The Devil's Footprint (19 page)

Kilmara
smiled.
 
"Well, since we don't have
any real budget by American standards, we picked up on the
U.S.
experience and some work in the
U.K.
and
produced our own machine, but decided to try a slightly different direction.
 
Both the Chenowth and the Saker are wheeled
vehicles, excellent for some terrains but no good in marshy ground or snow.

"But we
don't have the money to have different vehicles for different conditions, so we
decided to go for an unarmored high-speed tracked machine that could do most of
what the Chenowth and Saker could do but could operate worldwide.
 
Sand, mud, rocky shale, snow, ice, marshy
ground — the Guntrack can go just about anywhere.
 
The intention is to equip it with enough
firepower to knock out a tank and handle any immediate aerial threat, and it is
the weapons aspect that we are still working on.
 
Want to see it, Don?"

Shanley was
not used to generals being this informal.
 
He was a courteous man by nature and had found that around the U.S. Army,
a crisp "Sir" did not go amiss.
 
"Yes, sir!" he said.

Kilmara looked
at him.
 
"We're an informal culture
these days in
Ireland
,"
he said.
 
"First names are
normal.
 
I'm Shane.
 
He's Hugo, and he—" he indicated Maury —
"I think he is mellowing."

"Maury,"
said Maury.
 
He was looking downright
agreeable.

Fitzduane
slipped in the video.

The group
turned toward the screen.

The terrain
was rocky undulating ground covered with outcrops of heather and patches of
rough grass.
 
In the background there was
a line of hills under a lowering sky that was a surreal mix of menacing clouds
and shafts of light.

It was a bleak
but dramatic landscape that encompassed an extraordinary variation of shape and
line and shade and color.
 
It was
stunningly beautiful, and Shanley suddenly realized that this was not just some
foreign land.

This was where
his roots lay.
 
This had once been home.

A dark shape
appeared in the distance.
 
It was hard to
make out the details.
 
The silhouette was
low and indistinct.
 
The vehicle
approached following a zigzag course and across land that would have been
impassable in a wheeled vehicle.
 
The
sound track suggested it made surprisingly little noise.

The vehicle
came closer and drove parallel past the camera so it could be seen in
profile.
 
As it did so, it could be seen
that although the tracks were riding over rocks and a generally uneven surface,
the upper portion of the vehicle was virtually stable.

The driver
locked one track and the Guntrack did a 360-degree turn on its own axis and
then came to a complete halt.

It was like
nothing either Don or Maury had ever seen.
 
It was a small, low black box on tracks with a wedge-shaped front and
what looked like folded-up forklift prongs on the rear.
 
A driver and a gunner equipped with twin
5.56mm Minimi machine guns sat in the front.

The vehicle
was steered by left-hand drive.
 
To the
right of the front gunner, a Stinger antiaircraft missile was clipped into
position.
 
Behind the two front seats was
a gunner with an M19 belt-fed 40mm grenade launcher mounted on buffered soft
mount attached to a turret ring.
 
As they
watched, the rear gunner's station rose on a hydraulic mount to give him a
wider field of fire.
 
The entire station
then rotated 360 degrees.
 
It then
retracted and a slim mast mounting a miniature FLIR monitor rose up and panned
in a circle.

"The
Guntrack," said
Fitzduane,
"is the vehicle
that the Irish Rangers are beginning to use for special operations.
 
It is not armored in the traditional sense,
but it is made from a special plastic that will withstand small-arms fire, and
the tracks are a Kevlar and artificial rubber blend.
 
Hell of a good power-to-weight ratio.
 
Accelerates like a rocket and does up to
eighty-five miles an hour with a full payload.
 
The weapons fitted can, of course, be varied, but fully equipped with
something like you
see,
it should cost no more than
five percent of a tank.
 
As to
maintenance, if I can exaggerate just a little to make a point, it can be
maintained by the three-man crew with their Swiss Army knives."

The video
continued for another fifteen minutes as the camera focused in close-up on
individual aspects.
 
Everything from fuel
consumption to changing an engine was covered.
 
In fact, it was the attention to detail that was most impressive and
ingenious.

The fuel tank,
for instance, was of a honeycomb design that could be penetrated by an
incendiary round without igniting.
 
The
forks at the back could be lowered to pick up a standard NATO pallet holding up
to a ton.
 
Guntracks could be linked so
that if the engine on one went, the second could pull the first under power.

Shanley and
Maury watched with fascination.
 
The
sheer logic of the thinking was impressive.
 
The Guntrack had been designed by people who knew the reality of combat.

Maury could
still see a problem.
 
"Artillery
will make mincemeat of you," he said.
 
"Potentially, there is a terrifying amount of unfriendly metal on
today's battlefield, and much of it will cut right through your plastic
box."

"The
Guntrack is not the ultimate weapon," said Fitzduane.
 
"It is no more than one more useful
tool.
 
It is designed for a
shoot-and-scoot approach to survival.
 
It
is primarily a better way, we think, to get around when you are on the ground
on some special operations missions.
 
