The Archimedes Effect

24

Townenda Hollow

Virginia

Carruth picked a place he’d been to back when he’d been in the Navy. He and a bunch of buddies had gone camping, hiking into the woods in Virginia, and they’d passed this old falling-down barn way the hell out and gone in the country, down a gravel road. The farmhouse that had been there was gone, burned down, except for a chimney mostly covered with kudzu.

There were other farms around, but nobody within a mile or two of the old place.

He took Dexter, Hill, and Russell. They spent a couple hours checking things out—nobody had been down the gravel road as far as the barn lately; there might have been some hunters or cold-weather campers using the road, but no fresh tracks.

One they had the lay of the land, they turned to tactics. A couple shaped-charge shot-canisters were set up next to the road in trees, devices that could be triggered by a remote, right at eye level for a guy driving a car or van. Those would serve as backup. Nasty little things, they were essentially explosives packed heavy inside a fan-shaped tube that was welded shut on one end. The explosives were laced with little steel ball bearings. When the thing went blam! anything in front of the blunderbuss-bell would get blasted hard. It would turn the driver of a car within ten meters into bloody hash, window down or up, and with a pair of them, one on both sides of the narrow road, any passengers would be likewise chewed to ratburger PDQ.

Other than that, they didn’t need anything fancy. They had the ground. Carruth knew that Keep-It-Simple-Stupid was the best way. It might not always work every time, but KISS kept you from screwing up more often than not.

There were plenty of trees and scrub brush around the barn. Nobody would be inside the place—the wood was so rotten it might collapse from a big sneeze. They’d come in two cars—one would be the decoy, set up where it was easy to see, the other well hidden. They’d wear gillie-suits, and when the bad guys showed up, they’d do it by the numbers. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am . . .

He opened his cell phone. NO SIGNAL, it said. Good.

“Okay, boys, rendezvous at my place tomorrow morning, 0600. I’ll bring the hardware. Get some sleep, I want fresh eyes and trigger fingers, come the dawn.”

The other three nodded.

They had the decoy car set up—one that Hill swiped and switched plates on—and they were well hidden in the woods. Hill and Russell had overlapping fields of fire, using M-16s, though if it went the way they figured, they would only need those for mop-up.

They were in place and ready an hour before Lewis made the call to Al-Thani. The meeting was set for four hours after that, but it would only take maybe half that long for Al-Thani to drive there, assuming he was in or around the District, and if Carruth had been him, he would have pushed that to make it even sooner. But ninety minutes was way more time than they needed, since they were ready to rock now. . . .

Carruth had the Dragon, and the plan was simple. As soon as Al-Thani and his troops arrived, he would put a rocket through the windshield of whatever vehicle they were in and cook ’em. Bye-bye, boys.

If anybody survived that and managed to get out of the car alive, Hill and Russell would chop them down with automatic-weapons fire, and the dance would be over.

It would be a bit noisy, but by the time anybody got curious and came to see what all the thunder had been about, Carruth and his troops would be long gone.

They just might be smart enough to have a second car following, and if so, the shrapnel exploders would spray that sucker with hard sleet and Dexter would run a couple magazines of ammo after it, with Hill coming to add his fire as soon as they were done here.

It didn’t get much simpler than that. See the bad guys, cook the bad guys, and see ya, boys—we’re outta here. . . .

The four of them wore short-range, low-power LOSIR headsets that wouldn’t carry for more than a klick, and any changes that were necessary could be conveyed instantly. Carruth was wired, feeling speedy from the adrenaline rushing in his body. That’s how it always went when you were getting ready for war. Everything tuned up to full alert and hammers circulated in your blood . . .

It was forty-five minutes later when things stopped going according to plan.

It was Dexter who heard it first. They all wore shooters’ earplugs, designed to stop loud noises and to amplify normal sounds, but Dexter had always been able to hear a mouse twitch in the next room.

“Incoming helicopter,” Dexter said.

After a second, Carruth heard it, too. Well, damn!

He didn’t believe for a second it was a coincidence.

Crap. He hadn’t figured they’d be that well equipped.

