Freedom Express

by Maloney, Mack;

  Where the enemy is prepared, avoid him; strike at his weakest point.

  Again, Hunter was chilled to the spine. He could hear the voice so clearly, he imagined he felt a hot breath beside his ear.

  When appropriate, make them chase you; go slow when it bothers them.

  Once again, Hunter began to question his sanity. For a third time he opened his eyes, convinced that he would find someone standing next to him.

  But no one was there. The voice—so loud, so clear—had come from deep within.

  Chapter 32

  Two days later

  THE ALL-BLACK BOEING 707 leveled off at forty thousand feet and turned due north, half of its dozen F-4 Phantom escorts leading the way, the other half trailing close behind.

  Inside the old airliner’s luxurious main cabin, Duke Devillian was lighting a huge water pipe filled with crack cocaine.

  “It’s hard to believe things can get better than this,” he said, his twisted eyes instantly turning bloodshot with the first long puff. “But they will.”

  Sitting across the long, curved couch from him was the lovely Juanita Juarez and her gross brother, Jorge. Both were drinking champagne from the bottle. Next to them was Major Heck, wearing a Twisted Cross dress uniform and popping amphetamine pills like they were candy. Scattered throughout the rest of the plane and indulging in a cornucopia of drugs and liquor were two dozen other gang leaders, the top dogs of the unholy alliance that was Duke Devillian’s Burning Cross.

  Only Heck seemed nervous.

  “One surface-to-air missile and this plane could be destroyed,” he said to Devillian. “And all of us would die.”

  Devillian laughed at him. “So what?”

  “So, everything we’ve been working for would be lost,” the Nazi replied, his eyes going narrow.

  Devillian laughed again. “Then what difference would it make?” he asked, taking another long drag on the crack pipe. “None of this will matter if we’re all dead.”

  Heck popped two more pills and crudely washed them down with a swig from Juanita’s champagne bottle. He hated such existential blather.

  “What’s your problem, Major,” Juanita asked him, grabbing the champagne back. “Where’s your Nazi Iron Will we hear so much about?”

  “Will is one thing,” Heck said, anxiously twisting around to look out the plane’s window. “Stupidity is quite another.”

  “Relax, mein Fuehrer,” Devillian needled him. “We’ve got twelve escort fighters around us and more radar equipment on board than three squadrons’ worth of jets. Besides, who do we have to worry about? Not the United Americans. Their shoulder-launched missiles do not fly this high, nor do they have any high-performance jets in the area. We would see them from a hundred miles away if they did. Besides, they have other things on their minds.”

  Devillian smiled at this last statement, although his present excitement was as intense as he thought it would be.

  “Alas, our adventure with the United Americans ended too soon,” he said, just a tad wistfully. “I would have thought they’d put up a better fight.”

  He turned to his guests and let out a great chuckle.

  “But I overestimated them,” he said. “And now they are retreating, as you will all soon see for yourselves.”

  At that moment, the copilot of the aircraft stuck his head into the cabin.

  “We are about thirty minutes from the coordinate, sir,” the man said through a thick South African accent.

  “Let me know when we are ten minutes out,” Devillian snapped at the man. “And lock that door behind you.”

  The copilot did as told. Devillian then picked up a red phone next to his seat.

  “OK, send them in.”

  The door at the opposite end of the cabin opened, and four young women were pushed in by two burly Skinhead guards.

  “I have arranged a little entertainment to go along with our tour,” Devillian said.

  He clapped his hands, and the Skinheads nudged the girls toward the long couch. Each one was dressed differently: One was wearing a Sunday dress, another a tiny bikini, another a Catholic school uniform, and the fourth, a cheerleader’s uniform.

  “The first choice is yours, Major Heck,” Devillian said, turning toward the Nazi officer.

  The man was slightly taken aback. “Here? Now?” he stuttered.

  “Yes, yes!” Devillian roared, his eyes twirling crazily. “I bought these young beauties in Dallas especially for this—the occasion of our greatest triumph! So, all of you, take your pick.”

