Apocalypse unleashed

3

United States Rangers Convoy

Three Klicks North-Northeast of Harran

Sanliurfa Province, Turkey

Local Time 2116 Hours

Private First Class Jimmy Robinson sat in the back of the cargo truck and sipped metallic-tasting water from his canteen. He rode on an ammo box and swayed with the motion of the truck lumbering across the uneven terrain. Through the parted canvas partially covering the rear of the truck, he constantly watched the terrain.

“Man,” Butch Strahan complained from the other side of the truck. “You couldn’t ask for a bumpier ride.”

“You could,” Robinson said, “but I’d shoot you on account of you being too sadistic to live.”

Strahan laughed. “I’m just glad it isn’t so bumpy that some of this ammo goes off.”

“Wouldn’t do that. This stuff’s packed all right. I helped get it done.”

“I guess if you’re wrong, we’ll never live to know about it.” Strahan shifted, obviously trying to find a more comfortable position. “I heard you got to talk to your girl.”

Robinson nodded and tried to keep the smile from his face. The other men teased about such things. “Got Pablo’s Xbox 360 up and running. Hooked it into the Internet coming out of command. Captain Remington finally okayed that.”

“Good thing you guys didn’t get caught using it before he allowed it.”

“Tell me about it. But that Xbox just sips bandwidth. Even when you’re talking back and forth over the gamer network.”

“So what did your girl say?”

Robinson’s happy thoughts fled. “Her parents are missing.”

Strahan looked suddenly solemn. “Well, if Joe Baker was right in what he was saying, that God came and took all the Christians home to begin the Tribulation, that’s a good thing.”

“Maybe. But right now Nikki’s alone.” Robinson hesitated, wondering if he should say anything about what was really on his mind. “And she’s still here.”

“Oh,” Strahan said, suddenly understanding.

“I’ve known her since I was fourteen,” Robinson said. “Used to sit behind her in algebra. Her parents were always involved with the church. So was she.”

“You’re wondering why she’s still here while her parents are gone?”

“She says it was because she didn’t believe as much as her parents did. She thinks she was just going through the moves.”

“I think a lot of us were like that,” Strahan said. “I have to admit, I ain’t always played things on the straight and narrow, and maybe I’ve been too interested in other things than God’s Word, but I didn’t think I’d be left behind like this.”

“I never gave it any thought,” Robinson admitted. “I treated everybody fairly, tried to get along, but I didn’t make much time in my day for thinking about where I might end up when it was all over.”

“That’s because it’s not normal to sit around thinking about everything being all over.”

“Nikki’s parents did. Every Sunday and Wednesday at church. And I’m sure they didn’t forget about it during the rest of the week either.”

“But it’s not over. Not if what Joe Baker was saying was right. About how we can redeem ourselves in God’s eyes now.”

“I know. I’m hoping.”

Strahan shook his head. “You gotta do more than hope. You gotta believe.” He paused. “I don’t know about you, but before I hit my rack every night, I hit my knees and give thanks for getting through one more day.”

“I know. Me too. Nikki and me, we even prayed together on that Xbox hookup the other night. I mean, she doesn’t even have an Xbox. She was over at a friend’s house. They were logging on and staying on whenever they could because Nikki knows I like to play. She said that she knew if I was still alive, sooner or later I’d log on.”

“Then that conversation you two had was meant to be.”

“God wanted us to talk.” Robinson sipped his water again. “Nikki and I both believe that.”

Strahan abruptly sat up a little straighter and peered out the back of the truck. “Did you see that?”

Robinson put his canteen away and picked up his M-4A1. “See what?”

“Thought I saw movement out there in the brush.” Strahan pushed the canvas aside and swiveled his head. Then he jerked back.

Robinson stared at the other man, wondering what had happened, when the sound of the gunshots caught up with the cargo truck. He ducked immediately and scrambled over to Strahan as the truck’s driver floored the accelerator and started evasive maneuvers.

Blood welled from an ugly wound in the side of Strahan’s neck. For a moment Robinson thought the man was dead. Then Strahan reached up and caught his arm.

“Help… me,” Strahan wheezed. “Please. Help… me.”

Praying out loud, Robinson grabbed for a field dressing from his kit and slapped it against Strahan’s neck to stop the bleeding. From the amount of blood, he knew he had only minutes to stop the flow before his friend bled out.

More bullets ripped through the canvas over the truck’s cargo deck. Robinson wanted to scream at the men doing the shooting and ask them if they knew the trucks were loaded with munitions. Instead, he kept his head low and kept pressure on the field dressing.

Local Time 2118 Hours

“Drifter Leader, this is Base. Do you copy?”

Goose heard Remington’s voice in his ear over the headset’s crackling connection. Even though they had access to geosynchronous communications satellites, the connections weren’t always solid.

“Drifter Leader,” Remington said again, “this is Base. I repeat, do you copy?”

Goose didn’t want to take the call; he knew how it was going to go, but he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t blame Remington. He sat in the passenger seat of the Hummer and held his assault rifle canted forward. The seat-belt harness cut into his hips and chest, but it was the only thing keeping him from flying out of the seat. At times in its mad dash across the uneven terrain, the Hummer was airborne.

“Base, this is Drifter Leader.”

“Goose, that convoy is under attack. Where are you?”

