Ashley Bell: A Novel (19 page)

Assuming that Abdullah al-Ghazali and his associates were heavily armed and ready to die a martyr’s death, it would be suicide to blow down the door and fight the seven of them room by room. And seven would be the number, because the women would not be bystanders. If intel had their identities right, these two mothers—mothers in more than one sense of the word—had with enthusiasm provided four of their young children for service as human bombs. This spec op was the science-fiction-movie equivalent of a bug hunt, for which the sole hope of success would be the ruthless application of maximum force.

The Carl Gustav M4 recoilless rifle weighed fifteen pounds, four less than the M3, and had an overall length of thirty-seven inches. The ammunition was heavy, but considering the nature of all possible targets in the ghost town, none of which could be defined as a true bunker, merely aboveground buildings often of dubious construction, they had chosen to bring only four rounds. To compensate for this extra weight, which would complicate an overland trek, they carried less ammo for their rifles and pared their gear down where possible.

Two men were required to operate the weapon, one to fire it and the other to load. Paxton would fire, and Danny would load; and they agreed to launch not from the doorway of the abandoned house but from a long-ago-shattered front window. Some guys called the Carl Gustav the Carl Johnson, a surname used as slang for the male sex organ, and others called it the Goose, but whatever its name, the launcher was more effective than Thor’s hammer, with a range of more than 1,300 meters. Abdullah’s current residence stood little more than twenty feet away; a blowback of debris would be significant. Firing over the windowsill from a kneeling position, they could duck their heads after launch and hope that most of the trash flung in their direction would rattle harmlessly off the walls that surrounded the window opening.

After they both put on double ear protection, Danny arranged the four rounds on the floor, under the window. Kneeling, Pax shouldered the Gustav. Danny opened the Venturi lock, a handle that moved the hinged breech to one side for loading, and inserted the first round.

The roof of the two-story building across the street from the rear of Abdullah’s rathole provided a high mud-brick parapet with cutouts fitted with widely spaced iron bars, an ideal setup for a sniper. Perry and Gibb lay at different crenellations, watching the back of the house and the street.

In the quiet of the morning, the empty buckets, swinging from their handles, squeaked as the murderer returned from the community latrine. He let himself through the rear gate and crossed the yard, a rectangle of cracked and littered concrete. Someone had been watching for him. The door opened. He went inside.

Perry called the one number programmed into his satellite phone, and when the connection was made, he said, “Everyone’s safe at home.”

Given the short range to target, Pax didn’t need either the 3x optical sight or the fitted-iron sights. The impact explosion at once rocked the morning, while blowback junk rattled-pocked-pinged against the front wall of their house and whistled through the window over their heads simultaneously, or so it seemed, with the blast. There were the smells of concrete dust and hot gases from the Gustav, and Danny sneezed as he opened the Venturi lock to load the second round.

A Carl Gustav round could slam through steel-reinforced concrete as if through cheese, and the overpressure from the explosion tended to screw up most of a building’s interior. From their roof position across the street, Perry and Gibb were not able to see what happened to the front of the house, but the entire structure quaked and swayed and deformed, and two exterior shutters on the back windows blew off, clanging across the concrete yard, as spikes of window glass bounced and splintered on the pavement.

At most twenty seconds after the building was slammed, the back door flew open, and two men staggered out, disoriented and no doubt half deaf. The night-soil manager drew the pistol from his drop-leg holster, and the new guy carried a fully automatic carbine with an extended magazine, maybe an Uzi. Gibb needed one shot to take out the would-be Scarface, a second to ensure the kill, and Perry dropped the other terrorist, sparing him from further latrine duty.

Following the second round from the Gustav, the house resembled a set from a Transformers movie after a robot had stomped through it. Pax was prepared to use the remaining two rounds, and Danny loaded one. But the building swayed as though constructed of pudding and crashed in upon itself, clouds of dust billowing into the street.