Hunter closed his eyes and thought a moment. Then he turned to Fitz and asked, “If we maintain this speed, how long before we reach the bridge?”
Fitz consulted a series of maps, then replied, “I’d say just before dawn—three hours from now at the very most.”
“That should give us enough time, I think,” Hunter said.
“Enough time for what?”
“To reach the bridge and find out what they’re up to,” Hunter answered matter-of-factly.
“But how?” Fitz asked. “Your airplane or a chopper would draw too much attention if you landed anywhere near the bridge. And approaching on foot is risky, because I’m sure Devillian has both sides of the river heavily guarded there. Not to mention that we don’t have enough time to get there on foot.”
“So there’s only one way left,” Hunter said, grabbing his crash helmet.
“I’m almost afraid to ask this,” Fitz said. “But if it isn’t by air or by ground, then what is it?”
Hunter just shrugged again. “By water, of course,” he said.
The Little Colorado River was running fast—too fast—when Hunter and Fitz reached its banks less than an hour later.
They had hoped the river would be just like the hundreds of peaceful meandering streams they’d passed in this part of the country—only bigger.
They were wrong.
One look told them the rapids in the river were treacherous.
“Always wanted to go white-water rafting,” Hunter whispered sarcastically. “But this is ridiculous.”
“Aye, and it will be damn cold if we have to go in,” Fitz said.
Yet they both knew it was too late to turn back now.
They were traveling light, as per necessity. Being dropped by one of the Cobras a quarter mile away, they had to double-time it to the riverbank, carrying only one weapon apiece, plus an air pump and a folded rubber raft.
“Can this little dinghy take rushing water like this?” Fitz asked, concerned the rubber raft would explode with the water roaring by them so rapidly.
“I don’t know,” Hunter answered truthfully. “I didn’t have time to read the directions.”
It took about five minutes to inflate the raft, and another pair to assemble the enclosed oars, climb aboard and cast off.
In seconds they were traveling at high speed down the river, the rapids bouncing them up and down like a broken amusement ride. Instantly both men were soaked head to toe.
“Jeesuz!” Hunter yelled over the roar of rapids. “Shift this thing down into second gear will you?”
Fitz was trying to employ one of the oars to steer the dinghy toward the bridge, which was coming up on them very quickly. Yet both of them knew they were going much too fast to stop under the bridge—unless they collided with one of its supports, and that would mean disaster.
Yet Hunter knew that there was a chance they wouldn’t have to stop. He had two theories on what was wired to the underside of the bridge. Proving Theory Number One would involve stopping under the bridge—but at their present velocity that looked like an impossibility. Proving Number Two would be more of a gamble, but at that moment, it was the only option left.
“Hold it as steady as you can,” he yelled back to Fitz, as the bridge loomed just an eighth of a mile in front of them.
“What are you going to do?” Fitz yelled ahead, getting a mouthful of water in the process.
Hunter didn’t have time to answer. He knew that all he could do was attempt to snatch one of the packages as they sped past in the raft.
He stood up in the front of the boat and tried his best to see under the span. He squinted, adjusting his extraordinary eyesight while still trying to maintain his balance.
He pulled up his M-16 in his left hand just as they roared underneath the bridge. Then, in one swift motion, he was able to snag one of the many packages attached to the support beams with the snout of the rifle. Before they knew it, they were on the other side of the bridge and moving even more quickly due to the sudden narrowness of the river.
They proceeded to be propelled down the river and around a wide bend. Then, finally at that point, the river widened again and became more shallow, leading them to a relatively peaceful pool. Within a minute, they were drifting slowly to the shore.
Hunter was the first to jump onto the shore, reaching out to help Fitz do the same. Then, retrieving their weapons and the package from the raft, they punctured the dinghy with their knives and set it free, watching it sink in seconds.
“Any ancient proverbial sayings for that little adventure?” Fitz asked Hunter, already shivering in his soaked uniform.
