Freedom Express

by Maloney, Mack;

  Chapter 10

  The next day

  HUNTER’S CUSTOMIZED HARRIER JUMPJET sliced through the early morning fog and quickly rose above the Freedom Express as the two-mile-long train pulled out of Football City and headed westward.

  During the night, the troops under Catfish Johnson’s command had loaded onto the train. Numbering nearly twelve thousand men, the army was composed primarily of the UA 1st Airborne Division, complemented by two battalions of Football City Special Forces Rangers, the force that had gained a place in post-World War III military history for their bravery during the first battle for Football City.

  Thanks to Toomey and Ben Wa’s mission to Texas, the Cobra Brothers and their famous Cobra attack helicopters also were aboard. Hunter was very appreciative to have the Brothers along for the ride—not only were their high-tech Cobra attack helicopters among the most deadly rotary aircraft ever built, but no one alive could fly them any better than the Cobra Brothers, who were not really brothers, but simply bonded together by their skill and experience. To handle the insectlike Cobras, two other platform cars, similar to the specially designed landing car for Hunter’s Harrier, had been outfitted with landing pads for the choppers and had been placed toward the middle of the train.

  The commanding officer of this small but renowned flying unit was Captain Jesse Tyler. He and his old friend, Captain Bobby Crockett, had been free-lance chopper pilots in the days before the Football City war. Since then, the two pilots and their gunners, Lieutenant John “John-Boy” Hobbs and Lieutenant Kenny Baxter, had worked almost exclusively for the United Americans.

  They had returned to their native Texas for a short rest when Toomey and Ben Wa located them and recruited them for the train adventure. Actually, the recruiting part had been pretty easy. The minute Tyler and Crockett heard about Hunter’s plan, they eagerly endorsed it.

  The Cobra Brothers’ role would be to stay close to the train, flying short reconnaissance missions and driving off any would-be ground attackers. Toomey and Ben Wa, with their A-7E Strikefighters, would join the F-4X’s of the Ace Wrecking Company in hopping from one landing field to another as the train made its way across the country, trying their best to stay within striking distance in case they were needed. In addition to being the overall aerial commander for the journey, Hunter would stay in touch with the other jet pilots as well as fly his daily scouting missions. In this role, he felt like an old-time trail scout who rode on ahead of the wagon train.

  Before heading westward along the first day’s route, Hunter took the Harrier back over the train for one last look. He dropped down to five hundred feet and put the jumpjet into a slow, forward-moving, near hover.

  Buzzing the entire length of the train in this manner, Hunter took a grim satisfaction in what he saw: dozens of cars carrying anti-aircraft guns, assorted assault weapons, banks of heavy machine guns, recoilless rifles, long-range cannons and SAM missile batteries, all of them inside special “turtle” armored cars that could cover up in case of trouble and then open automatically when it was time to go on the offensive. Mixed in close to the middle were the two cars carrying the ferocious-looking Cobra attack copters. Then, came the fifty-foot-barreled monstrosity called Big Dick and then the dozens of three-piece mini-fort cars that would be dropped off at scheduled intervals.

  Hunter swung the Harrier back toward the west and contemplated the dark clouds that were ominously forming out there. For once, he chose not to be impressed by the omen.

  It will take more than a few left-over air bandits or Badlands freaks to stop this train, he thought confidently.

  The first stop for the Freedom Express was near the old city of Topeka, in the territory that once had been eastern Kansas. The first set of fortified cars would be dropped off in the vicinity of the city, thus becoming the first settlement on the road to recivilizing the country west of Football City.

  Although most of the violence that had been reported in the Badlands in recent weeks had occurred farther west, in the New Mexico-Arizona areas, Hunter knew it was wise not to take anything for granted. Despite the fact that the first day’s progress through Missouri was going smoothly, he knew the emerging open plains of Kansas held increasing dangers. While it might not be well-suited for an ambush from the ground, the train certainly would be a tempting target for an attack from the air once it reached the wide-open spaces.

