Rising Tiger: A Thriller (7)

Unfortunately, there wasn’t any time for a breather. The vehicles that had been chasing him had just entered the traffic circle.

Quickly sliding out of the cab, he holstered his pistol and leapt up into the bed of the pickup.

The machine gun mounted on top of the truck’s roll bar was an old M60. It was all scratched up and looked totally beat to shit, but that was par for the course in a country where everything aged rapidly and locals still cleaned their AK-47s by running knotted shoelaces through their barrels.

There was no telling how many ammo cans had originally been in the bed of the pickup. Right now there was only one, which, mercifully, had been strapped down.

Opening it up, he snatched the two-hundred-round belt of 7.62 ammunition, loaded the weapon, and made ready.

“Moonracer, this is Norseman,” Harvath said over the radio. “My vehicle has been disabled. I’m at a roundabout approximately three klicks north of the initial objective. Multiple hostiles inbound. I’m going to need some help getting out of here.”

“Roger that,” said Nicholas, who had been monitoring the team’s GPS trackers via a National Security Agency satellite overhead. “Can you activate your IR beacon so I can get a positive ID on your position?”

Prior to the Taliban “inheriting” shipping containers full of American night-vision goggles from the Afghan Army, Harvath would have had no problem activating the infrared strobe attached to the back of his helmet. Now, however, it could end up being the equivalent of bathing in gasoline and lighting himself on fire.

Once he turned on the beacon, if any of his pursuers were using the goggles, he’d be as eye-catching as a disco ball hanging over the altar at a midnight mass. But as he needed Nicholas to find him a way out of there, he didn’t have a choice.

What’s more, the belt of ammunition was studded with tracers. Every fifth round included a pyrotechnic that caused the round to glow. From the shooter’s perspective, it allowed a visual means to trace the flight path of the rounds as they streaked through the sky in order to see where they were landing.

From the enemy’s perspective, it allowed them to see, rather precisely, where their attacker was shooting from.

In other words, it wasn’t going to matter if the Taliban were wearing night-vision goggles. The moment he started firing, they’d be able to zero right in on him.

He had agreed to bring a beacon only in case of emergency, and if this didn’t qualify as an emergency, he’d be hard-pressed to know what did. Reaching atop his head, he turned it on.

He was just about to instruct Nicholas to start looking for it, when he heard Haney’s voice over his earpiece. “We’re almost at the extraction point, Norseman. Once we hand off our package, we’re coming back for you.”

“Negative,” Harvath ordered. “None of you are coming back for me.”

“We exfil together,” said Staelin, adding his voice to the proposed change of plans, “or we don’t exfil.”

“I appreciate the sentiment but stop screwing around. You have your orders. Now clear the net.”

As Haney and Staelin obeyed and fell silent, Nicholas said, “I’ve got a visual on you. Nice and bright.”

Leaning his shoulder into the M60, he took aim at the approaching Taliban vehicles and began applying pressure to the trigger. “It’s about to get much brighter. If you have any rabbits in your hat, now’s the time to start pulling them out.”

“Roger that,” Nicholas replied. “On it.”

The little man suffered from primordial dwarfism and stood just under three feet tall. What he lacked in physical prowess, however, he more than made up for in mental capacity. He was, quite simply, one of the most brilliant people Harvath had ever met. If anyone could find him a way out of this, it was Nicholas.

But regardless of how smart and how talented the man was, none of it would make a difference if Harvath didn’t neutralize the threat that was heading straight toward him. It was time for business.

Reaching up to his helmet, he turned off the beacon. There was no sense in giving the bad guys any more of an advantage than they already had.

The most important thing now was his timing. The attack had to be perfectly launched. The words of William Prescott, cautioning his soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill not to fire until they saw the whites of the British soldiers’ eyes, played in Harvath’s mind.

As the first vehicle entered the roundabout, he could feel his pulse quickening. Every fiber of his body tightened. It took everything he had not to put a single extra ounce of pressure on the trigger.

Instead, he took a deep breath and then slowly let it out of his lungs.

When the second of the two vehicles came into range, he was officially in “whites of their eyes” territory. Unleashing the M60, he rained hell down on them.

Swinging the machine gun back and forth on its mount, he lit up the night, shattering their windows and windscreens, sending rounds ripping through their doors, and sawing the Taliban trucks—as well as everybody inside—to pieces.

It was a frightening display of firepower, made even more so by the use of the tracer rounds.

One of the vehicles was on fire, and the other was smoking so heavily that it looked like it was actively trying to combust.

The bed of his pickup was filled with hot shell casings and the spent links that had held the ammo together.