by Mick Farren
"We got to take a break."
First one figure and then another flopped to the ground. There was no mistaking their seeming exhaustion. Streicher was still undecided. One of the figures was rummaging in his pack. He continued poking through it for a full minute more. Gomez shook his head.
"This isn't right."
"Drop a flare on them."
The main screen changed to real image as the flare floated down and lit up the desert. The people on the ground were all dressed in identical black coveralls and stocking caps. Their faces were smeared with black makeup.
"They ain't the survivors of no plane crash."
Streicher nodded. "Hit them."
At that exact moment, the red room went haywire. The LEDs blinked frenziedly as though the system was in pain. Some screens blanked out, others froze and a couple exploded in abstract, psychedelic effects.
"They've hacked in."
"That's what that bastard was doing with the pack. He was tapping into one of our landlines."
"They're damned good."
Streicher nodded.
"Hit them with five minutes of everything in a random pattern. They've probably figured a way to neutralize the traps and weapons around them but it'll still shake them."
Gomez hit the weapon control keys. Streicher pressed the general alarm.
"You stay here, Gomez, and try and get control back. You other two, come with me."
The entire perimeter was lit up like the Fourth of July. Tracers, flares, magnesium, smoke, balls of red and green fire boiled into the sky. Swivelling miniguns made the earth smoke; starshells burst in flashes of blinding light. The noise blurred into a continuous booming shriek. Vickers, Fenton and Bronce watched the spectacle crouched in the shelter of the kitchen door, looking out across the patio.
"Pretty damn awesome."
"I'd hate to be down there even if I was hooked into the control system."
"The guy doing the hacking can always fuck up."
Bronce glanced at his watch. "It should stop at any moment."
"We move out after the firing stops."
Bronce nodded. He was still looking at his watch. It was like he could hardly wait to get going.
"Any second now."
The firing stopped like it had been switched off. The last two flares drifted to earth, the only things that now marked the perimeter were smoke and scattered pools of still burning, green liquid fire.
"They'll be coming in as fast as they can."
"So what are we waiting for?"
"Go ahead, we're right behind you."
Bronce took off like a hare out of the trap, crouching low and zigzagging across the patio. Fenton and Vickers found themselves staring at each other. Neither had made a move to follow him. For a moment there was a tense discomfort and then Fenton grinned.
"Let some other asshole get shot up."
"Right. He was begging for it."
Bronce was halfway across the patio and still running. There was a crackle of automatic fire from over on the right.
"Shit!"
Bronce was down and screaming. The screaming faded to sobs.
"Did you see where that came from?"
"No."
"This could turn into a mess. There are too many of us blundering about in the dark."
Almost in answer, a floodlight came on. There was a burst of multiple fire and the light was dead again. Bronce seemed to be trying to cry out something. Vickers ignored him. There were more bloodcurdling screams from another direction. These weren't the sound of mortal pain, though. It was shrieking, crazy rage. Eggy came round the corner of the house at a dead run, an old fashioined MT in one hand and a machete in the other. His teeth were bared in a howling grimace that was hardly human. He was stripped to the waist and his mass of neck chains flew and flailed behind him. He failed totally to see either Vickers or Fenton as he raced across the patio and back into the darkness. The howl turned into semi-articulate curses punctuated by bursts of wild firing.
"Unstable little fucker, isn't he."
"Maybe he just enjoys his vocation."
"Let's work our way around the outside of the house." Fenton looked amused. "You want me to go first."
"You're nearest.'.'
"If you're not behind me, I'll come back for you." Fenton edged forward, keeping close to the cover of the wall. Vickers followed right behind. There was more firing and what sounded like the explosion of a grenade over by the heart-shaped pool. Vickers and Fenton paused and then hurried forward. They stopped again. Two figures came over the edge of the patio at a dead run on silent soles. Both Vickers and Fenton froze in the shadows. There was no mistake: black clothes, blacked-out faces. They were the opposition beyond a doubt. Vickers couldn't feel a thing about them. It was simply an exercise. They were no more human to him than the flip-ups on the training course. Both he and Fenton let the pair go right past them. They'd almost reached the living room windows before they cut them down. As soon as they'd fired, both men ran and finally hurled themselves down. Someone was shooting at them.
