Houston Attack

by Randy Wayne White

  “Yes, sir!” the guard shouted mechanically. “Right away, sir!”

  Williams released him and then turned to watch as the guard hustled off toward the brick path. As he hurried away, Williams dropped his cigar on the floor of the porch and ground it out with the heel of his boot. With a glance over his shoulder he took out a ring of keys, unlocked the door, and went inside.

  Hawker wanted to follow. But he couldn’t. Not right away, because the guard was coming straight at him.

  The vigilante forced his way into the bushes. His left foot caught on a root and he fell backward. The Colt Commando snagged itself in the thicket and hung by its sling above him.

  “Who goes there?” the guard challenged in a half-whisper.

  Hawker slowly reached for the assault rifle overhead. The noise the branches made when he moved seemed deafening, and he stopped.

  “Hey? Who’s in there?”

  In front of him the beam of a flashlight swept the bushes, and then there was a rifle barrel stabbing at him, a foot from his face. The guard knelt, peering into the thicket, and his eyes grew wide when he saw Hawker.

  “Who in the hell—”

  The guard never got a chance to finish his question. Hawker grabbed the rifle barrel and jerked the man into the bushes on top of him. He wrestled the weapon free, but he could not unseat the guard.

  The guard hit him twice in the face, hard. As Hawker brought his hands up to block the next flurry of punches, the guard locked his hands around Hawker’s throat.

  Standing next to the bulk of Skate Williams, the guard hadn’t impressed Hawker as being particularly big.

  But he had a grip like a bear trap.

  Catching his wrists cross-handed, Hawker punched the man’s hands away from his neck, then slid his thumbs inside the man’s cheeks and ripped with all his strength.

  The man’s scream was more like a hiss of anguish, and Hawker was thankful for that. Having his cheeks pulled open had taken the fight out of him, and now the guard wanted only to get away. As he turned to crawl safely out of the bushes, Hawker grabbed him by the back of the shirt and jerked him back. He drew the little Walther and used the butt to club him twice behind the ear.

  The guard kicked once, then lay still.

  Hawker pushed the dead weight of the man off him, recovered the assault rifle, then checked to see if the man’s body could be seen from the brick path.

  It couldn’t.

  Hawker hurried on toward the cottage, keeping low.

  The front door was closed once again, and the light inside was brighter. Hawker knelt at the porch, then crawled around to the back window and looked through the bars inside.

  What he saw both gladdened and sickened him.

  Cristoba de Abella was there. Still alive. Healthy. In good shape except for the strip of gauze bandage on her left arm. She stood beside a narrow bed. There was a lamp on the desk, which threw a soft yellow light over the room. In that first moment Hawker realized that he had underestimated her beauty.

  She wore a sheer white nightgown that came down to her thighs. Her legs were long and nut-colored, and in the light he could see that a soft, peach-hued fuzz grew on them. Her hair was blue-black, combed long to the small of her back, and it glistened in the light. Beneath the translucent nightgown, her breasts were abrupt swells, firm and heavy, that peaked at the dark expanse of nipple.

  Her face seemed more striking than he remembered: the sculptured Indio nose and cheeks; the soft curve of chin; the proud Mayan eyes, like brown liquid pools, which were devoid of all human emotion.

  Except for now.

  Now the eyes of the young Cristoba de Abella showed more than fear. They showed loathing and disgust—and terror.

  Skate Williams stood before her, dwarfing her. He had stripped off his jacket and shirt. His belly was covered with hair, a massive gray blob. His trousers were down around his ankles and, ludicrously, he wore European-style red bikini shorts.

  His big hands were on Cristoba’s shoulders, and Hawker could hear his voice through the window.

