Triplecross. Don Pendleton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 88. The tank was moving, however slowly, through the storm. He changed course for it, letting his rifle fall. It was too heavy and he had no ammunition. His Tokarev would have to do.

      Numbed fingers found the butt of the pistol. The metal of the weapon, even taken from under his parka, should have made him scream from the cold. He didn’t feel it. His left hand felt like deadweight as he struggled to drag back the slide of the pistol.

      He stumbled and fell. When he finally managed to struggle to his feet, he was completely disoriented. Where was the tank? He did not know why he hadn’t thought of it before. The tank had a radio unit he could use. He just needed to get to it. It was possible the tank commander had already used it, but he couldn’t be sure.

      The light from the flares above began to die. The flares were descending into the snow, where they were extinguished. In the darkness, he could see more weapons discharges. But now he could not remember in which direction the enemy lay. He pointed his pistol into the screaming winds but didn’t fire it. In the darkness everything was shadows.

      One of the shadows moved.

      He heard the rumble of the tank’s bogeys, heard the rattle of its poorly maintained engine. Crawling now, he forced himself to stand, plunging forward, staggering, falling.

      He collided with the tank.

      The armor was slick with ice. He smelled smoke and something worse, something oily and vile. As he tore flesh from his frozen hands scrambling up the side of the war machine, he realized that black smoke was pouring from a crater in its flank. It had been hit with an antiarmor weapon of some kind. He thought the Type 88 was supposed to have reactive explosive plates...but he wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. He found the hatch and threw it open.

      The tank commander was dead. Janwari didn’t climb inside as much as fall to the floor of the chamber within. The commander was the only body there; the rest of his crew had not made it inside. There was a great deal of blood pooled around the dead man. He had been shot, probably more than once, before reaching the relative safety of the machine.

      The enemy could fire another antitank missile at any moment. The tank was an obvious target. Janwari thought about taking control of the turret, trying to swing it around to bring the Type 88’s main gun into play. He knew the basic procedure. Every man in the unit did.

      Fighting was not as important as alerting the rest of the military to what was taking place here. He reached for the radio, which was intact and, as far as he could tell, powered and ready.

      His hand struck the console.

      Janwari looked down at his arms. Only then did he realize that he couldn’t feel his hands, couldn’t feel his fingers. He tried to grip the console and could not. He kept striking it instead, his hand a block of frozen, swollen meat that would not obey his mind’s commands. No! He had waited too long in the cold without gloves. He could not manage the dexterity required to switch on the radio.

      The hatch above him opened again.

      Janwari looked up. The circle of sky above was once more illuminated in the harsh green glow of the enemy’s flares. He could see faces above him, could see the uniforms his enemy wore. They looked down at him, dispassionate, almost bored.

      They wore the uniform of the Indian army.

      Janwari wanted to raise his Tokarev and fire at them, but his pistol was gone. His hand was a frozen, useless claw. He screamed at the soldiers staring at him.

      One of the Indian men dropped a grenade inside the tank and threw the hatch closed.

      The grenade rolled across the deck near Janwari’s feet. He tried to grab it, tried to scoop it up, thought of carrying it back to the hatch, forcing the hatch open and throwing the deadly bomb back toward the Indians.

      But of course he could not. His hands wouldn’t work. He had just long enough to wonder how long the fuse on the grenade might last.

      He had time to think the words, I don’t want to die. Not like this.

      And then he was finally warm, for just a moment, before he was nothing ever again.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Indian-held Kashmir

      “Does this place have a name?” Calvin James asked.

      David McCarter, the lean, fox-faced Briton and former SAS operator who was leader of Phoenix Force, gulped the last of a can of Coca-Cola, crushed it and tossed the can behind the passenger seat of the MRAP. From the driver’s seat, James shot him a disapproving look, which McCarter met with a measured stare. Finally the lanky black man from Chicago’s South Side allowed a wide grin to split his features.

      “According to the chart,” Rafael Encizo said from the rear of the MRAP, “it doesn’t. This village isn’t even supposed to be here.” He checked his satellite phone again, which was patched to a feed from thermal imaging satellites overhead. The delay was considerable, but what the stocky Cuban-born guerrilla fighter was observing was essentially a real-time top-down image of the target coordinates. “I’m showing a huge drop-off near one corner of the village, though. Probably part of the natural mountain formation.”

      “Got it,” James said. “I’ll try not to drive us over any edges.”

      Phoenix Force, the covert international counterterrorist team headquartered at the top-secret Stony Man Farm, had split its five members between the Farm’s two prototype MRAP vehicles.

      The MRAPs had been modified and customized by John “Cowboy” Kissinger, the Farm’s Armorer. Each Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle was a four-wheel-drive armored personnel carrier with a V-shaped chassis designed to deflect explosives. The armor offered protection against 7.62 mm armor-piercing rounds and even rocket-propelled grenades. The body of the MRAP was, in fact, touted as “blast proof,” although McCarter had his doubts about that.

      Powered by Caterpillar C-7 diesel engines coupled to Allison automatic transmissions, the heavy vehicles boasted 330 horsepower. They had both driver’s-side and passenger’s-side doors, as well as rear hatches for the troop compartment, while a roof hatch allowed access to the armored machine gun mount on the roof. McCarter’s MRAP sported a 7.62 mm M-240 medium machine gun, while the vehicle behind it mounted a MK-19 automatic 40 mm grenade launcher.

      In the rear vehicle were the stolid, soft-spoken Canadian giant, Gary Manning—Phoenix Force’s burly demolitions expert, once a member of an antiterror squad of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—and T. J. Hawkins, the youngest member of the team. Hawkins had been both a paratrooper and an Army Ranger before he was recruited to Phoenix Force.

      McCarter took his own secure satellite phone from his web gear and reviewed the mission data once more. It contained, among other things, a file that listed a series of coordinates. These were all sites at which the Pakistani and Indian military forces had come into conflict, despite a ceasefire that was supposed to portend peace and prosperity for the region. That had been the general idea, anyway. McCarter had about as much faith in political rot such as that as he did in the supposedly bomb-proof hull of the vehicle in which he sat. Promises were nice, but as an American president had once said, “Trust, but verify.”

      A pair of thermal imaging satellites over this part of the world had been “borrowed” by Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman and the Stony Man cybernetics team, re-tasked to monitor the upper Kashmir region СКАЧАТЬ