  Juanita’s brother Jorge needed no further prompting. He immediately grabbed the girl in the Sunday dress. Roughly forcing her to the ground, he yanked up her skirt and crudely entered her. Devillian grabbed the cheerleader and mimicked the Mexican bandit’s rude behavior. Being only slightly more modest, Heck took another two pills, then pulled the girl in the bikini into a corner and forced her to perform fellatio on him.

  This left only Juanita and the schoolgirl.

  Devillian lifted his head from his lecherous activity just as Juanita pulled the young girl down onto the couch next to her. Instantly the Mexican beauty was all over the girl, ripping her blouse open and kissing her small breasts.

  Devillian was instantly delirious. His plan to see if Juanita would take on a female had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He let out a howl as he tried to climax, completely ignoring the girl underneath him, instead watching as Juanita worked over her innocent victim.

  “Ten minutes, sir,” the South African copilot yelled from behind the locked cabin door.

  “Thanks for nothing,” Devillian screamed back.

  In this short time, Devillian’s temperament had turned around 180 degrees. The terrorist was puffing madly on the crack pipe—but nothing he could do would restore the stamina he’d just lost, as usual, in mid-thrust.

  “OK, party’s over,” he yelled at the three others, who were still being serviced by the somewhat depleted young girls. “We’re coming up on the coordinate.”

  The pair of Skinhead guards appeared out of nowhere and grabbed the four girls—one of them right out from underneath Jorge. Even Juanita was disappointed to see her sex object go. She had forced the girl between her legs and was letting the orgasmic waves wash over her when Devillian so crudely brought the activities to a halt.

  “I would like her again,” Juanita told Devillian matter-of-factly as the girls were marched out of the cabin. “She looks so much like Diamond.”

  The comment caused something to snap inside Devillian’s already distracted brain. Try as he might, he just couldn’t stop thinking about Diamond. Now the ache of lust lost was added to his usual sexual frustration.

  He knew there was only one solution: “Someone’s going to have to die,” he whispered to himself.

  Five minutes later, Devillian and the others had their noses pressed up against the cabin’s windows, watching with delight the rather pathetic scene below them.

  They were cruising right over the Freedom Express. The train was dead in its tracks, ten miles west of Eagle Rock, right where its forward progress was halted two days before. Streaming back those ten miles were two long lines of United American soldiers—retreating to Eagle Rock.

  A minute later, the 707 was coming up on the small town itself, and the observers could plainly see that an elaborate, though hasty, evacuation was taking place below. In a large field just outside of the town, literally hundreds of helicopters of all shapes and sizes were shuttling in and taking off, their holds filled to capacity with United American troopers.

  “It is like Dunkirk!” Major Heck screamed in joy, referring to the inglorious evacuation of Allied troops from France during the Nazi blitzkrieg of 1940. “So they are running from us.”

  Devillian was laughing again. “You are seeing the end of the United American Army,” he said, pressing a video camera up against the cabin window and still secretly wishing that his victory had been more bloody. “Those comic book heroes have fina
lly seen their day.”

  Two Burning Cross F-4’s were lazily sweeping up and down the evacuation plain, weaving in and out of the choppers. Even from thirty thousand feet, it was apparent to the people in the 707 that the F-4’s were simply harassing the helicopters and the troops on the ground and not firing their cannons with any regularity.

  “You do not shoot at the enemy?” Jorge asked.

  “Why should we?” Devillian asked. “I could have fifty jet fighters picking those choppers out of the sky like quails if I wanted to. But I don’t.”

  “But why?” Juanita wanted to know.

  Devillian smiled slyly, turning the video camera on her lovely breasts for a brief moment. Maybe she was coming around to him.

  “Because each one of those men is more valuable to me alive than dead, my dear,” he answered. “Each one of them will return to their homes and tell everyone they know about how enormous a failure this whole Freedom Express nonsense has been.

