Mission Liberty (28 page)

He heard shouts in the night, men screaming.

Hoolie opened fire again with the minigun. The magazine contained twenty thousand rounds, and after it was spent, there’d
be no way to reload it.

A grenade exploded, near where the infirmary had been.

They saw and heard more small-arms fire, directly in front of them.

There were more rebels than DeLuca had first thought. In another minute, they’d be overrun. He signaled to Dennis and Mack
to pull back, as Hoolie opened up with the minigun for the third and last time, firing in a sweeping arc until the magazine
was empty, the superheated barrel of the gun glowing orange in the night.

DeLuca was about to order a retreat to draw the rebels west when he heard, in the sky directly above him, another burst of
machine-gun fire, then a second, and a third, the sky lit by what appeared to be a thousand green chemlites. He thought of
fireflies. A few seconds later, a man flying a square parachute flared his toggles and landed on two feet between DeLuca and
Zoulalian. He was dressed in an insulated “Mr. Puffy” suit that indicated he’d dropped from a considerable altitude. The man
took off his helmet and his pressure-demand oxygen mask.

It was Preacher Johnson.

“On the money, boys,” Johnson called into his radio, immediately stripping himself of his jump gear. “You can pay me later.
Deploy and press ’em back while I talk to the chief.”

DeLuca saw other members of the group he’d known in Iraq as Task Force 21 landing all around him, flaring and dumping their
square parachutes all in a single motion. They were human monsters, genetic freaks, most the size of NFL defensive linemen,
bodybuilders trained in the martial arts and perhaps, man for man, the most deadly killing force ever assembled in the history
of warfare. Other than that, they were a fun bunch of guys to hang out with. He was glad to see them.

Johnson approached with a salute, unzipping his down-filled suit to reveal the DCUs and the full battle rattle he wore beneath
them. He saluted.

“How you doing, Chief?” Johnson said. “Got your message. Isaiah thirty-six verse twelve. Thought maybe you could use a hand.”

“I wasn’t expecting you. What are you doing here?” DeLuca asked him.

“Our shit up north went to fuck-all,” Johnson said. “We were on a 130 headed home when we heard you were having a party, so
we broke out the toys.”

“I didn’t hear a plane,” DeLuca said. It didn’t surprise him that Scottie hadn’t told him. TF-21 was an autonomous unit that
rarely asked permission or filed reports about half the things it did.

“We hahoed in from about forty klicks upwind of here,” Johnson said, referring to the HAHO or High Altitude High Opening technique
of incursion where paratroops pulled their chutes at thirty-five thousand feet (normal sky divers jumped at about five thousand
feet) and then sailed the winds aloft on steerable chutes for distances as great as a hundred miles. It was a form of parachuting
that only the most expert troops could pull off, but TF-21 certainly qualified as that. They also came armed to the teeth,
with as many different forms of arms and weapons as each man could carry. DeLuca saw a rocket-propelled grenade launch from
their side, streaking low across the landscape to explode five hundred meters off.

A single green chemlite landed at his feet, attached to a two-foot-square sheet of plastic.

“We were hoping they’d think there were thousands of us,” Johnson said. “Soon as they come across one of those, they might
figure we’re full of shit.”

There was weapons fire all around them, most of it headed north now as the rebels retreated and regrouped. One of Johnson’s
men approached, panting.

“Everybody’s down,” the man said. “Awaiting orders.”

“You remember Sergeant Green from Iraq?” Johnson said to DeLuca, turning to his man and screaming in his face, “Why are you
panting, Sergeant Green? Are you out of shape, Sergeant Green? Have you been slacking on your PT, Sergeant Green? Drop right
now and give me twenty!”

“Boo-ya,” Green said, dropping and doing twenty quick push-ups before jumping to his feet.

“Take three men and set Claymores along a line from there to there,” Johnson told Green, glancing at his own CIM for a read
of the battlefield. “And stand by while I talk to the chief.” Green ran off. “They love but fear me,” Johnson said. “I been
slacking off on the fear part lately. So, you got a plan, or do you just wanna stay here and blow the shit out of stuff for
a while?”

“I have seven hundred people down the road that way,” DeLuca said, pointing. “I want the bad guys to follow us this way.”
He pointed a second time. “There’s some sort of oil facility ten klicks down the trail where we might be able to make a stand.
This place is definitely not suitable. You got goggles?”

