Conquistador

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I don’t like the thought of splitting us up, Tom mused, looking through the light-enhancing binoculars down toward the Colletta ranch house and the mushroom of military base that had sprung up around it. The problem is, it’s the only way I can see us having a chance of pulling this off at all.

A plan was coming to him, and if he could sell Adrienne on it…

On the other hand, it’s a plan that requires a vastly inferior force to divide itself five ways from Sunday. A little… complicated. Too many point failure sources, as they said in the Rangers. If an officer had come up with something like this during the war, I’d have considered fragging the crazy son of a bitch unless he had a real good track record.

The binoculars gave the valley floor below an odd flat look, sharp-edged but carrying less information than his eyes would have taken in if the real level of light had been equivalent to what showed. It was oddly disconcerting, because his mind kept telling him the view was blurred, and objectively it wasn’t.

The view was good enough for his purposes; he ignored the distortion as he did the chill cold seeping through his jacket and sweater from the rock ridge beneath him. Tom counted the big Hercules transports lined up beside the runways to the south of the ranch house.

“Still eleven,” he muttered to himself ironically. “C-130J-30s, the stretched model. Colletta Air has sent its very best.”

Then he scanned over to the tented camp. Another company column was marching in to it from Cerro Gordo up in the Inyo mountains; that made six, and according to Simmons that was the full complement from the “mine.” Getting in there and getting back with the information had been a damned fine bit of scouting—evidently the Frontier Scouts really meant their title—and he’d done it fast, too, covering forty miles round-trip in a single day.

Six companies, about a hundred and forty men each; call it nine hundred troops, more or less, with the local TOE, and including some of the Collettas we saw down there.

The units were extremely spare even by the austere Ranger standards he was used to; a lot more riflemen, fewer technicians or support spots.

Well, they’re intended for one single action. And the armament is a lot simpler, too. Sensor systems are Eyeball Mark One.

“My guess is that they’ll load the troops in the morning,” he said quietly, glancing at his watch; just after sundown. The military reflexes were back in force… and I’m remembering why I was so glad to get out of the army. Oh, well, the company’s prettier this time.

Adrienne and the others lay on the ridge beside him; so did Good Star. He could barely see the Indian in the darkness, and he moved very quietly…. But the smell gives him away at close range, he thought. On the other hand, I wouldn’t wash the natural oils out of my skin either, if I had to live in the Mohave year-round.

The dryness and heat were bad enough, but the alkali dust was full of things that acted like chemical scouring powder—in fact, industrial abrasives and cleaning minerals like borax were the desert’s main products, back FirstSide.

“When will they give them their ammunition?” Good Star asked, ruthlessly practical.

“When the aircraft take off, not before,” Tom said.

“But first, we have a little problem,” Adrienne put in, and pointed. Tiny boxy shapes at this distance; the glasses showed him the angular welded contours of light armor.

The Nyo-Ilcha chief grunted as she handed him the binoculars; he’d picked up on how to use them very quickly.

“Three of them. Killing Turtles. We know them—you Deathwalkers send them against us when you make reprisals. Bad medicine.”

Tom wasn’t quite sure if that last phrase was a joke, or not: Good Star seemed to have a keen ear for what the local white men expected of Indians, and an ability to play off it. Tom was sure that the sight of the armored cars made the Nyo-Ilcha chieftain uneasy. Tom didn’t blame him; none of the weapons his people had would make much impression on even thin steel plate, and armored cars were a lot faster than a horse.

Hmmm, he thought, distracted for a fractional instant. Of course, you could make a Molotov from alcohol and tallow, or lure one into a canyon, or put a lot of musket charges together into a satchel charge and throw it underneath. Determined men always had some chance, even against superior weapons. But that’s all we-regret-to-inform-you and posthumous Medal of Honor stuff.

“Two Cheetahs and a Catamount,” Adrienne went on to Tom. “Two light armored cars with twin Browning fifties, or one and a grenade launcher. And a six-wheel heavy with a Bofors gun in the turret and a coaxial MG. Probably manned by Colletta household troops—there to keep the mercenaries in line until they get on the transports.”

“But available for other purposes,” Tom said.

Like massacring our Indian allies here. That wouldn’t cause Adrienne any grief, I think, but I’m a bit more squeamish. Besides… hmmm…

Good Star’s men were skilled and tough and brave, deadly dangerous killers in their own warrior’s life of skirmish and ambush. His own brief experience with their Akaka cousins had vastly increased his respect for the Indian fighters of FirstSide history, who’d broken tribes like this with nothing better than single-shot rifles. But the Nyo-Ilcha war band weren’t disciplined soldiers, and they had a well-founded dread of armored vehicles and aircraft and automatic weapons. They weren’t going to do a kamikaze for the sake of the House of Rolfe, that was for sure, even if Good Star told them to. Which he wouldn’t.

He’d worked with… indigenous forces, was the polite phrase… before, during the war back FirstSide. The trick was to use their strengths, and avoid situations where their weaknesses were important. You couldn’t ask them to do too much.

“We’ll have to take out the armor ourselves,” he said. “And those guard towers will be a problem. If we can do that, and Good Star’s men can get stuck into the mercenaries before they’re issued a combat load, we can do this.”

Tully looked at him, a glimpse of movement in the dark. Have you been watching too many of my old movies, Kemosabe? went unspoken between them. Adrienne sighed; he could read that, too.

And I would so have liked to do that marriage and children thing. Or another thought as pessimistic.