The
underlying idea is not to be detected at all, but if you are detected, to have
enough firepower to make the enemy back off while you hightail it out of the
area.
 
It beats the hell out of
dying."

Shanley had
been thinking it through.
 
"How do
you use Guntrack tactically?" he said.

"We've
found that the minimum practical deployment is two vehicles," said
Fitzduane.
 
"Then fire and
movement.
 
One covers the other like a
fighter pilot and his wingman."

Kilmara turned
to face Shanley and Maury.
 
"Well,
gentlemen," he said.
 
"Now you
know what we are working on.
 
The next
question is what you can suggest.
 
Any ideas?"

"More
than a few," said Shanley.
 
His mind
was racing.
 
What he had seen, if
properly developed, was not just interesting.
 
It was tactically significant.

"This
idea of a small, inexpensive fast attack vehicle taking on tanks reminds me of
something that happened in
Africa
.
 
The Libyans tried to grab their neighbor to
the south and assembled an invading army of hundreds of tanks.
 
They were beaten by Chadians driving only
Toyota
pickup trucks equipped with
Milan
missiles.
 
The pickups maneuvered faster than the
Russian tanks could move their turrets.
 
Also, they were so small they were hard to hit."

Kilmara, who
had been in
Chad
advising the Chadians at the time, did not say anything but looked at Shanley
with renewed respect.
 
This was a man who
did his homework.

"You
should look at Dilger's Baby," said Maury cryptically.

Fitzduane and
Kilmara looked at each other blankly.

"How does
a baby fit into all this, Maury?" said Kilmara carefully.
 
Maybe Maury had finally flipped.

Maury
beamed.
 
"You'll see," he said.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

When the
meeting broke up, Fitzduane checked the switchboard to see if Kathleen had
checked in.
 
If she went on an
expedition, she normally called during the day to say roughly when she would be
back.

There was no
message.
 
It was not significant, but
Fitzduane could not help feeling vaguely uneasy.
 
He looked at his watch.
 
It was heading toward 5:00
P.M.
 
The
exhibition would close at 6:00, and soon after was a barbecue and some
entertainment planned by the exhibition organizers for 7:30.
 
The posters announced that there would also
be some entertainment and dancing afterward.

Fitzduane had
never seen country-and-western line dancers and was mildly curious.
 
Certainly Kathleen, who loved dancing, would
like it.
 
As to the parachuting, there
was always something morbidly fascinating about watching fellow humans jump out
of a perfectly good airplane.
 
Would the
parachutes open?
 
Where and how would
they land?

It promised to
be a pleasant enough evening.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The North
Carolina State Police duty officer contemplated the message slip.
 
A citizen had reported seeing a woman being
manhandled into a helicopter that had been parked in a remote clearing in the
wooded land that bordered the freeway.
 
The woman had been struggling and then she had gone limp, the witness thought.
 
The helicopter had taken off
immediately.
 
Direction?
 
Unknown.

Color of hair?
 
Unknown.
 
She had a
bag or something over her head, he thought.
 
Color of skin?
 
The citizen did not know.

Descriptions of the assailants?
 
There had been two — or maybe three.
 
They had been casually dressed.

He could not
really tell much else.
 
How close had he
been?
 
He had been hiking in the woods
and had seen all this as he was walking back.
 
He was fifty to seventy-five yards from the clearing.
 
Something
like
that.
 
He wasn't real good at estimating
distances.

The duty
officer called in the dispatcher.
 
"This is pretty thin.
 
What
did he sound like?
 
Citizen
or crank?"

The dispatcher
shrugged.
 
"Elderly, a little vague,
but he definitely believes he saw something."

"Why was
he hiking in the woods?"

"He said
he is a birdwatcher.
 
He was looking for
the red cockaded woodpecker.
 
He's sure
about that."

"So he
saw all this through binoculars?" said the duty officer, somewhat
encouraged.
 
He had been wondering how
much an elderly man could see at fifty yards when peering through the gloom of
a forest.
 
Or was it seventy-five
yards?
 
It could be a hundred.
 
It could be thirty.

Could you
really tell the difference between a woman being helped aboard and pushed
aboard?
 
A bag over the head sounded more
like a head scarf to retain some semblance of a hairstyle under the assault of
a rotor wash.
 
Not a clear picture.

"Apparently
not," said the dispatcher.
 
"They were hanging around his neck, but he just forgot.
 
He said he was too surprised, but he insists
that he saw what he described.
 
Adamant
would convey the degree of
emphasis.
 
This guy was all fired
up."

The lieutenant
smiled and checked the report again.
 
The
incident had happened — if anything had happened — forty minutes ago.
 
His nearest patrol car was a good fifteen
minutes away.
 
And he was short two men.

"What
kind of chopper?"

The dispatcher
was getting a little irritated.
 
"I
asked him.
 
He's into birds, not
aircraft.
 
Single
rotor.
 
Civilian
paint job, something pale.
 
That's
all he knows."

"Did you
ask him why he didn't report his earlier?" said the lieutenant.
 
"I don't know what he expects us to do after
forty minutes.
 
The helicopter could be
sixty miles away by now."