Vs. RTI: camp fight

They split up, with Mia circling wide to come up on the other side. Bunny was always impressed by how she moved and wished she was on Havoc Team instead of Chaos. Maybe after this, something could be worked out.

He gave her a couple of minutes and then worked his way along a ridge, keeping low behind thick shrubs. When he was within fifty feet, he thumbed the switch on the Lightning Bug, rose up, threw with all his strength, and dropped back behind cover.

The device had just enough heft to make for a good throw. It arced over the truck and, just on the far side, detonated. In bright daylight, it was only a flash that was nearly invisible. And its mild pop was buried beneath the sound of men working. Bunny flattened out with the ridge crest between him and any resulting explosion.

The forklift jerked to a stop, a crate almost level with the flatbed.

“What the hell?” he heard someone growl. Men clustered around the forklift, offering the kind of useless suggestions people always thought worth sharing. There was no explosion.

Until there was.

But it wasn’t the massive blast Wilson had told them to expect. This was a good, deep solid crump of a standard-issue fragmentation grenade.

The blast caught everyone by surprise and punched the crated fighting machine off the forklift. The crate slammed against the side of the truck and then crashed to the ground, burning wood showering men who lay dazed and bleeding.

The other Fixers scattered.

Mia rose up and hosed them with her M5, burning through a full magazine and tearing two men to rags. Then she dropped down, rolled into a gully, and ran like hell as return fire from the sentries tore apart the place where she’d been. One of the sentries suddenly jerked forward, the entire front of his face disintegrating as a sniper round found him.

Bunny laughed. This was Magpie and Mother Mercy doing what they did, the fierce women scoring first blood.

As unarmed Fixers ran around to hide behind the truck, Bunny laid his combat shotgun on the ridgetop and opened fire.

A bird drone soared past him and buzzed one of the sentries, who spun and fired at it, but in doing so came out from the cover of the open truck door. Magpie and Mother Mercy both hit him, and the man seemed to become a cloud of red mist.

“Hoo-fucking-ah,” laughed Bunny as he poured fire down the hill.

...

Bunny kept firing as he moved laterally along the ridge. He was firing explosive rounds, and the whole area around the truck was pocked with smoking craters. Half a dozen bodies lay in the path of his barrage, and more lay where Mia or Belle had dropped them.

But now the Fixers were rallying. Those who were unarmed had crawled under the semi while two brave—and foolish—techs climbed onto the truck, opened a crate, and were handing guns and ammunition belts down. Mia shot one of them, but the other was at an angle that afforded no clear hit. Until, that is, he moved to his right to hand a belt of grenades down to another Fixer, and as he leaned out, it gave Belle three inches of his forehead to aim at. Even at 180 yards, that was enough.

The Fixers under the truck loaded their weapons and opened up, and the fusillade drove Bunny down behind the ridge. Two of them shimmied to the end of the semi and began trying to pick Mia off, and she, too, had to find better cover.

Belle was providing as much plunging fire as she could, but the Fixers were making maximum use of the semi.

There was a roar, and an armored personnel carrier came rocketing along the road from the front gate, with a Fixer in full armor standing behind a Browning .50-caliber machine gun, and he filled the trees with a deadly swarm of bullets. Belle’s sniper fire stopped, and Bunny’s heart sank.

-Relentless pg. 447-453, Kindle Edition.