Page 20 of Heart of Danger
In Nanjing, 50 members of the elite ‘Flying Dragon’ squadron were waiting, pending the outcome of today’s trial. If it was successful, in a month they would start accompanying trucks of iridium to the waiting ships.
For now, it was Flynn’s men who were being tested. Some ex US military and several South Africans familiar with the African bush. Each soldier had received an injection of SL-58 the previous evening. Orion’s men had been told it was a benign, long-lasting amphetamine that would let them stay awake and alert for the 20-hour journey.
Lee was sending everything to Beijing via long burst encryption.
It was an important trial. It was an important day. The first field test of the drug. So far, so good. The doctor’s report had been mundane, even boring, which Lee approved of. Boring was predictable. Boring was good.
Lee had watched the convoy start out at 5 am local time, the trucks heading out precisely, well-timed and well-organized.
The speed and precision of the soldiers at departure was visible, almost tangible. Lee wasn’t a logistics expert but he had some idea of what it took to get a convoy of 20 men going. They did everything at top speed, quick and efficient. While loading the trucks, Lee had to check the monitor dashboard to make sure the film wasn’t somehow fast forwarding. But it wasn’t on fast forward. everything was in real time. The men were walking as fast as most men could run, loading movements a blur.
Clancy was watching in Virginia, observing the tactical situation. Lee watched with a scientist’s eye, delighted with what he was seeing.
It was as if the soldiers’ movements were choreographed. Worked out beforehand and rehearsed a thousand times. It could have been on Broadway. However good Flynn’s men were, they couldn’t be that good. He was seeing the effects of SL-58.
They moved fast and precisely and were bristling with weaponry. But trouble was brewing.
Lee switched every five minutes to IR and noted human-sized bodies in the jungle, starting about 100 meters from the staging area.
Clancy had noted too and reported. The men were perfectly aware they were under observation.
At first the red dots could have been any large mammals, but their stillness over time as the convoy was organized and then set off could mean only one thing—rebel soldiers, observing.
Doubtless the rebels were in radio contact with other soldiers along the route—the only road to Freetown. It was a well-worn technique—attack convoys away from home base.
Well, if they attacked the enhanced convoy they were in for a nasty surprise.
The orders were to barrel ahead. An ordinary convoy would take 3 or 4 days to get to Freetown, travelling between 15-20 miles an hour during the day over the badly rutted road, laagering at night. This was to be a straight run at 40 mph, with no rest stops, pissing in bottles, shitting in cans, eating MREs. These soldiers wouldn’t need rest stops. All they needed after the injection was a minimum of 8000 calories a day and they could drive and fight nonstop for 48 hours. Twenty hours was nothing.
A 20-hour convoy run would guarantee an increase in profits of 300% for the diamond corporation and would represent a cash cow for Orion. But more importantly, it would be the first successful battlefield test run of SL-58. If it was successful, Clancy would be allowed to play with it for a year, during which time the Chinese would be producing it in industrial batches and injecting its soldiers. After a year of field trials through Orion, Lee would destroy the lab producing it, destroy the formula and the few scientists who knew of it, and would be exfiltrated from America, bound for Beijing before the first bomb detonated in Millon’s labs.
Lee had read up on his African history. African battles were often won by sheer numbers. After the Battle of Isandlwana,Western forces knew they had to be overwhelmingly better armed to prevail.
Flynn had briefed him on the convoy.
Leading the convoy was a Unimog with FLIR to detect hostiles, Ground Penetrating Radar for mine detection, and it had an armored chassis. Each vehicle had side and top mounted 50 cals and below them, microwave blasters calculated to cook the hostiles the bullets didn’t get.
Lee wasn’t a soldier but even he was taken aback by the appearance of the convoy. You’d have to be insane to attack it. Of course, the Lord’s Army was almost by definition insane, made up of crazy soldiers, drugged up, recruited as children and impervious to fear.
The convoy took off, fast and smooth. From the satellite images it almost looked like a living organism. Lee knew that the vehicles were in constant contact, with monitors showing displays of braking and acceleration of each vehicle, allowing the distance between the trucks to be minimal and constant.
As they took off at dawn, the IR images surrounding the camp scattered. A few red spots tried to run alongside in parallel but soon gave up—the convoy was moving too fast. Forty miles west, a conglomeration of red spots broke up like an ant colony that had had a stick poked in it. They’d received word on the radio that the convoy was arriving. But they were thinking in old terms and were still setting up traps by the time the convoy shot past, in tight and deadly formation.
The next trap was set a hundred miles further west, where the road led through a steep valley, a classic ambush point. Lee smiled at the ant-like movements at the narrowest point. He didn’t have to be a soldier to understand that short of unleashing an Armageddon of bombs, they didn’t stand a chance. The convoy would speed by them with nary a scratch on the armored sides of the Unimogs.
This was going to work.
He pressed a button. “Looking good,” he said to Clancy.
“Yeah. Real good,” was the reply.
Clancy would watch every second but Lee had work to do. He minimized the screen and reviewed some autopsy reports, then went for coffee. The canteen has just purchased a shipment of Blue Mountain Arabica and it was delicious. He’d bring a box of the stuff with him when he left for China. Which might be sooner than he thought.
Back in his office he gave a glance at the monitor, then frowned. A side monitor showed progress as a blue line on a detailed map of the terrain. They should have been a third of the way to destination but it looked more like halfway there. He punched in a query and stared at the answer in astonishment.
The convoy was travelling at 60 mph, an insane speed for heavy vehicles over rutted roads. Lee opened the screen but couldn’t follow the individual vehicles behind the lead. The satellite image showed only a thick plume of dust rising high.
All the contractor’s enhanced intelligence and strength, all their state-of-the-art gear wouldn’t help if one of the heavy vehicles toppled over. It would be like a wounded elephant, and the other trucks would have to establish a perimeter of defense while trying to winch the fallen truck upright. Word would spread fast and soon they’d have a thousand RUFs or Lord’s Army crazies shooting at them.