"What do we do now?"
"Crawl back to the cover of the house." There was more firing, way to the left, beyond the curve of the window. An explosion followed four or five quick bursts. Vickers and Fenton eased themselves back into the shadows and waited tensely. Fenton nodded approvingly.
"You know? I like you, Vickers. You don't take any chances."
Vickers was watching the area of darkness from which the firing had come.
"When I haven't been told what I'm doing here I'm not about to stick my neck out."
Something was moving out there. Vickers braced himself and pointed his machine pistol, gripping it with both hands. There were figures coming around the front of the house. Fenton also took aim. The leading one waved its arm. "Don't anybody shoot. It's me, Streicher."
Fenton didn't lower his gun. "We could pretend that we didn't hear and blow the sucker away."
"I don't think it's quite time for that, yet." Vickers stepped forward and called out. "It's okay. It's just us, Vickers and Fenton. There's a couple of opposition bodies beside you there."
Streicher and the others halted. "That accounts for all of them. Are you two okay?"
"Sure, we're okay." Streicher sounded weary. "We took some casualties."
Vickers flicked the Yasha onto safe and walked toward Streicher and the others. There were six of them, including Gomez, Garcia, Curtis and Linda. Parkwood was bending over one of the bodies. He rolled it onto its back. "Does anyone have a flashlight?" Gomez handed him one and he inspected the face of the body. Vickers joined him.
"Somebody should go take a look at Bronce. If he's not dead, he's hurt real bad." Streicher looked at Linda. "Go check."
She hurried to where Bronce was laying. Vickers watched her go. When the alarm had sounded she'd hardly bothered to dress. Someone inside the house was turning on the exterior lights. Linda called across the patio. "Bronce is dead as far as I can tell."
"Shit." Streicher looked extremely unhappy. This was clearly the last thing that should have happened to his charges. "Who else got it?"
"Morse. It was his own fucking fault. He walked right into it."
"Who else?"
"Anna Teig. They blew her head clean off. One of them was tossing out whammies. Sammy was hit on the shoulder but he'll be okay. Ralph's looking after him. Zoe fell into a trench and broke her ankle."
"You'd better take a look at this." Parkwood was slowly straightening up from where he'd been examining the body. "You look too, Vickers. You're not going to like this."
Streicher and Vickers both peered down. Parkwood flashed the light on one of the faces. Vickers sighed. "Oh Christ."
"You know her?"
"Sure he knows her, don't you, Mort?" Parkwood seemed almost amused.
"Sure I know her."
Streicher looked angrily from Parkwood to Vickers.
"So who the hell is she?"
Vickers sighed. "
Her name's Ilsa van Doren. She's a Contec corpse. She's had two tries at me already."
Stretcher's eyes were cold and hard.
"So how did she get here?"
"That's what I was wondering."
Parkwood allowed himself a thin, cool smile.
"At least you've killed her."
Streicher scowled. "That could have been very convenient."
"What are you suggesting?"
Streicher was once again the closed-up professional.
"I'm not suggesting anything. Right now I want answers." He turned to Gomez, Garcia and Curtis. "We'll do it tonight, we can't wait until morning. Collect up the opposition dead. They can go in the cold store in the basement. We'll search them and find out what we can."
"All I know is that my partner here's been shot up and someone's going to pay for it."
