Freedom Express

by Maloney, Mack;

  Still, supplying the mesa by this overland route would not come close to replenishing the most critically short commodity—aviation fuel. For that, Devillian had to make a separate deal with an old PEMEX refinery located near La Pesca on the Gulf Coast. The price was double what the Burning Cross had been paying for the aviation fuel via Port Desemboque.

  Plus, the tenuous supply lines were not attached to an endless spigot. Because these commodities were in demand everywhere, Devillian’s new suppliers could only sell him enough material to keep the mesa operating for two weeks at the most. Then they would have to shut him off.

  But at this point, Juanita knew Devillian didn’t care about what was going on inside the fortress. His total consuming passion was this new grand design of his—this massive production that he was planning in order to make the eventual destruction of the United Americans’ train a well-recorded and highly publicized historical event.

  But to her mind, it was all total madness.

  She had begun to settle down around nine that evening, drinking a bottle of champagne herself and splitting a huge chunk of crack with Jorge. He and his lieutenants were scheduled to leave for the Grand Canyon the following day, and so their routine intoxication turned into a going-away party.

  Devillian was the spontaneous host, and he rewarded Jorge and the six officers of his entourage with their pick of the harem of love slaves. It was mildly amusing for Juanita to watch her brother attempt to get it on with two screaming teenage girls, but she sobered when Devillian insisted on sitting very close to her. She quickly shut him down, grabbed one of the girls for herself and insisted that she be flown back to her house in West Santa Fe.

  Although aviation fuel was in short supply, Devillian bowed to her demands and had her and the love slave taken to Santa Fe by one of the Hinds.

  Once there, Juanita drank another bottle of champagne and then ravaged the young beauty. But oddly, she quickly tired of this also, and soon sent the whimpering girl on her way, out into the cruel night.

  Shortly afterward, she found the box.

  It was the strangest thing. She had left her house to go to the nearby bar to get one last bottle of champagne. When she returned, there was a small box sitting in the center of her bed. Inside the box was a photo of Studs Mallox—wearing a dress.

  This was when she began to get scared. She despised Mallox, but she also knew that he was a tough number to bring down, never mind get into a mumu. Anyone who was able to do that could only be tougher.

  Plus, she knew the photo had been left as some kind of a warning for her—though it was a strange one.

  She loaded her two enormous guns immediately and locked the doors and windows of her place. Another few gulps of champagne served to settle her down somewhat, but not enough to prevent her from dousing all the lights in the place.

  She longed for Manuel, the seven-foot giant who used to sit by her door whenever she was in town, screening the potential mercs for the Burning Cross and aptly scaring away anyone else who might have designs on her. But Manuel was no longer in West Santa Fe—she had heard that he and his midget brother, Carlo, were on their way to Italy to make movies.

  The night passed slowly, Juanita climbing into a small, black tight bikini in order to cool off, and eventually wishing she hadn’t dismissed the young love slave so quickly.

  Then there was a knock on her door. She quickly retrieved both of her enormous guns, then walked carefully to the door.

  “Who is it?” she asked, both pistols up and ready.

  “I’m the one who delivered the photo,” said the somewhat familiar voice in reply.

  She drew the hammers to her guns back in unison.

  “What do you want?”

  This question was met with only silence.

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  Again, silence.

  “Do you know I could have you killed in a second?”

  Still, nothing.

  Juanita raised her pistols heart-high and slowly opened the door.

  The figure on the other side was dressed in all black. He was wearing a heavy overcoat, with the collar turned up and a black fedora pulled low over his eyes, so much so that she couldn’t see his face. She raised her guns to shoot, but in one lightning move, the visitor knocked them both away.

  Only then did he raise his head so that she could see his features.

  “You?” she blurted out.

  “Yeah—me,” Hawk Hunter replied.

  Chapter 49

  Near Petaca, New Mexico

  THE BULKY, AWKWARD TRANSSAIL C. 160 cargo plane had been circling the small field for thirty minutes, its pilots cautiously waiting for the first rays of sunlight to break through the early morning gloom.

  Finally, low on fuel and anxious to get on with their mission, the pilots decided to go in using what little predawn light was available to them.

  “Get ready back there!” the pilot yelled into his intercom microphone, alerting his flight crew in the rear of the ship. “This one’s for real.”

  The plane circled the tiny clearing once more, then went into a shallow dive.

  “Christ, here he comes,” grumbled the commander of the South African mercenary unit as he and his men watched from the ground. “Let’s see if they can get it right this time.”

  “Everybody down!” the unit’s second-in-command yelled to the group’s fifty specialist soldiers.

  Without further prompting, every man in the unit—known by the perversely romantic title “Tongue of Fire”—lay facedown in the small grove of trees next to the field and covered their heads. They knew the next fifteen seconds would be very dangerous, and hearing the sputtering engines on the approaching cargo plane only underscored that danger.

  The C. 160 was only about twenty-five feet off the ground now and heading a little shakily toward a large X that had been marked in the field with flour by the Afrikaners. The airplane was not trying to land—rather it was attempting a low-altitude cargo drop. Two large pallets of supplies for the Tongue of Fire sat in the rear of the plane’s hold, a tangle of wires, ropes and huge rubber bands just barely holding them in place. Squeezed in between the pallets, three members of the aircrew waited nervously for the word to kick the cargo out the door.

