0144: Detonating SAM-5

In his hasty jump from the vehicle, Hou Rui took a hard fall on the roadside embankment, ending up bruised and battered. Yet, paying no mind to his injuries, the moment he pushed himself up into a crouch, thirty or forty guardsmen came charging out of the weeds.

"Rat-tat-tat-tat! Bang! Bang!"

The suddenly ambushed parties immediately exchanged gunfire. Crouched flat on the ground, Hou Rui was utterly focused, completely ignoring the bullets whistling past his body and around his head. Wielding an AK-47 he had instinctively grabbed upon jumping from the vehicle, he fired rapid, controlled shots at the first enemy, then the second, then the third...

In less than two seconds, at a range of under twenty meters, Hou Rui successively shot down four of the enemies closing in on him.

As Hou Rui dropped into a semi-crouch and resumed sprinting forward, the coalition's machine gun behind him opened up with suppressing fire. Strings of deadly bullets kicked up dirt all around him, forcing him to abandon any thought of running upright. Instead, moving much like a giant ape, he propelled himself forward while using one hand to constantly brace against the ground. The surrounding grass thrashed wildly under his movement, drawing the pursuing guardsmen's heavy machine-gun fire straight toward the violently swaying brush.

Amidst the rain of falling bullets, if they came from a .50 caliber heavy machine gun, each impact would launch a great spray of mud and earth. Conversely, rounds from a 14.5mm machine gun left remarkably little debris in their wake; their velocity was so extreme that the projectiles drilled deep into the earth before they could even churn up the ground.

Thanks only to the heavy shroud of night, which severely hampered the guardsman gunner's aim, Hou Rui would likely have been finished long before he managed to cover two hundred meters. Even so, trapped within this perilous zone, the situation grew increasingly dire. Worse still, a dozen or more guardsmen were flanking him from both sides, steadily closing the net around the patch of grass where he sought shelter.

It was over! Fighting an entire convoy alone was simply too reckless. After surveying the front and rear, Hou Rui realized he was truly trapped in a desperate impasse.

Yet, the bleaker the situation, the more it ignited the fierce tenacity embedded deep in his bones! Old Xiao, the person who had known Hou Rui the longest, had once said that given his personality, backing him into a corner meant he would unleash a frenzied counterattack before drawing his final breath. Even if he could not defeat his foes, he would undoubtedly splatter them with his dying blood.

Listening to the swishing footsteps converging from all directions, watching machine-gun rounds occasionally strike the ground around him, and feeling the splatter of dirt and grass fragments against his face, Hou Rui experienced a chillingly calm composure settle over his heart. Raising his AK-47 once more, he quietly took aim at a target over a hundred meters away and pulled the trigger.

"Bang! Clang, rat-tat-tat! Clang-clang!"

With each of Hou Rui's deliberate shots, the general's convoy in the distance immediately answered with the metallic sounds of impacts and ricochets. Elated to pinpoint his firing position, the advancing guardsmen surged forward, eager to close the remaining distance and eliminate the stubborn nuisance.

"Boom! Crash!"

A muffled blast echoed from the convoy over a hundred meters away, sounding much like a leaking gas cylinder ignited by a spark.

As the guardsmen closing in on Hou Rui turned to look back, they finally understood what he had been aiming at all along: he had been firing directly at the S-200 surface-to-air missile mounted within the general's convoy.

While the long-range accuracy of an AK-47 was notoriously poor, it could still maintain a reasonably precise point of impact at around a hundred and fifty meters. After a sustained barrage, Hou Rui had finally punctured and detonated the booster rocket fuel tank at the tail of the missile!

Before the eyes of everyone in the convoy, the tail of the obsolete S-200 missile suddenly erupted in a sheet of flame. The auxiliary booster rocket blew first, instantly triggering a massive explosion at the missile's rear. Propelled by the blast, the warhead lurched heavily forward, slamming straight into another armored vehicle in the general's convoy, culminating in the ferocious explosion Hou Rui had anticipated.

A massive shockwave rippled outward in a ring, tearing through the vegetation on the hillside side of the convoy, shoving the armored vehicles fore and aft into sliding skids, and knocking the guardsmen who were on the verge of capturing Hou Rui completely off balance. Their tightly packed formation instantly dissolved into chaos.

However, this violent shockwave had little effect on Hou Rui, who had flattened himself against the ground well in advance. Seizing the opportunity, he launched his counteroffensive. Leaping abruptly from the tall grass, he swept his AK-47 in a sustained burst across the guardsmen to his left until the magazine clicked completely empty.

