man rushed back to the gate. With the charge still attached to the lock next to him, he yanked off his backpack and pulled it open. From it he retrieved a smaller pack weighing almost twenty pounds, and this he also opened. Inside he turned a dial on the apparatus housed there, pressed a button, then hefted the pack and the device it held, flinging it over the gate and into the tiny forecourt of the office complex.
Mars turned, lifted his rifle, and began shooting down the street with one hand while triggering his push-to-talk button with the other. “Thirty seconds!”
Hades chimed in immediately from his position behind the van just a few yards away. “Exfil!”
The gunfire picked up as the men at the gate all began bounding back across the street to the armored vehicle, firing towards the alleyway as they went. Hades dropped someone looking over a balcony railing up the street; he hadn’t seen a weapon but shot the man out of an abundance of caution.
Mercury shouted next to him, “Frag out!” as he threw a baseball-sized grenade. It bounced and skittered along the sidewalk, knocking into food stalls and small folding tables set up on the pavement, and then it detonated next to a man attempting to shelter under a parked panel truck.
The security team expended magazine after magazine, lighting up the street to the south and firing a few bursts to the north, not at targets but simply as a means to suppress any potential fire from that direction.
A two-door hatchback turned onto the road three blocks away, and Thor sprayed it with copper-jacketed lead from his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. The driver of the hatchback slammed on his brakes, then threw his little vehicle into reverse, but before he made it more than a few meters back up the side street, the gas tank ignited and the rear of the car burst into raging flames.
Thor stopped firing to let Hades and the others pass in front of him on the way back inside the armored vehicle, and as soon as the four men of the assault element scrambled back into the MaxxPro, the four-member security squad outside the truck broke contact with the targets to the south and climbed in, as well.
The last hatch was shut twenty-six seconds after the breacher initiated the timer on the explosive, and Hades was still counting off the seconds in his head when he shouted over the mic, “Drive! Drive!”
The truck lurched forward.
Next to Hades, his second-in-command spoke up again in his southern drawl. “We’re gonna catch it!”
Hades slammed his hands over his hearing protection. “No shit!”
When the thirty-second mark hit, the noise of the detonation was unreal, even inside the armored car and even with ear pro worn by the entire team. The shock wave of the blast enveloped the vehicle; debris pelted the armor and the thick Plexiglas ports. A man inside the cab of the vehicle flew into Hades, who was then slammed hard against the inner starboard-side wall.
But the big American truck continued racing to the south, out of the kill zone.
“Everybody good?” Hades shouted into his mic. It took a few seconds for a reply, and it came in the form of Hades’s men counting off, some shouting their response under the effects of the concussion and the adrenaline of the attack and its aftermath.
They were all okay, and soon the back slapping, fist bumping, and high-fiving erupted in the confined space, but while this was going on, Hades looked out onto the street as the dust cleared and saw the bodies of civilians lying on the sidewalk. Many of them had been killed right where they had sheltered to stay out of the gunfire that preceded the explosion.
The bomb had been composed of ten M112 demolition blocks: C-4 plastic explosives wired together for simultaneous detonation. It had created a colossal blast, designed to kill those in the office complex, but it did not discriminate. No one inside the blast radius who was not housed in an armored vehicle stood a chance.
Civilians lay dead and maimed wherever he looked.
Also killed, Hades was pretty sure, were three high-ranking members of Al-Islah, a Yemeni political party, who had been meeting inside the office complex at the time of the blast.
The Al-Islah men were the targets. All these other victims, just collateral.
The collateral didn’t bother Hades and his team—at all. They’d achieved their objective tonight. And achieving their objective meant a satisfied client and, almost assuredly,