So there I was. By coming in from above, I hoped to bypass all of that.
I switched the goggles from infrared to night vision and studied the dogging lever on the far left hatch. It seemed straightforward enough. Slide the lever up and pull. Satisfied that I knew how to open it, I took the goggles off and once more hung them on my belt before readying my rifle. I eased my foot out until only the toe was left in the loop.
Taking a deep breath, I pushed off from the side of the building and swung out over to the far side of the tank. And jumped.
The sound of my feet hitting the armored top of the tank sounded incredibly loud to my ears, but I wasted no time worrying about it. I yanked up the hatch, finding it lighter than I had expected, or perhaps it was just well balanced, and stared into the surprised eyes of a man sitting a few feet below. I fired point blank and tried not to gag at the mess I made of his face as I kicked him out of his seat onto the floor. Dropping inside, I slipped in the blood and landed clumsily on my butt. I turned to see another man sitting slightly above and to the right, struggling for his pistol. Panicked, I fired wildly as I struggled to my feet. My shot missed, and the man ducked. I got back to my feet as he unsnapped his holster and slid down toward me. I realized my rifle was a disadvantage in the tight quarters; I was forced to shift back to get another shot off. I hit him in the neck, and he fell forward, trapping my M-16 between us. A third man to my left swung his pistol in my direction. He was only three feet away. It should have been an easy shot, and would have been, if I could have gotten my rifle free.
Instead, heart pounding with fear and adrenaline, I dropped my rifle, clapped my left hand over his and twisted the pistol backward, causing his finger to pull the trigger about the time that he saw the barrel pointing at his own chest. His eyes widened in fear, and then glazed over.
I yanked my rifle out from under the second man and looked around frantically, searching for another opponent.
Over that quickly? My heart pounded with unspent adrenaline, and the little voice was back. Ken had said to expect four men.
As if my thoughts were the trigger, the tank lurched into motion, first forward, then left. The sudden movement threw me off balance, and I fell back into the seat, feeling the warm, sticky blood that coated it soaking into my pants. What the hell? I checked the bodies, thinking perhaps one of the men had fallen on the accelerator. I searched closely for anything that might be a means of driving this tin can, but there was nothing I recognized as such. In a panic, I started flipping levers and pushing buttons, hoping to find something by chance.
I did, though it wasn’t at all what I expected. There was a stick-on label that read “TURRET” over a console. Next to it was what looked like a kid’s video game joystick. I pulled tentatively on the joystick and saw the turret begin to turn, and an opening appeared in front, growing larger by the second. A separate compartment for the driver, I realized, just as a hand with a pistol appeared through that opening.
I flipped the lever on my rifle to Auto and fired a half a dozen rounds into the tiny compartment. The driver twitched once and fell forward in his seat with the Abrams still accelerating.
Before dropping into the tank, my hearing had been slowly returning, but the firefight in the enclosed cabin brought back the familiar ringing that had been my constant companion since the blast that had thrown Billy. Touch, sight, and smell kicked into overdrive to compensate for my lost hearing. Suddenly, the scent of gunpowder and blood was overwhelming, the feel of blood seeping through my clothing from the seat nauseating.
Standing in the seat, I prepared to climb out of the tank. It looked like I was going to have to jump, and I wanted to do it before the Abrams built up too much speed. Then I saw where we were headed. Larry’s men were dead ahead, cheering and waving at the tank, unaware that it was driving itself and would run over their barricade in less than a minute.
They thought I was one of the crew. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. I looked at the fifty caliber machine gun in front of me and took the grips in hand. It only took a few seconds to find the manual controls, and only a few more to give Larry’s thugs the surprise of their lives. The last man went down just seconds before the tank crashed into the barrier of cars; the lurch as the Abrams flattened the automobiles dropped me back into the seat. There were only seconds left before I slammed full speed into the side of the Sears building.
