by Jon Land
“The deception’s not mine this time, fat man. It belongs to a mad Russian general named Raskowski to whom you so kindly delivered your reserves of Atragon.” McCracken stopped to put things together for himself. When he spoke again, it was mostly to Natalya. “That shipment must have powered the satellite he lost. When the need for more came up, he turned to Pamosa Springs. He could launch his reflector on board the replacement for Ulysses and save himself the bother of moving the crystals by constructing the generator gun right in the town. But one thing doesn’t fit. The second communiqué he sent, the one containing the three-week ultimatum, was sent after he lost his first satellite and way before the work in Pamosa Springs was finished. I don’t get it.”
“Another deception,” suggested Natalya. “He wanted to make your government believe they had more time than they actually did, so the element of surprise would return to his side. There won’t be any more ultimatums or messages. He’s going to begin firing just as soon as his reflector achieves orbit.”
“Twenty-four hours from now,” McCracken said. “Maybe less.”
“Stop!” ordered Vasquez. “Very well rehearsed, I grant you, but—”
“Give it up, fat man. The story’s true and you know it. Think about the fact that we weren’t the only party to end up in your private waters. Or have you forgotten those Russians you devoured a few minutes ago?”
“Russians?”
Blaine nodded. “Raskowski’s men, as I see it. He’s not just after us anymore, either. He wants you and your Atragon out of the way, too, and it’s my guess we’ll have proof of that before long. If I penetrated your guise as Salim, it’s a sure bet he did as well. Once I arrived on the scene you became too much of a liability. He’s probably had you under watch since the very beginning.”
Vasquez’s huge jowls puckered in grim determination. “Fitting, since I have kept tabs on his one-eyed bandit all this time too.”
Katlov! Natalya and McCracken thought together.
“Then you have tabs on Raskowski!” she blurted.
“Only if they’re together. The information’s a phone call away, that’s all. But that assumes I—”
The sonar operator broke in, turning toward Vasquez as he spoke. “Sir, I have three aircraft coming up on our position. Range, 5,000 meters and closing.”
“Prepare to dive,” ordered Vasquez, and a bell chimed three times within the huge belly of the Dragon Fish. He waited a few seconds longer, giving the armed guards ample opportunity to solidify their positions around their captives at what promised to be a most vulnerable moment. “Dive.”
The Dragon Fish dropped gracefully beneath the sea, lights growing immediately dimmer and hazing over with red.
“Aircraft 4,000 meters and closing,” reported the sonar operator as three additional blips appeared on his screen. He gazed back at the fat man once again. “I also show three large ships steaming this way. Range four miles. Speed increasing. Trying for a signal fix now… .”
“Join us, fat man,” Blaine urged. “There are some things important enough to bring even you and me together.”
“Planes closing,” sonar reported. “Range now 2,000 meters. Range of boats three-and-one-half miles.” He checked his screen, punched in a few commands onto his computer console, and read the results out loud when they flashed across his screen. “Sir, I have a signature now on those approaching ships. They’re trawlers, big ones.” He swallowed hard. “Soviet H-class complete with several high-powered deck guns and missile launchers. Warships in disguise.”
Vasquez looked at McCracken, then at nothing in particular. “Maybe they know I’m here, McCracken, but they couldn’t possibly know about the Dragon Fish.” Then, to the uniformed figure standing by the periscope, “Commander, set an intercept course for us with those trawlers and prepare the surface-to-air missiles. Our baby is hungry again.”
Chapter 30
“WOULD A BAKED YOU A cake with a file in it,” Clara Buhl had told Dog-ear and Sheriff Junk six hours earlier at five P.M. “But I forgot the recipe.”
“How’s things in town?” the mayor asked her.
“Real quiet since you boys became jailbirds. Our mysterious killer seems to be taking a break.”
“You and Isaac T. been around to the people?”
