Blood Lust td-85

by Warren Murphy

  Everyone had gotten into a gas suit by this time, including Remo's driver. Remo searched the cockpit for a mask of his own. He found one clipped under the dashboard. He pulled it over his head. It was a filter mask, with no attached oxygen tank. When he inhaled, the air smelled of charcoal, but it was breathable.

  For several minutes the Arabs tended their fans, manually rotating them so their airstreams overlapped.

  "Modern warfare," Remo grumbled. "Maybe next year they'll have automatic turning gears. Like K-Mart."

  The helicopter quickly returned, blowing up more sand and adding to the confusion. Remo decided to wait for the sand to settle down before driving off. If anything, it got worse. Oddly, the sand seemed to be blowing back from the front lines, despite the fans' furious output. The blades were completely enveloped in dusty clouds.

  Through the triple-paned windshield Remo could hear panicky exclamations in Arabic, none of which he understood.

  Prince General Bazzaz fought his way through the gathering grit. He pounded on the door.

  Remo opened it. "What's wrong?" he shouted over the din.

  "We must retreat." His voice was muffled by his mask.

  "Why? The fans are doing fine."

  "The Iraiti are advancing. It is war."

  "With tanks?"

  "No, they have outsmarted us. They have fans too. And theirs are bigger than ours."

  "You're joking," Remo exclaimed.

  "I am not. This vehicle is needed for the retreat. I am sorry. You are on your own."

  "Thanks a bunch," Remo said dryly.

  "You are welcome a bunch. Now, please, step out."

  "Not a chance," Remo snarled, gunning the engine.

  The prince general jumped back. He wasn't accustomed to disobedience. While he was getting used to it, Remo slammed the door.

  Turning, the prince general gave out a cry. The trucks started up. They advanced. That is, they went south, driving toward Remo, their fans blowing to beat the band, but doing nothing more to dispel the sandstorm.

  Carrying Bazzaz, the helicopter lifted off in the swirl, turning its tail and flying low to the ground. And the truck line roared past Remo.

  The dashboard gas sensors raised their screeching to a new level. Remo reached up under the leather and found a nest of wiring. He pulled them loose. The screeching stopped, although a few angry lights still winked.

  "That's better," Remo muttered, sliding behind the wheel. He started the APC lumbering forward.

  "Abominadad, here I come," he said.

  Remo sent the APC bouncing over the dunes and wadis. Visibility soon dropped to zero. The color of the sandstorm slowly changed. It went from dun to a mustard yellow, until it resembled airborne diarrhea.

  Holding the wheel steady, Remo relied on his natural sense of direction. He knew, somehow, that he was driving true north, and that was all that concerned him.

  He didn't see the oncoming truck until its sand-colored grille emerged from the swirl like a shark with bad teeth.

  It was a light truck, Remo realized. It was barreling straight at him, a goggle-eyed driver behind the wheel and canisters spewing the diarrhea-yellow gas mounted atop the cab.

  "Screw him," Remo said, holding his course.

  The heavy APC slammed into the truck without stopping. The grille caved in, its front tires lifting high. It tried to climb the APC roof, but its rear wheels lost all traction.

  It bounced away, upsetting its twenty-foot rear-mounted fan. The cage crumpled when it struck sand. The blades chewed themselves to pieces against the mangled framework.

  Remo wrestled the wheel around to get a better look at the truck. It lay on its side, wheels spinning. The fan lay several feet away. From the overturned cab, hissing yellowish billows of vapor spewed angrily. Remo glimpsed a battery of spilled gas cylinders, now no longer bolted to the dented cab roof.

  The cab had been split open and a driver sprawled in the sand, holding his throat and gulping like a beached flounder.

  His gas mask lay at his elbow, but he was too busy dying to look for it.

  "Remind me not to crank down the windows anytime soon," Remo muttered, grateful for the sealed gas-proof vehicle.

  In the distance, a line of similar trucks barreled south, as if impelled by their great fans. But the fans were pointed in the direction they traveled, pushing churning billows of gas ahead. Wind resistance pushed it back. The gas went everywhere except where it was supposed to.

