The lighted button he was now ready to push was marked SGF2, for petroleum smoke-generator fog formulation two, which, in truth, was hardly different from the diesel-and-oil smoke pot formula that had been used on battlefields since World War II. And while it created a quick, dense visual screen and did a good job muddling near infrared signals, giving it a considerable degree of efficacy in certain evasive situations to the present day, it didn’t work nearly as well as Type IV in degrading the functionality of thermal imagers sensitive to far end IR wavelengths.

That limitation was precisely what DeMarco wanted—no, needed—to put him on more or less equal terms with his opposite number in the treetop.

“Eleven, ten, nine, I want everybody set to go . . .”

An eye on his digital dashboard clock, DeMarco was also getting set, practicing what he preached as he ticked off the seconds over his comlink—only he would be going very much his own way.

“. . . eight, seven, send up the smoke!”

DeMarco hit his console button and white SGF2 vapor began pouring from his Rover’s tail pipe, Wade and Hollinger releasing it from the exhausts of their respective vehicles at the same instant, the two of them acting on his direct order.

DeMarco looked down at the weapon he’d taken from a hidden underseat compartment, resting all sixteen pounds of it comfortably across his lap even as he’d been having his little clash of opinion with Nimec. UpLink arms designers called it a Big Daddy VVRS, their own version of what master planners with the Pentagon’s Future Land Warrior program were dubbing an “objective individual combat weapon,” or OICW, which was itself a variant of the modular French FAMAS rifles that terrorists had used with grievously damaging results against an UpLink facility in Brazil two years earlier.

Ninety percent of the time, Sword’s munitions designers were way ahead of the curve, but every so often they found themselves playing catch up. When that happened, they always compensated by pulling into first place.

The Big Daddy was a single-trigger, dual-barreled, integrated firing system, its lower barrel chambered for 5.56-mm VVRS lethal/nonlethal sabot rounds, and its upper barrel a 20-mm fused multipurpose munitions launcher; a microcomputer-assisted, thermal image/laser dot range-finder targeting scope on top. This was quite the whole package rolled into one.

Hoping it would do the trick for him, DeMarco continued to read the numbers on his dash clock aloud, getting there now, getting there, three, two, one . . .

“. . . Commence evac!” he yelled.

And gripped the Big Daddy in both hands as he pushed out his door into the churning smoke.

In the 4×4’s rear compartment, all four of its terrified passengers sat watching everything beyond their windows dissolve into a blank white void, as if the world were simply being erased before their eyes. Without exchanging a word, they had linked hands on the seat between them, bowed their heads, and begun moving their lips in spontaneous, silent prayer—each according to his or her individual belief, desire to believe, or willing abandonment to the possibility that a higher power might be stirred into turning an ear in their direction.