“Yeah, and I can tell you …”
The conversation was held within earshot of three of Guillermo Paz’s soldiers. And it was all a front for Dog-ear to figure out a way to slip Clara the note he and Heep had composed on a tattered piece of newspaper they found under one of the mattresses. They had actually composed it two days before, but Clara had been the first visitor they were allowed.
They were under watch almost all the time and had stolen the minutes required to write the note, with Heep distracting the guards. Paz had jailed them in the right cell, the one nearest the street, where Heep had stowed two crates, one each of grenades and Laws rockets. He’d had plenty of experience with bazookas in Korea and these damn things couldn’t be much different. He’d seen how they worked on television. Problem was figuring out what to make them work on. Oh, they could do plenty of damage from here before Paz’s men caught on, but what would that accomplish? No, what they needed was to get the hell out of jail and get word to the outside world that they needed help. Neither man knew exactly how they were going to accomplish all that.
Dog-ear kept coughing into his hand as he spoke with Clara. He hoped the guards would be bored with the small talk and the gesture which was meant to disguise his passing over the note at the proper time. He was just about ready to figure that the proper time was never going to come when Clara, bless her, feigned a slip on the slick floor and had to use the bars to hoist her beefy frame back up. As she gripped them low at the start, before the soldiers had a chance to approach, Dog-ear slipped the note into her hand. She accepted it without expression, figuring all along the mayor would have plenty to say he wouldn’t want heard and attracted by his coughing into a bit of white crumpled in his fist.
“I always wanted to be mayor, you know,” Clara said at the end.
“Looks like you got your wish,” said Dog-ear, forcing a smile.
Clara waited until she was back home before reading the note; she had to, really, since the printing was too small to manage without her magnifying glass. She ran it over the wrinkled page methodically, shocked and excited by the enlarged letters passing before her:
Not enough space to explain everything. We got weapons to use in here but they won’t do the town any good unless we can get out and bring help. Need two things from you and Ike T. if we’re going to pull this off: a distraction to draw the attention of the guards here in the jail. And a jeep parked somewhere near enough to reach in a hurry once the shooting starts. I know you got lots of questions I wish I had the space to answer. But I know you’ll get this done somehow anyway. We’ll be waiting. Try to make it tonight after ten when the guard shift around town drops a little. See ya then.
Clara sat back to think.
Dog-ear and Sheriff Junk had almost given up hope by eleven, but a commotion in the streets at 11:15 drew them to the barred window of their cell. It wasn’t easy, but if they strained their necks they could see almost the whole street.
And coming down it right now, six-guns strapped to his side in an ancient leather holster, was Isaac T. Hall. The pistols were his prized possessions, said to have once belonged to Wyatt Earp himself, and there wasn’t a better use for them than the one he was about to provide. He’d nodded his head dimly at Clara’s plan for his original role in the distraction, knowing all the time that the whole plan stood no chance of working. So he’d come up with this alteration by himself without telling her because he knew she would have argued him down.
He used to practice with the guns every day until the arthritis got too bad and the best he had been able to manage for the past few years was once a week when he remembered. The guns were oiled and loaded, twelve shots at his disposal. If he got them all off
he’d consider it a victory even if none found their mark.
“Look, it’s Clara!” Sheriff Junk whispered to Dog-ear.
There, across the street, Clara was waddling in the shadows toward one of three parked jeeps. She ducked down out of sight when she reached it.
Down Main Street, in front of the bar, Ike Hall had stopped and drawn his pistols outside the fringed jacket that was probably a century old.
A dozen or so soldiers on patrol in the streets had sighted their rifles on him, waiting. One ran to get Major Paz.
Outside the jail cell, the three on-duty guards’ eyes were glued to the proceedings. Sheriff Junk slid away from the cell window and moved to the cot, beneath which lay a pried-open crate of grenades.
Ike Hall didn’t know where he found the strength to draw both guns in a single motion or why he chose that particular moment to do so. The swiftness of the action surprised the soldiers, and they hesitated long enough for Ike to get a shot off from each as he dove to the ground and rolled for cover behind a parked jeep. One of his shots actually winged a soldier in the instant before a dozen of them opened fire. Ike might have been shot; he hurt so much already he couldn’t tell.