In fact, he suspected that the only person on the ridge who wasn’t thinking something like that was Sandra, and that would be because she didn’t have enough experience at this sort of situation to judge the risks properly. He felt bad about her, in an odd way worse than he did about Adrienne. He was worried about Adri, but he also had a lot of confidence in her ability to take care of herself, and she was a professional whose trade involved deadly force, if not on this massive scale. Sandra was just a nice, brave kid who liked horses. He wished intensely that Henry Villers was available, but the head wound had left him with loss of balance and peripheral vision that would probably last for months, if not forever.

He turned his head to Good Star. “The only advantage we have is that all the enemy’s armed troops will be guarding the mercenaries. That’s where they expect trouble.”

Simmons snorted. “I’m surprised they can get their Russian cadre to get on the planes when the men are armed,” he said. “After the way they’ve been treating them.”

“They’ll be in the air, then,” Adrienne pointed out. “And the Zapotecs’ only hope of ever getting home will be to win and fulfill their king’s contract with the Collettas and Batyushkovs. If they did that and got home, they’d be the next thing to kings themselves, or at least rich nobles. His elite strike force. Their time in hell’s about over—they just have to get through a battle, and I don’t think getting killed in a fight is something any of them desperately dread.”

Tom nodded; from what One Ocelot said, they were all veterans—and of a school where combat meant facing edged metal at arm’s length.

She turned to him. “Tom, you’re the field man here. What’s your advice?”

“OK,” Tom said easily. “Here’s what I think we should do.”

She listened, nodding now and then. Tom wished he hadn’t been aware of Tully’s eyes going wide with horror as he laid out the plan.

“These are—” Tom stopped and looked at the Nyo-Ilcha warriors as Good Star translated his instructions. “Like gunpowder. Only much stronger.”

He held up a one-pound brick of the plastic explosive. Semtex had the consistency of stiff bread dough, and it was about as safe; it could be rolled, pinched or pushed into any shape you wanted. You could set small pieces of it on fire with a match, and it burned very hot—but didn’t explode. Ditto hitting it with a hammer. Bury a detonator in it, and it went off like TNT, only better. One version or another was used by every army on FirstSide for demolition and engineering work, and terrorists loved it because it was cheap and hard to detect.

“Take each one and plant it against the legs of the wooden towers. Where the beams come together—in the crutch of the beams. Do that very quickly—you must not stop between here and there. The men in the towers will be looking inward, toward their own soldiers, but you must be quick and very quiet.”

He demonstrated with his arms how he wanted the charges placed; if you crammed it into a joint, one charge should be ample to sheer twelve-inch beams and the steel bolts that held them together.

“Then leave them there. We can set them off. You just pull back, and when the towers fall, attack. That will be no later than—”

He gave the time to Good Star; the chief said something in his own language, and all the shadowed heads followed his arm as he pointed to a star, named it, and drew his finger down to the horizon. Not as accurate as a watch, but Tom would be willing to bet that it would work within five minutes or so.

“Everyone understand?” Tom finished.

Oh, Jesus, help us, he thought, as the half-seen ranks of faces nodded eagerly, scars and tattoos and animal-skin headdresses, braided hair and massed stink. On second thought, maybe Old Scratch would be more helpful.

They filed off into the darkness; there was a dull jingle of harness padded with scraps of leather and cloth, a surprisingly muted drum of hooves, fading as they split into small parties and rode east through the canyon mouth and into the valley plain. The ones with the explosive would dismount and crawl in like leopards when they got closer. There was no use in worrying about it, and sneaking around in the dark with hostile intent was something well within the nomad warriors’ area of expertise. Now they could only wait.

He looked up; the sky was dense with stars through the clear cool high-desert air, more than he’d ever seen before. They wheeled above as the others waited in companionable silence; a quiet murmur told him that Sandra was praying—which couldn’t hurt and might possibly help. Some of the more robust psalms would fit in right now, and he wished he had enough faith in the stern Lutheran God of his ancestors to take comfort from reciting them.

Or even going Ho-la, Odhinn, he thought, his teeth white as he grinned in the darkness. Old One-Eye would be a natural for help in a setup like this… except that he loved to get heroes killed so he could stockpile them in Valhalla.

Adrienne stood by her horse, stroking its nose to calm it as the beast caught the fear-scent in the humans’ sweat.

Always the hardest, waiting, Tom thought. Abstractly, I couldn’t object if I died—I’ve lived better than most human beings, and seen more. He met her eyes, and she winked and shaped a kiss. Concretely, I would object. Got too much to live for right now. Maybe that’s why armies prefer teenagers!

Tully broke the quiet at last, when Sandra murmured an amen and crossed herself.

“Anyone want odds on how many will pocket the explosives instead of setting ’em as directed?” he said sourly. “Or possibly just throw them away?”

Adrienne shrugged. “Hopefully enough will use it the way they’ve been told. As to anyone who wants to keep the stuff… they’re going to get an awful surprise when the detonators go off, aren’t they? A very brief surprise, if a pound of plastique goes off in a hip pocket.”

Tom snorted slightly. It was grim humor, but that was the only type you were likely to get in a situation like this.

“It’s the ones who’ll try and use little balls of it in their muskets that worry me,” he said lightly, checking his watch. The Indians should be nearly at their targets by now. Give them time to set the charges and get out….

