SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

“I think—” Ritzik pressed his right hand against his earpiece. “Come again?” He listened intently. “Roger that, Shep.

“We’ve got more company than expected,” he said. He looked at Sam. “Your IMU pal Mr. Mustache is coming back, too.”

All the color drained from Sam’s face. For an instant his eyes went dead — the face of a serial killer. And then he looked at Ritzik, smiling as cold a smile as Ritzik had ever seen, and said, “It’s my natural charm. He can’t stay away.”

Ritzik frowned, momentarily knocked off course. Then he fiddled with the radio. “TOC, Loner—” There was a momentary pause. “TOC, we’re gonna stay on the air until further notice. I need play-by-play tactical overhead.” He paused. “Roger that.”

Ritzik saw Rowdy Yates jump off the tailgate of the big truck. He put two fingers to his lips, whistled shrilly to get the sergeant major’s attention, and beckoned him over.

“How’s she coming?”

“She’s got the damn thing opened up.” Rowdy stroked his Fu Manchu mustache. “I wish we had an exhaust fan. The battery fumes are pretty damn strong.”

Ritzik said, “Why not just pull the canvas off the frame?”

“I asked. Steel grommets. Steel frame. She’s worried about static electricity.”

“From canvas?”

“From everything,” Yates said. “The HE{High Explosive.} is sweating. That is one nervous woman, boss.”

“With reason.” Ritzik flicked a pebble with the toe of his boot. “Tell Bill to slice the canvas so she has some light.”

“Gotcha.” The sergeant major wiped a big hand over his bald head. “I gotta tell you — if it had been me working on that thing, we’d all be vaporized by now.”

Abruptly, Ritzik said, “Rowdy, we need to buy her some time. You set an ambush — hit the sons of bitches three, four miles down the road.”

Yates blinked. “Who? Where?”

Ritzik pointed east. “Satellite says three trucks, four pickups. The TOC estimates we have about forty minutes — maybe as much as an hour.”

“That’s not a lot of time.” The sergeant major’s face grew grim. He jerked his thumb toward the truck. “She needs more than that.”

“I understand.”

“Not a lot of alternatives either.” “Huh?”

“We used up the claymores, Mike. We have Semtex, and a couple of boxes of grenades, and maybe a dozen RPG rounds — and that’s all, except small arms.”

Ritzik said, “You could rig the Semtex — cook up a land mine.”

Rowdy pulled at his mustache. “Maybe,” he said. “If I can come up with a way to shape the charges.” Ritzik said: “Just do it.”

Sam Phillips blinked. “Take Chris — X-Man — with you. He was first in his class in car-bomb school.”

Rowdy looked dubious. “Car-bomb school? Who the hell taught that, Hizballah?”

“Close,” Sam said. “Fatah.”

Rowdy’s eyes widened. “Give me a break.”

“No — it’s the truth. X led one of the first teams to train the Palestinian National Authority as a part of the state-building security programs CIA ran in the mid-nineties. It was a result of the Oslo Accords. CIA contractors taught them crisis driving and VIP protection down in Lakeland, Florida. CIA employees taught countersurveillance, interrogation, secure comms — all the tradecraft they’d need to build a security/intel apparatus once they got their own Palestinian state — at a secure site in North Carolina.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Serious? This was approved at the highest levels,” Sam said. “Of course the Palestinians turned it all around. Instead of making peace with the Israelis, they used everything we’d taught them to wage war against ‘em.”

“Well,” Rowdy said. “It is, after all, the Middle East.”

“Precisely. Anyway, X-Man met this guy from Fatah who’d spent ten years in an Israeli jail for making bombs. He was known as the Engineer. He taught X the basics of his craft. In return, X gave him rudimentary edged-weapons training.”

Rowdy said, “Throat slicing in exchange for car bombing. I like it. And all in the name of nation building.”

“Are we a great country or what?” Sam said. “I mean—”

“Hate to interrupt your history lesson, Sam,” Ritzik broke in. “But some of us gotta get to work.”

0814. “Boss—” Mickey D loped over to where Ritzik stood listening intently to an update from the TOC. Ritzik’s hand went up in the pilot’s face like a traffic cop’s. “Hold a sec.”

Ritzik nodded. “Roger that. Loner out.” The news was not good. The Chinese were airborne. Judging from the overhead, they were loaded for bear. He focused on the warrant officer. “What’s up?”

Mickey D jerked his thumb in HIP One’s direction. “It’s flyable, if not quite landable. But if I set it down gently, we might just walk away.”

The chopper was an option he hadn’t considered until now. Ritzik stared at the chopper, his brain spinning. There was no way they’d outrun the Chinese — not HIND gun-ships anyway. Mustache Man and the IMU were closing fast. And Wei-Liu had disassembled enough of the MADM to make it nigh on impossible to move it. Three nasty balls in the air. The question was, which one to shoot first.