Freedom Express

by Maloney, Mack;

  Again, Devillian could not answer. He just slumped over in his chair, spilling a bottle of champagne in the process.

  “I think … you all better leave … now,” he said in a voice so weak, Juanita and the two communications officers barely heard it. “Please….”

  They slowly backed out of the room, Juanita not quite knowing what to do. Devillian looked absolutely pathetic, so much so, she heard herself whispering: “This is the end of him.”

  She was sure her intuition was correct as she closed the huge doors of the Play Pen behind her.

  In her last glimpse of Devillian, she saw that he had picked up a revolver next to his chair, unloaded five of its six bullets and then put the gun to his head.

  Now, with her ear pressed up close to the door, she could hear only the man’s labored breathing and a faint, disturbing click!

  Chapter 37

  Kansas

  CATFISH JOHNSON PULLED ANOTHER burr out of his backside and cursed.

  “Goddamn things will cut you up like a knife,” he muttered, flicking the sharp piece of grass away from him. “Between these frigging things and the smell of all this horseshit, I’m losing my enthusiasm.”

  He was sitting next to a small campfire, hidden underneath an outcrop of rock in a blind canyon about twenty-five miles west of Dodge City. Twelve of his 1st Airborne troopers were lounging next to the fire, which was doing only an adequate job of warding off the night chill. A larger fire would have helped—but they couldn’t risk attracting any more undue attention. As it was, there were more than one hundred paltry campfires such as this one within a five-mile radius.

  Just then, twelve more of his troopers walked into the small camp. None of the men were wearing their standard Airborne uniforms; instead they were dressed as cowboys. Slowly, they climbed out of these outfits and, in a ritual that Catfish had seen many times already, exchanged them with another dozen troopers.

  Within five minutes, the squad of twelve new cowboys was marching out of the camp, with the men who’d given them the clothes getting into their usual uniforms and taking their places around the fire.

  “How are the horses doing?” Catfish asked Captain Drews—the same officer who had briefly commanded the mini-fort at Eagle Rock before it was abandoned—as he settled down next to the fire.

  “Everything’s fine,” Drews answered, warming his hands. “The count is right: nine hundred and seventy-four. The hay is holding up OK, and I doubt if that watering hole is going to run dry anytime soon.”

  “How about the fence?”

  “Also, OK,” Drews answered. “We strapped up a piece near the south gate. It was just old, falling apart. The boys fixed it up real good though.”

  Catfish caught himself unconsciously taking a deep breath of night air. As usual, it practically caught in his throat.

  “Goddamn, I knew horses smelled bad,” he said, “but not this bad.”

  “Some people like that smell, Major,” Drews kidded him. “Some people like stepping in the horseshit, too. They say it’s good for you.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Catfish replied. “But not me—I’m a city person.”

  Drews poured himself a cup of coffee and leaned back to relax.

  “Look at it this way, sir,” he said. “We’re babysitting the smallest herd. Imagine the guys up near Abilene. They’re sitting on top of three thousand of these gigsters. Can you imagine how that must smell?”

  “Can’t be any worse than this,” Catfish replied.

  The night passed, and Catfish spent the time going over his duties for the following day.

  They were expecting two air drops. One was a shipment of saddles which were being parachuted in by the Free Canadian Air Force just before dawn. The other was their daily food drop, also courtesy of the Canadians.

  Catfish had to shake his head at the enormity of this new, rather bizarre mission he and the 1st Airborne had taken on. Just the logistics alone of keeping nearly ten thousand men—the better part of a whole division—fed and hidden in the wilds of Kansas were staggering. Flying all the stuff in from Free Canada only made the whole thing even more complicated.

  But he knew it had to be done this way.

  As the hours crawled on toward midnight, Catfish also found time to catch up on his field reports. More than three battalions of the 1st Airborne Division were hidden in the camps in his immediate area. Despite being deployed undercover—if, in fact, ten thousand soldiers could ever really be put undercover—there were still the day-to-day things to attend to, like strength reports, sick call and so on. Even back in his office in Washington he’d never had to wade through so much paperwork.

  However, despite his current situation—and the one-in-a-million long-shot operation that they were slowly preparing for—Catfish only had two real worries on his mind. The first concerned his family: They had undoubtedly heard that the United Americans had abandoned the Freedom Express and that the 1st Airborne had ingloriously retreated from Eagle Rock in the face of overwhelming opposition from Devillian’s white supremacist armies.

  As such, Catfish knew that his family was probably expecting him to arrive home at anytime now, defeated but still alive. Trouble was, he didn’t know whether he’d ever make it home again.

  His second worry was of a more immediate concern: Within the next couple of days, he would have to learn how to ride a horse. He was not looking forward to that experience at all.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Hawk,” he whispered into the night. “Wherever you are….”

  Chapter 38

  Aboard the Freedom Express

  HUNTER SNEEZED ONCE, HARD.

  “It’s too strong,” he said to himself. “Damn stuff is clogging my nostrils.”

  He reached over to the cup of water next to his chair and threw half of it on the incense that was burning in a makeshift urn nearby.

  But the spray of water only increased the amount of pungent smoke drifting around the dark cabin.