  "What the hell," Remo said to himself. "Juniper can cool his heels in Mad Ass's dungeon a little longer."

  He sent the APC rolling after them.

  Remo drew up alongside one, and pulling the wheel to the right, inexorably crowded the truck into the next one in line.

  The drivers' peripheral vision was impaired by their gas mask goggles, so the first time they realized they were in trouble was when their spinning wheels rubbed one another.

  At the speed they were traveling, that meant instant disaster.

  Remo watched the first two trucks collide and spin away, tumbling, throwing off whirling fan blades and rags of gas.

  They landed wrapped together in an impossible contortion of metal.

  From that point on, it was just a matter of sideswiping each underweight truck with the armored APC until it tipped over or lost control.

  After the last truck ate sand, Remo wrestled the APC north once more and played with the steering until his body told him he was attuned to magnetic north. The approximate direction of Abominadad.

  He settled down for the ride, one thought uppermost in his mind.

  How had Chiun done it all those years? The damn kimono was hotter than hell.

  Chapter 31

  Major Nasur Hamdoon was tired of shooting Kuranis.

  He had been glad to shoot Kuranis during the early heady days of the reclamation of Kuran. Especially when the ungrateful Kuranis resisted being returned to the Iraiti motherland with their puny small arms, stones, and Molotov cocktails. Who did they think they were-Palestinians?

  Did they not understand that all Arabs were brothers, and destined to be united? It was very strange. Nasur had expected to be welcomed as a liberator.

  So when the liberated Arabs of Kuran turned on him with their pitiful weapons, Nasur indignantly shot them dead in the streets. The surviving Kuranis went underground. They planted bombs. They sniped from rooftops.

  And the Iraiti troops under Major Hamdoon's command simply rounded up civilians at random and had them executed by various methods. Sometimes they were simply bled in the streets, their blood collected in glass beakers to be stored as plasma in the unlikely eventuality the Americans summoned up enough courage to attack.

  This had been the good old days, Major Hamdoon thought unhappily as evening came to the Kurani desert. There had been many Kuranis to shoot and many excuses to do it.

  Not now. Now he lived in his lone T-72 tank-practically the only safe haven in the entire country. In fact, it was virtually the only habitation in Maddas Province, as occupied Kuran was now called.

  Perched high in the turret, Major Hamdoon trained his field glasses down the lonely trait-Kuran Friendship Road. It stopped dead only twenty kilometers south of here-the Hamidi Arabs having impolitely declined to pay for extension in the good old days when Irait battled Irug in another war of President Hinsein's creation. But for their stinginess, Major Hamdoon thought morosely, they would have been liberated as well. Major Hamdoon looked forward to their ultimate liberation. As he was based in the inhospitable marshy southern region of Kuran-now Irait's thirteenth province-he had had no opportunity to share in the redistribution of wealth imposed on fat, too-rich Kuran.

  For there was nothing worth stealing in southern Kuran.

  So Major Hamdoon bided his time and hoped the Americans would finally attack. That would provide the excuse to assimilate the corrupt and lazy Hamidi Arabs. And he would have plenty of U.S. Marines to shoot. Major Hamdoon had grown sick at heart from shooting fellow
Arabs-even ones who had the indecency to make themselves prosperous while other Arabs went without.

  A throaty engine roar pricked up his ears. It came from the south. He raised his field glasses. An unfamiliar squarish vehicle was coming up the Friendship Road-which was very interesting, since, technically, it went nowhere.

  Major Hamdoon squinted through the field glasses, cursing the infernal dark. When the Americans made their inglorious but inevitable tactical mistake, he expected to plunder their night-vision goggles from their dead bodies. He had heard that they cost four thousand dollars each. That was five figures in Iraid dinars.

  Moonlight caught and silvered a fast-traveling vehicle coming up the road. Major Hamdoon's heart quickened with anticipation. The vehicle was traveling without lights. It must be the Americans!