“Plenty,” Johnson said.

“We should go before they flank us,” DeLuca said.

“Let us go then, you and I, to where the evening sky lies etherized, like a patient upon a table,” Johnson said.

Before they left, Johnson had a man booby-trap the Mercedes with a charge of C4 explosive rigged to a motion sensor, set to
detonate at the first disturbance. Any rebel soldier who thought he’d just found himself a new Mercedes was in for a rude
awakening.

Another parachute flare lit the night sky. A rebel soldier in a red beret, wearing a brightly colored tie-dyed T-shirt, ran
from the bush, screaming and waving a machete over his head. DeLuca cut the man down with a burst from his MAC-10, as a second
and then a third man charged, each to be cut down and killed in a similar fashion.

“Looks like they’re sending all the stupid people first,” Johnson said.

Then the rebels charged in greater numbers, the night split with the sound of a thousand rifles firing.

But DeLuca and his team were gone.

Johnson’s men led the controlled retreat, running double time down a path worn into the sand by thousands of feet over perhaps
thousands of years. DeLuca heard, behind him now, the Claymores detonating, and then a massive explosion as the Mercedes went
up.

“We must have had something we didn’t know about in the trunk,” Zoulalian said.

MacKenzie and Vasquez stayed with DeLuca. They fired bursts behind them, more or less at nothing in particular, to let the
enemy know which direction they were headed. DeLuca expected the enemy to follow, but cautiously now, aware that the path
might be mined or booby-trapped. The read he got from his CIM indicated he was right, dots taken from an infrared image from
a camera in the U-2 ninety thousand feet above them showing the positions of the enemy troops behind them. They’d taken the
bait, and now followed from a distance of about a mile.

The terrain leveled into barren sand and scrub brush as the trail climbed a hill, then dropped again to a plain of sparse
grass and widely spaced acacia trees, the night sky a dome of stars with a quarter moon rising in the east.

They ran. DeLuca kept an eye on his CIM, watching the enemy, who were neither gaining nor losing ground.

They came at last over a hill, where they looked down onto a large pipeline, twin parallel conduits each about five feet in
diameter, mounted on concrete support pillars to elevate the line six feet off the ground. The pipeline ran south, carrying
oil from the northern oil fields to the storage facilities in Port Ivory, where the crude was loaded onto tankers to be taken
to refineries around the world. They saw, in the moonlight, a group of small buildings about half a kilometer to the south.
DeLuca could have used a breather, and Mack looked a bit weary herself. Dennis had a kind of bewildered smile on his face.
His memory wasn’t back, he said, but he was adjusting to the ambiguity.

They moved again at double time and stopped running when they reached the compound, a maintenance camp that appeared, upon
initial inspection, to have been abandoned quickly. They found a large tool shed, a cook shack, bunks, a supply shed, computers
that had been smashed, a TV with a DVD player and a collection of porn DVDs, and a garage where a single ATV sat disabled
with its wheels missing. The buildings were made of tin, with tin roofs, and would offer little if any protection to anyone
foolish enough to hide inside one of them. Johnson had twelve men with him. DeLuca’s team brought the total to sixteen. According
to his Critical Information Module, about a thousand enemy soldiers had followed, marching along the trail behind them, about
twenty or thirty minutes away.

“I’m interested in hearing your thoughts,” DeLuca told Johnson.

“No you’re not,” Johnson said, “because I’m thinking of the hereafter. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to get right with
God, but now might be a good time to begin.”

“I didn’t know you were such a pessimist,” DeLuca said.

“Not pessimistic at all,” Preacher Johnson said. “No man with faith can truly be a pessimist. Which isn’t to say it don’t
look like we are truly fucked. I do have one thought.”

“Which is?”

“We blow the pipeline and leave a two-hundred-mile-long fence of fire between us and them. Something like that. Might be hard
on the average American’s pocketbook at the gas pump.”

“I think the average American will understand,” DeLuca said. “If they don’t, the above-average Americans can explain it to
’em. Do it.”

While Johnson’s men set explosives along the pipeline, using C4 plastique charges, Vasquez rushed to tell DeLuca he’d found
something. DeLuca ducked under the pipeline. On the other side, Vasquez led him to a large hangar where, inside, he showed
him his discovery, a fleet of Flightstar Spyders, open-cockpit single-seat three-hundred- pound ultralight aircraft, twenty
of them, with sailcloth wings and ten-gallon tanks, each aircraft powered by a forty-eight-horsepower air-cooled engine, Vasquez
explained.