He went over the terrain in his mental map. The nearest clearing big enough to land a chopper was three hundred meters to the south. They’d put the bird down there; the troops would alight and try to ghost through the woods, to set up on the barn. Once they hit the ground and spread out, that would be bad—Carruth and his men might well be outnumbered and the advantage of surprise would only go so far. They needed the targets in a bunch.

“Go, go, the clearing to the south!” Carruth ordered.

It was a bitch running in a gillie-suit, all that crap flapping in the breeze, and the Dragon was heavy enough to start him breathing fast after a hundred meters, but the sound of the chopper was getting louder. Walking wasn’t going to get it done.

It seemed to take forever, but they reached the edge of the clearing while the chopper was still a couple hundred meters up. Looked like a Sikorsky S-series to Carruth, a 76 or maybe the S-76A. Those would hold six or eight passengers and two pilots comfortably, with gear, but you could stuff as many as a dozen people into one and still get it into the air. Even if the pilot stayed with the craft, that could mean as many as ten or eleven pairs of boots on the ground, and that was way too many against their quad.

“Fan out,” Carruth ordered. “Don’t nobody get behind me.”

Somebody laughed.

Carruth sat, perched the rocket launcher on his shoulder, and lined it up on the gently settling helicopter.

There came the big whoosh! of exhaust back-blast blowing leaves and bushes apart behind him, and the missile zipped away.

The pilot must have seen the flash or the back-blast and recognized it; he tried to turn and power up, but it was too late. Carruth kept the crosshairs on the craft’s body amidships, and almost instantly the rocket lanced into the copter and blew up, making a hellacious noise that his earplugs cut out. Mostly cut out, anyhow.

The main rotor ripped loose from the impact. The tail rotor then spun the bastard like a top as the Sikorsky dropped like a brick soaked in flaming fuel—which is what it had become.

From two hundred meters, it wasn’t likely anybody was going to survive the impact, but Hill and Russell tracked it to the ground. When it hit, it rocked Carruth like an earthquake. Fiery gas spewed in all directions, arcing sheets of flame up and out in a ragged circle as the frame crunched and collapsed in on itself.

Hill and Russell ran toward it, but couldn’t get any closer than twenty meters because of the intense heat. Carruth could see their suits stirring under the force of the radiant heat.

If you couldn’t get any closer than that, then anybody in there was already quick-barbecued by now, Carruth knew. If the fall hadn’t killed them, the fire sure had.

Thick, roiling, black smoke erupted into the clear sky in a great cloud, and even if there was a car coming later for backup in an hour or so, Carruth and his men sure as hell weren’t going to be here to see it. This much smoke in the woods was a bad thing, and the locals would be heading this way to check it out in a hurry. Which meant Carruth and his troops needed to be leaving for the car right this minute.

Carruth triggered his LOSIR transmitter.

“Dex, grab the explosives, crank up the decoy car, and head out. Rest of us’ll take the primary vehicle. Don’t stop until you get to the rendezvous.”

“Copy.”

“Let’s go, boys. We’re gonna have company if we stick around here.”

They ran for the hidden van.

The FAA would show up sooner rather than later, too, and it wouldn’t take them long to figure out that a helicopter full of armed guys hadn’t fallen out of the sky due to pilot error. Well, except that he was stupid enough to be flying out here where Carruth was with his rocket launcher.

Wouldn’t take the feds long to figure out what had done the trick, either; he didn’t have time to clean up, they had to cut and run. If they found pieces of the rocket, and they would, there was the wire stretched out right there, it’d be like a fingerprint, so they’d know it was from a Dragon, and it wouldn’t take a big brain to figure out where that had come from, either.

Who had gotten shot down and why? That might be harder, but probably they’d figure out the dead guys were on some list. Maybe one terrorist faction was going after another, and let Homeland Security try and sort through that.

Not that it mattered. Carruth and the boys wouldn’t be here.

Lewis probably wasn’t gonna be too thrilled about this, either. Chances were, the head honcho had been in the chopper—the backup car, if there was one, wouldn’t have been the way for the boss to travel. Carruth couldn’t be positive—maybe the guy was afraid of flying or something—but probably he was in the copter, which was mostly melted into slag by now and anybody inside it would be a crispy critter. No way they were gonna be able to stick around and get IDs, though. He mentally shrugged. It was what it was. You did the best you could with what you had. Anything else, fuck it. . . .