In retrospect, it probably would have been smarter for me to have just closed the hatch and stayed inside the tank than to have jumped, but by the time I realized just how fast I was really going, my choices were rather limited. I was already outside, on top of the tank with the department store rushing at me at about forty miles an hour. It was either jump or take my chances sitting on the outside of the tank as it slammed into the building. Visualizing a wall of bricks falling on top of me, I decided to jump.
The ground rushed up at me, and then there was darkness.
Chapter 16
August 19 / Morning
Triremes pleines tout aage captif,
Temps bon a mal, le doux pour amertume:
Proye a Barbares trop tost seront hatifs,
Cupid de voir plaindre au vent la plume.
Triremes full of captives of every age,
Good time for bad, the sweet for the bitter:
Prey to the Barbarians hasty they will be too soon,
Anxious to see the feather wail in the wind.
Nostradamus — Century 10, Quatrain 97
“Come on, Jefe. Time to wake up!”
Why was it that lately, I always seemed to awaken to the feel of someone shaking me and calling my name? There must be a sign on my forehead that read, “Go ahead and wake him up! He doesn’t really need any rest.”
I tried to tell whoever it was to stop shaking me and let me die in peace, but all that came out was “Shunnggghhh.”
“That’s it, Jefe! We almost home.”
“Stop shaking me,” somehow got lost in translation once more, although “Shtothing ma,” was closer than the previous grunting.
“Come on, Sensei. You can do it.” Sarah’s voice caused me to turn my head, an act which I had immediate cause to regret. Sudden nausea and dizziness accompanied by pain sent excruciating flashes of light to my brain, which for some odd reason, seemed to remind me that my eyes were still closed. I opened them without thinking, causing even more agony.
“Umph!” I explained firmly, clenching my eyelids tightly closed once more. Now, if I could only get them to stop shaking me.
“He acts like the light hurts his eyes,” Sarah said.
“Of course it hurt his eyes! Don’ it hurt your eyes when you first wake up? Come on, Jefe!”
This time Rene’s voice accompanied a firm slap to my cheek. The pain in my head hurt immeasurably worse than the slap could account for. “Ow!” The single syllable was simple enough to make it through my scrambled neurons exactly as I had intended. For some reason, however, it only seemed to encourage another light slap.
“Good, Jefe! You need to wake up an’ stay awake. You hear me?”
When I refused to answer, someone decided to raise my eyelid to see if I was really home. I jerked my head away and immediately suffered another wave of pain and nausea.
“Jefe, you gotta concussion. You gotta stay awake! Fight it, Jefe. Open you eyes!”
I cracked one lid a fraction of an inch and squinted at the two women hovering over me. Both Sarah and Rene smiled when they saw that I was mostly cognizant.
“Stoshnme,” I mumbled, but it only earned a puzzled frown.
“What he say?” Rene asked. Sarah shrugged.
I took particular care with my pronunciation, forming my lips into the proper shapes and enunciating slowly and deliberately. “Stob. Shakin’. Me!”
Rene laughed. “Ain’ nobody shakin’ you, Jefe. You in the back of a Humvee an’ we takin’ back roads to keep from being spotted. The roads, they jus’ a little bumpy.”
I braved
the light, cracking my eyelids a bit more. Sarah nodded encouragingly. “That’s good, Sensei. How do you feel?”
“Like I’m gonna throw up and die. And not necessarily in that order.”
“Considering what you’ve been through, I’m not surprised.” She placed a carbine in my hands. “We were able to get some people back to see what you and the others did with that ambush of yours. We found this and the rest of your squad, most of them dead.”
“Most of them?”
“We found Billy and that Filipino guy still alive. What was it, Ed, Edward…?”
I laid my head back and smiled. “Billy and Edwin. They’re all right?”
“They say Billy’s going to be fine. Don’t know about Edwin. He looked pretty bad.”
“How about Ken?” I feared what I might hear. The last thing I remembered was the tank rushing directly at the building where Ken and the rest of our people were holed up. My imagination supplied countless scenarios involving a runaway Abrams crushing them all to a pulp.
