Soar (35 page)

X-Man pursed his lips. “Roy used to say you can never have too much explosive, only too little.”

“Roy was a wise, wise man,” Kaz said. “I’m sorry I never took the course when he was teaching it.”

“He was so cool,” X-Man said. “Told us how he and two other Frogs once blew a mile-and-a-half underwater trench in Barbados as a favor to some local guy.”

“C’ mon.

“No, I’m serious. A mile and a half.” X-Man began to knead the other half of the Semtex block. “God, I would have loved to see that one.” He rolled the plastic into a salami-sized sausage, pinched off the ends, and flattened what remained. Then he layered new explosive atop the old, giving the Semtex more bulk, still careful, however, to maintain the sixty-degree angle of the cone. The cone would detonate in what was known as the Monroe effect, and would explode in an arc similar to the fan-shaped pattern of a claymore.

Once the Semtex was properly shaped and packed, he passed the can to Kaz, who used the knife to puncture the
water can precisely behind the apex of the cone. Kaz inserted a detonator into the explosive. When the detonator was firmly in place X-Man examined Kaz’s handiwork and found it acceptable. Then the two of them repeated the operation with the second water can.

0845.
X-Man worked his way up the crest of the ravine and along the ridge until he found where Rowdy had set up one of the two camouflaged positions. He glanced around. All things considered, the Delta men had done a remarkable job—he hadn’t seen the MADM until he was virtually on top of the device. And the firing positions were great. Rowdy’s people commanded the high ground. That alone would make an infantry assault costly. But just as valuable, he’d found positions that afforded the Delta shooters protection from air attack.

Yates was on his radio. X-Man waited until the sergeant major signed off and turned to face him. “Good news and bad news, Sarge.”

“Call me Rowdy.” Yates was preoccupied and in no mood for the spook’s lighthearted banter. “I don’t give a shit which you tell me first.”

“The good news is that we won’t have a problem flipping the truck. The bad news is that there’s only enough plastic for these two improvised devices if you want to do a good job on the truck.”

“You’re wasting my time,” Rowdy said. He held his arms out. “Let me have ‘em.”

X-Man laid the two shaped charges atop a knee-high flat rock, as reverentially as oblations. He was careful to display the explosive without disturbing the detonators. Rowdy’s eyes moved quickly over the plastic-filled cans. Then he looked up and his expression softened. “Thanks,” he said. “Good job. You two need a hand setting the truck?”

“Naw.” Kaz kicked a stone down the hill. “We can do it. We’ll let you know when we’re set to blow it.”

Yates rubbed a hand across his forehead then checked the digital watch on his left wrist. “Work fast,” he said. “We got less than a half hour until the opposition arrives.”

“Wilco, Sarge.”

Yates put on his War Face. “I said, call me Rowdy.”

“Why?”

Yates turned on him, coming up very close, eyes wide, bull neck throbbing, invading X-Man’s space. The sergeant major, X-Man realized, could become hugely intimidating when he wanted to—and X-Man wasn’t easily intimidated.

“Why?” Rowdy stared down at the younger man wild-eyed for a few seconds. Then he growled, “Because ‘Sarge’ sounds like a character played by William Bendix in all those World War Two movies.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“Bad karma, guy. The William Bendix character always used to die. The negative association could affect my
feng shui.”

X-Man blinked twice. He watched as Rowdy’s mustache upturned into a sly grin. He pressed his hands palm to palm in front of his chest and bowed his head in mock reverence to the sergeant major. “I am chastened, Master Rowdy,” he said. Then he turned and scurried back down the ravine with Kaz following in his footsteps.

Yates watched them go. They weren’t bad kids—for spooks. Rowdy looked down at the IEDs
²⁴
with approval. The kid certainly knew his explosives. Still, Rowdy didn’t have much use for spooks. His dealings with CIA had been
mostly futile. In Iraq and later Somalia, CIA had been more a part of the problem than the solution. Rowdy was convinced that for all the help the suits at Langley provided Delta, the Agency’s initials should really stand for Can’t Identify Anything. In Mogadishu, faulty CIA intel caught Rowdy’s platoon in an ambush that cost him two of his troopers and a painful gut wound that took him out of action for six months. During the Kosovo campaign, Delta’s Agency liaison had been a retired Supergrade who’d been station chief in Belgrade in the mid-seventies. He’d had no contacts and no sources, and provided the Unit with no useful intelligence whatsoever. Still, it wasn’t the guys on the ground—the kids like X-Man who had some understanding of the real world—so much as the suits back at Langley who kept things screwed up so badly. Christ,
they
were such dumb-asses; they might as well be generals.