  “It’s all right, Hawk,” Diamond called over to him. “I think you are getting use to it.”

  The train was moving slowly—painfully so. He could feel every jolt and bump, every quake and quiver as it sluggishly wound its way through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  It had been like this for nearly a day and a half.

  He closed his eyes and returned to his meditation.

  If you must attack an enemy far away, create the illusion that you are only going a short distance.

  “I understand that,” he whispered.

  But if the enemy is nearby, trick him into thinking that you are going a long way.

  “That is clear too.”

  He had finally stopped questioning the strange intonations in his head; finally stopped worrying about where they came from or why. For many reasons, his concern for his own sanity was secondary right now. He had more important things to do.

  It had been the voices that convinced him that the Freedom Express should carry on—though explaining his elaborate plan to Jones and the others had been one of the most difficult things he had ever done. Something was happening to him, he tried to tell them. Something deep inside. If they just followed his advice—as he received it from deep in his psyche—there was a chance the train, or some part of it, would reach LA.

  But they had to trust in his instinct more than they had ever done before.

  Predictably, JT had been the hardest to convince. He thought the whole thing smacked of the New Age channeling craze of years back—supernatural voices coming through human mediums. Hunter tried to explain to his friend that it was nothing like that, but the sometimes hotheaded pilot remained unconvinced. And at times, Hunter wasn’t entirely sure his friend was not right.

  Fitz, Crunch and the Cobra Brothers didn’t know what to think that day after Jones had cancelled the mission when, during a completely bizarre meeting, Hunter spelled out his strange plan to them. They had seen him in action before—had seen his gambles pay off. But it
was a little too much for them to watch as Hunter sat, eyes closed, deep in a trance, spewing out ancient-sounding adages on military strategy and tactics while a stick of homemade incense burned nearby. Even Michael Crossbow, he being a student of myths and legends, was baffled by it all, especially when Hunter suggested that he become a ghost and go on a very dangerous solo mission.

  Oddly, only Ben Wa seemed to fully understand. Before he “abandoned” the train with the others, he had urged Hunter to go with the strange feelings.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to you, the Oriental fighter pilot had told him. “But sometimes, I feel it happening inside of me, too.”

  It was Catfish who proved to be the biggest surprise. When Hunter told him that an intricate part of his strategy involved his proud 1st Airborne retreating, he thought the former NFL player would have cried foul.

  But he didn’t. Instead he listened carefully to Hunter’s grandiose plan—the strange advice from beyond included—and then simply said, “OK, we’ll do it.”

  This had left only two hundred people remaining on the train—volunteers all. In addition to Hunter, Diamond, Fitz, the Cobra Brothers, the rest were Football City Special Forces Rangers, and 25 of Bad Rivers Piutes, probably the toughest, most versatile troops in the world. These soldiers had taken over manning the various weapons on the mile-long train, as well as all aspects of the train’s movement.

  It boosted everyone’s spirits enormously that the first elements of Hunter’s strangely inspired plan went off so smoothly. The advice he’d received pertaining to them—Attack where they don’t expect it—had boded well. Turning Devillian’s arrogance back on him, Hunter deduced that the racist leader assumed the United Americans were finished after the retreat from Eagle Rock. Or, if he was expecting a counter-attack at all, he would expect it would be launched against the mesa fortress. Using the mysterious voices as a guide, Hunter suggested the United Americans hit the white supremacist where he wasn’t looking. That beautifully simple bit of advice turned into the air strikes on Santa Fe and Port Desemboque.

  The second half of his subconscious message—Move when your enemy thinks you cannot—resulted in the more elaborate booby-trapping of the second half of the train. The egomaniacal Devillian had made the over-confident mistake of prematurely sending his best troops in to claim the Freedom Express.

  By conservative estimates, only about forty of five hundred enemy soldiers had survived.

  There hadn’t been any action against the train since Hunter orchestrated these bold moves.

  It was almost as if Devillian had instituted a kind of unilateral ceasefire. Some on the train even went so far as to suggest that the terrorist leader might be all through, that the surprise attacks on Santa Fe, on Desemboque and against the Skull and Crossbone battalion had been enough to shatter the madman’s dishonorable alliance of bandit gangs and mercenaries.

  But Hunter didn’t believe this for a moment.

  All he had to do was close his eyes, and he knew that the larger battles lay ahead. Though stung, Devillian’s army was still a very formidable force. As many as one hundred fifty thousand enemy troops were waiting along the tracks up ahead, and it was only a matter of time before the train would have to deal with them.

  Once again it had fallen to Hunter to figure out how to accomplish an impossible mission for his country. And to do so, he knew he had to pull out all the stops, even if it meant taking on a totally weird persona and listening to voices in his head that could be announcing nothing more than the onset of insanity.

  He sneezed again, but resisted the temptation to spill more water on the incense.

  It was only through many hours of intense concentration that the voice was able to come through—and then only in spurts. But Hunter had found that certain changes in the atmosphere of his cabin helped ease the messages to the surface.

  Therefore his chair now rested high atop a table at one end of his cabin; he had moved it there after receiving the message: In times of emergency, a leader must climb up to a high place and throw away the ladder.

