Stephen Coonts - Combat

The Freightliner snicked into gear, revved up, and an almighty screech of rending metal followed. The engine idled again while Norm shouted some kind of gabble. Then, while someone strained at the wreckage and I adjusted the pliers at the butt of the torch: “I am called Daud al-Sadiq, my friend, but my true name is revenge.”

“Love your camouflage,” I called back. Now a louder hiss as the acetylene fitting loosened at the torch while I continued to untwist it. With the sudden unmistakable perfume of acetone came a rush of acetylene, which has no true odor of its own. The fitting came loose in my hands and I shoved the hose through the hole, to fumble blindly for the fitting. “I especially like that ‘my friend’ bullshit,” I called.

“In my twenty years of life in the bowels of Satan I have been a true friend to many,” Norm-Daud called back in a tone of reproach, everything in his voice more formal, more rhetorical than usual. Now it became faintly whimsical. “Including Jews. You’d be surprised.”

“No I wouldn’t,” I called, knowing that if a hot round came through now it would turn me into a Roman candle. My own voice boomed and bellowed in the shed. “How else could you learn to pass yourself off as your own enemy?” I tried to mate the fittings without being able to see them. Cross-threaded them; felt sweat running into my eyes; realized some of it was blood; got the damned fittings apart and began anew.

The Freightliner’s engine revved again. Norm-Daud called, “Not the real enemy. Western ways are the enemy, but I could be your friend. Heaven awaits those of us who die in the struggle; do you hear me, Majub? What can this man do but send you to your glory an hour sooner?”

I knew he was goading his buddy into trying to jump me or to run. “He’s just sitting here with the whites of his eyes showing,” I lied, to piss my friend-enemy off. The sigh of escaping acetylene became a thin hiss, then went silent. In its place, a hollow whoosh of gas rushing unimpeded into an empty pipe fifty feet long, starting slowly but inevitably — if the bank of supply tanks was full enough, and if there weren’t any serious leaks — to fill that four-inch-diameter pipe that was now a pressure tank.

“We will all find judgment when I reach the Ras Ormara ,” Norm-Daud called happily.

“The Feds know about your ternary agent, pal, and they’re on the way. That tub isn’t going anyplace,” I called.

That set his laughter off. “So you’ve worked that out? Fine. I agree. And no one else will be going anyplace, downwind, from the Golden Gate to San Jose. What, two million dead? Three? It’s a start,” he said, trying to sound modest.

Then the Freightliner’s engine roared, and the rending of metal intensified. The big rig was shoving debris that had been my Toyota backward. I didn’t know how fast my jury-rigged tank was filling, and if I misjudged, it wouldn’t matter. I grabbed up my Glock and the burp gun and darted to the door I had kicked shut.

I had jammed it hopelessly.

I began to put rounds through the wall, emptying my Glock in a pattern that covered a fourth of an oval the size of a manhole cover. When I’d used that up I continued with the Ingram until it was empty. The oval wasn’t complete. That’s when I went slightly berserk.

I kicked, screamed, cursed and pounded, and the oval of insulated wall panel began to disintegrate along the dotted line. With insulation flying around me, the Freightliner grinding its way toward the boulevard in a paroxysm of screaming metal, I saw the oval begin to fail. I could claim it wasn’t hysteria that made me intensify my assault, but my very existence had focused down to shredding that panel. When it bent outward, still connected at the bottom like the lid of a huge tin can, I hurled myself into the hole.

For an endless moment I was caught halfway through, my head and shoulders in bright sunlight, an immovable target for anyone within sight. But I was on the opposite side of the shed from the big rig, and when the wall panel failed I found myself on hands and knees, free but without a weapon.

Twenty feet away stood a huge inverted cone on steel supports, and beyond that a forest of braces and piping. As I staggered away behind the pipes one of Norm-Daud’s helpers saw me and cut loose in my direction, ricochets flying like hornets. Meanwhile the Freightliner moved inexorably toward the open gate, the Toyota’s wreckage shoved aside, the massive trailer trundling its cargo of megadeath along with less than a half mile to go. I hadn’t so much as a stone left to hurl at it.

But I didn’t need one. Funny thing about a concussion wave: when that fifty-foot pipe detonated alongside the trailer, I didn’t actually hear it. Protected by all that thicket of metal, I felt a numbing sensation of pressure, seemingly from all directions. My next sensation was of lying on my side in a fetal curl, a thin whistling in my head. Beyond that I couldn’t hear a thing.

I must have been unconscious for less than half a minute because unidentifiable bits of stuff lay here and there around me, some of it smoking. The trailer leaned drunkenly toward the side where my bomb had exploded, every tire on that side shredded, and gouts of liquid poured out of its cargo tanks from half a hundred punctures. Still addled by concussion, I steadied my progress out of the metal forest by leaning on pipes and supports. I figured that if anyone on the truck had survived, I’d hear him. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that I was virtually stone deaf for the moment.

Not until I saw the blood-smeared figure shambling like a wino around to my side of the trailer, wearing the remnant of an expensive black-leather jacket. He was weaponless. One shoe was missing. He threw his head back, arms spread, and I saw his throat work as he opened his mouth wide. Then he fell on his knees in a runnel of liquid chemical beside the trailer, and on his face was an unspeakable agony.

A better man than I might have felt a shred of pity. What I felt was elation. As I stalked nearer I could see a headless body slumped at the window of the shrapnel-peppered Freightliner cab. Now, too, I could hear, though faintly as from a great distance, a man screaming. It was the man on his knees before me.

Standing three feet behind him, I shouted, “Hey!” I heard that, but apparently he didn’t. I put my foot on his back and he fell forward, then rolled to his knees again. I would have hung one on him just for good measure then, but one look at his face told me that nothing I could do would increase his suffering. Even though his bloody hair and wide-open eyes made him look like a lunatic, a kind of sanity returned in his gaze as he recognized me.

Still on his knees, he started to say something, then tried again, shouting. “What did this?”

I pointed a thumb at my breast. “Gas in a pipe. Boom,” I shouted. He looked around and saw the long shallow trench that now ran along the pavement. The entire length of the shed wall nearest the pipe rail had been cut as if by some enormous jagged saw, and of course the pipe itself was nowhere. Or rather, it was everywhere, in little chunks, evidence of a fragmentation grenade fifty feet long.

He looked up at me with the beginnings of understanding. “How?”

I could hear him a little better now. “Acetylene is an explosive all by itself,” I shouted. “Can you hear me?” He nodded. “You store it under pressure by dissolving it in acetone. Pump it into a dry tank and it doesn’t need any prompting. As soon as it gets up to fifteen or twenty pounds pressure — like I said: boom,” I finished, with gestures.

He showed his teeth and closed his eyes; tears began to flow afresh. “Primitive stuff, but you would know that,” he accused in a voice hoarse with exhaustion.