Inside the jail cell, Sheriff Junk pulled the pin on the grenade he had lifted from the crate and rolled it across the floor toward the three guards by the window. It exploded with Heep and McCluskey pressed tight into the comer with their faces covered. The explosion rocked the jailhouse and caught the attention of the guards who were moving on Ike.
It was then that Clara settled her bulk low in the driver’s seat of the jeep and felt blindly for the key. She’d driven jeeps plenty of times back in the old days, but she hadn’t driven anything in the six years since her eyes went, so it was with eyes closed and a silent prayer in her mind that she depressed the clutch and gunned the engine.
Ike T. Hall felt the bullets. A burst of energy surged through him, and he swung around with both guns firing at the same time. Wyatt himself would have been proud. He thought he might even have hit one of the soldiers, but he crumbled over before he could be sure.
The soldiers were rushing the jail from all sides now, some appearing in T-shirts and still zipping up their pants. But Heep already had an armful of Laws rockets ready and as expected they were simpler to use than any bazooka he’d ever seen. He flipped a catch, extended a stock backwards from which the thrust exhaust would belch and aimed the Laws for the middle of Main Street. A single squeeze of the trigger and the projectile hit on macadam and sent debris showering upward. A number of soldiers went down writhing and screaming.
“Another!” Heep yelled to McCluskey, who tossed a second Laws up to him.
Sheriff Junk had it cocked and ready an instant later, his target the empty K Mart across the street from which a number of soldiers were still emerging. The whole front of the building went up in a single blast of orange and black, with shattered glass flying in every direction. The soldiers were on the defensive now, searching for cover instead of culprits. But Junk wasn’t finished with them yet.
As he readied his third Laws, Clara Buhl brought the jeep around in a screeching U-turn to the front of the jailhouse. Heep’s third target was the telephone pole containing the junction box for all of Main Street. The pole shattered as if struck by lightning, and all of Pamosa Springs was plunged into total darkness. With that, Heep rushed to the door and hoisted a heavy boot into the latch. The rusted catch gave on contact, and the cell door flew outward. He started to grab crates.
“You mean, we coulda done that anytime since we been here?” wondered Dog-ear.
“I don’t tell you everything, Mayor.”
By then they were out the cell and heading for the front room. Heep toted crates under both arms, barely feeling the sting in his ankle, while Dog-ear grabbed a pair of the guards’ scratched-up rifles. They seemed in good enough working order and he led Heep forward with one ready in either hand.
Outside the jailhouse, Clara had just screeched the jeep to a halt. But the soldiers were regrouping and the mayor found himself with plenty of targets when he led Sheriff Junk out of the building. Both rifle barrels blazed orange, aimed at similar colors flashing in the darkness or at moving shapes. By the time the clip of his first rifle was exhausted, Heep had gotten the crates into the jeep and was signaling him forward.
“Come on!” Sheriff Junk screamed, and Clara backed the jeep up alongside him.
McCluskey leaped in and bumped his head on the extended stock of an attached .50-caliber machine gun.
“Well, I’ll be damned… .”
He yanked back the bolt and balanced himself precariously as Clara spun the jeep around for the other side of town. The .50-caliber had more of a kick than he remembered—or maybe he had just gotten older—but with the jeep picking up speed, McCluskey kept pointing the weapon toward anything that moved, holding the trigger and feeling his teeth gnash together from the gun’s kickback.
The soldiers were giving chase now. Up ahead was Bill Hapscomb’s filling station and from there a road that would lead part of the way into the San Juans.
McCluskey was still firing, the clip melting into the machine gun and shells flying everywhere, when Sheriff Junk grasped another Laws and popped the stock out as they drew near Hapscomb’s. He fired as they moved, aiming at the first of the three gas pumps. His aim was good enough.