141 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.
0844 Hours Local Time.

“H
EAR ANYTHING
?”
Ritzik shook Sam’s shoulder to get his attention, then tapped the spook’s headset.

“Negatory.” Sam shook his head, shouting to be heard over the swash of the rotors. “I think they’re maintaining radio silence.”

“Possible.” Ritzik thought for a minute. He bent his head to get himself closer to Sam’s ear. “How’s your Chinese accent?”

“Kind of like Maurice Chevalier’s English,” Sam shouted back. “I sound like a round-eyes. Why?” “I was thinking,” Ritzik said. “Maybe you could try to
convince them the radio was shot up. You know—a syllable or two, and then silence?”

“I could try something real basic like
wŏ bŭ-dŏng.”

“What’s it mean?”

“No comprendo—I
don’t understand.”

“Could you say, ‘Can’t read you’ instead? ‘Don’t understand’ sounds pretty phrase book.”

“That’s an idiom,” Sam shouted. “I’m not fluent enough to do idioms. But I could try one-word directions to get ‘em where we want ‘em to go—y’know,
dŏng, nán, xī, běi—
north, south, east, west. And I could probably add left and right:
zoŭmián
and
yòumián.”

“Up to you,” Ritzik said. “You do as much as you feel comfortable doing.”

“Got it.”

“Good.” Ritzik looked up and peered through the windshield. His hand found the radio dial and he switched to the insertion-team net frequency. “Mick—”

He watched Mickey D’s head go up and down. “Yo?”

“Your eleven o’clock, about nine, ten miles out.”

There was a three-second pause. Then: “Roger that, Loner. I see the dust trail.”

“Drop down some. Stay low—where they won’t see us or hear us for a while.”

The pilot’s head went up and down. But by the time he’d said, “Wilco,” Ritzik had already switched frequencies. He steadied himself as the big chopper slowed and lost altitude. “TOC, Loner—I need an update on the incoming flight.”

Ritzik waited for a reply. “TOC—Loner.” He transmitted the call sign a third, fourth, and fifth time. But all he heard in his earpiece was white noise.

125 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.
0854 Hours Local Time.

“C
URTIS
,
can you and Goose give me a hand?” Tracy WeiLiu had reached a critical stage of the disassembly. She’d unbolted the capacitor bank from the body of the MADM, then disconnected the fuse wires running from the energy cells into the Pentolite, easing the wires millimeter by millimeter from the capacitors. That had been the most problematic element of the exercise because there was no way of measuring whether or not any of the capacitors’ latent energy remained in the wiring. More to the point, the core of the fuse wire was made of copper—and Chinese Pentolite, Wei-Liu knew, reacted adversely to copper, brass, magnesium, and steel. There were two wires buried three inches in the pale grayish-yellow explosive. By the time she exposed the end of the second one from the capacitor unit, she’d sweated clear through her shirt.

Rowdy had put her in the most secure position he could find. She and the bomb were concealed under a ten-foot-long outcropping of rock, some twenty yards below the top of the ridge. Slightly below her position, a ragged cluster of scruffy trees, bent almost forty-five degrees by the wind, helped shield her from view. Rowdy and the rest of them had used whatever they could find to obscure her work site. They’d brought boughs from below, as well as using the tarp from the truck to create a trompe l’oeil effect of light and shadow that masked Wei-Liu and the device.

It was time to remove the capacitors, to get them safely clear of the explosives. For that, she’d need an extra pair of hands or two. The capacitors themselves were banked in an insulated rectangular box that sat atop the MADM’s hull. The fifty-five-pound battery pack, which resembled the
compressor compartment of a 1930s refrigerator, had been bolted directly behind the capacitors. The battery had been removed. But acid had leaked, fusing the six capacitor-unit bolts to the metal hull. Wei-Liu hadn’t been able to budge a single one.

The two Delta shooters ducked into Wei-Liu’s hideaway. She showed them the problem.

“Give us a couple of minutes,” Goose said. He rolled onto his back and pointed a small flashlight inside the MADM shell. “Got to see the nuts.” He squinted, then pulled himself onto his knees. “Twelve millimeter—maybe thirteen,” he said. “You have a socket set, ma’am?”