“That‘ll be a surprise, you betcha,” he went on easily. “You know, it would be interesting to see what did happen if you set fire to a pellet of Semtex under a wad and lead ball. I’d rather someone else did the experiment, though!”

Simmons crushed out a cigarette and said something to Kolo in the Yokut’s language; both men chuckled. Adrienne went over to the Scout and his tracker. “Godspeed and good luck,” she said, shaking their hands. “See you again when all this is over.”

They nodded and mounted, vanishing into the night. She took a long breath and looked at Tom.

First time I’ve ever gone into action with someone I loved, the big man thought. Got some of the same drawbacks as doing it with people who you just like a lot, only worse.

He put a fighting grin on his face, and shoved down absurd thoughts about talking her into going off somewhere else on an urgent mission.

“If we pull this off, we’re heroes,” he said. “Thanks of a grateful nation. I won’t have to sweat when I finally meet your dad.”

“If we don’t pull it off, we’re goats, of course,” Tully said, checking his machine pistol.

“I don’t think that would be our worst worry,” Tom replied.

Adrienne threw her arms around him. He could hear Tully murmuring to Sandra, but the moment was too intense for him to pay attention. Then he felt Adrienne stiffen.

He did too, at the sound from the valley behind them. Engines, many engines—the transports were beginning to warm up their turbines. Turning, he could see the exhausts, streaks of red fire in the night. The landing lights of the airstrips came on, harshly brilliant across the miles of distance.

“Looks like we didn’t allow quite enough time,” he said grimly, pulling down his night-sight goggles; the dimness sprang into silvery light. Adrienne did likewise and vaulted into the saddle.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They poured down the wash and out onto the plain, riding at a hand gallop; they might be seen, but they would fail if they didn’t hurry.

Damn, Tom thought, wishing he had a jeep or a motorbike. The great muscles of the gelding flexed between his legs, and the chilly wind cuffed at his face. You feel faster on a horse, but you aren’t really.

Closer, and they could see the first heavy transport taxi out on to the runway and halt with the rear ramp lowered. A column of men were coming down the dirt track from the camp; they were insect-tiny in the distance, but it was getting close to ride….

“Down!” Adrienne said, echoing his thought and throwing up a hand.

They all dismounted, all except One Ocelot. He took the reins of the horses as they swung down, then turned south and rode fast, leading them. Tom felt a moment of envy, despite the Zapotec’s slim chance of making it anywhere near home. He was out of it, with nothing to worry about but his own survival.

“All right,” Tom said. “Let’s go.”

“We couldn’t possibly pull this off if they weren’t so short of manpower,” Adrienne said, settling into a steady jog-trot beside him.

She was carrying one of the P90 machine pistols slung across her back. So were Tully and Tom; any fighting was probably going to be at close range. Sandra Margolin carried an O’Brien rifle. That was the weapon she was familiar with, and you didn’t change in midstream.

“That’s not the half of it,” Tom said—thinking of personnel-detection radars, sonic sensors, drones, robot perimeter-guard guns. “They’re running so tight they can’t afford to take basic precautions. Everything has to work to ten-tenths or they get a chain of disasters.”

Then he laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Adrienne said, her eyes fixed grimly ahead. At least one of the transports was going to get off the ground and under way.

Well, we’re in exactly the same situation, for starters.

“I was remembering our last date to go running,” he said aloud, and she laughed in turn… until the first Hercules closed its ramp and accelerated down the runway, dust boiling in the lights as its wheels cut the dirt. It lifted into the night and vanished; they could see its silhouette black against the stars as it wheeled overhead, and its riding lights blinking. Turbine throb echoed in their bones, and then another taxied out on to the strip, and men began to board.

Her lips moved then, in a silent curse or prayer. That was a hundred armed men headed toward the heart of her nation and another hundred filing up the ramp and being handed full magazines.

His country too, he supposed, if he lived and settled down here afterward; well, his great-grandparents had left Norway, hadn’t they? Daring the ocean and the Sioux for a chance at land of their own.

I’ll worry about that later.

What he wasn’t worried about was the increasingly brilliant haze of light ahead—they were running parallel to the northwest-tending dirt runway now. All those landing lights and searchlights would just kill the defenders’ night-sight and wouldn’t show them anything more than a few hundred yards away. His head turned north toward the ranch house. It was lit too, but more softly; at half a mile, its windows shone a gentler yellow into the night.

Was the Batyushkov or this Giovanni Colletta there, watching? Frightened, or exhilarated, or murmuring: “The die is cast”? Odd to be fighting a man and never even have seen his picture.

He might well be relaxing, sighing in relief, thinking I’ve done it! Tom smiled grimly. You shouldn’t feel the after-action buzz before the fat lady sang. Doing otherwise was an invitation to being the last casualty of an op and having your friends shake their heads over a beer and talk about how poor X nearly made it back.

“Over to you,” Adrienne said when they came to the edge of the lights. “Your area of expertise, Tom.”

“Right,” he said. “Everyone slow down. Take it at a brisk walk and look like you own the place. Sandy, catch your breath.”

She was in hard good condition—all of them were, after crossing the Mohave—but she didn’t have as much practice running under a load as the rest of them. He made himself wait until her face was less red and the desperate whooping of her panting had subsided. That despite the crackling tension that he could feel radiating from Adrienne as the next C-130 took off; they were closer to the runway now, and the four big props kicked a torrent of dust.

