End Game (Will Robie #5)(10)

Three quick trigger pulls, and each ISIS member manning the machine guns toppled off the back of the trucks.

Reel had bullets and she had enemies, and she set out to merge the two forevermore.

Three men tried to take the place of the machine gunners. And three men caught Win Mag rounds in their heads for the trouble.

Then the ISIS force wised up and the trucks went into evasive maneuvers, with the lead truck providing cover for the other two.

Reel grabbed her spotter’s weapon, and without taking her eyes off the targets, her fingers snagged the ordnance she wanted to deploy next.

She fed the rounds into the rifle, took aim, and fired.

The incendiary round found its mark, and the gas tank of the lead truck was pierced. A split second later the ordnance ignited and so did the vapor in the tank.

The concussive force lifted the Toyota pickup straight off the ground, like a rocket taking off. Then gravity took over and the truck flipped and came to rest on top of the second truck, crushing it.

Reel sent another incendiary round into the third truck. The gas vapor detonated and also caused the .50-cal ammo stacked on the truck beds to explode, turning the night sky bright as day. Bodies and weapons and pieces of Toyotas hurtled across the sand, some landing as far as a half mile away.

When the smoke cleared, Reel could not see one living person in front of her. Just wreckage, flaming objects, and burned corpses.

She had not a second longer to dwell on this, because firing came from behind her. She saw Barkley strafing the ground in front of him with rounds from his MP5.

Reel sprinted that way, planted her weapon on the sand, slid into firing position, and sighted through her scope and fired. And kept firing.

But bullets were coming at them far faster. And then grenades landed and started exploding all around them.

Barkley moved to his left, which was a mistake. The heavy round sliced right through his body armor and blew out his back. He moaned once, gurgled twice, and fell facedown in the sand.

Now it was only Reel left.

She sighted through her scope looking for targets, when it emerged out of the smoke, dust, and darkness.

“Shit!”

It was an American M1117 armored security vehicle. A bunch of them had been captured by ISIS from the Iraqi army. It was heavily armored, weighed thirty thousand pounds, and had a top speed of seventy mph. It had a grenade launcher and a .50-cal machine gun in addition to a second machine gun, all mounted on the rotating turret. That was what had been firing at them. That was what had rained grenades on them, and a round from the .50 had just killed Barkley.

Reel grabbed the other rifle she always brought to battle, the Barrett M82. It was already chambered with the most powerful ordnance Reel had to combat the armored rhino coming for her. She would only use it if everything had gone to shit.

Now seemed the perfect time.

The round she was about to fire was technically known as the Raufoss Mk211, developed by a manufacturer in Scandinavia. It was so devastating that, under the Geneva Conventions, it was not supposed to be used against humans.

Right now Reel knew it was her last chance to survive. She didn’t try to change locations. If she got up and ran, they would simply mow her down with the .50-cal like they had Barkley. She didn’t move a muscle. They might assume she was already dead.

Reel aimed her weapon, centered her breathing, and let her finger slip to the trigger. The M1117 had good armor, but armor needed to be maintained. And she had spotted some missing plates on the front underbelly of the vehicle, probably from a previous run-in with an IED when the metal beast was still working for America.

Yet Reel didn’t aim there. Her muzzle was pointed at the front window of the ASV. The glass was multi-layered ballistic glass, but the Raufoss’s tungsten core could punch a hole in eight inches of concrete at four hundred meters or an inch of steel at two thousand yards. Well, she was a helluva lot closer than that. And glass, even ballistic glass, was not steel or concrete.

“Do it, baby, do it,” she murmured as she slowly pressed the trigger.

The round blew right through the glass, probably killing one of the crew on contact. And she followed that up with two more rounds where the missing armored plates had been.

Its ability to pierce armor was not the reason she’d selected the Raufoss. Like the rounds she’d used to take out the Toyotas, the Raufoss had an incendiary component. But the Raufoss also had a high explosive charge built in. It could take out aircraft, choppers, and ships.

And, as it turned out, M1117s.

The trio of explosives detonated and the ammo and the fuel in the vehicle ignited a millisecond later.

Reel had to look away and bury herself in the sand to escape from being blinded by the flash. Debris, flaming objects, and body parts rained down all around.

She finally leapt up, sprinted away, and threw herself under one of the destroyed and still smoldering Humvees as large objects struck it and the ground all around.

After a minute things stopped falling and it grew quiet.

Another minute passed, and Reel dragged herself out from under the Humvee.

She looked around at her destroyed team.

She looked at the body parts of her attackers.

She looked at all the burning vehicles.

She was still sitting there when a chopper flew over and swept a light over the area.

When the SEALs fast-roped down to her she didn’t acknowledge them, though she did let them attach a harness to her. The winch was engaged and she was swept into the air and hauled aboard the chopper.