“I don’t,” Wei-Liu said. “I have a set of wrenches, though—here.”

The soldiers examined the tools. Curtis fit one of the wrenches to the top bolt and twisted it. “Too big—use the twelve.”

Goose picked through the pile, found the wrench, and worked his arm inside the MADM hull. After a few seconds he said, “Damn,” and pulled his arm out. He looked at WeiLiu. “It’s fused. Gonna have to muscle it off. You have any pliers?”

Wei-Liu retrieved a small pair from her tool satchel and displayed them. “Will these work?”

Goose’s face fell. “Needle nose,” he said. “Useless. I can’t get traction.”

Wei-Liu said, “What’s the problem?”

“The bolt head and nut are the same size,” Curtis said. “You have a single twelve-millimeter wrench. I need something to hold the bolt head tight while Goose takes the nut off.”

“Got it covered.” Goose pulled a dark multipurpose tool from a pouch on his belt. “Try this.”

He tossed the tool to Curtis, who flipped it open, revealing
a set of snub-nosed pliers. “We’ll have these off in a couple of minutes, ma’am.”

Wei-Liu’s hand covered the bolt head. “Wait—”

Goose looked at her. “What’s the problem?”

“Those are steel,” Wei-Liu said. “You can’t use them—they might cause a spark.”

“Your call, ma’am.”

Wei-Liu plucked the multitool from the soldier’s hand and played with it for a few seconds. And then she extracted a saw-edged knife blade from one of the handles, locked it into place, and cut two small strips of cloth from her shirt-tail. She wrapped one strip around each of the pliers’ jaws. “Now,” she said. “Now.”

0900.
“Fire in the hole.” From his position behind a boulder fifty yards upwind, X-Man shifted the safety bail on the firing device to its armed position, depressed the flat handle, and ducked. The six-pound charge of Semtex lifted the uphill side of the truck and flipped it, rolling the big vehicle onto its back in a huge orange fireball and cloud of toxic black smoke.

Kaz poked his head up to admire their handiwork. “Was it good for you, X?”

X-Man brushed debris out of his hair. “Oh, yeah. The earth really moved for me, Kazie-poo.” He waved at Yates, who gave the two spooks a smile, an upturned thumb, and then beckoned them up to his position.

“As soon as Bill and Tuzz finish siphoning off the avgas, get to work on the chopper. I want it burning when the Chinese show.”

Kaz grinned. “How come you give us all the good jobs?”

Rowdy shooed them away. “Go—play with matches. I have real work to do.”

He did, too. He had to position the IEDs where they’d do the most harm. He’d already scanned the area, trying to put
himself inside the head of the Chinese commander. The PLA wouldn’t make the same mistake again. No—they’d try to drop their force above or behind. So Rowdy’d use them on his flanks. They might not stop the Chinese, but they’d slow them down.

He peered down at the overturned truck and the destroyed shell of the HIP. He knew he’d have to move the Chinese corpses again, scattering them to make it appear that they’d died overcoming the terrorists. It wasn’t something Rowdy was especially anxious to do. But it was essential if the ruse was to work. He scanned the horizon to the east, saw nothing, then glanced reflexively at the watch on his left wrist. Not nearly enough time, dammit. Not enough at all.

0906.
Six detonator wires. Six detonator wires ran from the capacitors into the explosive. Wei-Liu was certain. She’d painstakingly isolated twelve from the unmarked bundles. But six of those had to be either duplicates, dummies, or re-dundants, because this MADM’s circuitry was engineered for a six-point detonation. She pulled the schematic out of her pocket, checked it for the fifth time in eleven minutes, and confirmed once again that the J-12 device was triggered by a six-point detonation.

But what if she was wrong?

S
HE
’
D MANAGED
to remove and then drain the capacitor block using an improvised ground to ensure there was no significant power left. Yes, the explosive was unstable. But she’d kept it from being unduly shocked or disturbed and, more important, protected from any sudden surge from the residual power in the capacitors. So, unless someone smacked it, dropped it, or put a bullet into it, the Pentolite wasn’t going to blow. And—as she’d explained so that Rowdy and the rest of them wouldn’t worry needlessly—
once she’d disconnected the wires, even if it did blow up, the explosive wouldn’t trigger the MADM’s nuclear core, because the Pentolite wouldn’t be able to detonate in the precise sequence necessary to induce critical mass. There would simply be one hell of an explosion.