That made it natural to bend their heads and hold their hands over their eyes. Not only would this be impossible if the Bad Guys could set a proper perimeter guard, Tom thought. It would be impossible if they had any warning we were coming. The Batyushkovs and Collettas knew that any tall blond white men around here were on their side, and they were keyed up getting the Zapotec mercs onto the C-130s.

It was a mistake to get too focused on what you had planned, but it was a mistake everyone made. Tom licked sweat off his lips and hoped they’d go on making it at least a little longer.

The graveled surface of the road down from the camp crunched under the tread of soldiers’ boots, coming down in platoon columns. Behind them the searchlights from the guard towers played along the track, showing the endless rows of men in gray uniforms and peaked caps—a battalion was a lot bigger from ground level than you’d think, when you said eight hundred men. They marched in the rather stiff Russian style, swinging their free arms up across their chests from the elbow; from the look of it, the lieutenants and a couple of NCOs in each platoon were the men Batyushkov had brought in. A bit older than you’d expect men in junior positions to be, and a lot of them had Red Army medals jingling on their chests—Russkis were strange that way, wearing decorations on combat fatigues.

The armored cars were spaced out along the north side of the road, at two-hundred-and-fifty-yard intervals, ten or twenty yards back from the verge; they and the thin scatter of men between them kept the business ends of their weapons pointed at the marching troops—but fairly casually, in the way of men taking a routine precaution they don’t think will be really necessary. They were probably feeling relieved too—they’d gotten the wild men trained and on their way without a major mutiny.

The air was full of the sound of boots, of engines, rank with the stink of burnt kerosene.

The six-wheeled car Adrienne had called a Catamount was in the center; not far from it two senior officers were taking the salute of the troops passing by, returning the salute as each company did an eyes-right. One of the pair made the gesture in Russki fashion; he was tall and blond and wore a beret. The other was shorter and darker, wearing a Fritz helmet with a gray cloth cover, and he used the American style.

“Major Daniel Mattei,” Adrienne said softly, indicating him with a slight tilt of her head. “West Point, class of 1988, believe it or not. He’s commander of the Colletta Domain’s militia and the Prime’s household troops. A Family member, collateral. I don’t know the blond. Tom… that was the fourth plane.”

They were still too far away to really distinguish features. One of the men by Mattei did look over his shoulder toward them, but casually. With just a little luck, the Collettas would think they were Batyushkov men, and the Batyushkovs would think the same in reverse. Everyone being in the same uniform, with minor variations, helped a lot—and the uniform was the same gray fatigues Tom and the rest were wearing.

Still, they were going to need a distraction real soon now. And that was the fourth plane of eleven. Four hundred and eighty men; they probably intended to put the armor on the last two, to land after the infantry had seized enough ground. The whole thing was sort of pointless if they all got off….

“Sandra,” he said, without turning his head. “When the balloon goes up, you hit the deck and try for those two guys. Got it?”

“Go flat, take out those two,” she said. “Got it, big man.”

She was an excellent shot—as a hunter; he’d seen that. Whether she could actually pull the trigger when a human was in front of the sights was another matter, but it would sure help.

“Roy. On the count of three. One.”

He took a long deep breath; worry and thought went away as he exhaled. The commander of the Catamount was sitting on the turret, his left elbow hooked over a pintle-mounted Bren gun.

“Two.”

The details of the armored car came clear; six equally spaced wheels, a wedge-fronted box with a slab-sided turret. The driver was at the front in the center, three armor-glass windows in a semicircle around his position, with movable steel shutters and vision slits to cover them at need. Engine and transmission at the rear, turret in the center… and the Colletta tommy gun on the side of the hull.

“Three!”

Tully pulled a box the size of a paperback book out of a pouch. It had a handgrip in the center, and above it a covered button. His thumb flicked up the cover; he squeezed the grip safety and mashed his thumb down on the button.

Things seemed to move very slowly after that.

Jim Simmons waited patiently, the rifle snuggled against his shoulder. Fire and thunder woke in the night to the northeast, toward the mercenaries’ camp. He didn’t turn his head; no point in looking at a bright light.

He was flat on the dirt on one side of the runway; the wind from the propellers of the last Hercules had blown off his hat. The crack of his rifle was lost in the greater chorus of shouts, shots and screams that broke out closer to the ranch house, where the troops were marching down to embark. Somewhere a dog was barking, which was just what was needed to add the final touch of lovely chaos. Not that a dog could have smelled anything besides the stink of fuel burning. The spent cartridge spun away to his right and tinkled on a rock.

And two hundred yards away, where the two runways met and the control shack stood, a guard crumpled. The man beside him glanced over sharply; he’d have heard the splitting twick of the bullet, perhaps even the flat smack of its impact on flesh. Simmons shifted the crosshairs—two hundred yards was a clout shot, even in the bad light—and stroked the trigger again.

Crack.

The second man dropped, shot cleanly through the upper breastbone, blood splashing on the plank wall behind him. The impact wasn’t quite dead center, and the force of the blow turned him around and slammed him face-first into wall. He slid down it, smearing the blood.

“Go!” Simmons said crisply, snatching up the rifle as he bounced to his feet.

He dashed forward, running across the blunt nose of the next transport taxiing into position for takeoff. Kolo went before him, running with an elastic bounding stride and howling like a wolf every time his feet hit the packed dirt. He gained with every stride too, carrying nothing but the knives in his belt and the tomahawk in his hands. Simmons followed, eyes flicking over the windows in the long shed.