The reassuring answer came from the driver’s seat in front. “I’m doing just fine, thanks to you and your asinine stunt with that tank.”
“Ken!” Grinning from ear to ear, I struggled to sit up. Rene and Sarah helped me, and seconds later I was clapping Ken on the shoulder as he tried to drive and look back at me at the same time.
“’Bout time you woke up.”
Somewhere on the ride back to the factory, I lost my battle with consciousness and succumbed once more to the exhaustion that permeated my being. At least I had something to smile about when oblivion reclaimed me.
My next coherent thoughts involved intense feelings of vertigo and the uneasy, not-quite certainty that something was wrong-not threatening, but still wrong. Confused, unsure of where I was, my mind tried to sort through a collage of unfamiliar sensations.
Soft cushions, the smell of mildewed fabric, and the dank, humid atmosphere served to let me know I was no longer in the back of the Humvee. I heard the echoes of voices in solemn conversation beyond the door of my room. I concentrated on the voices. Only a word or two made it through, but I recognized my wife’s, and her tone was somewhat less than friendly. My memory was a bit fuzzy, but I recalled flashes of her alternating between laughter, tears, and anger when she saw my condition upon my return from our raid. Then, after examining my head with the experienced eye of a nurse’s daughter, she had decided I was in no real danger and prescribed compresses and bed rest, concussion notwithstanding.
Under her direction, Rene, Ken, Jim, and Sarah had moved me into Jim’s office and laid me down on the sofa, where she threatened dire consequences should I dare get up.
She needn’t have worried. As badly as I had felt, it wasn’t likely I could have gotten up if the building caught fire. I didn’t even recall hitting the cushions, so quickly did my exhaustion overcome me.
My body seemed to have recovered somewhat. I swung my feet over the edge of the couch and sat up, barely catching myself in time to keep my face from introducing itself to the floor. Weak and trembling, I raised my hand to touch a makeshift bandage over a huge knot on the front of my skull; I vaguely recalled everyone’s worries about a concussion. Memories of a nightmare tank ride reminded me that if a concussion was the worst of my injuries, I had probably gotten off lightly.
The exhaustion that had previously overwhelmed everything else was gone, replaced by aching, stiff muscles that stubbornly resisted my brain’s commands to rise. Synaptic impulse slowly won out, and I carefully limped through the door and down the hall toward the sound of the voices.
I couldn’t hear much of what was being said through the door, only enough to hear Debra adamantly refuse to allow some person or persons to awaken me.
Woe to the foolish mortal who dared the wrath of Debra. I smiled a bit at the thought and wondered how long I had slept. Snatches of conversation filtered through the door.
“… let him get some rest… already done enough?” I couldn’t hear it all, and my head hurt too badly to concentrate much, but it soon became evident exactly who she was arguing with. Ken’s voice, firm and calm as always, answered, though I couldn’t hear what he said. Jim joined in a few seconds later.
With a little grimace at the ache in my forearm, I turned the doorknob and entered. The previously animated discussion abruptly ceased, and the three occupants of the room turned to face me, suddenly seeming unsure of themselves. I turned from one face to the other, hoping to show them that I was all right. “Am I interrupting?”
Their lack of response was less than reassuring. I had just heard them arguing about me. Now… nothing. “Come on, guys, how would you feel if you walked into a room, and everyone stopped talking all at once?”
Jim grinned a little and waved me to a chair. “Come on in and sit down before you fall over.” Ken pulled the old wooden desk chair out, and I sat cautiously at the table across from Jim. Debra, sitting on my right, reached over and squeezed my hand. I tried not to grimace at the pain caused by that simple act.
“You shouldn’t be up.” It was a gentle admonishment and, though I could tell she meant it, she also seemed relieved to see me.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“Seriously, how’re you feelin’, Lee?” Jim’s smile and light tone were forced, his expression grim. The black eye made it look worse.
