Tale of The Thunderbolt

by E. E. Knight

  Not one shot was fired from the walls.

  The Haitians poured up and over the stone battlements linking the buildings, using loopholes as footholds or boosting each other up by having two men launch the third over. There were a certain amount of mishaps to the attempt on the wall, but without bullets flying, the bumps and falls were comic rather than tragic. Axes and fence-post battering rams made short work of the wooden doors once the men made it inside the compound, as Valentine and Ahn-Kha's Grogs secured the perimeter and main gate, which gaped open. He heard shouting, splintering wood, and assorted whoops of victory from beyond the peaked roof of the main building.

  Valentine was glad to see a corral with animals still in it, but judging from the way the gate was left ajar, only lame animals were left by the departing garrison. As he patted a dejected-looking mare nosing her empty grain bin, he heard the main doors to the armory swing wide. Monte-Cristi and two panting soldiers bowed elaborately.

  "The Citadel of San Juan is ours, mon capitaine," Monte-Cristi laughed. "Not a shot fired. Most of the garrison has evacuated. What is left is inside."

  "Send a few men down the road, where they have a good overlook on the trail, but I want them still to be able to see these buildings. Get organized for a quick pullout, I'll blow my whistle, and loud, three times if I want us out of here. Is there electricity?"

  "No, just fat lamps."

  "Be sure no one goes looking in the dynamite shed with one, would you?"

  Valentine left the gate to Ahn-Kha and passed the main gate into the compound. The hollow-eyed officer lay there, bound hand and foot, with two of his former subordinates holding on to lines tied to his limbs. An old charwoman sat on a step, smoking cigarettes rolled from newsprint as she watched events; a pair of Haitians clubbed the officer who had offered an exchange of heads with their rifle butts.

  "Stop that!" Valentine yelled. Another guerrilla squatted before the officer, laughing and taunting the wretch.

  "Stop that!" he yelled again, putting his hand on his pistol. The men stood and turned, and backed away, hiding behind each other like children caught at mischief.

  "We join, we join, we fight the Capos, you see," one of the erstwhile Santo Domingan soldiers holding a rope said in French.

  Valentine looked at his new recruits-they had probably been bad soldiers for the Santo Domingans, and would be bad soldiers in his Cause, but he had to make do with what he had. Valentine tried to put words together in Spanish.

  "Thank you ... give him freedom," he managed.

  The Santo Domingans looked at him blankly, either not able to understand why he would want to free an enemy or confused by his Spanish.

  Valentine drew his knife and took a step toward them. They dropped the traces in alarm. He realized that he was snarling. He knelt by the officer.

  "My eyes! For the love of God shoot me, but don't burn out my eyes," the man said.

  "I won't hurt you," Valentine said, doing his best to soothe the man. "You won't be hurt at all. Have you left any surprises ... booby traps?"

  The man shook his head.

  "You'll remain among these buildings until we've found out for sure. If you speak the truth, you'll be let go. Do you still say there are no booby traps?"

  "No. No, sir."

  Valentine turned to Monte-Cristi. "Jacques, put him under guard. Guard, not torture. God, I'm thirsty. Is there a well?"

  "Between the barracks and that house your friend stayed in."

  "See if you can find any carts, wheelbarrows, anything, to begin with. I saw a wagon by the corral. Start there. Then start loading, medical supplies and machine tools first, then hand tools, then good-quality guns, and finally ammunition. Put the best cart you can find outside the walls but inside the gate. Load any explosives on it. No nitroglycerin even if you find it-I don't want to mess with that stuff. Dynamite would be best, if it hasn't sweated. Nothing heavier than a grenade or a small mortar. We'll use bigger shells and any nitro to bring down this place later. Then we'll start looking for food."

  Valentine climbed a ladder to look out over the walls on Ahn-Kha, and then moved to the well. After a generous water break, he moved inside the officers' house. He checked the radio first. It was smashed, and there were no notes on the clipboard hanging next to it.