Motion, left two. He halted, the butt swinging smoothly up to his shoulder; crosshairs on the window… target backlit by lights in the room behind…

Crack. Glass shattered away from the .30-06 round. Crack. Just in case the bullet had been deflected by the glass or the frame.

He ran forward again. A dozen paces and Kolo was nearly at the door; it opened, and someone was standing there with a machine pistol in his grip—

Simmons halted again, and the rifle made the same smooth transit to his shoulder. This is going to be a little more tricky….

But Kolo was already diving to one side, not to escape the stubby muzzle that tracked him, but to give the Scout a clear shot. The crosshairs leveled on a face—it had to be a head shot, to make sure the man didn’t have enough time to fire.

Crack. The youth with the Uzi toppled backwards, a round blue hole in his forehead and the back blown out of his head. Crack. Crack. To discourage anyone thinking of following him out.

He pounded forward again. Kolo waited until he was nearly there, then dove through the open doorway. Simmons hurdled the body lying there.

“Eddie?” someone called, from a door to the right down the corridor. “Eddie?”

Kolo went through; Simmons followed just quickly enough to see his hand chop forward. The hatchet moved in a blur, and the technician in the swivel chair behind the radio spun with the blade sunk three inches deep between his eyes, the .45 flying from his hand. His boot heels drummed on the plank floor as he pinwheeled across the room, the chair rattling on its casters. Simmons stopped the chair with a slight grimace of distaste at the huge spastic yawn on the dead man’s face and pushed the sprattling body out on the floor. Then he set his rifle against the table and sat down before the shortwave set himself. It was a powerful unit, and there was a relay station on Mount Whitney; it would reach the coastal valleys without a problem. His fingers twisted the dials to the frequency that would be listening twenty-four hours a day, and he flipped the transmission switch:

“Climb Mount Etna. Climb Mount Etna. Climb Mount Etna.” That code had been John Rolfe’s idea, and for some reason the ghastly old bugger had thought it was hilarious. “Climb Mount Etna. Climb Mount—”

Something very heavy struck James Simmons on the point of the left shoulder. Cold flashed along his side; he clawed at the radio with his right hand, but still fell out of the chair. His legs buckled as he tried to rise, and then he was on his back, half under the table, mouth opening and closing as he tried hard to breathe.

Kolo was fighting with two men, shrieking like a mechanical saw going through a millstone as he leapt and slashed. A third lay curled around himself in the entranceway, trying to hold his rent stomach closed and screaming. The other two were close to Kolo, too close to shoot, trying to hit him with the butts of their rifles or stab with their bayonets. The Yokut moved between them as if they were in slow motion and he in real time, and red drops trailed from his knife. One man folded over with the blade buried in his gut; the other staggered back, firing blindly, blood flooding across his face from a cut that stretched from the corner of his mouth across an eyeball.

Two of the rounds punched home into Kolomusnim’s torso, and he dropped limply, the war scream cut off.

The room was suddenly empty except for the crackle of the radio speakers and the moans of the wounded. Simmons tried to breath again, but his insides felt wet. There were voices in the corridor outside, shrill with alarm. He fumbled behind himself, and found the toggle of the explosive charge.

Supposed to throw it in when we left, he thought, as he doggedly fought to close the numb fingers. So damn cold. Mother—

One last sharp tug.

“Three!” Tom said.

Tully’s thumb came down on the button. Half a mile away, the Semtex exploded where the Nyo-Ilcha warriors had crawled through the night to pack it around the bases of the watchtowers.

The light from the flashes came a fractional second before the sound, a multitude of thudding, snapping barks. Sound and flashes rippled like a strobe light, the explosions overlapping but distinct. The towers were thread-thin at this distance, the three he could see; their searchlights went out all at once, lowering the ambient light by about half. The blockhouse at the top of one tower seemed to fall straight down; the shock must have blown the four heavy pine logs away from the cross braces, and they’d opened out like someone doing splits. The other two shook, trembled, and then fell inward like hammers—which was exactly the effect the logs of the blockhouses at their summits would have on the machine gunners inside, and any Zapotecs in the tents beneath, when they hit the ground. Dust billowed up, cold under the starlight and the distant floods.

“Well, well, Good Star’s men did place all their charges,” Tom said quietly, as he began to walk briskly toward the armored car.

Behind him Sandra Margolin dropped to her belly in the dirt. Of the three of them, she was the mostly likely to make someone twig that instant too soon—nobody was going to miss the fact that she was a woman, not even in fatigues and not even for the half second that the rough baggy clothing might fool someone looking at Adrienne’s taller, sleeker curves.

Besides…

Crack.

The shot came from behind him, and the tall blond man in the beret a hundred yards ahead staggered, clutching at his arm.

Tom could have placed the location of the shooter easily from the sound alone, but he was expecting it. Everyone else was staring off toward the tent camp, and the chorus of screams and shouts there. And the high shrill whoops, and the flat banging of muskets. Some of the Russian officers and noncoms marching toward the transport aircraft with their Zapotec trainees had hit the ground and had their personal arms out, and they were bellowing at their charges to do the same. Tom was worried about their reflexes; they’d been there when it hit the fan before.

Less worried about the Colletta household troops manning the armor or lining the road. This was their first taste of the devil’s stew, mostly.

Crack.

The blond went down with limp finality, but the smaller man beside him had hit the dirt with commendable speed.

Good girl, Tom thought; she’d gotten one definitely at least.