“I’ll get back to you on that,” Hunter said, sitting down on the small sandy beach and examining the satchel charge. “All right!” he yelled less than a half minute later. “I figured Devillian would do something screwy like this.”
He turned to his friend, who was taking a nip of brandy from a small flask in an attempt to warm up, and pointed to the handful of words inked across the package’s canvas outer lining.
“Glory be,” Fitz said, passing the flask to Hunter. “This gets stranger and stranger.”
Hunter took a huge swig of the brandy and then packed up the satchel and his rifle.
“We’ve got to get to that rendezvous point toot sweet,” Hunter told Fitz. “Not only do we have to make sure the train goes across that bridge, we have to make sure it goes across at full speed.”
Chapter 62
One hour later
“HIT THE DECK!” SHOUTED the Burning Cross soldier, getting ready to push down on the handle of the detonator. “It’s going off in one minute.”
The sun was just popping up over the eastern hills when the Freedom Express rumbled around the bend and onto the approach to the bridge. From his vantage point, Heck could see that all of the windows and openings on the railway cars were shuttered and locked, but he didn’t have time to wonder how this would affect their impending action against the train.
He grabbed his walkie-talkie and pushed its ON button.
“Gun positions, ready?” he barked into it.
The inquiry was received with a quick sound off of the twenty-two gun nests on either side of the tracks.
“Mortar teams?”
This was answered by another twenty-two yeas.
“Cameras?” Heck heard himself yelling, feeling foolish as he did so.
The answer came back as twenty-two mumbled OKs.
“Thirty seconds!” the detonation officer yelled.
“Start cameras!” Heck yelled into his walkie-talkie.
But no sooner had he given the order than Heck knew something was wrong.
It was standard railway operating practice to slow a train’s speed down to two-thirds whenever crossing a bridge or similar structure. Yet now, as Heck watched the approaching Express through his spyglasses, he realized the train was increasing its speed.
“Ten seconds!”
This is going all wrong, Heck thought, rapidly beginning to panic. He knew if the train didn’t go across the bridge at a relatively slow speed, the whole operation at Desert Point View would be a bust.
“Five seconds!”
Heck didn’t know what to do. They had to activate the charges, but….
“Three … two … one … now!”
Suddenly the entire bridge was lit up in an incredible flash—so bright it turned the misty dawn into high noon. A half second later, there was the noise of an incredible explosion, so loud, it caused several large rocks to topple down the side of the small hill where Heck was located.
But the bridge did not crumble, collapse and go down with the speeding train on top. Rather it stayed completely intact—as it was supposed to. This was because the packages were not real explosives—as Hunter had found out shortly before.
Rather they had been flash explosions—fake bombs from a Hollywood special effects department. And just like the fake brick walls earlier, the noise of the “explosion” ha
d actually been a loud recording, blared out over a large speaker at the pinnacle of Heck’s hill.
The original plan had been two-fold. First, detonate the incredible flashes for the benefit of Devillian’s camera crews and the loud boom for the necessary sound effect. At the same time, it was hoped the men driving the train would think the bridge was wired with real bombs, causing them to instinctively jam on the brakes which would, in turn, allow the men in the hills to fire on them with relative ease, their special targets being the train’s many SAM cars.
But for some reason, the men on the train hadn’t fallen for the hoax. The mile-long collection of locomotives and shuttered weapons cars roared through the false explosions and across the span at top speed, giving the gunmen in the hills a mere few seconds to open fire instead of the half minute or so that Heck had originally hoped to have it in his sights.
Within twenty seconds, the last of the train was across the bridge and winding its way out of sight, giving the Burning Cross cameramen only a handful of seconds of usable footage.
“What the fuck happened?” Duke Devillian roared at Heck as the German officer emerged a little shakily from his Hind helicopter just seconds after it had touched down at the Burning Cross main observation station.