First a flash of flame and then a huge mushroom of black smoke sprouted from the pump island. Gasoline sprayed outward from the ruptured lines, spreading the flames, until a wall of fire stretched across Main Street between their fleeing jeep and the charging troops, effectively blocking the enemy behind it. The flames climbed higher as numerous secondary explosions added fuel and heat.
“Heeeeeeee-yahhhhhhhh!” screamed Dog-ear and Sheriff Junk together.
The wall of flames had shrunk in the distance behind them when they saw a jeep charge through it. It wavered for a few seconds but then straightened, a soldier in it rising to his feet to steady its machine gun. The jeep was coming fast, gaining, bullets churning outward in a continuous stream, a few clanging off the leading jeep’s frame.
“Shit!” yelled the mayor, ducking low. “We’re out of ammo.”
“Not quite,” said Heep as he reached for another Laws.
“It’s up to you now, Clara.”
Clara didn’t say anything, just kept on driving. The road ahead seemed one big black blur and she was squinting like crazy just to keep the jeep reasonably straight. She hoped her expression wasn’t giving away the knifing pain she felt in her chest. She thought at first she’d been shot but the tightness down her whole left arm all the way from her jaw told her the old ticker had finally had enough and was calling it quits. Just hang on a little longer, she urged. Keep pumping. Come on!
She saw stars from the pain and her vision clouded over even more. The jeep wavered slightly as the narrow road that would take them into the San Juans came up fast. Sheriff Junk had managed to steady another Laws with the bullets just clearing his head, but Clara’s sudden turn into the mountains made him drop it.
“Shit!” he wailed, feeling for it desperately.
Clara clutched and downshifted into the hairpin turns, afraid to use the brakes and sacrifice their lead over the trailing jeep. Her vision had been reduced to simply steering her jeep between the mountainside and the deadly edge. She was gasping for breath now and each thud in her chest stole more of it away. The pain felt like bubbles bursting inside her. She could feel her hands stiffening, and the night was starting to go from dark to black. The jeep keeled left and sideswiped the mountain. Clara overcompensated and almost plunged them over the side.
“Easy!” screamed Dog-ear.
She got the jeep straight again, holding her breath now because it seemed to keep down the pain. Sheriff Junk had the Laws steady once more. The trailing jeep was now ten yards back. But the steep grade and sudden turns confused his aim and denied him the certain kill shot he felt he had to have.
“Fuck it,” he said and rose in the jeep with Dog-ear clutching his knobby legs for support.
Heep’s knees cracked and popped. He fired as Clara swung over a rise, which forced his shot down too low. But the jeep was close enough for the powerful explosion to send road fragments crashing upward into it. The driver struggled with control only briefly before the jeep smashed first up against the mountainside and then careened wildly across the road and over the edge.
Junk and Dog-ear failed to see any of this. They had both fallen to the floor of the jeep, which came slowly to a halt. Both men struggled to their feet, looked back and saw there was no more pursuit.
“We did it! Goddamnit, we did it! Got those bastards good! Hey, Clara, we—”
Dog-ear stopped when he saw Clara Buhl slumped over the wheel.
“Oh shit,” he said. The San Juans loomed ahead of them, and Pamosa Springs was nothing but a dark patch below.
Part Five
The Battle of Pamosa Springs
Pamosa Springs: Thursday, eight A.M.
Chapter 31
GUILLERMO PAZ COMPLETED DETAILING his orders to his individual unit commanders and dismissed them. In the havoc of last night he had lost a dozen men, a dozen to an old geezer with a pair of six-guns and a trio of middle-aged bureaucrats. Paz cursed himself for underestimating the lot of them, for not killing them when he could have. But his orders had been to stabilize the town and until last night the execution of the six citizens and jailing of the leaders had accomplished precisely that. Even the mysterious murders had ceased, and, if not for lax security, all would still be under control.
Worst of all, a rocket fired during the escape had knocked out the telephone substation containing the outside line on which General Raskowski had been calling him. But his priorities were clear: keep the townspeople where he could control them, and keep the generator gun safe from all possible harm.