“Good girl!” Tully said. “Didn’t freeze, and kept on thinking.”

The armored car loomed up, massive and shadowed—most of the light was coming from the landing lights of the airstrip behind him, and they were placed low and pointed straight up. The commander was still out of the turret hatch, his head cocked as he listened to something on the headphones he held in one hand rather than wearing. Now he was looking back a little, at the group of figures in gray field uniforms approaching him, but the light welling up out of the turret would make them indistinct. It made him very clear to Tom, down to the Colletta flash on his shoulder.

Tom began shouting: in Russian, keeping his voice deliberately blurred. The commander of the Catamount probably didn’t know Russian very well, and wouldn’t expect to understand what this tall blond man was shouting. He would recognize the sound of the language and immediately assume it was one of his lord’s Batyushkov allies.

Five yards from the vehicle, Tom began to run. Adrienne and Tully were both at his heels, but he left them behind; people were usually surprised at how suddenly Tom Christiansen could accelerate, although not those who’d seen him as a running back at Ironwood High. His legs were long enough that he walked quickly even without taking fast strides, and when he did…

Three paces, and he was moving fast enough to leap, reaching for one of the U-brackets welded to the car’s hull. The commander started to drop down into the turret; unfortunately, he also tried to reach for the pintle-mounted machine gun beside the hatch and to shout something into his throat mike, all at the same time. The net result was that he did nothing for a crucial second and a half.

Tom’s hand clamped on the bracket. His shoulder muscles crackled as he heaved, combining with the thrust of his legs to throw him up onto the flat deck of the fighting vehicle in a single six-foot bound. The muzzle of the machine gun swung toward him; there was nothing wrong with the other man’s instincts, although he wasn’t going to acquire the experience he needed to use them properly. Tom grabbed the gun in his left hand and wrenched it brutally away; that turned the weapon into a long lever at the end of Tom’s even longer arm, a combination that slammed the man holding it into the side of the hatchway with enormous force. He gave an agonized wheeze as it rammed into his body just below the ribs like a blunt axe, but his hand scrabbled at his belt and the holstered .45 anyway.

The determination was admirable, but futile. Tom’s right hand closed on his throat and rammed his head sideways into the upright hatch cover. Bone hit steel with a sound like heavy dense wood splintering under an iron maul. Wetness spattered Tom’s wrist; he ignored it and surged the man’s body up in a straight lift and threw it aside. It tumbled limply on to the rear deck of the Catamount, then slid over the side like something made of jelly.

Adrienne was right behind him. As the body cleared the hatchway she went into it head first… except that her right hand went before it, with the FN FiveSeveN pistol, and her left to brace her against something in the interior. Tom caught her by the rear loop of her webbing harness, taking some of the weight.

The little weapon yapped shrilly, three times, hard to hear amid the growing clamor—the burble of the idling diesel would have been enough to cover it. He was profoundly glad it was her doing this part and not him; he was anything but a pistol artist, particularly not in the strait confines of an AFV’s turret.

“Clear!” she called, and wiggled backward.

He helped, then popped the gunner’s hatch, reached in and pulled out the body of the man who’d occupied that position; it required a bit of shoving and shaking, as well as strength, to prevent the limp weight from catching on things. The dead gunner had a hole in the back of his neck. Most of the front of it missing in a ragged hole that was still pumping out blood, and the body dripped fluids as it came free. Tom threw the corpse away with unnecessary violence.

While he did, Tully was running around to the front of the armored car and leaping up the slope of the wedge-shaped glacis plate. The hatch over the driver’s compartment was open, and the central window was spattered with brains and bits of matter. Tully dragged the body out; using both hands and his back, but not taking too much time about it. He was five-six and scrawny, but his strength in a tight spot was surprising.

The whole business had taken perhaps forty-five seconds from the moment Tom made his move.

Now he slid into the hatchway himself, feet first. It was well enough lit inside, and the surfaces were mostly painted or enameled white for better visibility anyway. And it was more spacious than any APC he’d ever ridden in, too. The Commonwealth didn’t need to design its fighting vehicles to resist modern weaponry, only small arms at most. This was essentially a big overpowered cross-country amphibious truck with a turret on top. Tom took the gunner’s position to the left of the breech of the Bofors gun and the big carousel of ammunition beneath it, ignoring the tackiness and the smell, and wiping off the control surfaces with a handkerchief and the sleeve of his tunic until they were clean enough for government work.

Adrienne had given him a rundown on the fighting machine, and a glance was enough to fix the needful details in his mind’s eye. Most of the middle of the turret was taken up with the cannon’s workings; an automatic loader cycled rounds up to the breech, presenting the five-round clips to the action; the spent casings ejected out a port in the side of the turret. The gunner’s couch-style seat was leather cushioned, with a screen and control yoke before it—there was a backup set of optical sights, and manual wheels for elevation and traverse, but New Virginia had bought state of the art otherwise. Everything stabilized, and a laser rangefinder tied into the sighting screen with feedback through the ballistic computer. The screen showed everything out front, a compressed 180-degree display from a wide-lens pickup right over the gun’s barrel and two more at either front corner of the turret; in the center of it was a circle with diagonal arms just touching its perimeter. Place the pipper over the target, and the gun would automatically adjust so the shells hit right there. Another circle, smaller and to the left, gave the point of impact for the coaxial machine gun. The controls were computerized simplicity, a horizontal bar with upright handgrips at each end. Twist left like you did with a bicycle’s handlebars and the turret rotated left; twist right for the other direction. Pull back and the gun went up; push forward and it depressed; button under the left thumb for the co-ax, and a foot pedal for firing the main gun. Dial on the control panel to select type of ammunition and fusing.