“I don’t know,” Heck stammered. “They must have somehow figured out we wired the bridge with fake bombs.”
“Well, that’s pretty fucking obvious!” Devillian screamed, a script girl patting his forehead with a wet cloth. “No wonder you guys got your asses kicked down in Panama.”
“What could I do about it?” Heck asked, finally snapping out at Devillian. “Only a fucking idiot would go through the trouble of wiring a bridge with fake bombs. In fact, only a real fucking idiot would have let that train come this far already!”
Immediately he knew his outburst would cost him his life.
“You’re right,” Devillian said to him in a strangely tranquil voice. “I am an idiot—for thinking that you could really pull it off. You fucking Germans … you screwed up two wars; you couldn’t even hold on to one lousy canal. Some Master Race. You’re just a bunch of fuck-ups.”
“Nobody talks that way to me,” Heck snarled, reaching for his revolver. Before the gun could clear the holster, however, Devillian’s automatic weapon was up and ready. With two bullets, he calmly blew out the Nazi’s heart.
Several of Heck’s men were standing a few feet away and had witnessed this sudden carnage. Devillian swung his gun in their direction.
“He got what he deserved,” the Burning Cross leader barked. “He told me he could do a job, and he failed. We can’t have that kind of weakness in our organization. If you guys can’t cut it, then you’ll be right after him.”
To punctuate his point, he nudged the bloody corpse with his boot, and signaled for the body to be photographed. A barrage of camera flashes later, Devillian turned and walked away, leaving the men staring at the bloody remains of their former leader.
Chapter 63
MINUTES LATER, DEVILLIAN’S OWN personal helicopter was touching down at the nearby Grand Canyon National Park airport.
His rage at Heck’s screw-up was tempered somewhat when he saw the two rows of shiny F-101 Voodoos lined up beside the small airfield’s single runway.
“Finally, someone who can do something right!” he screamed at no one in particular as he alighted from the chopper to be greeted by a flurry of underlings.
“Where’s the squadron commander?” he yelled.
“Right here!” came the quick sharp reply.
Out from the crowd surrounding Devillian stepped a tall skinny man with a bad facial complexion.
“Colonel Billy Lee Riggs,” the man said, giving the cross-eyed terrorist a halfhearted salute. “We finally meet again.”
Riggs was a man that Devillian had hated for nearly ten years. A former top officer in the pre-war Imperial Knights of the Klan, Riggs and his boys would frequently do battle against the United Klans of America, the hate group to which Devillian had belonged before World War III.
In the post-war years, Riggs, a well-known air mercenary, had gathered together a dozen and a half like-minded pilots and formed what he arrogantly, yet accurately called the Ku Klux Klan Air Force, or the KKKAF.
Desperate for aircraft after the Santa Fe air strike, Devillian had been forced to deal with the man. He had struck a bargain with Riggs via the radio several days before, first paying him an exorbitant amount of money to conduct the air raid on LA and then leasing the entire outfit for the duration of the canyon battle. The KKKAF had deployed from their secret base in West Texas to the canyon field just an hour ago. It would be their job to deal with whatever aerial opposition the United Americans would garner—the assignment formerly held by the long-departed Skinheads.
“I’ll tell you what I tell everyone else,” Devillian said to Riggs. “Play your part right and you’ll get more gold than you thought existed. Fuck it up and my pit bulls will tear you all to shreds—one at a time.”
They retired to a small tent, where one of Devillian’s lackeys unfurled a map.
“A bunch of Twisted Cross guys fucked up, and the train got across this bridge almost untouched,” he told Riggs. “So the script is going to change a little.”
Riggs actually took notes as Devillian ordered him to deploy his fighters in a kind of umbrella formation that would orbit the critical Ten Miles to Hell trackbed.
“Your guys have to keep the United American fly-boys busy while we hit that train from the ground,” Devillian concluded, purposely neglecting to tell him that the train’s SAM cars had not been attacked as planned. “Then once we’ve got enough footage from the ground level, you guys can start strafing what’s left of the train itself. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” Riggs answered flippantly. “And don’t worry, Duke, we won’t fuck it up like your German pretty boys did.”