  Reaching down into the hatch, he touched the turret-turning lever, sending the smoothbore cannon grinding toward the road. His tank lay athwart the road. The vehicle, whatever it was, could not pass.

  His hand leapt to the cannon trigger. But on reflection, he held his fire. A 125-millimeter shell would no doubt ruin his expensive night goggles. He would intimidate the Americans into surrendering, instead. But he would not bleed them. Their blood was not good enough to sustain Arab lives.

  The vehicle was low and wide and armored, Major Hamdoon saw when he turned on the gimbal-mounted spotlight.

  "Halt!" he cried in thick, accented English.

  To his pleased surprise, the vehicle obediently coasted to a stop. A door clicked open and a man stepped out. He was tall and lean, walking with an easy confident grace. He wore a long black garment like a Hamidi thobe or a Kurani dishdash.

  He was no American, Major Hamdoon thought disappointedly. And he wore no night-seeing goggles.

  The man drew near.

  "What do you do here, effendi?" Major Hamdoon asked in Arabic.

  To his surprise, the man answered in English.

  "Help me out, pal. I'm looking for the town of Fahad. Know it?"

  "Who are you?" Major Hamdoon asked slowly, puzzled because the man did not act like an aggressor.

  "Just a nameless traveler trying to get to Fahad."

  "I would know your name."

  "Remo. Now, point me to Fahad, and while you're at it, get that tank out of my way." The man rotated his hands absently.

  "You sound like an American," Hamdoon suggested in an unsteady voice.

  "And you sound like an Arab with half a brain."

  "Is that an insult?"

  "Is Maddas Hinsein full of shit?"

  "I asked my question first."

  The American's thin mouth quirked into a smile. He did not flinch from the thousand-candlepower searchlight. His eyes simply squeezed down to nearly Oriental slits. They gleamed blackly, menacingly. Unafraid.

  Major Hamdoon tapped the cannon control, dropping the smoothbore until it was pointing directly at the approaching figure's black chest.

  "Are you prepared to die, unbeliever?"

  "Not till you point me to Fahad."

  "I will never do that."

  Suddenly the American executed a kind of circus flip. He tumbled into the air, to land, perfectly balanced, on the cannon's long bore.

  This was an eventuality that Major Hamdoon had not been prepared for at the Iraiti Military Academy. If he fired, he would miss completely.

  So Major Hamdoon did the next best thing. He threw the turret-turning lever back and forth wildly.

  The turret jerked right, then left, then right again.

  The American walked up the barrel to the turret with breezy assurance. He didn't bother lifting his arms to balance.

  Major Hamdoon hastily tilted the searchlight into his eyes.

  The man simply ducked under the cone of light. Casually he plucked Hamdoon from his perch. He did this with one hand, without even disturbing his balance. This impressed Major Hamdoon, who had understood that Americans were inept in all things--except making movies.

  "Hi!" he said. "Want me to repeat my question?"

  "It will do you no good," Major Hamdoon said stiffly. "I am a Moslem. We do not fear death."

  The man's hand jumped out. Two fingers struck the searchlight glass. It was very thick. Still, it shattered into fine glassy gravel. Sparks flew. Something sputtered and burned.

  "Please do repeat," Major Hamdoon said in his most polite English.

  "Point me the way to Fahad."

  The major pointed north up the Friendship Road. "It is back that way."

  "How far?"

  "Less than seventy kilometers."

  To Hamdoon's horror, the American frowned. "How many miles is that?" he asked.

  "As many as you want," the major said, not understanding the question.

  "I love a cooperative Iraiti," the American said pleasantly. "Now, get this pile of junk out of my way."

  "Gladly. In return for a favor of equal value."

  A slow smile crept into the American's face. In the failing light, his eyes floated like evilly glowing stars in the skulllike hollows of his eyes.

  "Sure," he said laconically. "Why not?"

  "I will trade you this information in return for your best pair of night-seeing goggles," Major Hamdoon said boldly.

  "Why do you want them?"

  "So I can see the Americans when they come."

  "I got news for you, pal. They're here."

  The Iraiti looked momentarily confused. "But there is but one of you."