  “Now look at it from my point of view, señorita, darling.” Williams smiled. “When they brought you in here, you was damaged goods. Had that nasty little bullet hole through the meat of your arm. I could have let you die. Could have just told that greasy Mexican to cart you on back to that nice little bar down Rio Bravo way. They got a show there with a dog and a big nigger—and they’d’a had you on that stage the next day.” His smile broadened. “But, instead, out of the goodness of my heart I took you in. Had a fine doctor tend you. And, hell, it was you who promised that if we didn’t stick no needles in you to make you more … loyal … you’d be extra real nice to me.” The smile vanished, and he shook her roughly. “Well, darlin’, we didn’t stick no needles in you, and now you’d damn well better be nice to me. Real nice. And I mean right now.”

  Cristoba gave a low, throaty moan of revulsion as Williams’s hand slid down her arm and found her breast, squeezing it roughly.

  She tried to pull away. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Please. That hurts.”

  Williams leaned over her, kissing the young girl’s neck. “Then be nice to me, Cristy, baby. Get down on your knees and be nice—”

  “No!” The girl tried to jerk away, and as she did, her face turned toward the window where Hawker now stood. She saw him then, her eyes growing wide in recognition, and her one free arm reached out as if yearning to take Hawker’s hand. But then Williams pulled her back and ripped the gown from her shoulders and clamped his wide mouth on her pale breast.

  Hawker saw no more because he was running. Running toward the front door of the cottage. Running, not caring any longer for the mission or the unanswered questions. Running with but one thought: to get his hands on Skate Williams and to kill him; kill him slowly.

  But as he slid around the corner of the cottage, the Colt assault rifle at hip level and ready, several things happened at once.

  The searing beam of a searchlight caught him full in the face. Then a siren screamed a long, continuous wail from somewhere near the main house, like an old World War II warning to head for the bomb shelters.

  The firecracker crackle of automatic weapons fire erupted from a line of trees several hundred yards away, kicking up tufts of dirt far in front of Hawker.

  In that sudden chaos Hawker still had but one thought: to get inside, kill Williams, and free the girl.

  But as he reached for the railing to swing himself up on the porch, Williams charged halfway out the door, his pants still down. In the microsecond it took him to realize Hawker was not one of his men, he fired two quick shots from the heavy-caliber revolver in his right hand.

  Hawker ducked, then sprayed the door with a quick burst of the Commando. But too late. Williams had ducked back inside.

  Hawker stood with the intention of shooting away the lock, but a flurry of slugs from more guards splintered the wood on the porch in front of him. He could see them running at him: a dozen guards, all with heavy weapons, all firing at once.

  He could do nothing but retreat.

  And run. Run for his life and take as many of the guards with him as he could.

  As Hawker reluctantly trotted toward the darkness of the ranch’s back acreage, he heard the high, pleading scream of the girl: “Help me! Oh, please, you must help me!”

  I will, Hawker thought as he held the assault rifle on full automatic, and three more guards fell in his wake. Hang on for just one more night, Cristoba, and I will. I promise.…

  twelve

  The next two hours were a nightmare as James Hawker ran the gauntlet of his life.

  It was like barging through a forest filled with hornets’ nests. Every twenty yards, it seemed, he stumbled into a new one.

  Twice he tried to work his way back to the cottage in which Cristoba was imprisoned. And twice a fresh charge of guards pushed him back.

  Finally Hawker had to admit that he had no choice but to make a fighting retreat. He couldn’t do
anyone any good if he was captured or killed.

  Hawker lost the first set of guards in the best way he knew how. Running toward the back acreage of Williams’s inner estate, Hawker took cover behind a stone bench and rummaged in his knapsack until he found what he was looking for.

  He was in, he realized absently, some kind of ornamental garden. He wondered if any of the men chasing him had ever guessed they might die in such a pretty spot.

  In a few seconds the guards came fanning down the hill, shoulder to shoulder. They fired only sporadic bursts now, a covering fire to clear the path ahead.

  Hawker waited until they were about forty-five yards away, then pulled the pins from two M-34 incendiary/fragmentation grenades. The M-34 is one of the most deadly grenades ever manufactured by the Department of Defense. It kills two ways. The rolled steel body is serrated to help fragmentation. And the four hundred twenty-five grams of white phosphorous filler burns at twenty-seven hundred degrees Centigrade for approximately one minute.