  Hunter’s trained eye scanned the skies ahead of his Harrier. All seemed peaceful. Nothing appeared on his radar screen. He even allowed himself to relax a little.

  Maybe the first day would be uneventful, he thought. That would be just fine with him—he had been feeling slightly edgy since taking off. He had caught several strange, conflicting thoughts creeping into his head. On one hand, something out there was making him feel more anxious about this mission. But on the other hand, he was feeling almost too confident about its success—and that bothered him.

  Suddenly his specially designed cockpit scrambler radio crackled to life.

  “Hawk … this is Catfish. We just got a radio message from JT and Ben. There’s trouble up ahead.”

  Hunter turned back to the train and landed. Within ten minutes, he was in the Control car, getting briefed by the Catfish.

  “They called in from the old Topeka airport,” he told Hunter, pulling out a map. “You know, that was the first landing strip they were scouting as a possible forward base. Well, they were able to set down, but they say it looks like a battle zone.”

  Hunter was surprised at the news. “I thought that place had been abandoned.”

  “According to our information, it had been,” Catfish replied. “But the guys say it’s littered with bodies, about fifty of them.”

  So much for the easy first day on the job, Hunter thought. “Do they have any idea who they are? Or were?”

  “They’re not sure,” Catfish said. “JT thought he recognized a couple of the guys he used to work with in his free-lance days. And he says unless they had changed drastically, they were pretty strongly in favor of our cause. His best guess is that some ex-soldiers and free-lance pilots got together on their own to try and combat some of the crap that’s been going on out here.”

  “And wound up being the victims of it,” Hunter said grimly. “Could the guys tell how it happened?”

  “From what JT and Ben said, it doesn’t sound like just a band of roaming bandits raided the place,” Catfish continued. “A couple of buildings had been completely leveled, and some of the bodies were pretty well blown apart. Looks like they were hit with some pretty sophisticated weaponry.”

  “Missile strike?” Hunter asked.

  “Maybe,” Catfish replied somberly. “Followed up by an air strike.” Catfish paused, then added, “And they found something else that’s a little strange.”

  “What’s that?” Hunter quickly asked.

  Johnson paused for a long moment. “They discovered one of our flags which had been pulled down from the flagpole at the airport and partially burned,” he said slowly.

  Instantly, Hunter felt anger rise from his belly. Though he recognized their Constitutionally-approved right to do it—after all, “Freedom” meant nothing less than total freedom of expression—he despised anyone who would burn the American flag.

  “Another flag was waving over the place,” Catfish continued. “It was obviously left behind by whoever staged the raid.”

  “Whose flag was it?” Hunter asked sharply.

  “That’s the weird thing,” the army commander responded. “It’s not one that we’ve ever seen before. The only insignia on it is a huge cross … in flames.”

  Chapter 11

  DUKE DEVILLIAN WAS FEELING extremely pleased with himself.

  Sitting in the front-seat gunner’s cockpit of the Soviet-built Hind helicopter gunship, he was just about trembling with delight. The past few weeks had been very, very productive, and now, with several of his grand schemes going forward at once, the future looked very bright indeed—for
him.

  He couldn’t decide which of his latest triumphs pleased him the most, though on examination, the meeting in Houston with Major Henrik Heck, former corps commander of the Twisted Cross, would probably rank Number One.

  Devillian was surprised to learn that he actually enjoyed dealing with Heck and the leftovers from the Twisted Cross, especially since he was now their boss. A neo-Nazi organization, the Cross had seized control of the Panama Canal Zone the year before as the first step of a plan to extend its tentacles into North America and eventually rule the continent. But the United Americans had crushed this plot by winning back the canal in a savage land and air battle.

  Although most of the Twisted Cross’s war machine was destroyed, a handful of their officers, including Heck, had escaped.

