Chapter 52

52

Carpenter swung the BearCat's armored plate back door closed like the door of a Swiss bank safe and then Shaw, all alone now behind the driver's seat, put the transmission into Drive and hit the gas.

The twin turbo diesels purred as he pulled off from the first waypoint. He drove down the block and before the left turn onto Main Street, he pulled the indestructible monster truck in under an old oak.

He needed to wait a bit now, give the boys some time to sneak down to the side of the restaurant.

He rolled his neck as he took a look around at the square. The whole town was like something out of an innocent yesteryear, wasn't it? he thought, surveying the bumpy sidewalks, the wide lawns trimmed with actual picket fences.

The front porch of the hundred-plus-year-old house to his right had a hanging rocking chair swing. In a minute Ma and Pa Ingalls would come out and sit down and sip some fresh lemonade as they read the Bible, wouldn't they? Shaw thought, shaking his head.

"Worthless hayseeds," he mumbled as he fished into his gear bag.

"Ah, there you go," he said brightly as he found his pill bottle of Adderall, dry swallowing three of them. Almost immediately he felt his heart rate begin to kick.

Hitting on the tunes on his phone, he began drumming the steering wheel along to the ominous jungle drumbeat of the opening of Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some!!"

"Oh, yeah, scratch my back, baby," he called out as Eddie's first screeching chords filled the inside of the cab.

Nothing like a handful of lid poppers and a stadium rock classic to get the old game face on , Shaw thought, doing a little air guitar.

Just like old times indeed.

Juices starting to flow now, he turned off the tunes and adjusted his comm link microphone as he brought up the electronic tablet surveillance screen.

It was all done through the firm's control center, and it was like something out of a computer game. On a maplike background, his four men were closing in on the target on the left. On the right was the real-time street view from each of their body cams in gull-gray-and-white thermal footage.

His merc firm wasn't as good as the guys in the service, Shaw thought. They were better.

A minute later, he watched his men glide smoothly into the parking lot to stop behind a car.

On the screen he could see Carpenter hold up the breaching unit as he brought it out of its satchel.

It consisted of a bundle of Primacord, a kind of flexible plastic tubing filled with PETN, an explosive very similar to nitroglycerin. The shaped charge it was connected to was a plastic explosive called HMX.

All of it was laid out on a large square of double-sided soft and thick almost candy-like adhesive that had a plastic backing that you had to peel off like a Band-Aid once you were ready to stick everything in place.

Once that was done, all you needed was to get safely back, pull the electric detonator and Bob's your uncle, the wall had a hole in it and you were in.

"How we looking?" Shaw said in a low voice.

"Approaching," Carpenter whispered as Shaw watched him head for the side of the restaurant with Tejada, the brothers following right behind in a tight train.

That was Shaw's cue.

Showtime , he thought as he flicked every outside light of the BearCat into the ON position.

Then he put the badass vehicle into Drive and pulled slowly out onto Depot Street and made a left.

It was a real promenade all right. He gunned the turbo diesels loudly as he came down the rise and then, a hundred feet from the restaurant's front door, he stopped.

The armored plate driver door squealed loudly as he muscled it open. He flipped open its circular gun port and rested the barrel of his .45 on it and smiled.

Jesse James robbing a bank hadn't felt this good, Shaw thought, grinning. Reach for the sky!

That's it. Eyes on me, suckers , he thought as he saw movement at one of the windows. Now we play my way .

"I'm in place. Are you ready?" he called over the comm link.

"Almost. Peeling the tape back," Tejada said, watching Carpenter. "There we go. Placing it on the structure and—"

The pure bright white that suddenly flashed on the screen before Shaw's startled eyes came a split second before the thunderclap explosion.

Even at a hundred feet away, the blast wave shook the truck like a hurricane gust, slamming the door shut and sending Shaw flying back into the cab.

As this happened, the driver's seat smashed into the back of his head like a club. When he half came to in a concussed daze a moment later, outside the windshield where his men had just been was a billow of smoke.

The nine-thousand-pound truck was still rocking off its run-flat tires when Shaw detected the sound. It was the still-falling debris of the side of the shattered restaurant beginning to pitter-patter off the roof of the truck in a shower of toothpick-like wooden rain.

Then a large portion of roofing slammed off the hood filling the windshield with shingles.

He was shell-shocked and dumbstruck, gaping in unhinged terror. His concern for his fallen comrades as well as twenty-five years of military training instantly fled. Shaw with a shaking hand began to mindlessly slap at his seat belt and then finally managed to slip the transmission into Reverse as he pinned the gas.