The news hit Goose like a sledgehammer. He’d guessed that the convoy might get attacked, but he’d hoped the radio silence had been because everything was okay. They’d tried to reach the convoy, but the hills had interfered with the signal.

“On our way back now,” Goose said.

“You shouldn’t have left them.”

“No, sir,” Goose agreed. “I shouldn’t have.”

“What were you thinking when you-”

“Begging pardon, Base, but unless you have pertinent information I need right now, I suggest we shelve that particular topic.”

“That’s fine,” Remington said. “We’ll make time for it when you get back.”

“Yes, sir. Can you tell me how many hostiles we’re looking at?”

“We read nine vehicles.” Remington’s voice calmed as he focused on the mission.

“Manpower?”

“That’s unknown at this point. The nine vehicles are all light and fast. No heavy rolling stock.”

“Copy that.” Tanks wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the convoy, but Niyazi and his people could have been waiting in ambush with heavy weaponry. Goose glanced at his watch automatically. Running gun battles generally didn’t last more than a few minutes.

And they were behind.

When he glanced over his shoulder, Goose saw the jeep carrying Danielle Vinchenzo trailing by only a few feet. The reporter’s face was a pallid oval in the passenger seat as she clung to the seat belt and roll bar.

“Harlan,” Goose called over the headset.

“Yeah, Sarge.”

“You were a state police officer in Tennessee, weren’t you?”

“You bet. Got called up in the reserves for the Iraq situation and decided I’d stay on.”

“Do you know how to get that vehicle out of our hair without hurting anyone?”

“Yeah.” The grin was apparent in Harlan’s voice. “It’s called a PIT. Pursuit Immobilization Technique.”

“I’d rather the civilians didn’t arrive with us. I want them out of harm’s way.”

In the jeep, Danielle turned around in her seat and pointed at one of the Hummers coming up on the left. She shouted at the driver. Her actions let Goose know she was monitoring his ops frequencies.

Harlan was a better driver than the man handling Danielle’s vehicle. He crept up on the left side and gently nudged the left rear quarter panel with the right front bumper of his Hummer. Danielle’s vehicle launched into a spinout and came to a dead stop in a whirl of dust.

“Man,” Cody Brenner said behind the steering wheel of the Hummer Goose occupied, “Harlan makes that look easy.”

“My daddy taught me how to do that when I was twelve,” Harlan replied. “Before I took up with the state police, I ran stock cars on circuit racing.”

With Danielle out of the way-at least temporarily-Goose turned his attention to the coming battle. The Hummer roared over the next hill, went airborne for just a moment, then crashed back to the ground in a skidding, sliding advance.

At the bottom of the hill, the convoy was hurtling cross-country, the Rangers inside fighting for their lives. Muzzle flashes sparked white-hot holes in the night.

“Come up on the left side of the attack vehicles,” Goose directed. “If we can take out the drivers, we take out the attack teams.”

Local Time 2120 Hours

“I can’t believe Gander ordered them to do that.” The driver keyed the ignition and tried to get the jeep started. The ignition engaged and the engine turned over, but the motor didn’t start.

Danielle growled in rage as she watched the line of Ranger vehicles disappear over the ridge. “This is exactly something Goose would do.”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“He is. That’s why he did it.”

The driver tried the engine again. “We could have gotten killed.”

“No, man,” Gary the cameraman said from the back. “That was a classic move. And I know Harlan. Man’s a master of anything with four wheels. He put us right where he intended to.”

“Is this thing going to start?” Danielle asked. “There’s a story breaking right over that hill, and I’m missing it.”

“The way things are going,” the driver said in disgust, “if you miss this one, there’ll be another one tomorrow.”

Danielle barely checked an angry reply in time. The driver was new to her.

“Dude,” Gary said, “out here you don’t just want another story. You want Goose’s story. That guy’s like a magnet in this whole thing. If there’s trouble brewing somewhere, it’ll find a way to try and get a piece of him.”

Danielle silently agreed. She climbed out of the jeep. “Grab your camera, Gary. We’re walking.”

Frustration chafed at her. With everything she’d discovered since the Syrian attack, she believed she was at the eye of a vast conspiracy. One that seemed to involve her new boss, Nicolae Carpathia. Everything tracked back to him.

But every time Danielle thought she’d unearthed a new lead to the puzzle, someone or something got in her way. Her producer had shut down most of her lines of inquiry, freezing her out from the vast information archives within OneWorld NewsNet. She couldn’t prove that, but she was certain it was true.

Only a couple of weeks before, she’d chatted up one of the new people in research and had been starting to make some headway in her internal investigation of Carpathia. But someone had discovered that. The research assistant was released, and Danielle had been assigned to cover Goose’s convoy. If she hadn’t been thinking about the cover-up, the convoy story would have made sense. It was a good one.

The downside was that she might very well get killed tonight.

If OneWorld NewsNet wasn’t already out to kill her. She still wasn’t certain of that, and the possibility, when she wasn’t scrambling to stay alive, frightened her.

She shouldered her bag and started walking.

“Gimme a sec,” the driver said. “All that whirling around we did in the dust probably choked out the carburetor intake. It’ll clear.” He tried the ignition again. This time the engine caught, blatted unevenly, and finally managed to run steadily.

Without a word, Danielle climbed back into the passenger seat. The driver engaged the transmission, and they got underway. Even over the roar of the engine, Danielle heard the sharp reports of automatic weapons fire from over the ridgeline.