  He wondered how long Bayenne and the other Haitians would be able to keep up their facade of an attack on the border garrisons to the northwest. Even now the Kurians could be mobilizing. He took up one of the smelly tallow lamps and checked the bedrooms; he decided that three officers shared the quarters. Strange that only one was still present; no wonder the man looked harried and his troops were on edge.

  Valentine broke open lockers with a crowbar until he found a supply of cigars. He heard someone else investigating the dining room and saw Cercado rooting through a liquor cabinet. Once the roadwatcher had satisfied himself that nothing alcoholic remained, Valentine asked him for his translation services. He walked out of the house and went to the officer, who was drinking a cup of water brought to him by the charwoman. He offered his prisoner a cigar and a light.

  "Now things are easier between us that the ugliness is over," Valentine said through Cercado.

  The man drew on his cigar and looked at Valentine through narrowed eyes.

  "You have nothing to be ashamed of," Valentine said, and waited for Cercado to interpret. "With the troubles you've been having on the borders and elsewhere, we knew you would have only a handful of men."

  "Men!" the officer said, his eyes filled with disgust. "If only. I was left with the stupid and the incompetent. I, I- whose father was at the storming of Monte Plata. Left with the imbeciles and cowards."

  "I understand. It is the same on my side. These Haitians, they look formidable, but they are hardly better than animals. I would trust a horse to have more sense."

  "Mine forgot what sense they had when they saw the leavings of those scouts."

  "With your best men away, what could you do?"

  "Yes, first they called up the militia for the assault on the island in Lago Enriquilo. It is time we took it back from the Kurians of Haiti. Some of my underofficers went with them. Then when your guerrillas started trouble at the border, our Capos ordered that every man be scraped up and sent to reinforce the garrisons. Otherwise, you would not be sitting here."

  "Undoubtedly. The fortunes of war, sir. One moment while I find out if you keep your word about the booby traps, and then you'll see that I keep my word about letting you go. I suppose it is too much to hope for that you would join us."

  "No. In the end, you will be hunted."

  Valentine smiled. "We shall see." He jerked his chin at Cercado and had him follow. When they were safely out of earshot, he stopped the guide.

  "This Lago Enriquilo-it's southeast of here in another valley, yes?"

  "I do not know much about it. An island in the center of a lake that lies in the pass to Port-au-Prince. The Kurians here have feuded with the Kurians there before. This island is fortified, it has guns that command the roads in the valley."

  Monte-Cristi moved about the courtyard, shouting orders to his men. He joined the two. "Not a great bounty, I fear. The tools yes, but few weapons. Some explosives, some ammunition."

  "That's disappointing, but it will mean we can move faster," Valentine said. "Can we be out of here by dawn?"

  "Even before. The men are looking for food now, but so far have little that is good for travel."

  "If that's the worst luck we have on this trip, I'll take it," Valentine said. "We can raise some hell behind this Kurian's army on our way out."

  Monte-Cristi nodded. He looked pale and weary. Valentine was about to tell him to get some rest when a call from the gate brought them to the walls.

  A runner came in through the gate. "Engines, sir, coming up the road. Headlights, too."

  Three trucks ground up the irregular road from San Juan, judging from the lights.

  "Ahn-Kha," Valentine called, "get the Gro
gs out of sight." Then to Monte-Cristi: "Hell, we should have had someone put on a uniform. Where have our new 'recruits' gotten to?"

  "Too late to find them now."

  Valentine got a better look at the trucks. All were variants on the sturdy two-ton military model, the backbone of the world's former armies since the 1940s. So beat up were these that Valentine would have believed they had seen service with Patton's Red Ball Express. Metal panels had been replaced with bamboo and canvas, and instead of headlights, oil lamps hung from the front and sides like a nineteenth-century carriage. Each had a perfect set of off-road tires and spares, however, thanks to the abundant rubber trees on the island.

  Valentine waved from the walls, hoping that he would just be a silhouette.

  "Don't shoot, don't shoot," Valentine said to the men now gathering at the walls and main gate. "We'll need these trucks. Let everyone get off. Jacques, pass the word. Lower that gun!" he said, the last to a Haitian who was sighting on the driver's side "window," which consisted of corrugated aluminum with a triangular view-slit cut into it. "Nobody shoot until I do! Nobody shoot!"

