Thunder Run by David Zucchino Read Free Book Online Page A

letter. Hell, his man Hernandez had taught the fire evacuation course.
    Colonel Perkins was growing impatient. Not only was the entire column stopped and exposed, but the time lag in radio reports was also confusing everybody. It was one of the hazards of combat—radio updates often were outdated at the moment they were issued. From the hatch of his armored personnel carrier stopped on the highway, Perkins was in a position to see the flames. Yet he kept getting radio reports from Captain Conroy, relayed to him by Major Nussio, that the tank fire had been put out. Yet he could plainly see that Charlie One Two was still on fire.
    Then the first suicide vehicle appeared. Conroy saw it, a blue truck hurtling down the on-ramp in front of him. He ordered a machine-gun round fired into the engine block as a warning. The round tore into the truck and the vehicle screeched to a halt. The driver, a man in civilian clothes, stumbled out and put his hands up. Behind him, gunmen in one of the bunkers opened fire. Conroy motioned wildly at the driver to get down. The tanks couldn’t fire on the bunker without hitting him.
    The man dropped down on his belly and one of the tanks fired a main gun round into the bunker. It exploded. Five soldiers emerged from the wreckage, running at the tanks, firing assault rifles. A burst of coax splattered them across the roadway.
    Now a white pickup was roaring across the bridge and heading for the on-ramp. At the foot of the ramp, Conroy ordered his gunner to traverse and fire. The gunner yelled that the hydraulic power had suddenly gone out. He was trying to traverse the main gun with a manual crank. Conroy picked up his M-4 carbine just in case, then radioed a Bradley next to him. “Hey, there’s a suicide truck coming down.”
    The Bradley commander picked it up right away. The truck turned sharply and picked up speed, racing down the ramp. Conroy could see three men inside—one in uniform, one in civilian clothes, and squeezed between them a young man wearing a white headband with black Arabic script. They weren’t slowing down. They were aiming for Conroy’s tank. The Bradley opened up. From his hatch, Gruneisen pumped away with the .50-caliber. Everybody was unloading—coax, 25mm guns. They couldn’t stop it. They kept firing. Finally the pickup shuddered, bounced crazily down the ramp, and slammed into a guardrail a few meters from Conroy’s tank.
    Conroy could see something piled in the pickup bed. He was afraid it was explosives, so he screamed into the radio net for everyone to hold their fire. Then he saw the young man in the headband moving. The other tank crews saw him, too, and everyone thought the same thing: he might be reaching for a remote device to trigger a truck bomb. Conroy gave the order to fire. Rounds slammed into the pickup. It caught fire, and the man in the headband was burned alive.
    Behind Conroy, everyone was furiously pouring water onto the fire inside Charlie One Two, with little success. The burning tank had now consumed nearly thirty minutes of precious time, and the level of fire from both sides of the highway was intensifying. Iraqi military trucks were pouring in from the city, dropping off dismounts.
    Diaz began to resign himself to losing his tank. He hated the thought of it, but he hated even more the thought of losing one of his men in a futile attempt to put out a fuel fire. The fuel had leaked into the turret by now, and the fire was spreading. Everyone decided not to try to tow the tank for fear that the ammunition loaded inside would detonate, threatening the towing tank.
    Diaz had the crew unload the tank, yanking off sensitive items like radios and code boxes and combat manuals. They piled the stuff, along with their rucksacks and weapons, on top of Gruneisen’s tank and inside an armored personnel carrier commanded by the company first sergeant.
    Gruneisen had been pleading with Conroy for just a little more