  “God, don’t fuck this up,” the unit commander muttered as he too lay flat out on the ground and covered his head.

  The Transsail came down to about fifteen feet when one of its engines began to stall. The plane’s pilot quickly applied throttle, and the engine coughed back to life. Trouble was his aircrew was pushing first one, then the other of the pallets out the back of the airplane at the same moment.

  The combination of actions caused both pallets to hit the ground much harder than intended. Each one kicking up as much dust as a small bomb, the cargo loads slammed into the rocky desert ground and immediately split open, scattering their contents all over the field.

  At the same time, the plane’s pilot yanked back on the control column and put the aging aircraft into a dangerously near-vertical climb. Despite the drastic maneuver, the airplane just nicked the tailplane of another Transsail—the one that lay burning and charred at the end of the clearing.

  “Well at least they didn’t crash,” the Afrikaner commander said sarcastically as he watched the airplane climb unsteadily to about five thousand feet, then immediately turn south, the very first rays of the dawn glinting off its nearest wing. “They’ll probably ask Devillian for a raise.”

  The Tongue of Fire had been hiding in the very inhospitable forests of the South San Juan Mountains for more than a week. When they were first hired by the Burning Cross to attack but not destroy the Freedom Express, the Afrikaners had been under the impression that they would be airlifted in and out the same day. But the events in Eagle Rock—first the United Americans’ evacuation and then the destruction of the Skull and Crossbones battalion—had caused them to stay in the field for eight long days.

  Trouble was, the unit ha
d only brought along enough equipment for thirty-six hours; so they had to be resupplied by air by the Burning Cross. The resupply effort was a tricky operation from the word go, as the wreckage of the Transsail at the end of the field clearly attested. This was not helped by the especially volatile cargo the Tongue needed to stay effective—that was, gasoline.

  True to its name, the Tongue of Fire was a flamethrowing outfit. Their profession was strategic and tactical burning—of buildings, military equipment, people, whatever. Their speciality was rooting out hard-core cases from caves, mountains and deeply dug fortifications, and their reputation of ruthless efficiency was well-deserved.

  But they had never been called on to attack a train before.

  “OK, guys,” the second-in-command yelled. “Let’s pick up all the salvageable stuff on the chop-chop. Hustle!”

  Immediately, the troopers jumped up and took to the field. In a minute they were sorting out the usable goods from the ones that were damaged in the drop.

  “Tell me again,” the unit commander said. “How much are we getting paid for putting up with all this crap?”

  “Not nearly enough,” the second-in-command replied bitterly.

  The officers walked out to the field and did a quick count. Seven of the gasoline barrels dropped by the airplane had burst open upon impact. That left eleven relatively intact.

  “Some of the barrels are leaking,” a sergeant reported to them. “But we can draw the gas out before they drain away.”

  “Well, get to it,” the unit commander ordered.

  Due to the nature of their work, the Tongue almost literally drank gasoline. Their flamethrowers were custom-designed jobs that mixed the petrol with a gelatin base that created a kind of highly fluid napalm. Anyone or anything on the receiving end of a “tongue blast” would be covered with a fiery jelly substance that would stick to anything: wood, concrete, metal or skin. And because of its congealed gasoline property, the flames took minutes, sometimes hours to completely burn themselves out.

  But the eight days in the desert had drained them of some of their already critically small supply. Gasoline was not easy to keep in the field; some just naturally evaporated, some went bad, and some was just simply spilled. Plus the daily necessity of testing their thirty-five separate weapons burned up about two barrels alone per day.

  Now, with the drop, they were up to twenty barrels, just one barrel over the prescribed amount needed for a successful operation.

  Also retrieved from the scattered remains was a pouch containing the unit’s up-to-date orders from the Burning Cross.

  The orders, which ran more than twenty pages long, contained the latest updates on the train’s extremely slow progress, as well as various charts and graphs with which the Tongue commander could determine the train’s ETA in their area.

  As always, the missive ended with a warning from Devillian himself: “Do this job right or I’ll make sure you never burn a damn thing again.”

  This was one threat that the Tongue commander took seriously. He had heard of Devillian even before he’d gotten the call from the Burning Cross to transit over from Pretoria not a month before. But the Afrikaner was also confident that there’d be no screw-ups. The gasoline jelly dispensed by their weapons was perfect for stinging the train. His plan was to concentrate on lighting up the last third of the train cars as they passed by. Then the men on the train would have no choice but to cut those cars loose.

  This way, the train would be severely crippled from the loss of thirty percent of its defensive weaponry, yet still able to continue on to its deadly rendezvous with Devillian’s main force.

  “Then maybe we can get the hell out of here,” the fastidious Tongue commander told his second-in-command after reviewing the new orders. “I haven’t gone this long without a bath since college.”

  Chapter 50

  La Casa de las Estrellas

  THE BURNING CROSS COMMUNICATIONS officer didn’t know what to do.