The screen had magnification up to twelve times, too, and full light amplification. The scene outside was as clear as an overcast noon.

He pulled on the intercom headset as he ran through the controls once more, touching everything so his hands and feet would know what to do. That wouldn’t make him an expert, but he didn’t have to refight the Battle of 73 Easting , either.

“I’ve got the unit push for the Colletta troops,” Adrienne’s voice said in his ear. “Tully, you’ve got the closest thing to the local accent, male variety. I’m switching you live. Sound hysterical.”

“No problemo,” Tully said.

“Switching… now.”

He went on with a thickening of his native Arkansas, in a voice shrill with fear and excitement:

“We’re under attack! The Injuns are attacking! The strike force are joining them! They’re breaking into the bunkers and taking the ammuntion. I say again, we’re under attack! Open fire on any strike force or Indians you see!”

He repeated himself and then squealed: “No! God, no! Help—” and then let loose a bone-chilling scream of agony, dying off in a gurgle and a click as the exterior link was cut. Then a hoot of laughter… Roy had a rather gruesome sense of humor, when you came right down to it.

As Tully spoke, Tom settled his big hands on the control yoke and felt the quiver of the feedback. A twist, and the lower pip of the screen slid over the dirt road, still full of the startled mercenaries. His left thumb jabbed down again and again, and a streak of tracer lashed out like a finger of red arching fire as the co-ax stuttered long bursts into the packed rows of men. Adrienne was firing the pintle-mounted gun above, standing in the commander’s position with her head and shoulders out of the turret.

“Yes!” Tom shouted.

The rest of the Colletta troopers were firing at the mass of Zapotecs and their Russian cadre too!

And the Russians, at least, were shooting back. With empty weapons their students just hugged the ground, or less wisely jumped up and ran and were cut down. Both the lighter armored cars were firing as well; just then the landing lights on the airstrip went out, and the light level outside fell to something approaching full night. It didn’t affect the armored car’s screens at all, save for an imperceptible flicker as the intensification went up; probably someone at the Colletta HQ wanted to put the Zapotecs at a disadvantage. Behind them the control shack for the airstrip went up in a blast that flung its plank walls away as black confetti in front of orange-red flame.

“Good show, Jim!” Adrienne called, and whooped.

Tom ignored that, and the Indian mercenaries. The ones left on the ground were doomed anyway, and he didn’t much like shooting at effectively unarmed men. Instead he lifted his thumb and kept the turret swinging; it had a nice fast traverse. A few seconds later the main sighting pip slid onto the side of the Cheetah on his right. That was lashing the road with both weapons, a heavy machine gun and a belt-fed grenade launcher beside it… and both of those would rip the thin armor that surrounded him the way a machete would open up a soda can. The grenades arched out almost slowly enough to see, bursting with bright snaps in rows like firecrackers.

The Cheetah spurted forward onto the dirt road, its turret whickering spiteful flames in the darkness. Tom’s foot came down on the firing pedal.

BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!

The 40mm automatic cannon cycled through three rounds as it pistoned back and forth, and a massive blade-shaped muzzle flash belled out from its muzzle. The twelve-ton weight of the Catamount surged back on its suspension as the massive recoil was transmitted through the trunnions to the turret and hull, like three hard punches in succession.

Those shells were fused for contact; each punched into the little vehicle and exploded, one in the turret, one in the fighting compartment and one in the fuel tank between the engine and the turret basket. That was enough to rip the Cheetah apart along the seams of its welds; fractional seconds later the belts of grenade ammuntion went off; the contents of the tank sprayed out into a finely divided mist of hydrocarbon mixed with air and then they exploded—the original meaning of a fuel-air bomb. Tom grunted as the big armored car rocked back on its wheels, and Adrienne yipped in involuntary alarm; the Cheetah’s turret went flipping up into the air like a steel tiddlywink. Most of the rest of it was converted into the equivalent of fragments from an enormous grenade. Some of them went pting! off the hull of the Catamount.

He didn’t think they’d have to worry about the Colletta riflemen between them and the armored car, much.

“Goose it, Tully!” he called, reversing the controls and swinging the turret northwest with a wrenching suddenness that made the servos whine in protest.

Jesus, I was a Ranger, not a tanker—

The armored car was moving before the first syllable was out of his mouth; Tully threw it into reverse and swung the wheel hard right. All four of the first two pair of wheels were steerable; the Catamount had a tighter turning radius than many much smaller civilian vehicles. That turned the bow back toward the remaining Cheetah at the other end of the line considerably faster than the turret could have done alone.

Someone there had realized what was happening. The little car was scooting away, its turret reversed to fire behind it and the twin bars of tracer swiveling toward him. They were throwing .50 caliber hardpoint bullets, each the size of a thumb and moving at better than three thousand feet per second. If they hit the thin armor of the Catamount, they’d be moving at least half that when they went through him, or Adrienne or Tully.

But driving straight away from him was a bad idea. Zero-deflection shot… His foot came down on the firing pedal.

BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!

“Tom, the transports!” Adrienne called urgently from where she rode with her head and shoulders out of the commander’s hatch.