  "One's all that's needed. Now, move that tank."

  "I refuse until you give me something for my eyes that will turn night into day."

  "You mean day into night," the American said.

  "Yes, I mean that," Major Hamdoon said, wondering how he had gotten the American words for "day" and "night" confused for so long.

  Then the American lifted two fingers of one hand and drove them into the major's eyes so fast there was no pain. Only sudden blackness.

  And as the major fell into the sand, wondering what had happened, the American's cheerful voice rang through the night that would last to the end of Nasur Hamdoon's days, saying, "Don't sweat it. I'll move the tank myself. You just enjoy the view."

  The town of Fahad was virtually a ghost town when Remo rolled into it hours later. Dawn had come by this time. He had encountered minimal resistance along the road. Just the occasional two-man patrol in Land Rovers.

  After ascertaining from the first two of these patrols that he was indeed on the correct road to Fahad-and by the way, he could consider himself a prisoner of the Iraiti Army-Remo didn't bother to leave the APC to break any Iraiti necks. He just ran them down where they stood.

  The more he did this, the more impressed he was by German engineering. The APC barely gave a bump as it passed over the bodies. And either they were slow to scream or the soundproofing was excellent too.

  As he lumbered through the town, Remo made a mental note to look into a German model if he ever had personal need of an armored personnel carrier.

  Fahad had been virtually picked clean, he saw with disgust. Some buildings still stood. None had glass in them. Only a few windows had actually been broken by violence. They had simply been removed, sashes and all.

  Remo looked for street signs. There were none.

  "Damn. They even took the frigging street signs. How the hell do I find Afreet Street?"

  A woman in an ebony abayuh ran for cover when he lumbered around a corner. A child threw a rock that bounced harmlessly off his sandwich-glass windshield.

  He saw no uniformed troops. But then, he saw hardly anything of human life of any persuasion.

  In the center of town was a disturbed patch of dirt that had once been some kind of park. Remo could see the fresh stumps of date trees, evidently carried away to Iraiti lumberyards. The dirt was freshly turned.

  "Don't tell me they took the grass too?" Remo wondered aloud.

  In the middle of the park, a derrick reared up. Remo was surprised that it too had not been dri
ven back to Irait. But as he made a circle of the park, he saw why.

  A man in a white Arab costume hung from the derrick cable by the neck. It obviously served as the local gallows.

  Remo braked and got out.

  Cupping his hands to his mouth, he called out in English, "Anyone home? I'm an American. Friend or foe, come get me."

  A moment passed. A bird squawked somewhere. It sounded hungry.

  Then out of the hovels of Fahad, men, women, and children poured. The men were old, the women frantic, and the children, like children everywhere, excited by the commotion.

  "Americans!" they shouted. "The Americans have come. It is the Americans."

  "There's just one of me," Remo told the approaching stampede. This cooled them off faster than a water hose.

  "There is only you?" an old woman asked, creeping from a doorway.

  "Sorry. Look, I need to find Omar. Sheik Fareem sent me."

  The woman pushed through the crowd. "Omar the freedom fighter?"

  "Sounds about right."

  "He is behind you, American who has come too late."

  Remo turned. The only person behind him hung from a derrick, where a falcon alighted to begin pecking at his eyes. After a few pecks, the bird flew away. He was obviously not the early bird. That bird had taken Omar's eyes long days ago.

  Remo addressed the crowd.

  "How easy is it to get to Abominadad from here?"

  A toothless old man said, "Can you read Arabic?"

  "No."

  "Then you cannot get to Abominadad from this Allah-forsaken place. What few street signs survive are in Arabic, and the way is long and winding and full of Iraiti dogs." He spat in the dirt.

  "I gotta get to Abominadad," Remo said.

  "If a man is desperate enough, anything is possible."

  "Is that a hint of encouragement?"

  "If one is willing to surrender himself to the Iraiti invader," Remo was told, "one might get to Abominadad from here. But only if one is valuable to the Iraitis. Otherwise they will carve your belly with their bayonets."