Ghosts of War: A Pike Logan Thriller by Brad Taylor

Author:Brad Taylor [Taylor, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780525954927
Amazon: B017SCQLBE
Publisher: Dutton
Published: 2016-06-28T05:00:00+00:00

39

Even in the summer, the early morning air in Bratislava was crisp, around fifty-five degrees, which made hiding our weapons that much easier because of the jackets we wore to ward off the chill. We’d been in place behind a giant church called Saint Martin’s Cathedral since eight A.M., and while the sun was up, the church itself blocked the rays, leaving us in the cold shadow.

After an extensive reconnaissance, we’d decided that this was the route the armored car would take, as the back of the church held a little courtyard with an exit onto a four-lane highway that crossed the Danube, the river less than two hundred meters away. From the diamond wholesaler, there were only a few routes out of the narrow cobblestone city center, and most took you deeper in before letting you exit. One route was shorter, but it ended up at the promenade with the underground garage, which meant more spaghetti roads before getting to the bridge that crossed the Danube. The driver of the car would not want to traverse all that. He’d want to get out of the canalized lanes and onto a high-speed avenue of approach as soon as possible, which meant he’d go north on Venturska, then west on Prepostska—a very narrow lane barely wide enough for a car to pass—before heading south again toward the church on Kapitolska, basically making a short box to get to the four-lane. He’d turn off of Kapitolska into this courtyard, then drive right through.

Or so he thought.

We had a tiny force to deal with the issue of stopping a veritable tank, which had required no small amount of preplanning. I needed every man because we had very little time to accomplish the tasks involved, and they were formidable.

One, we had to stop the vehicle, and it was built specifically to keep moving, with bulletproof glass, an armored engine, run-flat tires, and enough torque to climb out of a sinkhole. Two, once stopped, we had to penetrate the carriage. The bulletproof glass and door armor would protect the two driving, but our concern was the two men in the back. We had to get them to voluntarily open the doors, or it would take us blowtorches and over thirty minutes to hack our way in. Which brought up point three: We had little time to do all this and escape without compromise. We couldn’t waste a second. We had to hit, get them to give up, then flee on our mopeds before the inevitable police response.

Mossad had provided the method of stopping the vehicle in the form of small limpet mines mated to a magnet—something they’d perfected in their elimination of Iran’s nuclear scientists. They were designed to separate the tire from the wheel and render the run-flats useless. With Knuckles’s information, and a short trip to a hardware store and a gas station, we had what we needed to penetrate the carriage. All we required now was to have early warning for the assault, and this was where we ran into trouble.

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