  “They will be interviewed by the press. They will be the subject of endless debate. They will get drunk and wail about their sorrows in barrooms. They will have fights with their loved ones. Families will split apart; children will suffer. Best of all, those soldiers will forever hate the blacks, and the Jews, and the Papists, and the Indians and all of the other non-white scum who got them into this position in the first place.

  “They are an army in disgrace, and they will no longer consider themselves as true men. And they will go to their graves knowing that the Burning Cross was responsible.

  “Now I ask you, my friends, is there any better way to spread our message than that?”

  Chapter 33

  Eagle Rock, two days later

  “IT IS WITH GREAT honor that we accept this mission,” Major Heck told the five hundred blackened faces before him. “Herr Devillian has chosen us to take possession of the ultimate prize of war.”

  Heck paused for effect, staring into the eyes of the men of the Twisted Cross’s most elite shock unit, the Skull and Crossbone battalion.

  It was barely dawn, and the men had just finished a field breakfast. They had been airlifted into Eagle Rock during the night, landing in the same field where the United Americans had evacuated forty-eight hours before.

  On a hill nearby, a large cross was burning.

  “You men know your orders,” Heck went on. “We will take possession of the train and drive it to Arizona, where it will pass in glory by our many strongholds there. Once we reach the hills of San Bernardino, we will strip off any useful weaponry. Then, just as before, we will send this train crashing down into Los Angeles, a further message that the Burning Cross is in control of this part of the country—territory that rightly belongs to it!”

  There was a great cheer from the troops, their enthusiasm stoked by the amphetamine pills their medics had generously distributed with the morning chow.

  Heck snapped into a ramrod posture and raised his right arm in salute.

  “Heil Devillian!” he screamed.

  “Heil Devillian!” the soldiers screamed back. “Heil Hitler!”

  It took the Skull and Crossbone Battalion just a little over an hour to reach the Freedom Express, the last mists of the New Mexico dawn burning off as the first elements came up on the tail end of the train.

  Within minutes, the unit’s advance scouts were clamoring all over the end cars, sweeping through the mile-long series of empty mini-forts with giddy abandon. Inside they found much ammunition and many cases of TNT, brought along by the United Americans no doubt, for track clearing operations.

  By this time, the main elements of the elite battalion had split in two and were walking up on either end of the train. Some of the men were grumbling that the battalion’s advance scouts—known among the regular soldiers as “The Forty Thieves”—were getting the lion’s share of the booty. Still the Twisted Cross troops were in high spirits. They were practically sprinting by the long section of mini-fort cars, determined to get to the weapons cars. This was where the real souvenirs would be found.

  The dash to the front of the train nearly turned into a disorderly race before the battalion commanders shouted at their troops to slow down and walk. This order hit home quickly, and the soldiers returned to their standard single-line advancements. Thus, it was an orderly troop that marched up toward the midsection of the train, where the mini-fort cars gave way to the weapons carriers, the first of which was the mighty howitzer, Big Dick.

  Meanwhile, the scouts inside the train had already reached the midpoint. It was Heck’s second-in-command, a Captain Ruzz, who symbolically swung open the door at the front of the first mini-fort and stared with smug delight at the railway car carrying Big Dick.

  “Behold the spoils of war,” he said, turning to his two dozen souvenir-laden scouts and pointing back toward the enormous howitzer. “And remember this moment well. Just as our forefathers touched the waters of the Atlantic after only a few days of blitzkrieg, we now claim this prize, for ourselves and for our children.”

  Ruzz’s scouts would have appreciated their leader’s visionary prose more if they hadn’t been so anxious about the exact position of the gigantic howitzer’s gun barrel.

  It was pointing directly at them.

  It was Heck himself who first saw the mighty flash.

  Walking at the head of the column advancing on the train’s southern side, he saw the monstrous tongue of flame roar out of the barrel of the howitzer and simply obliterate the first twenty mini-fort cars in its wake. Oddly, the sound of the explosion didn’t reach Heck for a long second or two, but when it did, it was powerful enough to knock him to his knees.