  The driver of the first truck dismounted, with not a few glances into the passenger cabin. He opened his mouth, as if summoning words, before ejaculating in Spanish and throwing himself to the ground, butt in the air and arms crossed over his head. Faces looked up from the beds of the trucks.

  "I didn't catch that," Valentine said.

  " 'Shoot, shoot, it's the Haitians,' the fallen driver said." Monte-Cristi translated, raising his pistol.

  "Wait," Valentine bellowed in French. "Don't fire!"

  A familiar figure swung himself out of the cabin of the first truck. "I told you not to be a hero," he said, planting a boot in the upthrust Domingan's behind. "Don't tell me I'm late to the party again?" Lieutenant Post called up at the walls, a broad smile on his face.

  Post looked as exhausted as Monte-Cristi, and Valentine was determined to allow everyone a couple hours' sleep in shifts while they loaded the trucks and assorted wagons. Monte-Cristi and his men looked after the few animals able to pull a load while Valentine spoke to Post.

  "We found the road easily enough, sir," Post said. "Overgrown, deadfalls everywhere, mudslides ... so picking a good ambush spot was simple, too. We let a rider or two pass before these trucks came running back from the border garrison. Full would have been better, but I figured you'd need either kind soon, so we hit these. There wasn't much of an escort, some men on horseback. The men went crazy with the machine guns-there wasn't an unwounded horse. I ended up pistoling three. Hated to do it. I don't know what's worse, screaming women or screaming horses. We got the dead and hurt off the road, bandaged up the wounded as best we could in the time it took to turn around the trucks and get things organized, and drove down here. I think we got into third gear once-it was mostly first and second. First in one of these is crawling, second is a quicker crawl. Only one checkpoint outside San Juan. I don't know if word that we were heading that way got out or what, but it was empty."

  "Losses or wounded?"

  "None, unless you count dysentery. Some of the men got gut-sick from eating the Santo Domingan's rations, I think. Or maybe it was from drinking lamp oil. That kid from Cer-cado's family, he knew every bend in the road, I'll give him that. You know, we could do worse than to give the road-watchers the weapons we find."

  Valentine nodded. "We've both been lucky."

  "From the stories the kid told me, there's a lot of discontent on the island. If some of the peasants here could just get their hands on enough guns and mortars-"

  "That's the first thing I'm going to tell them when we make it back to Mountain Home, my friend. Get some rest: find a mattress and use it."

  "Aye aye, sir," Post said, licking his dry lips as he eyed the well.

  The rest of Valentine's evening/morning was an excursion into the curse of Babel. He found himself giving orders to work details in French, English, and Spanish, all of it reinforced with hand gestures and a constant struggle against exploding into profanity. He had to stop men from putting ammunition into weapons meant to be transported, and piling their own weapons in stacks to be carried on the trucks. Groups of men occupied themselves by removing food from one truck and placing it in another, and others, after having made three trips in and out of the armory, decided they had done enough and crawled under the carts and trucks to sleep. Men lit cigars by striking matches on the side of the explosives truck, tossing the matches into the sawdust used to cushion the cases of dynamite. Some of the Thunderbolt's sailors and marines worked drunkenly, reeling and reeking from Haitian-soldier-supplied rum concealed in their canteens, before passing out from dehydration or dropping to their hands and knees to vomit. He caught the Santo Domin-gan deserters stuffing block after block of chocolate into their mouths, and briefly considered making an example of them. In the end, he put them under Ahn-Kha's supervision, and after they saw their new supervisor pick up a napping Grog by his ear, half-tearing it off so that blood ran down the side of the derelict's head, they took to their duties with a will. Valentine tried to comfort himself with the thought that he had been on more disorderly expeditions into the Kurian Zone.