  He had just received a bit of good news—something that was running in critically short supply on top of the mesa lately, along with everything else. The Transsail crew had completed their mission and the Tongue of Fire unit was now resupplied for at least the next forty-eight hours.

  The communication officer’s dilemma was whether to wake Devillian with the news or not. It was just six AM, and he had to figure the Burning Cross leader was still sleeping—or, more accurately, still unconscious. Waking the cross-eyed terrorist was a dangerous proposition. The officer knew that on one hand, the boss shot people for rousing him too early. On the other, he’d also shot a number of people for delivering news too late. Such were the pitfalls of serving close to the top of the Burning Cross power structure.

  The communications officer remained undecided during most of the long walk toward Devillian’s Play Pen. He was about two thirds of the way there when he hit upon a compromise strategy. He would simply put his ear to the lust nest’s door and knock only at the first sign of life inside.

  So it was with great surprise that the officer found the doors to the Play Pen open and a groggy, yet noisy party still inside.

  The man gulped when he first saw Devillian. The white supremacist leader was lying on his huge bed, drunkenly orchestrating a bevy of confused, naked beauties as they halfheartedly flagellated him.

  On the floor next to the bed was the massive frame of the bandit Jorge Juarez, naked from the waist down and laying in a multi-colored pool of unidentifiable liquid. The recently returned Major Heck, he being bandaged on the head and shoulder, was sitting in one corner of the huge room, babbling incoherently as he tried to stick the needle of a morphine-filled syringe into his arm, two unconscious naked girls at his feet.

  All the while, an extremely sickening video of newsreel footage depicting the horrors of the World War II Nazi war camp Treblinka was playing unwatched on the enormous TV screen in the far corner. The room itself smelt of vomit.

  The officer had no choice but to give Devillian the message now. Holding his breath, he saluted and handed the communiqué to the cross-eyed man. Devillian started gurgling as he tried to focus on the neatly typed-out words, all the while enduring the less-than-satisfactory flogging.

  It took a full two minutes before he caught the gist of the news.

  “This is great!” he proclaimed, so loudly even the gross mass that was Jorge Juarez stirred slightly. “Leave it to those South Afrikaners to prove to me that you shouldn’t give a critical job to a bunch of darkies.”

  Heartened that Devillian seemed pleased at the news, the communications officer was still trembling with anxiety. Devillian had been known to kill people on an early morning, get-the-day-off-to-the-right-start whim before, and the man knew that if he saw the terrorist reach for his trusted Polaroid instant camera, his life was soon to come to an end.

  So the communications officer was amazed when Devillian promptly jumped up from the bed and swallowed a handful of speed tablets instead.

  Then he turned to him and said, “You’ve just been promoted. Be in the War Room in one hour.”

  It was actually an hour and ten minutes later when Devillian finally entered the crowded War Room.

  The communications officer was sitting in the front row when the terrorist leader swaggered in, resplendent in his jet black Nazi-style uniform. He was followed by a phalanx of guards who had been pressed into service as an unlikely squad of cooks. Two of them were wheeling a cart that contained a large, six-tiered cake. Except for the lack of a wax bride and groom figure on top, the cake would have been appropriate for an enormous wedding reception.

  “Today is a new beginning for the Burning Cross,” Devillian said. “Today, we commence feeding from the fruits of our new power. Today, we begin pulling the strings that will make the people in this country stand up and take notice of us.”

  The last thing that the twenty other people in attendance—representatives from the various bandit gangs, air pirate groups and other mercenary units in
the employ of the Burning Cross—thought they’d hear at the early morning meeting was a sugar-coated pep talk. Instead, most had been under the impression that the terrorist leader was going to address the alarmingly critical supply shortage. The last they had heard, an overland convoy was to reach the mesa by that afternoon. Yet essential items such as diesel fuel, food and water were in such low supply that the replenishment would be sucked up immediately, thus doing nothing to relieve the base of the shortage problem.

  Making a bad situation worse was the fact that Devillian had ordered most of what precious supplies they had left to a secret location somewhere in northern Arizona, the purpose of which the terrorist leader had yet to reveal to them.

  Until now….

  “The final die has been cast,” Devillian said, strangely sounding as if he were reading from a movie script. “Here is the layout for the triumph of our will.”

  Turning on the War Room’s huge electronic map, Devillian indicated the Tongue of Fire’s current position on the west side of the San Juan Mountains.

  “Going along with our plan of harassing the guys on the train, I’ve got a unit of South Africans sitting here on a bend in the track near a shit hole named Petaca,” Devillian explained. “They’ve just been resupplied, and when the train passes by them, they’re gonna burn them.”

  There was a spontaneous cheer from those assembled.

  Devillian then indicated an area in the northwest corner of New Mexico. “When they reach this point, we’ll send up a bunch of Hinds to pop them. This will keep them thinking while they pass into Arizona territory.”

  There was another cheer.

  “Then,” Devillian continued, pointing to the area around the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, “they’ll reach this area, where most of our forces are deployed. At this point, gentlemen, we stop toying with them and let them have it with both barrels.”