Three minutes later, Devillian was aloft again, shuttling back to his location HQ. Flying over the approaches to the canyon, he could see the train making its way slowly through the small patches of pine trees of the Kaibab Forest that bordered the tracks before they spilled out beside the rim of the canyon itself.
Devillian grabbed the chopper’s radio and contacted Jorge Juarez. The obese bandit leader not only commanded an army of mounted bandits located three miles in from the beginning of the Hell stretch, he also controlled a detachment of troops just a half mile before the Mile One post itself.
“Scratch pages one through four from your script,” Devillian told the man. “The train got over the bridge without a fucking scratch. This means your men have got to be ready to hit it the fucking instant your cue happens, and it means your mounted guys are going in a lot sooner in the play. Can you clowns handle that?”
The Mexican, as usual, grunted a response. “Don’t fuckin’ worry about us,” he replied. “We’re always ready to keek some ass.”
“You better be, you fat fucking slob,” Devillian replied. “If not, I’ll keel both you and your sister—when I find her.”
Devillian’s next call was to the outpost at nearby Tusayan where the squadron of Hind gunships was waiting.
“Looks like we’ll need you sooner than expected,” Devillian told the squadron commander, a reject from the New Order named Lt. Nicholai Kolotov. “Skip to page sixteen of the script. That’s where you guys come in and strafe the train around Mile Two and a half.”
“We’ll be there, comrade,” Kolotov responded.
Up and down the line, Devillian contacted the various unit commanders along the ten-mile stretch of Hell.
Finally, only one call remained for Devillian to make. He reached the officer in charge of his secret weapon, which was waiting at the far end of the canyon straightaway.
“The plot at the bridge went bad,” Devillian told this officer. “So we’re tearing up the first four pages of the script. Understand?”
“We’re ready and more than willing” came the reply.
Chapter 64
THE TRAIN HAD TRAVELED a relatively quiet two miles since the strange incident at Desert Point View Bridge.
Hunter was now airborne and flying low and slightly ahead of the Freedom Express as it slowly made its way out of the dense forest and onto the trackbed that ran alongside the Grand Canyon itself.
He actually took a moment to admire the incredible beauty of the canyon. But like everything else, he didn’t have the time to dwell on Nature’s splendor. He knew that within minutes, the train would enter a killing zone so intense and overwhelming that anyone in his right mind would believe that not even a miracle could help it now.
Still, a low spark was smoldering in the back of Hunter’s mind: “Only those on defense can be truly invincible. It is those who attack who leave themselves open to vulnerability.”
The lull below was shortlived.
Routinely monitoring all nearby radio channels, Hunter was astonished to hear a message from the enemy come over the shortwave receiver.
It was a squeaky, high-twanging voice that screamed at the top of its owner’s lungs: “Roll ’em!”
Only later would Hunter find out the voice belonged to Devillian himself.
Now, before the train had traveled a half mile out of the forest, a blast of fire erupted from the rock formation on the right side of the train. A small missile antitank rocket corkscrewed its way through the air and slammed into the side of the lead locomotive.
At the same moment, a dozen parachute flares were launched on either side of the train as well as from a wide pedestrian footbridge about a half mile ahead.
Suddenly the ever-brightening dawn sky was aburst with the surreal pink glow of the dozens of parachute flares. Then more fiery anti-tank missile streaks homed in on the train from three sides, joined by a rain of tracer rifle fire.
The running of the gauntlet had begun.
“This is it,” Hunter said to himself, immediately arming all his weapons, taking care to pat the front pocket of his flight suit where he kept the meditation notebook and his small tattered American flag wrapped around a worn picture of his love, Dominique. “This is where it gets settled, once and for all.”
Freedom Express Page 27