Corsair - Cussler Clive. Страница 56

Given that Assad wasn’t particularly attractive by anyone’s standards, his conquests were all the more impressive.

Eddie and Hali both concluded that Assad was nothing more than a mildly corrupt harbor pilot with an overactive libido and one hell of a pickup line. That was until Max Hanley called with his bombshell announcement. Assad’s ingratiation into the bedrooms of Libya’s government took on a whole new and darker aspect.

JUAN LISTENED OVER THE phone as Eric Stone described the route the old rail spur took through the mountains toward the coast, twenty-odd miles away. The satellite pictures didn’t give the gradient of the line, but Juan’s tracking chip had put him at nearly a thousand feet above sea level when he’d gotten off the helicopter at the terrorists’ training camp.

From the outline of a plan that was forming in his mind even as Eric spoke, Cabrillo decided it was going to be one hell of a wild ride.

Worse, though, the timing was going to be incredibly tight, and he could think of no excuse he could have Overholt pass on to the Libyans to delay their assault without tipping his hand.

Adding to his problems, he hadn’t slept more than six hours out of the past forty-eight, and, judging by the appearance of his three shipmates, they weren’t faring much better.

“What is it?” Linc asked, his surgical gloves covered with blood as he finished the last of the tight stitches. He had sewn the cut in Juan’s leg by layering three rows of catgut, moving from the deepest part of the wound out to the skin, so there was no way it would reopen. With a local anesthetic keeping the pain to a dull ache, Juan felt confidence in his body’s abilities.

“What?”

“You just chuckled,” Linc replied, snapping off the gloves and stuffing them into a red biohazard-containment box.

“Did I? I was just thinking that we are so deep over our heads right now I don’t know if what I have in mind is going to work.”

“Not another of your infamous plan C’s?” Linda groaned. She stood just outside of the Pig, looking over Linc’s massive shoulder.

“That’s why I laughed. Gallows humor. We’re well past C and into D, E, or F.”

There were two options facing Cabrillo but no real choices. He was about to put them all into a shooting gallery, with the Pig playing the role of sitting duck.

Linc duct-taped a gauze pad over Juan’s wound, and said, “If Doc Huxley has a problem with my work, tell her to take it up with your HMO.”

Juan struggled back into his pants. They were ripped in a dozen places, and so crusted with sand that they crackled when he drew them over his hips, but the Pig didn’t carry any spare uniforms. He did a couple of deep knee bends when he leapt to the ground. The cut was tight, but both the stitches and the anesthesia held.

The sun had yet to show itself over the distant mountains, so the stars blazed cold and implacable overhead. Cabrillo studied them for a second, wondering—and not for the first time—if he would live to see them again.

“Mount up,” he called. “The show’s gonna be mostly over by the time the Oregon arrives, and we’ve got a lot of grim work ahead of us.”

“Just curious, Juan,” Linc said casually. “Who are these people we’re going to rescue? Political prisoners, common criminals, what?”

“I think maybe they’re the key to this whole thing.”

Linc gave a little nod. “All right.”

“If you ask me,” Mark said and started to add, “I’ve got a bad feeling about—”

Cabrillo cut him off with a look.

Forty-eight minutes, by Juan’s watch, ticked by before he judged they were ready. Barely. He had seen the quality of the guards looking after the prisoners and knew they weren’t a serious threat in small numbers, but there were forty or so of them, and if his timing was off the two hundred more he hoped to lure from the training camp would reach the mine before everyone had made good their escape.

On their approach to the mine, they had left Linc to make his way to higher ground overlooking the stockyard behind the old administration buildings. With a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, the ex-SEAL could have accurately hit targets from well over a mile away. His effective range with the smaller REC7 assault rifle was still an impressive seven hundred yards, and for what Juan had planned Linc would be taking significantly shorter shots than that. The Pig was just out of sight of the mining camp, atop the narrow trail where the day before the desert patrol had returned with the body of the escapee.

Dawn was a brushstroke in the distance, so darkness filled the hollows and gullies around them, and the air carried the chill of the distant sea.

Juan wished there was a way he could leave Alana and their new companion, Fodl, out of the fight, but he couldn’t risk leaving them in the desert in case he and his team couldn’t return. He had explained his plan to them, made sure they understood the dangers involved, and both were ready to do whatever he asked of them.

“Just so you fit in with all the other archaeologist-adventurers out there, I’ll get you a fedora,” he said, and smiled at Alana when she had told him she was game.

“And a whip?” she’d joked back.

“Kinky,” he’d admonished with another grin.

“Comm check,” Linc called over the tactical net.

“I’ve got you five by five, big man.”

“I’m on top of the old ore-loading structure,” the sniper reported. “The guards are starting to roust the prisoners for breakfast. It’s now or never.”

“Roger,” Juan replied, and swallowed hard, his throat suddenly as dry as the desert sand. He looked across the driver’s seat to Mark Murphy. The success or failure of Juan’s plan hinged on Murph’s virtuosity with the Pig’s weapons systems. “Ready?”

Mark nodded.

“Tallyho!” Juan said.

Mark keyed up the Pig’s roof-mounted mortars. They had already been sighted in with Linc’s help, using a laser range finder. They fired simultaneously, and the weapon’s autoloader had a second round dropped into each of the four tubes before the first rounds had traveled a hundred yards on their high, arcing parabolas.

The second fusillade launched with a comically hollow sound, and Mark shouted, “Go!”

Juan already had the Pig’s engine revved, so that when he dropped it into gear, all four tires spun. They roared over a ridge, and the camp came into view. As he’d planned, no one had heard the mortars fire. Ragged prisoners were lining up for their pitifully small breakfast while guards casually harassed them. He saw one guard use a baton on a man, crashing it into the man’s kidneys so hard his back bent like a bow at full stretch and he collapsed in the dust.

The mortar rounds hit the apex of their flight and started barreling earthward, each packed with a kilo of high explosives. Mark had spent part of the drive to the camp removing most of the shrapnel from each round to minimize the chance of hitting any of the detainees.

Linc laid the crosshairs of his REC7 on the guard who’d just clubbed the prisoner, let out half a breath, and squeezed the trigger. “We have pink mist,” he reported when the guard’s head exploded.

He took out another pair of guards before the first ripple of concern passed through the security contingent. The captain of the guards appeared from a tent. His chest was bare, and he wore his uniform pants bloused into his combat boots. Linc noted the radio antennae sticking up through a hole in the tent’s roof and moved his aim onto another target.

Four mortar rounds struck the ground at precisely the same instant. The path leading down to the floor of the open-pit mine erupted in geysers of dirt and greasy fire. A moment later, more rounds hit even closer to the camp.

Both guards and prisoners alike pulled back, moving toward the large wooden buildings, while Linc continued to thin the ranks of terrorists, one shot—one kill—at a time. He made the ones carrying weapons his priority.