For almost an hour, Ralph had moved backward and forward from the edge of hysteria. It had taken that long for Streicher's boys to bring in the bodies. The Contec connection had put Vickers on the receiving end of some hostile and suspicious stares. Three of their number had been killed and two more were wounded. Some of them needed an individual to hold responsible. Apparently Vickers might do until a more complete and satisfactory explanation came along. The search of the bodies had revealed little. Three had been recognized as Las Vegas freelancers, exactly the kind you'd hire if you were going to attempt an assault mission of this kind. Except for Ilsa, the others were mysteries. They had brand new and identical sets of clothes and a selection of brand new weapons.
Streicher seemed more shaken than he ought to be by the attack. This puzzled Vickers. He'd imagined the man was far more experienced. He had the jumpy preoccupation of someone who knows that hell will fall upon him the moment that he reports to his superiors. His authority seemed to be slipping and he had to openly restrain himself from leading the move to make a scapegoat out of Vickers.
"Somebody had to tell them where we are."
Vickers was calm and patient. It wasn't so much Streicher that worried him. With Streicher, discipline would always win out in the end. It was Ralph that bothered him the most. Ralph's lover, partner, companion or whatever, was wounded. Vickers couldn't trust that his alternate ranting and brooding might not explode into a full-scale flash of get even. Nobody had yet asked Vickers to hand over his weapon and he continued to hold onto it.
"How could I have told anyone where we are? I didn't know, and if they'd planted some gizmo on me, you would have found it. You ran tests on me for twenty-seven hours."
When the dead had been brought in, Streicher had insisted that everyone follow them down to the cold-room in the cellar. The thirteen bodies had been laid side by side on the concrete floor. They looked like wax figures under the harsh, white refrigerator neon, with as little relationship to life as the sides of beef and bacon that were hung along the wall on steel hooks. The Rancho was also prepared for a siege as well as an attack. There were a pair of plain wooden coffins stacked in a corner. These somehow disturbed Vickers more than the dead on display.
Streicher paced up and down the row of bodies. Everyone else waited, chilling down in the bone-cold, metallic air and listening to the ring of his boots. After the warm desert night the freeze came fast. Ralph was the first to crack.
"What I want to know is what are we going to do about this?"
The remark was thrown directly at Vickers. Ralph, however, wasn't the only one who was cold and angry. Debbie was squatting on the floor, massaging her legs.
"This is getting ridiculous, Streicher. We're professionals and we coped with the situation. Why are you keeping us down here freezing our collective ass off? We were just in genuine combat and we don't need this shit. If you think you're going to get Vickers to confess to something, you've got to be crazy."
Vickers gave her a half smile. Ralph immediately swung at one of the side of beef. There was a hollow thud. The meat swung backwards and forwards.
"Let me have a try at him. He'll tell everything he knows."
Streicher was glowering. Vickers was trying not to shiver with the cold. He was getting tired of all this nonsense. When people started punching meat, it was time to take the offensive. His delivery was slow, fairly soft but very distinct.
"If you people didn't have shit for brains you'd realize that I couldn't-in any way-have brought this team down on us."
Ralph was advancing on Vickers.
"Don't tell me I have shit for brains, motherfucker."
Vickers took a pace back and raised the Yasha.
"One more step and I'll cut your ass in half. I swear to God."
For too many seconds it was a frozen tableau. Ralph snarling, Vickers pointing the machine pistol at his stomach while the onlookers tried not to think about what was going to come next. Then Fenton, one hand in his pocket and the other tapping his own gun against his shoulder, sauntered into the picture.
"For so-called professionals, you really aren't thinking too seriously. Vickers is right when he says you've got shit for brains. Consider this…"
Debbie interrupted. "Could we consider it somewhere else? I'm going to get sick if I stay down here any longer."
Vickers and Fenton both looked at Streicher.
"Well?"
Streicher nodded. He seemed to be more in control of himself. Fenton turned to Ralph.
"How about you? Ready to discuss this upstairs?"
Ralph let go a little. Fenton put a hand on his shoulder.
"Let's go upstairs, shall we?"
There was collective relief as everyone filed out. Finally there were only Vickers and Streicher left. Vickers took a final look at the bodies and then motioned with his gun.
