Page 21 of Heart of Danger
Insane.
He glanced at a side monitor showing data and blinked. The vehicles werespeeding up. The speed was now 67 mph.
Clancy’s cowboys were endangering the entire mission. He moved to link with the former General when he heard Clancy’s booming voice with a deep southern accent fill the room from the speaker. His red face scowled from a small square on the bottom right hand corner.
“What the fuck is going on, Lee? I’m clocking these bastards at 70 mph. Thefuckare they doing?”
He was right. They were travelling at 70…no 72 mph.
“Mr. Clancy,” he replied coldly, deliberately omitting his usual deferential title of General. “I have no idea what your men are doing but they are running the risk of crashing the trucks at this speed. I see rebel activity ten miles ahead. The road’s in real bad shape there. If they crash there they will be in major trouble.”
His IR monitor showed a mass of red lights under the tree canopy ten miles ahead, invisible in the normal satellite images.
“They know that,” Clancy growled. “They’re seeing what we’re seeing.”
“Then this recklessness is doubly inexcusable,” Lee said coolly.
Clancy didn’t answer. The former General’s breathing was loud in the room. He was a man who liked his pleasures at the table and in bed and every time Lee had seen him over the course of the past year, he’d been ten pounds heavier and ever shorter of breath. Right now his face was red and swollen on the monitor, a heart attack in waiting.
Greedy Americans,Lee thought with disgust. Always more, more, more. Like monstrous ticks engorging themselves until they burst. You couldn’t find a fat general in the entire People’s Liberation Army.
“Jesus,” he rasped. “What are they doing?”
Lee focused on the main monitor, unable to believe was he was seeing. Was something wrong with the satellite camera? No. It showed events in real time and what it showed was the convoy now slowing down. At the chokepoint of the valley road.
50 mph
35 mph
20 mph
Lee watched, unbelieving, as the convoy rolled to a stop, in perfect synchronization.
Clancy was shouting. “Hardy! Rollins! Come in! What the fuck are you doing? You’re surrounded by hostiles! Do you have mechanical malfunction? Why are you stopping?”
A deep voice came over Lee’s speakers. Not speaking to Lee but to Clancy. “No sir, no malfunction. We’re just taking the fight to the enemy.” The voice sounded super excited, panting.
Lee remembered listening in on the radio reports at the beginning of the convoy’s journey. The voices had been laconic and emotionless. Fighter pilot voices, relating facts like automatons.
“Negative, negative!” Clancy was screaming. “Do not engage! Repeat! Do not engage! Just bring that goddamned convoy to Freetown!”
A click. No answer. Excited voices in the background, the sounds of men piling out. Lee didn’t need the audio feed, what was happening was perfectly clear. The monitor showed the overhead feed, men spilling out of the front and back trucks.
Lee knew nothing about military strategy but even he knew that a stranded convoy surrounded by hostiles should be setting up a perimeter, hunkering down, guarding the shipment. Instead, the men poured out of their trucks and ran straight into the jungle, rifles to shoulders. One by one, the red points, like ants milling around an anthill, stopped. Whatever else they were, Orion’s soldiers were excellent shots. Four of the men had powerful lethal tasers and were taking down rebel army members five at a time, mowing them down.
But however crazy brave, however well-armed, however excellent shots they were, the Orion contractors were outnumbered several hundred to one.
The Orion contractors were easy to follow even under the canopy. Their heat signature was significantly lower due to the body armor they wore. The first contractor fell two minutes into the battle. Another a minute later.
It was a massacre. The men went down hard but for every RUF army crazy they killed, fifty, a hundred took his place. They were so outnumbered, the RUF rebels could have been armed with clubs and they would have eventually succumbed.
Soon, all the Orion contractor IR signatures were still. Each contractor had a swarm of rebels around him and Lee realized with a sick lurch to his stomach that they were being ripped apart.
It had all happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, that there was silence at Orion headquarters. Then—” What the fuck happened there?” Clancy’s rough voice screamed. “What did they do? Why didn’t they just ride on through as quickly as possible? Did your drug rob them of intelligence? What the hell did you give them?”
Lee had an idea what had happened.
On the monitor, rebel army members were filing out from under the canopy onto the open road. Lee suppressed the urge to vomit. Several were prancing in the road, severed heads impaled onto their bayonets. They swarmed around the two trucks. The armored truck was impenetrable but even if they could break into the back, the payload was in a titanium vault. It was safe from the marauders. But the diamonds were stuck on a road in the middle of the jungle, surrounded by heavily armed lunatics. The diamonds might as well have been on the back side of the moon.
