Piranha

45

It took Linc and Eddie fifteen minutes of belly crawling to get in position around the corner just out of sight of the cement plant. They settled into a ditch thirty feet from the road, with the RPG now resting on Linc’s stomach.

“I’m ready,” he said to Eddie.

“Same here.” Eddie radioed to Linda. “Show them the sacrificial lamb.”

“Coming your way.”

The PIG accelerated from its hiding space until it passed them, providing a rich target for the Ratel and its cannon. As soon as the armored vehicle was in view, the PIG’s bumper-mounted machine gun chattered, but the rounds bounced off the Ratel’s outer hull as expected. The PIG made a spinning U-turn in the gravel as the 20mm cannon shells sizzled past. It passed Linc and Eddie again and had nearly reached the safety of the rock outcropping when smoke began to pour from the rear. The PIG veered wildly off the road and disappeared down the embankment toward the lake.

That was the cue for the Ratel to give chase and it didn’t disappoint. The vehicle’s commander was obviously confident that he’d scored a mortal shot and wanted to verify his kill.

The Ratel roared past Linc and Eddie’s ditch and came to a stop at the top of the embankment while smoke continued to rise from the wreckage of the PIG. The side doors popped open and four men in camo gear and helmets jumped out, aiming their assault rifles in the PIG’s direction.

Linc and Eddie leaped from their hiding spot and rushed at the men.

“Drop your weapons!” they both shouted in the crude Creole that MacD had taught them over the radio.

Bazin’s mercenaries were either brave or too stupid to realize when they were caught with their pants down. They crouched against the Ratel and raised their weapons to fire.

That was all the warning they’d get. Eddie expertly took down three of them while Linc got the fourth with his sidearm pistol. But the driver inside the Ratel didn’t know when he’d been beaten. He backed it up and swiveled the main cannon around to fire at them.

Linc shook his head at the idiocy. He holstered the pistol, shouldered the RPG, and pulled the trigger before the cannon was in position. The antitank round blew the armored vehicle apart.

He dropped the empty tube and kicked the gravel in frustration.

“There goes our Return of the Jedi plan,” Linc said.

“It was a good idea,” Eddie said. He called to Linda. “What’s the damage to the PIG?”

“Nothing at all,” she replied. “With Eric’s snappy driving, they completely missed. The smokescreen worked just like you thought it would.”

The PIG powered its way up the embankment, the smoke now dissipating.

The two of them walked over and checked the mercenaries. All of them were corpses.

Eddie looked at the largest of the bodies and then at Linc as if he were comparing them.

“What’s going on in that devious mind of yours?” Linc asked.

“You could pass for a Haitian from a distance.”

“I suppose so, but we don’t have the Ratel anymore.”

“We still have the PIG. What if the mercenaries captured it and drove it back? As long as they thought you were one of the them, we could get within visual range of the last Ratel. The PIG does have one rocket left.”

Linc thought about the plan and nodded. “I like the idea, but we need something to really sell it.”

“Like what?”

Linc picked up one of the mercenaries’s walkie-talkies and started pulling off the uniform of the least bloody soldier. “We’re going to require MacD’s language skills one more time.”

Bazin tried to raise the third Ratel on the radio and got only static in reply. He peered from his concealed window within the main building, but all he could make out was a plume of smoke over the hill.

If the Ratel had been taken out, it still didn’t change anything. For Cabrillo and his men to attack, they would be endangering the lives of sixty hostages. And a straight-on assault would be suicidal, with the Ratel he had left and the number of men still deployed outside.

A vehicle came around the hill, but it wasn’t the missing Ratel. It was the truck that the Corporation called the PIG. He was about to order the remaining Ratel to open fire when he saw one of his men standing in the PIG’s open roof, waving his gun and shouting with glee. He could see two more men inside the cab, driving their prize back to the cement plant.

The man in the roof had a walkie-talkie to his mouth. Bazin listened on his, but the voice was almost unintelligible with the wind and engine noise. He was shouting in Creole that they had captured the American’s truck and not to shoot.

“Stand down,” he radioed to the rest of the men.

Kensit had given him the intel on Linda Ross and her men, but he had been keeping an eye on them only in short spurts, when he could divert his attention away from the drone mission. Bazin didn’t object since he had the situation under control and the Haitian National Police on the way as backup.

As the captured PIG approached, Bazin confidently called Kensit back with the intention of telling him his services wouldn’t be needed anymore and to concentrate on destroying Air Force Two.

“What the hell is going on down there?” Kensit shouted when he answered, shocking Bazin, who’d never heard Kensit so out of control.

“What are you talking about? We’ve captured the Corporation’s vehicle. It’s over.”

“It’s not over! I can’t see anything. Something happened to Sentinel. My screen went blank and I can’t contact any of the techs. I’m trying to reconnect now. You get your butt in there and find out what’s going on. And don’t waste any more time. Set the self-destruct. I’ll need an hour to complete the mission. Go!”

He hung up.

Bazin was about to turn and head for the tunnel when he realized that Kensit hadn’t been able to watch what was happening in the battle between the Ratel and the PIG.

He looked out the window with dawning horror. The PIG was close enough now for him to make out the faces of the men and he noticed two things at once: the driver of the PIG had a bullet hole through his forehead and the man on top of the vehicle shouting in Creole was not one of his men. It had to be Franklin Lincoln.

He raised his radio to tell his forces to open fire, but it was too late. A rocket shot from the side of the PIG and hit the last Ratel, blowing it to pieces and his men around it to the ground.

Bazin heard Lincoln yelling for the hostages to get down. They dived to the ground as one and the machine gun behind the PIG’s fake bumper chewed through the mercenaries like a meat grinder. Eddie Seng joined Lincoln on the roof of the PIG and added his firepower to the assault. Two more of his men fell to sniper fire. The rest scattered for cover. It was only a matter of time before they were defeated.

Bazin was furious that Kensit couldn’t keep his precious machine running properly during the time when they needed it most. He knew a technical glitch in such a complicated device was inevitable. His only choice now was to get in to Sentinel, set the self-destruct, and escape in the speedboat he had stashed in one of the outbuildings along the water. Although he never expected the cement plant to fall, he always planned for the worst, so he also had a hidden SUV waiting for him on the other side of the lake.

As for his mercenaries, with the money he was pulling in from the drug lords, he could always hire more. And when Sentinel 2 was up and running, he could buy as many of them as he wanted. Haiti would still be his.

But he couldn’t let them capture Sentinel 1 intact. Kensit had been clever to build in a self-destruct that was more than simply an explosive to obliterate the equipment. Equipment was replaceable. It was the Oz cave, with its unique natural properties, that was the real treasure. Someone could eventually clear it out and build a replica of Sentinel.

Kensit had rigged Sentinel itself to prevent that from happening. The device used a five-pound cobalt 60 core scavenged from used medical equipment to focus the neutrinos. The cave itself was slightly radioactive now, but nothing hazardous. However, detonating the core inside the cave would make the interior dangerously radioactive for generations. It would be impossible to build another neutrino telescope inside it.

As the battle raged outside, Bazin picked up an RPG from the weapons stockpile in case the Corporation helicopter tried to chase him across the lake. Armed with an Uzi submachine gun, he took off into the tunnel toward the Oz cave to start the sequence that would destroy Sentinel 1 forever.