying off the brake, Doc managed to regain control. The hours they’d spent practicing at a California racetrack paid off.

The Mercedes kept going on the run-flat wheel inserts, just not as fast.

The Germans made good cars and good armor. Both cars passed through the checkpoint gauntlet, and perhaps there was even a faint expectation that they might make it.

Then, back at the checkpoint, a man stepped out into the road. He shut out the confusion around him and settled the crosshairs of his optical sight on the rear of the fleeing Mercedes, leading it just a shade high. He smoothly squeezed his trigger. There was no sensation of recoil, but a thunderclap of flame and smoke erupted from the rear of the RPG-7V launcher tube on his shoulder.

Everyone at the checkpoint watched the flare on the tail of the rocket as it seemed to float toward the Mercedes.

The road curved up ahead. The only question was whether the rocket or the Mercedes would get there first.

The rocket hit the car with a yellow flash. The checkpoint erupted with guns being fired into the air and shouts of “Allahu Akbar!”

“God is Great!”

Then someone with their wits about them screamed, “Get them!”

The whole mob seemed to shake themselves awake and ran shrieking down the road.