“Like I dove off the high dive into an empty pool.” The smile relaxed a little, as did his expression. “So what’s all the arguing about?”
The mayor hesitated, apparently loathe to renew the debate.
“Come on, Jim. You look like you just swallowed something that’s trying to claw its way back up. What’s going on?”
I searched the faces of the three people I trusted above all others. If there was something they were keeping from me, it must be pretty bad. I sighed and looked up at the sunlight filtering in through the office window. From the angle, I estimated the time to be about an hour or two before noon. I’m too tired for this!
Turning back to the three around the table, I saw that Ken had on his best poker face. I’d seen it before and knew I wouldn’t get anything there that he didn’t want to show me. Jim was just the opposite with his face a tortured roadmap of emotion. Above all else, I saw the worry of a man responsible for the fate of an entire town resting on his shoulders. Though the two men’s expressions were as opposite as east and west, the results were the same. I could tell nothing about the situation at hand.
I concentrated my gaze on Debra. We had been married for almost twenty years and knew each other better than we knew anyone else. It was hard for us to hide anything from one another. So when I saw the tightness of her lips, I knew she was fighting back her anger. She seldom raised her voice unless she was really riled, so that wasn’t unexpected, but her eyes bothered me-just a little wider than usual, a little brighter with moisture. I had seen the expression all too often during our internment in the shelter-fear.
“What is it that’s got you three at each other’s throats?” I prodded. None of them would meet my eyes, their gazes darting to one another like school children caught at some clandestine activity, none wanting to be the first to confess. “Jim?”
James Kelland, Mayor of Rejas City, the man most looked up to by all of its citizenry, shifted nervously in his seat and studiously avoided my gaze. He turned to Ken as though he wanted the other man to start.
I followed Jim’s cue. “Ken?” But Ken also seemed reluctant to take the reins.
I sighed wearily, too tired to properly express my frustration. “Look, guys, I’ve known you two for a couple of years now, and I’ve never known either of you to mince words, so I can imagine just how bad this probably is. Right now, though, I’m tired, my head is killing me, my whole body aches, and the only thing you two are doing by passing the buck back and forth is making me even more nervous. I can’t take too much of this crap right now, so could you please just spit it out?”
It was the mayor that finally started. �
��Larry’s outside.”
Those two simple words froze the blood in my veins.
“Outside where?”
“Out front. He’s got two of his tanks on the road outside the factory. One of ’em’s on the bridge with its cannon pointin’ right at us. The other one’s back behind the tree line.”
Oh, Lord. “Okay, I don’t hear any shooting. What’s he doing?”
“He’s got hostages.” Debra’s voice dropped to nearly a whisper, and she wouldn’t meet my gaze, choosing instead to examine the grain of the tabletop as if it were the only thing she could bear to look at. As I watched, a tear fell from her cheek to dampen the wood. Here then was the heart of the matter.
I looked back at Ken. “I thought we got them all out. What happened?”
“Eric’s group didn’t do as well as ours. They ran into some complications with the hospital extraction.” Extraction? Was that what it had been? Such a fine, sterile word for such a bloody operation. My thoughts were understandably bitter. “Some of the hospital patients were injured too badly to move, and some of the doctors and nurses refused to leave them. They got as many out as they could, but ended up leaving nearly a hundred behind.”
“A hundred hostages?” I groaned.
Ken shook his head. “There’s more. Or I should say, there’s less.”
I shook my head irritably. “No more games! What else?”
He pursed his lips. “When he showed up here yesterday-”
“Whoa!” I interrupted. “Yesterday? He was here when we were in town?”
Ken shook his head. “That was the day before yesterday. You’ve been out for the last day and a half.”
“What?”
Debra nodded confirmation. “You were pretty banged up when they brought you in. When you didn’t wake up all day, we figured the best thing for you was to let your body rest and heal itself.”
Half Past Midnight Page 27