  The cabin was also very dark, the only light being provided by the two dozen candles Diamond had found on board. Now as the young girl walked through this shimmering, flickering illumination, she looked absolutely beautiful. Holding a piece of straw to a large red candle that was burning nearby, she used the flame to relight the stick of incense.

  Hunter had no idea why the combination of the incense and the candle light, plus his high perch, somehow helped the messages from beyond to come through. But other elements were necessary too: Having only Diamond in the room with him helped enormously. Intuitively she knew that she was somehow caught up in all this, too.

  To this end, she had taken some silklike material that a woman had passed to her back during the Eagle Rock celebration and sewed a long, Oriental-style gown for herself as well as a similarly styled tunic for him. Although he felt like some kind of mandarin, the soft feel of the material next to his skin seem to aid in the channeling process.

  And so did Diamond’s symbolic breast feedings.

  “It is time again,” she would say to him about once an hour.

  He wouldn’t speak; rather he would just watch as she undid the front of her gown revealing two of the loveliest breasts he’d ever seen. Gently, she would place one of them up to his mouth, and he would softly suck on the nipple. Then she would withdraw it and repeat the act with the other breast. No words were ever spoken. But the ceremonial suckle never seemed to fail to uncap yet another stream of wisdom from the mysterious well in his soul.

  The intense meditation continued, Hunter sitting perfectly still, trying to summon the voice, take its advice and then incorporate it into the grand strategy that still only existed in his mind.

  So, he barely heard the knock on the door.

  “Fitz is here,” Diamond told him.

  Despite the time needed for his meditations, Hunter tried to meet with someone from the outside—usually Fitz or the Cobras—at least once every few hours.

  He sneezed a third time.

  “Let him in,” he said.

  Mike Fitzgerald slipped into the room, immediately squinting to adjust his eyes to the low, flickering light.

  “How’s it going?” Hunter asked him as he climbed down off his perch.

  Fitz shook his head. “Damn spooky,” he replied, rubbing the incense smoke from his eyes. “Nothing is happening, and I don’t like it. It’s making me nervous.”

  The Irishman then took a long look around the room.

  “Of course, not so nervous as all this,” he added.

  Hunter shrugged self-consciously. “I don’t understand it completely myself, Mike,” he told him. “All I know is that something is compelling me to act this way, and this feeling gets stronger by the hour.”

  “I can’t argue with your success so far,” Fitzgerald replied. “I just wish this place didn’t look so much like a church.”

  “What’s the latest on our situation?” Hunter asked, as they sat down on the floor.

  “Nothing much,” Fitz replied, gratefully accepting a glass of ice water from Diamond. “As you suggested, we’re going as slow as we can without burning up the engines. Everything is functioning well, and we’re cutting down on all unnecessary power sources. We’ve still got plenty of fuel, but it can never hurt to conserve a little.”

  “I agree,” Hunter replied. “Anything new from the Airborne guys?”

  “Not really,” Fitz said, habitually reaching for a cigar then thinking better of it. “Jones told me over the scramble phone earlier that they’re getting their airdrops regularly. Our old pal Major Frost is taking care of all that from the Canadian side. They should be getting their first bunch of saddles today, in fact. I guess it won’t be long after that when they’ll be ready for the next order.”

  “I’ve been, well, meditating on that for the past few hours” was all Hunter had to say on the subject. “How about the high altitude recon flights
. Have they picked up anything on the tracks up ahead?”

  “Nothing major,” Fitz told him. “They did a big heat sweep last night—you know—with the infra-red gizmo that can detect movements on the ground by keying in on heat? Went right across the northern edge of Arizona. Found pockets here and there—but nothing that would indicate a heavy concentration of troops.”

  “And what do you think about all this?” Hunter asked him.

  Fitz could only shrug.

  “Devillian hasn’t made a peep since we hit him,” the Irishman said, taking off his green beret and running his hands through his thinning hair. “We don’t see any signs of large enemy movements up ahead. All of our escape route junctions are still clear; we could pick any one of a dozen track lanes to follow, either north, or south. And there are at least five that would turn us around and point us back to Football City. So, who knows? Maybe Devillian is finished. Or maybe he’ll crawl back into his hole and stay hidden for a while and we can all breathe a little easier. After all, we got the last shot in, so maybe turning back now wouldn’t be such a big deal.”

  “Once the heart and soul is committed, it is too late to turn back,” Hunter said in a voice that alarmed even a hardcore like Fitz.

  Hunter closed his eyes and sat very still for five long minutes.

  “Devillian will begin to deploy his major formations within thirty-six hours,” he said finally. “He is planning his final attack right now.”

  Fitz was astonished. It was almost as if he were talking to an entirely different person.

  “Are you sure, Hawk?” was all he could ask. “Once we get over these mountains and into Arizona itself, there won’t be many places they can attack us from concealed positions. That terrain out there is pretty flat—most of it anyway.”

  “This is why we must prepare to be attacked while we are still in these hills,” Hunter replied. “But these will not be the major actions—rather they will be designed to weaken us. Therefore, we must ward off these smaller attacks as economically as possible. We must not deplete our strength swatting at flies.”