AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Perfect,” Rapp responded, starting for another line of gear that his team was already digging into. The Russian firearms wouldn’t be familiar to all of them, but they were fast learners and in Syria you had to work with what you could get. AK-74s and a few RPG-7s, mostly. His suppressed Volquartsen .22 was the most exotic thing on the menu.
“Nine minutes,” Coleman said over his earpiece. “Repeat. Nine minutes. Questions? Problems?”
Everyone indicated that they were good to go, so Rapp handed Kadir off while the now-empty pits were covered.
“Do exactly what Joe tells you, Kadir. I’ll see you soon.”
Rapp jogged toward the road, cautious on the uneven terrain, but then picking up speed when he hit the pavement. After less than two minutes, he cut into the desert, once again easing his pace as he used the starlight to navigate rocks and sand. A quiet metallic clack sounded to the northeast, and he headed for it. Charlie Wicker’s ghostly hand appeared briefly from the desert floor and then vanished again beneath the canvas he was hiding under.
At five foot six and barely one hundred and forty pounds, he wouldn’t have been all that helpful dragging gear around, but out here he was very much in his element. Rapp slipped under the tarp next to him, taking a position behind a bipod-mounted McMillan .338 Lapua Magnum. Checking one of Wick’s rifles would be a waste of time, so instead he scanned the target area through the Nightforce scope.
A moment later, Coleman’s voice came over their earpieces. “Four minutes, eighteen seconds. Problems? Questions?”
There were none.
Showtime.
CHAPTER 43
“IHAVEeyes on the truck,” Scott Coleman said over the comm. There was a brief pause before he came on again. “I’m confirming that this is the target. Repeat, this is the target. Approximately one minute, twenty seconds out. No other vehicles in sight.”
“Wind’s unchanged,” Wick said. “Three miles an hour directly in our face.”
Rapp slowed his breathing and concentrated on the rhythm of his heartbeat. Based on their calculations, distance was four hundred and fifty-eight yards with a sixteen-foot loss of elevation. Not a giveaway shot, particularly since rifles weren’t his specialty. Further, they had to penetrate the Ural’s windshield, which, even with the armor-piercing rounds they were using, could be unpredictable.
“Thirty seconds,” Coleman said.
Wick was the better sniper, so he was targeting the driver. Hitting the man in the passenger seat was less critical, but missing wouldn’t be a good start to an operation with this many moving parts. Worse, he’d never live it down.
The sound of grinding gears reached them as the driver slowed to navigate a steep corner.
“I’ve got a shot,” Wick said calmly.
The glare from the headlights made it impossible to see through the windshield, so Rapp had to make an educated guess. “I’ve got a shot.”
They fired in unison, causing a flash that lit up the desert around them. The sound, muffled by a pair of Thor Thundertrap suppressors, lasted a little longer, but then faded back into the night.
Rapp cycled his rifle’s bolt and watched through the scope as the truck began to weave. There was a long list of things that could go wrong at this moment. He could have missed the passenger, creating a situation where his men would have an unpredictable shooter to deal with. Wick could have failed to kill the driver, leaving him capable of making a run for it. The truck could flip. Mathematically, they had enough men, ropes, and bikes to right it again, but those kinds of calculations tended to fail in the field.
Lady luck was with them. The truck drifted right and slowed to an idle as Coleman and his men appeared from both sides of the road. No shots were fired and a moment later they were dragging two bodies toward the shallow pit that would be their final resting place.
Rapp came out from cover, running toward the road, while Wick stayed behind to break down their position. By the time he arrived at the truck, Coleman was conducting a chaotic symphony of activity. Flex-cuffed prisoners were being unloaded and hustled out of sight. Men were jacking up the truck and removing lug nuts at a speed that would have impressed an F1 pit crew. Tires on both sides of the road were being uncovered and rolled toward the vehicle for installation. Cleaning teams were sopping up blood from the interior while trying to stay out of Maslick’s way as he removed the damaged windshield.
The former SEAL seemed to have everything well in hand, so Rapp went around the rocky outcropping to where the prisoners were now blindfolded and lying facedown in the dirt. A Jordanian mercenarywas standing guard with an AK-74 in hand. The smart move would be to summarily execute them and then dump them in the holes he’d spent so much effort digging, but that was going too far. Even for him. While it was true that most had at one time been active with any number of terrorist outfits, what did that mean exactly? In Syria, the lines between good and evil, terrorist and freedom fighter, were blurry at best.
“Listen to me,” Rapp said in Arabic. “If any one of you causes any trouble, tries to get free, or opens their mouth,allof you get executed. On the other hand, if you just stay still and quiet, you’ll be released in a few hours. After that, what you do is up to you.”
When Rapp arrived back at the road, four men were wrestling the last crate of explosives into the truck and Kadir was pounding the windshield in place with an open palm. Three of the new tires had been installed and Bruno McGraw was tightening the last lug nut on the fourth.
Eight minutes had passed since the Russians in the cab had been killed. By Rapp’s calculations, his team was fifteen seconds ahead of schedule.
“Kadir,” he said, walking around to the front of the truck. “Are you almost done?”
“Less than a minute. We used epoxy instead of the proper adhesive. It will dry quickly and there will be no noticeable odor.”
It had been Maslick’s idea to put the Syrian in charge of the installation and it appeared to be keeping him focused.
“Good work,” Rapp said and then used a penlight to examine the interior of the cab. Military vehicles tended to have very few upholstered surfaces capable of absorbing bodily fluids and the Ural was no exception. Both seats were still wet in places, but those sections would be covered when they were occupied. Other than that, the epoxy oozing around the interior edges of the windshield was the only thing out of the ordinary.