  In the months that followed their devastating defeat in Panama, Herr Heck and his cronies spent most of their time plotting their revenge against the United Americans—and especially Hawk Hunter. But without the military might of their former organization behind them, these men were basically impotent. Their plotting consisted mainly of rambling, drunken conversations in sleazy bars in the lawless towns of the Badlands, the only area where they felt relatively safe.

  Then one day, Duke Devillian came back into their lives.

  Devillian had actually been dealing with the Cross for several years. Long an ardent admirer of the Nazis and their doctrines, the cross-eyed Texan was also a slave to the notion that “White is Right,” and therefore, like the Nazis, he had little patience for do-gooders who still thought that people of different races could live together in peace.

  Colored? Asians? Indians? Mixing peacefully with pure White? How could anyone be that stupid? he would ask himself over and over.

  Like his daddy before him, Devillian had jumped into the Ku Klux Klan with both feet as a young man, doing his best to stir up racial hatred wherever he went. In the violent days that followed World War III, he turned to gunrunning—both selling and buying—as a way of living. His customers needed only to pass one test: They had to be white. After that he would supply them with any and all weapons he could muster, no matter how perverse their cause might be.

  Coincidently the Twisted Cross became one of his best customers, and for Devillian, it was like a dream come true. Nothing like a good mix of business and pleasure to bring out the best in a man, he thought. Being arms dealers themselves, the Nazi’s procurement section hired Devillian as a sort of advance man for them, scouring the fringes of the American continent, his pockets full of Nazi money, buying up weapons caches that were for sale and stealing ones that weren’t.

  Then came the devastating defeat of the Cross in Panama. When that happened, Devillian was so despondent he nearly committed suicide. His dream of riding to power on bloody Nazi coattails seemed to vanish.

  However, it didn’t take long for him to see that the Cross’s defeat could be a golden opportunity for him.

  Over the years, Devillian had built up a fortune in gold and diamonds through his black market dealings. Even more importantly, he had made a lot of contacts with powerful people, including many enemies of America. One by one, those enemies had been defeated by the United Americans—vanquished, but not totally wiped out. Like Heck and his Nazi cohorts, they had retreated to lick their wounds and dream of revenge.

  Somewhere along the way, Devillian decided he could be the one to make those dreams come true.

  With his nefarious network reaching into many of the terrorist groups around the Bads, who was better positioned to unite all of the scattered enemies of America? Who was better equipped to build a new organization that could rise from the ashes of past defeats and launch a new, even more deadly challenge to the United Americans?

  Once this grand idea came to him, Devillian wasted little time putting a plan into action. He recruited some of his old cohorts from the Klan, and together they began to quietly expand their power base by forming a secret alliance of Badlands terrorist organizations that had been operating in their own hit-or-miss fashions.

  Supplying arms for his growing army was no problem for the cross-eyed terrorist. He knew most of the major gunrunners and weapons smugglers still operating in the world. Plus his contacts also included people who owned some fairly sophisticated military aircraft. Soon enough, Devillian had himself a patchwork air force containing a number of Soviet fighters as well as French Mirage aircraft.

  Then another deal was added to this deadly air corps. It was no secret that the most vicious and feared of the Canal Nazi units was the Skinhead squadron. Eighteen pilots in all, the ’Heads flew their F-4J Phantoms with a bloody and reckless abandon that struck fear into enemies and allies alike. Temporarily “unemployed,” they were only too happy to accept Devillian’s invitation to join his evil crusade.

  But Devillian still lacked a cohesive, well-trained officer corps to keep his unruly bandit gangs in line. So when he finally approached Major Heck, he already had put in place the foundation for a military organization that would rival the Twisted Cross at the height of its power; yet it was one that lacked the needed discipline from the top. Heck jumped at the opportunity to round up what was left of the Canal Nazis’ officer organization and join forces with Devillian.

  To prove his value to Devillian’s cause, Heck had been given a test assignment: stop the cross-country train journey of the Modern Pioneers. Heck accomplished this with typical, ruthless efficiency. Any lingering doubts Devillian might have entertained about Heck’s ability to command troops again vanished when he heard about the fate of the train. The meeting in Houston completed the incorporation of the old Twisted Cross officers’ corps into Devillian’s new war machine.