Without wasting a single second, Hou Rui immediately drew his QSZ-92 automatic pistol and opened fire on the guardsmen to his right, firing on the move. Even if those rounds failed to find their marks, they at least forced the enemy to scramble back into the grass, neutralizing any immediate threat. Resolutely discarding the empty pistol, Hou Rui wheeled around and bolted, unexpectedly charging right back toward the convoy.

By this time, that stretch of the highway had been transformed into a raging sea of fire centered around a massive crater.

When the S-200 warhead struck the armored vehicle, the scattering flames of the blast had fortuitously ignited the convoy's supply trucks. Consequently, the already depleted guardsmen had to divert a portion of their men to fight the fires—providing Hou Rui with a golden opportunity to slip back in for a surprise counter-attack.

"Machine gunners, secure the flanks! Infantry, disperse! I want guards stationed at the front and rear of every single vehicle. Drivers of the pickup trucks and supply lorries, all of you get out. Put that fire out first; if you can't extinguish it, drive that burning truck far away. Everyone currently lying on the ground, if you're not dead, get up right now! Tend to the wounded and drag the bodies to the roadside!"

A coalition lieutenant stood in the bed of a pickup truck, shouting orders to organize the guardsmen into conducting orderly defense and rescue operations around the convoy.

After shouting for a moment while the surrounding soldiers sprang into purposeful action, the lieutenant vaulted down from the pickup and strode briskly toward the cluster of large off-road vehicles. "General, the fire will be put out immediately, but the convoy has suffered heavy losses."

"Where is that damned Englishman?" demanded the man inside the leading off-road vehicle, his tone dripping with an unquenchable venom.

"We haven't captured him yet, General. He must have fled some distance away."

"Keep sending men after him! I want to see him die with my own eyes!"

"General, I strongly advise you to leave this place immediately. We've just had a massive explosion here, and I fear remaining puts your safety at risk."

"Very well! I shall wait for you at the town ahead. Remember, you must capture that wretch and drag him to the town to face me. Anyone who dares to challenge the Liberation Front—I, Garcia, will hunt them down to the last man." A heavy reek of blood permeated the man's words.

"Yes, General."

While the lieutenant conferred with General Garcia, Hou Rui took advantage of the convoy's confusion to slip back into their vicinity through a blind spot ignored by the sentries. Crawling along the roadbed beneath an armed transport truck, he stealthily and alertly surveyed the surrounding situation.

On the clamorous highway, guardsmen were busy repositioning vehicles, tending to the injured, and hauling away bodies. As a BR-60 armored vehicle, directed by a coalition sergeant, pushed the charred wreckage of the vehicle blasted by the S-200 off the roadway to clear a path for the convoy to advance, the convoy began to reform.

Vehicles destroyed in Hou Rui's rampage were abandoned entirely, leaving the remaining three-quarters of the convoy to close ranks. Commands and slogans echoed back and forth along the road, and a moment later, Hou Rui felt the transport truck sheltering him begin to roll forward.

Sure enough, an instant later, the transport truck lurched forward a meter and a half, exposing Hou Rui's lower legs from beneath the chassis. Unluckily for him, as he scrambled desperately forward to re-conceal himself underneath, two guardsmen stationed at the tail of the truck for security spotted his boots.

The two guardsmen exchanged a sinister look and nodded in unison. One leveled his rifle at Hou Rui's exposed legs while the other crouched, grabbed the fugitive's trouser cuffs, and yanked hard.

Hou Rui was hauled out like a pulled radish. However, because he was still lying face-down, the guardsman holding him at gunpoint could not see his face and thus held his fire, signaling his comrade to flip the body over.

Regrettably for them, the moment the guardsman crouched beside Hou Rui and reached out to grab his arm, before he could apply any leverage to roll him over, the seemingly lifeless Hou Rui sprang into sudden motion.

Rolling sharply to the left, Hou Rui fired two shots from his M29 revolver into the guardsman covering him, expending the very last rounds in the cylinder. Without waiting for that soldier to hit the ground, Hou Rui scrambled to his feet, only to take a heavy punch straight to the cheek from the second guardsman.

Staggering sideways to the left from the impact of the blow, Hou Rui quickly twisted his waist and locked his arms around the soldier who had thrown the punch. By then, alerted by the gunfire, a swarm of guardsmen was already closing in from all directions.