Chapters (37)
- Cover
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Chris Ryan Readers’ Club?
- Letter from Author
- About the Author
Bowman and Loader hastened past them, ducked around the corner of the garden wall. They climbed down into the southern end of the drainage ditch, crawled forward twenty metres, stopped and placed the charges facing out towards the northern end of the ditch.
‘Line them up here,’ Bowman said. ‘We’ll turn this area into a massive IED.’
They carefully removed both mines from their bandoliers, flipped out the scissor legs and planted the Claymores in the grass, sighting them down the ditch. They screwed the blasting caps into the detonator wells, sprinkled grass and leaves over the mines to camouflage them, rechecked the sights. Then Bowman and Loader unwound the coils of electrical wire and retreated around the wall, back towards the mortar pit. They made sure the safety bails were flipped up on their firing devices, then connected the electrical wires to the clackers.
‘You triggered one of these before?’ Loader said to Casey.
She gave him a long hard stare. ‘Take an educated guess.’
‘Just checking.’ He indicated the clackers. ‘The safetys are on. Don’t fire them until one of us gives the word from the rooftop. We’ll need to nail as many of the enemy as possible. No point wasting them on one or two attackers.’
‘Got it.’
She set the clackers down beside the cannon, went back to setting up the mortar. Loader grinned.
‘That’ll give those fuckers a nasty surprise,’ he said to Bowman.
Bowman glanced back at the ditch. The Claymores would repel any rebels attacking from the dead ground to the north of the garden. As soon as the enemy neared the southern end of the channel, Casey would detonate the mines, annihilating them in a lethal torrent of steel balls. Anyone caught in the blast radius would be torn to pieces.
‘Tiny! Get the rest of the Gimpy ammo on the roof.’ Mallet yelled at them from across the front drive. ‘Josh, start putting down some range markers for the mortar and sniper teams.’
Loader bounded back over to the Unimog. He started unloading the remaining boxes of 7.62 mm belt for the Gimpys, garlanding the linked brass around his neck. Meanwhile Bowman tapped the pressel switch on his webbing and raised Webb on the tactical radio. The latter was on the mansion rooftop, scanning the estate through the Schmidt & Bender Mark II variable sight attached to his rifle.