“These’ll do about seventy-five miles an hour,” Vasquez said. “I flew one in California last summer. These must be what they
used to patrol the pipeline. You can land almost anywhere.”

“What’s the range?” DeLuca asked.

“About two hundred miles,” Vasquez said. “Give or take.”

“What’s the payload?”

“I’m not sure,” Vasquez said. “It’ll get a normal-sized man up fine, but these guys are huge. It won’t go as far with a big
guy in it as it would with somebody like…”

“Like me?” DeLuca said.

“No offense,” Vasquez said.

“None taken,” DeLuca said. “Can they fly?”

“They look ready to me,” Vasquez said. “They’re all gassed up. I’ll bet the only reason whoever abandoned this station left
them behind was that they didn’t know how to fly them.”

“Is it hard?” DeLuca asked.

“Not really,” Vasquez said. “You got a side-mounted control stick. You just pull back on it once you’re doing better than
thirty miles an hour or so and up you go.”

DeLuca checked his CIM again. The rebels were half a mile off.

“Get ’em rolling,” he said. “Now. What’s the range again?”

“About two hundred miles?”

“And how far is the coast?”

“About two hundred miles,” Vasquez said.

“I’ll call ahead and see if we can get them to move the coast a little closer.”

Johnson assembled his team at the hangar. Each ultralight featured a cockpit about the size of a small baby carriage, where
the pilot sat beneath the thirty-inch-deep wing, the engine centered and mounted atop the wing, so that the pilot looked through
the propeller to see where he was going. DeLuca borrowed a radio headset from one of Johnson’s men to stay in touch with TF-21
and gave a second headset to Vasquez, who would lead the way. One of the ultralights was a two-seater, which MacKenzie and
Zoulalian shared, the lightest possible pairing, and because DeLuca didn’t quite trust that Dennis’s head was entirely right
yet. They heard music again, as a flare soared above the maintenance camp, on the other side of the pipeline.

“Gentlemen, start your engines,” Johnson said.

DeLuca’s propeller jumped to life as he turned the ignition. He waited for the others to take off, then throttled up as the
small aircraft began to roll forward. DeLuca had a lifelong fear of flying, but in this case, it was overmatched by his lifelong
fear of being killed and eaten. The Spyder rumbled and shook as if it was going to rattle into a million pieces, but then
he pulled back on the control stick, and he was airborne. They took off at 160 degrees, climbing at a rate of about one thousand
feet per minute. He wished he had a parachute, but then, that was pretty much what he was flying, a powered parachute. He
throttled forward as men fired at him from the ground, one round striking his landing gear, he guessed, rattling the small
aircraft but doing no other damage, and then the tracer rounds were all streaming below him, arcing back to earth, and he
was out of range. He wondered how he was going to set down, with a damaged landing gear. He’d deal with it when the time came.

“This is awesome,” he heard Preacher Johnson say, with the enthusiasm of a teenager behind the wheel of a car for the first
time. “Eyes below, people, and watch out for flying shit.”

Johnson triggered the detonators, and the two crude-oil pipelines blew in a massive display of pyrotechnics, huge clouds of
smoke and fire rising high into the sky behind them. DeLuca banked left to get a better view and felt the heat rising until
he had to briefly cover his face with his arm. The explosions spread down the pipeline, racing south like an old-fashioned
gunpowder fuse before extinguishing itself where the pipeline dipped below the surface of Lake Liger in the distance.

“Well done,” DeLuca said.

“You know our motto,” Johnson said. “Task Force 21— when you need shit blowed up good, but you don’t have time to blow it
up yourself…”

They flew for a few minutes. It was almost peaceful, once you got used to it.

“Hoolie,” DeLuca said. “I’m thinking if we throttle back we could save—”

His question was interrupted by a stream of bullets that flew just below his left wing, including bright red tracers that
made him turn his stick instinctively to the right. He looked behind him and saw, in the moonlight, one of the ultralights
they’d forgotten to disable, piloted, apparently, by one of the rebels who was shooting at him, the muzzle flash of his weapon
showing his position. DeLuca swerved again, rather than give him an easy target. They’d fastened green chemlites to their
wingtips to make their aircraft visible to each other, lights that were relatively dim to the naked eye but glowed brightly
when seen through night vision goggles.