  If the shrapnel doesn’t get you, the fire will.

  The grenades work on a four-second delay system, so Hawker counted to a nervy “one-thousand-three” and then hurled them overhanded in quick succession.

  There was an almost simultaneous double explosion followed by a blinding white light.

  Hawker knew what was coming, so he turned away. Even so, his peripheral vision caught the shocking brightness of the light and saw the handful of men wither beneath its heat.

  Caught within that fiery white hell, their screams were short-lived.

  Hawker punched a fresh clip into the Colt Commando, adjusted the knapsack over his shoulder, and continued uninterrupted to the back adobe wall.

  Hawker knew that by climbing the wall he might pinpoint his position for Williams’s men. The electronic security system was certainly sophisticated enough. But he couldn’t worry about that now. He unbelted the grappling hook, tossed it over the wall, then climbed hand over hand to the top.

  What he saw on the other side surprised him. He expected to see Ranch #3, and he did. But what surprised him was that Ranch #3 looked nothing like the other ranches. Since it was supposed to be an experimental farm, he expected to see barns and outbuildings.

  There were none of these things.

  Instead he saw what looked like a single large factory complex surrounded by miles and miles of greenhouses. The greenhouses weren’t the glass structures he had seen in the Chicago area. These were shielded by translucent nets, under which heat lights blazed beneath sprinkler systems. Through the nets Hawker could see long rows of what looked to be sapling trees.

  What in the hell was Williams growing? he wondered. It wasn’t marijuana. And it sure as hell wasn’t poppies. But what else would explain the conversation he had heard between the two guards about a “shipment” leaving tonight?

  For the moment Hawker didn’t have time to give it much thought. As he dropped from the wall he heard a muffled voice call out, “There he is!”

  Immediately shots exploded from the heavy mesquite brush that covered the field between Hawker and the distant greenhouses. Hawker jumped to his feet, ran a zigzag course, then dove into the cover of the wiry mesquite.

  Sighting through the Star-Tron scope, Hawker surveyed the field before him.

  Had the situation not been so dangerous, Hawker would have smiled at how Williams’s soldiers stood out in the owlish vision of the Star-Tron.

  He could see all six of them very plainly. They knelt or lay in what they thought to be the protective shadows of the mesquite. In the eerie red glow of the Star-Tron Hawker watched what he assumed was the team leader signal for two of his men to move forward.

  As they moved Hawker prepared to change positions quickly before calling out to the men, “Hey! Freeze right where you are and listen, because I’m only going to say this once. I’m going to give you assholes one chance to drop your weapons and let me pass, because if you don’t—”

  They never allowed him to finish. Heavy weapons fire ripped wildly through the cover, seeking his voice.

  Hawker dived, rolled, and dived again before coming up on one knee, the assault rifle at ready.

  He had given them their chance to get the hell out alive. And they had refused.

  Hawker brought the 135mm Star-Tron to bear on the chest of the leader. Because the Colt Commando is a shortened version of the M-16, its accuracy is not quite as good. It was built for tough in-fighting and tight situations. But Williams’s soldiers were only about fifty yards away, so Hawkker didn’t require pinpoint accuracy. He brought the cross hairs to bear on the team leader’s chest, squeezed off two careful shots, and the team leader dropped as if he had been magically deboned.

  Hawker waited to see if the others had figured out what was going to happen to them.

  The heavy return of fire told him they hadn’t.…

  Shooting sitting ducks wasn’t Hawker’s idea of sport. But this wasn’t sport. It was war.

  One by one, Hawker brought the Star-Tron scope vectoring on each man in the squad, and the 5.56mm slugs smacked through their flesh traveling at eight hundred eighty meters per second, more than twice the speed of sound.

  When the dirty work was done, Hawker got to his feet and jogged through the thick mesquite toward the factorylike building in the distance.