  News of this sinister union spread quickly though quietly through the Badlands, and hundreds of additional air pirates, bandits and other low-lifes decided to jump on the bandwagon. If there was going to be another war, they didn’t want to miss out on the action.

  With his still-secret army growing in numbers and power, Devillian’s recent visit to Football City had been a kind of celebration-cum-scouting mission. He loved the very smell of money, and it permeated the very air of the place. Moreover, he dreamed of the day when his forces would march into Football City and he would take over the gambling empire.

  But there was something that Devillian liked even more than money, and that was why he was sitting in the cockpit of the fiercesome Hind gunship.

  Quite simply, he enjoyed killing people. And not just one or two murders at a time—he’d had enough of that during his Klan days. No, what really turned him on was slaughtering dozens, even hundreds, of people, all at once, and then filming the freshly killed bodies soon afterward. Just the thought of roaring out of the sky in a powerful airplane, with its nose cameras turned on and all guns blazing, blasting away at anything that moved on the ground, was enough to make his scrotum pulsate. Now he knew what the Nazi pilots of World War II must have felt like—strafing helpless civilians, bombing hospitals and schoolyards. Getting rid of the riff-raff.

  Purify the country. That was the name of the game.

  Of course, he couldn’t actually fly an airplane, but he could function as a gunner, and that was even better: He got to pull the trigger that unleashed all that glorious havoc, all the while recording the carnage on his video gun cameras. As a favor from Heck, he had flown with the squadron of Skinheads that demolished the old Topeka airport just for the fun of it—and he had loved every bloody minute of it. When they landed and he filmed the death and destruction they had caused, he was overcome with a surge of sexual excitement so strong he nearly passed out.

  It had been the best day of his life.

  Now the whining of the helicopter’s engines starting up knocked him out of his seminal daydream and back to reality.

  “Buckled in?” the Skinhead pilot’s raspy voice asked him over the intercom from the back seat. Normally an F-4 fighter pilot, this particular ’Head had drawn the shit duty of carting Devillian all around the Badlands
.

  “Shit, yes, I’m buckled in!” Devillian anxiously replied. “Now just get this fucking thing into the air.”

  The Red Star that formerly had adorned the tail of the Hind was gone. In its place was a large cross shown against a backdrop of fire—the symbol of Devillian’s new organization, the Knights of the Burning Cross.

  Devillian glanced back at his Skinhead pilot just as the Hind was lifting off.

  He’s an ugly bastard, but he sure knows how to put this baby through its paces, Devillian thought.

  They turned west, over Oklahoma, heading for the secret headquarters Devillian had established in the wilds of the desert southwest. It was here that he was going to meet with his chief lieutenants to inform them of the news he had picked up during his visit to Football City.

  Several days before Devillian flew to the gambling mecca, his spies had told him about a huge train that had rolled into town from the east, apparently headed for the West Coast. Devillian wasn’t too surprised. He figured that someone would eventually be foolish enough to try and succeed where the Modern Pioneers had failed. However, from all reports, this latest train was much bigger and was hauling a tremendous amount of firepower.

  By the time Devillian arrived in Football City, the whole place was buzzing about the super train. He had even traveled down to the railway station to get a look at it himself, though it wasn’t much of a sight as all its cars had been covered over with canvas tarps.

  But the trip had confirmed one thing: Just as Devillian had suspected, the United Americans were responsible for assembling and operating the train.

  And for many reasons, learning this had made him perversely happy.

  They flew along uneventfully, the Skinhead pilot keeping the Hind about a thousand feet above the wide open Oklahoma rangeland.

  Suddenly, Devillian became erect with excitement. He grabbed his microphone and screamed back to the pilot: “Over there!” He pointed toward the ground. “I thought I saw something. Let’s go down and take a look.”