"I'd be happier if you went first."
Streicher continued to scowl.
"I'm not convinced of anything."
"Neither am I; that's why I don't want you behind me."
They reassembled in the living room. The curtains were drawn back and it was like a glass box. There was a hint of dawn in the eastern sky. Someone had helped himself to drinks and most had put down their weapons. The mood was now one of discussion rather than retaliatory kill. Vickers and Fenton still clutched their guns. Vickers noted that, for a second time, Fenton had slipped easily into the role of watching his back.
Again he wondered what it was that Fenton ultimately wanted. In the living room, he went even further. He seemed to be acting as Vickers' attorney.
"It's like he told you downstairs. If you think it through, you'd realize that neither he nor any of the rest of us could have guided that team in here."
Ralph was still clenching and unclenching his jaw and fists.
"Some motherfucker did."
"That's a fact, but it wasn't Vickers."
"Maybe you're just hot for his ass."
"Now you're really being stupid."
"I don't like to be called stupid."
Streicher was halfway out of his chair with a parade ground bellow.
"Just shut the fuck up, Ralph!" He turned to Fenton. "You go on, but you'd better make it good."
Fenton scanned the room, moving with scarcely concealed contempt.
"What everyone's forgetting is that we took those suckers with ease. If anyone in this room had managed to get out the location of this place and precise details of the defense set-up including the actual position of the landlines, they would also have reported on how many of us were staying here. How many are we?" He looked around questioningly. "Two dozen? Right? If they'd known that there were two dozen of us in here, would they have sent in a little bitty team of just ten?"
Vickers nodded. "They'd have either sent in a full-blown assault force of fifty or, much more likely, wouldn't have bothered in the first place."
Debbie reached for a bottle of Jack Daniels. "So who did tell Contec we were here?"
Fenton shrugged. "It must have been a leak on the outside."
"Why should an outside leak be any more likely to give out the wrong inf
ormation?"
Fenton frowned; for the first time he looked uncertain.
"I don't know. Maybe they had bad information, maybe they had old information, maybe it was all part of some weird setup. What can I tell you? Whatever the answer, it makes more sense than trying to work out an impossible theory so we can pin the blame on somebody here."
Neither Streicher nor Ralph appeared to be any closer to being convinced.
"It's all too easy to place the responsibility back in Las Vegas."
"How many people knew we were all out here, Streicher?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Do you even know?"
Debbie put down her bottle. "Tell me something, Streicher, why are you so all-fired keen to make one of us a traitor?"
Vickers noted the phrase "one of us." Debbie and maybe more had moved on from looking for reasons to hang Mort Vickers to searching for real answers. The suspicious glances were now directed at Streicher. Answers were something he didn't seem to have.
"I just have a feeling. I can't explain it. There's a great deal that I'm not permitted to talk about."
Vickers let the gun dangle by his side. He advanced on Streicher and nobody made a move to stop him.
"That's the trouble with guys like you. You're like trained dogs. You are fine just as long as someone's telling you what to do but if you ever start to lose faith in your master, everybody watch out, you go to pieces."
"I don't have to take your shit, Vickers."
Debbie made an impatient gesture. "Forget about Vickers, what we want to know is what you intend to do."
"I have to get instructions on this. Nothing I've been told covers what's happened here."
Parkwood yawned. Up to that point he'd kept out of the discussion.
"If that's the best you can do, Streicher, I think I'll go and get some sleep. You can wake me if there are developments."
There were noises of agreement and assent. Eggy stood up with a rattle of chrome chains.
"He's right. I've listened to enough of this garbage. I'm fucking off to bed."
Eggy had killed four of the intruders, apparently in a silent, berserk rage, but after they'd come back inside he'd become withdrawn and silent with a strange, heavy-lidded satiation that seemed to indicate that, for Eggy, bloodletting was a deep, profound, even awesome end in itself.
