Recoil

17

06:23 hours

Our truck was first out of the gates. Sam’s foot was hard to the floor, and it wasn’t just so he could make it over the bodies we hadn’t been able to move. The front three enemy vehicles were no more than four hundred metres away. At least another dozen were lined up in the dust trail behind them.

‘I can’t cover that arc!’ I was out of my seat. ‘Gonna have to shift.’

Sam braced himself. ‘Go for it.’ He knew what I had to do.

I jumped on to the sandbags, manoeuvring myself until I was lying at a diagonal through the dashboard and across the bonnet. My arse was just about in Sam’s face, but at least I had a solid platform, bipod wedged into the sandbags, from which the gun could point east as we raced south.

The wagon lurched and I almost careered off it. Sam grabbed my leg and steadied me as I got back into a fire position. I wasn’t going to put down rounds yet, though: I’d be aiming at moving vehicles, from a moving vehicle. Every round had to count. It was whites-of-their-eyes time. Where the fuck were those gunships?

Sam had to steer one-handed as he gripped me with the other. The rebels’ vehicles careered towards us like a stampeding herd. The sun was less than a third above the horizon, but it was getting hard to look east, even so.

Davy’s wagon broke ranks behind us and aimed right, then braked so sharply that for a moment I thought it’d broken down.

A couple of seconds later, the backblast from an RPG kicked up a storm of sand and grey smoke.

I followed the grenade’s flight path all the way in. The leading pickup jumped a good three feet in the air. There wasn’t a fireball, just an instant sand halo around it as the shockwave expanded and blew bits of wagon in all directions.

By the time the carcass had thumped back into the ground, the three remaining pickups at the front were less than a hundred away. I could hear the scream of their overworked engines.

The guys in the back of them fired wildly and indiscriminately, no idea where their rounds were going.

I wondered if Sam was praying to his God. If so, he was wasting his breath. Right now, God wasn’t creator of the universe: God was a Cobra two-ship.

I waited until they’d closed to within fifty of us before I fired my first double-tap. I aimed for a windscreen. You try to get the driver every time.

Davy kicked off another RPG. He had only two left.

This time, I didn’t see where it hit. I was too busy in my own little world, checking the link, firing as best I could as the vehicles circled us like Indians round a wagon train.

I fired again. Glass shattered. The vehicle swerved. I sent another double-tap into the front passenger door at chest height.

The pickup slewed right round and I went to fire again, but the Renault rocked violently and I lost my aim.

Sam had to fight the wheel, and sand blew up around us as we were buffeted by downwash.