  From every direction, it seemed, came the haunting wail of sirens. A thin smile touched Hawker’s sweat-streaked face. Skate Williams had had his big dinner, and he had planned on a night of fun with the pretty litte Indio girl from south of the border. A night of recreation spiced with the perverted allure of rape.

  Well, Hawker was going to give him a night of recreation. But the only thing going to be raped was Williams’s confused little army.

  From the woods, now behind him, Hawker could hear the alto hacking of dogs. He knew that the men at Ranch #3 would be on full alert: Stop unknown attacker or attackers from exiting the compound. Those would be the logical orders. But those orders, in reality, were to his advantage.

  Hawker thought about it as he ran. The security force from the main ranch would be coming after him in a wave through the woods. But the soldiers from Ranch #3 would probably be spread out around the fence that no doubt enclosed the area. If he could draw all their fire toward the center of the compound, he might be able to find a way to slip out unseen while they traded shots with each other.…

  It sounded good.

  But, as always, he would have to play it by ear.

  As Hawker ran he realized, oddly, how much more … alive … he felt in these situations of life and death. His concentration was total. His objective was always perfectly clear. There were no half-truths; no dingy grays of reality. There was only the clarity of his mission: to succeed completely or fail totally. And everything depended on his physical strength, his endurance, and his intellect.

  There were no time-outs in this game. No rules; no disputed calls; no second chances.

  In such a conflict every moment seemed distilled. Every minute seemed pure. He enjoyed perfect communication between body and mind.

  Sometimes Hawker told himself he had become a vigilante because there were great wrongs in the country that needed to be righted. Even to himself he sometimes played the role of the middle-American knight in slightly tarnished armor, the beer-drinking patron of the week, the terrorized, and the leaderless. And while it was true that there were great wrongs being committed, and some of them could only be righted by a vigilante, Hawker couldn’t pretend those were the only reasons.

  It was in the rare moments that he understood it best; the singular moments of honesty and clarity, such as this one, when he admitted to himself why he really did what he did. He did it because it was what he did best.

  And he loved it.

  Ahead was the first line of greenhouses. Hawker slowed by the first one and looked in. The covering was made of a common black screen that reduced the harshness of the sun. Inside were about a dozen rows of thin trees, tw
enty to a row. The trees were about twelve to fifteen feet tall with shiny, thick stems and short, pale green leaves. Spaced above every row of trees were bare light bulbs and a sprinkler system made of PVC pipe. The trees were planted in black plastic buckets and there were plastic tubes looping into each bucket: a hydroponic feeding system.

  A nursery?

  For a moment Hawker couldn’t believe it. This is what the mysterious Ranch #3 was—a nursery? He rubbed his chin. It didn’t make any sense. Why the heavy security? Certainly there had to be more at stake than the weird story he had heard of Skate Williams’s preparation for the coming world collapse.

  But what?

  Hawker stripped a couple of leaves off one tree and held them to his nose. They smelled good—like fresh tea leaves. He bit a small piece of one leaf, chewed it, then spat. The leaf was bitter, and it immediately numbed his tongue.

  There was, something here that touched one of Hawker’s memory electrodes. Some past bit of information; some subject he had once done a good bit of reading on.

  And suddenly he remembered.

  Suddenly he realized what it was all about.

  It finally made sense: the slave laborers, the factory, the army, the ingenious franchise system—everything. When illuminated by the knowledge of Skate Williams’s greed, everything fell neatly into place.

  Hawker’s one problem was that he had underestimated the man’s greed. And his ruthlessness. And his cleverness.

  But now it all made sense.

  Williams did have it all: oil, water, produce, and beef. Especially beef—if Hawker was right. But what else explained the conversation he had heard between the two guards? Something about tonight’s shipment going straight to the streets? What else answered the implied question: Where did it go when it didn’t go straight to the streets?

  Williams had indeed developed a practical method to take control of a massive cross section of the American public.

  As nauseating as his method was, Williams had found the final solution to the question of total control.

  And that was his goal, as Hawker now knew—total control. Skate Williams didn’t just want to be a big man in Texas; he wanted to be the biggest man in the country.