  “Take cover!” someone screamed as six of the railway cars shot straight up in the air, carrying long trails of flame and smoke and debris with them. Suddenly it seemed as if the whole world had caught on fire.

  Heck was already hugging the ground, biting his tongue in an effort not to go into shock. A full quarter mile of the second half of the train had simply vanished into the frightening conflagration set off by the howitzer’s shot. In seconds, a rain of murderous shrapnel and debris began falling all around Heck and his troops, killing and injuring scores of the prone, confused soldiers.

  Heck’s brain could not believe what had just happened. At first he thought some kind of terrible accident had taken place. But then he heard more explosions. Twisting around to look back through the hell that had erupted on the tracks, he saw each of the remaining mini-fort cars blowing up in precise succession, likely an orderly detonation of a string of enormous firecrackers. Anyone within twenty feet of either side of each car was instantly blown to bits, adding to the carnage already created by the monster blast from the howitzer.

  Still, Keck searched his consciousness for some kind of rational explanation. But the horror was only fifteen seconds old when he finally came to the dire conclusion that the railway cars had all been elaborately booby-trapped and that his elite Skull and Crossbone battalion had blundered into an incredible ambush.

  His fears were confirmed as he peered through the smoke and flames and death at the titanic howitzer. He could see men in distinct blue-camouflage uniforms—the colors of the accursed United Americans—rapidly reloading the gun.

  “No!” Heck screamed just a millisecond before the enormous howitzer fired again.

  The second shot only blew apart what little remained from the first. Still, it added to the confusion and the terror of the moment.

  Heck felt like he was floating on a sea of blood. His brain was pulsating, and his tongue had gone thick. He closed his eyes and imagined that he was suddenly floating above the earth, which was hanging motionless in space. Then suddenly with the crack of a mighty thunderbolt, the huge globe began spinning again.

  He managed to shake himself out of the terrifying hallucination only to be hit on the forehead by a chunk of flaming metal an instant later. As he passed into true unconsciousness, he lifted his head one more time to see that the front half of the Freedo
m Express was slowly pulling away….

  Chapter 34

  Santa Fe Airport

  BULL SHEEHAN WAS FEELING lucky.

  “This is the life,” he murmured, taking a healthy slug from his bottle of beer. “I must have been crazy knocking myself out all those years.”

  Sheehan, a ground-attack pilot-for-hire, had spent the previous two years fighting in Central America for whatever side was paying the most. The hours had been tough; but the money had been good, and his base of operations in Costa Rica—now known simply as Big Banana—had been a trading post for everything from drugs to white slaves to X-rated videos.

  Everything changed however when the United Americans stomped the Twisted Cross in Panama. After that, most of the air mercenary work dried up. A few months later, Sheehan decided it was time to get into a new line of work.

  He had been gunrunning for only four months when he met the representative from the Burning Cross one night in the waiting room of a cathouse. The man was drunk and loudmouthed, but not so much that Sheehan wasn’t able to arrange a meeting with him the following day. It was in the midst of this hangover-plagued get-together that Sheehan was given his first assignment by the Burning Cross: locate and buy as many of the rare blockbuster bombs as he could get his hands on.

  The job took him all the way to the enormous weapons markets of Algiers in North Africa. Using the bottomless sack of gold from his employers, Sheehan had made arrangements with a South African cartel to buy ten dozen of the extremely destructive, high explosive weapons. Like any other customer, Sheehan wanted to see some of the bombs in action, and once he was satisfied, he shipped the first dozen to the Burning Cross for their approval.

  As he later understood it, the Burning Cross had used this first shipment of bombs in an attack up in northern New Mexico. Just what the fight was all about, Sheehan didn’t know—or care. He’d received the OK to buy the remaining 108 blockbusters, and left Algiers in a rented Ilyushin I1-76 cargo jet, its belly full of the rare weapons.