Warriors

CHAPTER 68

Ten minutes later, Hawke’s men were rapidly moving down the rocky shale mountainside in single file. The footing was dicey, a lot of slipping and sliding, but they were moving double time because of the newly adjusted time parameters.

Hawke had started the mental countdown clock in his head. They now had less than fifty minutes to fight their way inside the perimeter and locate the target building. Then they had to locate Chase. If the hostage was still alive, extract him. Get the auto-destruct codes and fight their way to the heavily protected Centurion sub base and wreak such havoc as they were capable of with Chase’s help.

Finally, fight their way to the end of the rocky point where the SDVs would be waiting offshore. And escape to the sub before the overwhelming force of crack paratroops had a chance to stop them.

Nearing the bottom, they entered the good protective cover at the foot of the mountain.

They’d identified the area in the sat photos, large clusters of boulders the size of automobiles with a clear view across the strip of open land to the camp’s stockade fence line beyond. Stoke handed Hawke his high-powered Zeiss binoculars.

A hundred yards inside the fence was a tall steel watchtower, fifty feet high and four sided at the top with a large high-powered searchlight on each corner of the rooftop. Tripod-mounted heavy machine guns were placed on all four sides.

From the aerial views, the tower had looked like some kind of shed on the ground, because all you could see was the roof. Now it was a serious obstacle that must be dealt with. Hawke silently signaled for Fitz to move up. Fitz and his trusty RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

“Can you take that tower out from this distance?” Hawke asked him.

“Is Dublin a city in Ireland?” Fitz replied.

“On my signal,” Hawke said. “Wait for it.”

Concertina wire topped the eight-foot-high fence.

Inside that fence, running the length of it, Hawke knew, was a two-lane asphalt track that encircled the entire compound. Studying the sat feed on board USS Florida, he and Stoke had spent hours timing the perimeter guards’ rotation schedule, over and over, until they knew they could count on it. They’d been watching a real-time feed from one of the U.S. military satellites now whirling by above them.

The rotation worked like this.

Two armored troop carriers, each with twin tripod-mounted machine guns in the rear, and carrying eight heavily armed guards, traveled around the perimeter in opposite directions. Every four hours, the two squads were relieved, new men took their places, and the cycle started all over again. The trucks traveled at exactly twenty miles per hour.

It took nearly half an hour to complete the twisting circuit, which looped out around the sub base located on a thrusting rocky point to the seaward side of the military base.

Stoke was on recon, watching the patrol vehicles now patrolling the six-mile-long circuit through high-powered Zeiss glasses.

“On my mark…” he said.

The armored vehicles passed each other wordlessly, the officers saluting each other. A moment later, both trucks had disappeared around a curve. Stoke was monitoring the sweep second hand on his Rolex. He knew precisely long it would take for the two vehicles to pass each other on the opposite side of Xinbu Base.

At that precise moment, when the guard trucks were as far from the invaders’ insertion point as possible…

The minutes stretched out.

“Mark!” Stoke said, and Hawke tapped Fitz on the top of his helmet.

With a huge WHOOSH, the RPG fired. It left a trail of dense white smoke as it streaked toward the target.

Fitz never missed.

Where the tower had been, a blinding ball of yellow, orange, and red. A huge fireball created by the explosion fifty feet in the air. The sound reverberated off the mountainside and lit up the ground around it. Then came a rolling blast wave even Hawke could feel on his face.

“Go, go, go!” he shouted.

Rainwater had already packed C-4 explosives on a twelve-foot-wide section of stockade fence. He pulled out his iPhone and triggered the second blast in as many minutes.

Now the eighteen-man hostage rescue team began to race across open ground to the insertion point in the fence. It had not been chosen randomly. It was at the farthest point from any physical structure within the perimeter.

It was also the farthest point from the guard barracks and the hulking marble monstrosity that was the Te-Wu Academy for young assassins. Not to mention home to its headmaster and new leader of the People’s Republic of China. Hawke’s old enemy. A man whose daughter had once tried to assassinate him. A man who had recently ordered not only Hawke’s own death, but that of his beloved son. A man responsible for the death of a lovely young woman beloved by his son: Sabrina Churchill.

General Sun-Yat Moon.