As she spoke he heard thumps on the roof of the turret, and the gunner’s hatch popped open. He looked up, and saw Sandra Margolin’s pale, strained face; she climbed down across him—which would have been interesting, under other circumstances—and then dropped to crouch on the floor of the turret basket. She even muttered an apology as she did it. He checked quickly to see that she wasn’t in a position were she’d be in the path of the gun breech or loader.

Adrienne went on sharply: “Tully, Sandra’s here. Get us out on the runway. Now.”

Tully did, straightening the wheels and hitting the accelerator. The engine was a three-hundred horsepower turbocharged diesel, and the twelve-ton vehicle had acceleration like a jeep. It had a lot more inertia, though, and Tom braced himself with a foot and a hand as it bounced over the ditch on the side of the road, over several bumpy objects—he resolutely didn’t think of them as human bodies, probably still alive until a dozen tons rolled over them—and across the strip of dirt. The fence beside the runway was chain-link, with barbed wire on top.

“Close the hatch!” he called to Adrienne as the fence loomed up in the field of the gun screen; you could get decapitated by something like that, if you weren’t careful.

She dropped down, pulling the hatch after her; the Catamount lurched as they struck the wire. Some of it broke in a shower of sparks; one of the thick timber posts snapped across and tumbled out over the dirt runway, dragging open a section like a huge door. The Catamount swayed to one side as Tully cut a sharp turn—he wasn’t used to driving something this heavy or overpowered either, but Jesus, Odhinn and Almighty Thor witness he was doing a good job!—and hit the gas. The Catamount surged forward like its namesake, going after the sixth transport. The big plane had its ramp up, and the rising scream of its engines came even through the closed hatch.

Tom Christiansen had ridden in a lot of C-130 transports, a couple of them into places where they thought there might be hostiles waiting near the landing fields with heat-seeking missiles. He could imagine exactly the fear and confusion aboard the big aircraft, the dim light and crowding and the mind-numbing noise.

And he could imagine exactly what the hundred-odd men packed into it cheek to jowl were about to experience.

The aiming pip slid across the flat rear of the Hercules, eight hundred yards away to the west. It tilted as the nose left the ground…. And Tom’s foot hit the firing pedal.

BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP! The first burst of three rounds hit the thin aluminum of the closed ramp like a giant blade. The ramp dropped open as the shells cut the couplings, shedding great rooster tails of sparks as it dragged on the ground.

BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP! Flashes as the shells exploded in the troop compartment. Tom’s lips writhed back from his teeth in a grimace of horror.

BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!

He hit something vital this time, the control cabin or the hydraulics. The huge aircraft stopped accelerating away; it tried to turn sharply left while it was traveling faster than a race car, and then pitched over onto one wing as it overbalanced. There was an explosion of sparks, probably from one of the props beating itself to death against the ground, then a real explosion—vaporized kerosene from one of the wing tanks hitting something white-hot. Tom flung his hand up in a reflex action, even though there was nearly a thousand yards of space and a quarter-inch of armor plate between him and the holocaust that followed. A towering ball of flame enveloped the Hercules, and engines and part of a wing flipped out of it. The armored car rocked back, harder than it had from the recoil of its own weapon, then surged forward as Tully hit the brakes. The frame of the C-130 showed again for a moment, and then the stored munitions on board went off; bits and pieces flew into the air, trailing fire and white smoke through the night.

“Jesus,” Tom whispered. “A hundred and thirty men. Jesus!”

“Tom!” Adrienne said sharply.

“Yah,” he replied, scrubbing a hand across his face.

Tully gave a rebel yell and swung the car around in a tight leaning circle—not quite on one side’s wheels—and they raced back down the airstrip. Tom turned the turret ninety degrees, waiting as the motion dragged the sighting pip across the remaining five C-130s. Those were empty of troops, and probably abandoned by their three-man crews at this point. It wasn’t necessary to destroy them either, just to put a couple of shells into their noses. They wouldn’t be going anywhere after that.

BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!

The screen let him see how the bows of each peeled back as the shells hit and exploded—at less than a hundred yards, he was putting them right through the windscreens into the control cabins of each. Some of them caught fire, in a low-intensity way, but none of them blew up.

The big fuel store did blow up when he put a couple of rounds into it; the huge pyre reached into the night, like the funeral of Giovanni Colletta’s blood-thirsty ambitions. It also cast a good deal of light; someone opened up with a light machine gun, and the bullets beat on the hull like iron hail on a bucket. He backtracked along the chain of tracer rounds and discouraged them with a couple of rounds.

“Well, now, do we go help Good Star, or do we just drive out into the desert and watch the lovely fireworks until it’s time to meet up with Jim and Henry?” he said.

“Neither,” Adrienne said tautly. “Nearly half of them got off the ground. There’s still a chance they could pull it off—or at least kill a lot of New Virginians.”

“Damned right,” Sandra called from the bottom of the turret, where she sat with her arms around her knees. “But what the hell can we do about it, Adri? This thing can’t fly.”

“No, but those Mosquitoes can,” she said. “Tully, get us over there.”

Tom opened his mouth to object, then slowly closed it. He knew exactly how that conversation would go: she’d say she was going, and he could come or stay as he pleased. And he’d get into the cockpit right beside her. Why bother having an argument?

The fact is, he thought, while his eyes stayed on the screen, you’re doing this from love of country, and I’m doing it for love of you, my Valkyie. I don’t love this country—not much, and not yet. I may come to, warts and all, if I live here and my children are born here. But you do, and so I have to follow.