Page 60 of No Safe Place

It was all done through the firm’s control center, and it was like something out of a computer game. On a maplike background, his four men were closing in on the target on the left. On the right was the real-time street view from each of their body cams in gull-gray-and-white thermal footage.

His merc firm wasn’t as good as the guys in the service, Shaw thought. They were better.

A minute later, he watched his men glide smoothly into the parking lot to stop behind a car.

On the screen he could see Carpenter hold up the breaching unit as he brought it out of its satchel.

It consisted of a bundle of Primacord, a kind of flexible plastic tubing filled with PETN, an explosive very similar to nitroglycerin. The shaped charge it was connected to was a plastic explosive called HMX.

All of it was laid out on a large square of double-sided soft and thick almost candy-like adhesive that had a plastic backing that you had to peel off like a Band-Aid once you were ready to stick everything in place.

Once that was done, all you needed was to get safely back, pull the electric detonator and Bob’s your uncle, the wall had a hole in it and you were in.

“How we looking?” Shaw said in a low voice.

“Approaching,” Carpenter whispered as Shaw watched him head for the side of the restaurant with Tejada, the brothers following right behind in a tight train.

That was Shaw’s cue.

Showtime, he thought as he flicked every outside light of the BearCat into the ON position.

Then he put the badass vehicle into Drive and pulled slowly out onto Depot Street and made a left.

It was a real promenade all right. He gunned the turbo diesels loudly as he came down the rise and then, a hundred feet from the restaurant’s front door, he stopped.

The armored plate driver door squealed loudly as he muscled it open. He flipped open its circular gun port and rested the barrel of his .45 on it and smiled.

Jesse James robbing a bank hadn’t felt this good, Shaw thought, grinning. Reach for the sky!

That’s it. Eyes on me, suckers, he thought as he saw movement at one of the windows. Now we play my way.

“I’m in place. Are you ready?” he called over the comm link.

“Almost. Peeling the tape back,” Tejada said, watching Carpenter. “There we go. Placing it on the structure and—”

The pure bright white that suddenly flashed on the screen before Shaw’s startled eyes came a split second before the thunderclap explosion.

Even at a hundred feet away, the blast wave shook the truck like a hurricane gust, slamming the door shut and sending Shaw flying back into the cab.

As this happened, the driver’s seat smashed into the back of his head like a club. When he half came to in a concussed daze a moment later, outside the windshield where his men had just been was a billow of smoke.

The nine-thousand-pound truck was still rocking off its run-flat tires when Shaw detected the sound. It was the still-falling debris of the side of the shattered restaurant beginning to pitter-patter off the roof of the truck in a shower of toothpick-like wooden rain.

Then a large portion of roofing slammed off the hood filling the windshield with shingles.

He was shell-shocked and dumbstruck, gaping in unhinged terror. His concern for his fallen comrades as well as twenty-five years of military training instantly fled. Shaw with a shaking hand began to mindlessly slap at his seat belt and then finally managed to slip the transmission into Reverse as he pinned the gas.

53

RDX, which stands for research department explosive, is an extremely nifty, highly effective British plastic explosive used in underwater demolition.

In the SEAL units, we used it all the time in training and after I had retired years ago, I had found a bunch of it—twenty kilo blocks of it to be exact—that I had accidentally left in the trunk of my car.

This find came months after my honorable discharge so I had decided it was probably easier to just keep hold of the restricted stuff instead of trying to explain my potentially illegal possession of it.

It turned out to be a good thing that I had decided to bring a couple of bricks of it with me on my trip, didn’t it? I thought as I cracked open the door of the banquet room.

Stuff came in pretty handy indeed, I thought, as I saw that the banquet room had now become the parking lot.

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