Corsair (Oregon Files 6)

“How far are we from the Tunisian border?” Linda asked after a couple of hours.

Mark checked their position on his computer. “About eight miles.”

“Keep sharp. I doubt they’ll cross it.”

The ghostly shadows cast by the risen moon suddenly winked out as a curtain of clouds crossed in front of it. Linc’s NVGs didn’t have enough light to process, so he keyed the active illuminators, sending out wavelengths in the near-infrared spectrum that were undetectable to human vision but which showed clearly in his goggles.

They drove like that for another mile. Mark Murphy was well aware that the active signal from Linc’s goggles could be seen by anyone else equipped with a night vision device, so he never took his eyes off the FLIR. So far, the desert ahead remained completely dark on the thermal scans.

And then a tiny blip showed itself. It was too small to be a man, he thought, and he dismissed it as some nocturnal animal when suddenly a burst of light exploded in the truck’s cabin across nearly every wavelength.

The hot exhaust from an RPG showed like a st

reak of white lightning on Mark’s screen while Linc’s NVGs were nearly overwhelmed by the blast of the rocket motor. They had stumbled into a perfectly laid ambush, and had the man with the grenade launcher fired a moment sooner they would have been blown apart in the opening salvo.

FIFTEEN

THE PIG WAS AT THE CREST OF A HILL, SO THEY COMMANDED the high ground, but without cover it did them no good. Their forward momentum didn’t give Linc enough time to jam the transmission into reverse, so he took the only option open to him. As the rocket came at them on its unguided, flat trajectory, the former SEAL mashed the accelerator and charged down the slope. He pressed a button on the dash to activate the hydraulic suspension, lowering the vehicle’s center of gravity by pushing the wheels out well beyond the fenders.

Murph no longer had the ground clearance to engage the .30 caliber machine gun mounted under the front bumper, but Linc’s move had given the truck enough stability to race across the face of the dune without tipping. Linc hit another switch to lower the curtain of chains behind the rear tires to cover their tracks. At the speeds he was hitting, the heavy lengths of chain hurled up a dense cloud of billowing dust, something their FLIR could see through but which the grenadier’s NVGs could not.

The rocket-propelled grenade impacted the earth where the Pig had been seconds before, blasting a harmless fountain of dirt and debris into the air. Tracer fire began to knife out of the darkness, converging on the rampaging truck like fire hoses.

“Linda—” Linc started to say, but she cut him off.

“I’m on it.”

She opened the door to the rear cargo area and launched herself through feetfirst. She went immediately for the switch that opened the top hatch, and the instant it was opened she pushed the secondary machine gun up and onto its roof mounts. The hatch covers gave her protection from the sides, so she aimed for the gunmen firing at them straight ahead. The .30 caliber roared in her hands, and spent brass arced away from the breach in a shimmering blur. She poured rounds into one particularly dense area of fire. In the darkness, she couldn’t tell what was happening a hundred yards away, but the stream of tracers racing for the Pig withered away to nothing.

She swung the gun to counter Linc’s erratic driving, ravaging another foxhole. There must have been a grenadier with the men firing assault rifles because the position was blown apart by an explosion that sent shattered bodies high into the sky.

Another RPG blasted out of the night, but the aim was so far off that Linc could afford to ignore it. He pointed the Pig at a long mound of sand that was giving several attackers perfect cover. He went up its face at an angle, and when he reached the top he threw the heavy truck into a four-wheel drift so that when they reached the bottom on the far side Linda had the entire row of gunmen in her sight’s crosshairs. She walked her rounds up the defile, tearing apart the defensive positions in a fury of destruction.

“I’ve got a massive thermal image here,” Mark said, staring at his computer.

“Range?”

“Five hundred yards. It’s partially obscured by the topography, but there is something big out there, and it’s getting hotter.”

“Missiles,” Linc ordered.

Even bouncing over the rough ground, Mark didn’t miss a keystroke as he worked his computer. Hydraulically operated panels opened along the Pig’s sides just enough to reveal the blunt nose cones of four FGM-148 Javelin antitank missiles. Normally a shoulder-fired weapon, the Javelin carried a seventeen-pound warhead, and had proved capable of defeating any armored vehicle it had ever engaged.

The Javelin was an infrared-guided fire-and-forget weapon, so as soon as Mark locked his computer’s targeting reticle on the unknown heat signature, the missile was ready.

“Fire in the hole,” he shouted for Linda’s benefit, and launched the rocket.

It came out of its tube in a gush of hot exhaust and streaked across the desert. Linc turned the wheel so Linda could engage another machine-gun nest that was peppering the Pig’s flank with a steady barrage of fire. It seemed the only active enemy still willing to engage them.

The Javelin homed in on the heat source with single-minded determination, ignoring the battle raging around it and the futile attempts of a couple of men to shoot it down as it roared into a secret desert base. Fifty feet from its target, its seeker head suddenly lost the signal, though it picked up a cooler, and closer, contact. Still, it ignored the bait and maintained its original course.

What the missile didn’t know was that a fuel truck had passed between it and its target, the cooler thermal image being its engine. The rocket slammed into the tank just behind the cab. The driver died in an instant as the fuel-air mixture detonated in a blossoming fireball that seemed to lick the heavens. A cluster of nearby tents was torn to shreds by the blast, their guy ropes turned to ribbons, and the poles reduced to split wood. Cargo netting strung up from date palms to hide the compound from satellite photography flared like tinder. Pieces of metal blown from the truck scythed down the ground crew that had been working at the base, but the shrapnel did nothing to the machine the crew had been servicing.

In the towering flames of the destroyed truck, Linc, Mark, and Linda saw two things at the same time. One was that the drill truck belonging to the State Department team had been blown onto its side by the explosion and its undercarriage was aflame. The second was what the perimeter guards had been protecting.

Nestled in a sandbag bunker was a Russian-built Mi-24 helicopter gunship, perhaps the most feared battlefield chopper in history. The heat from its twin Isotov turbines spooling up was what Mark had detected on the FLIR. The rotors were a blur as the pilot readied the flying tank killer for takeoff.

“Holy crap!” Murph cried. “If he gets that thing off the ground, we’re toast.”