  Somehow, the sun found the armory above San Juan empty and the trucks and carts loaded. Behind a vanguard of cavalry was Post's "battle truck," piled with sandbags and fitted out with the Thunderbolt's machine guns. Then came the other two trucks, towing carts filled with food and water. Behind that were horse-drawn carts and the packhorses, hardly burdened now compared with the loads they had brought over the Cordillera Central The engines gunned to diesel-fueled life. There was not room for everyone to ride, so the convoy would have to move at the pace of a walking soldier, though the walking men enjoyed the rare treat of moving with only their arms and a small amount of ammunition.

  Valentine placed himself in the third truck, the one hauling the explosives, with the most experienced driver: one of the Chief's mechanics from the Thunderbolt. He was an aging, bald Asiatic, with the pulp-Western name of Handy Sixguns.

  "Actually it's Hardy, and the family's real name is Chen," Sixguns explained when Valentine asked him his last name. He had always known the man as Handy, until he sat in the webbing that served as the passenger seat in the truck cabin. They made conversation while the vehicles inched forward out of the gate. "My father carried four pistols everywhere, he was a 'wheelgun man' he used to say, just like the old old cowboy books. Trucker in the old times with a Mobile-Birmingham run, jammed gears for the Kurians, too. I wanted more variety, so I went to sea. Ended up in the Thunderbolt, going from Galveston to the Florida coast line once a month or so."

  "You know Galveston?" Valentine asked. "I've been there, but never had a chance to get off the ship."

  "Spent some time there, the old Darcy Arthur got wrecked in a storm, and I was living on the streets there for a while. You grow up fast under them."

  "What ever happened to the elder Sixguns?"

  "I never found out. I went back once, when I was in my twenties. The house was just deserted. No note, no nothing. The neighbors couldn't or wouldn't tell me anything. Funny, I still look for his face everywhere I go. Bad not knowing."

  Worse than knowing the worst? Valentine wondered. At least Sixguns could imagine a future for his father. Valentine had the sorrowful memory of a crow pecking at the hole in the back of his father's skull, his dead siblings, his mother's violated corpse.

  A long mile down the road, the convoy halted. Post and two sailors trotted down the road from the fort, where wisps of smoke could already be seen coming from the armory.

  "When it hits that black powder..." Sixguns said.

  Post trotted up to Valentine's truck. "We probably have another thirty minutes, sir," the lieutenant said. "I didn't want us to get caught in the explosion."

  "Release the prisoner, not much he can do about it now," Valentine said. Post nodded and went over to the two Haitians escorting the captured officer. They cut the corded knots aroun
d his wrists and ankles. The officer looked back at his post, ashen-faced.

  Valentine climbed down from his truck. "We're looking for good men, sir," he said in Spanish. Emotion gave him the eloquence to get through the semirehearsed speech. "I once served the Kurians, too. But now I'm with those who resist.

  It's not a lost cause, or a sure death." The part about serving the Kurians was not strictly true, Valentine acknowledged to himself, but he thought it might help the man.

  "No, they have my oath. They have my sister in Santo Domingo. All I need from you is a pistol with one bullet."

  "That's not the way-," Valentine began, but the man lunged at him. Valentine sidestepped, stuck out a foot moving one way and a hand moving the other, and the officer went sprawling to the dirt. A Haitian raised his gun.

  "No! Bind him again-he's coming with us," he said in French. Then in Spanish to the officer: "I'm sorry, I won't have you hurting yourself."

  When they thought they were out of Valentine's hearing, some of the Haitians grumbled that a prisoner would ride while they would walk. Valentine shrugged it off. Soldiers that didn't grumble were thinking about something else, like their fears.

  The trucks rattled into gear, and the men got to their feet, and the column was on its way.

  The first stragglers appeared as they crossed a bridge south of San Juan. There had been some kind of skirmish at the bridge. Monte-Cristi's horsemen lit out after a few sentries who took shots at the column. After Post determined that it was safe to cross, Valentine ordered the men out of combat positions and back into the march order.

  Valentine walked with the rear guard as the column headed south. He had heard riders somewhere to the east, and was not sure if they were some of Monte-Cristi's scouts or a Santo Domingan's. He saw six or seven ragged people, bundles over their shoulders or in woven baskets, following behind.

  He found one of Monte-Cristi's subchiefs. "Who are they?"