“Good God …” Jones whispered. “Five hundred? Is your source reliable, Hawk?”
“Believe me, she has no reason to lie about it,” he said. “In fact, she was in a near state of shock when she told me. I checked with a couple of my other sources. They confirmed that a few hours past midnight, Circle guards went into one of the POW compounds and just randomly selected five hundred prisoners.”
Jones shook his head. “We expected something like this when the battle started,” he said. “But why in hell are they killing those guys now?”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense,” Hunter said. “It’s almost as if Viceroy Dick suddenly stopped giving the orders. But they’re doing it.”
“They’re dealing away their only trump card,” Dozer said. “If they kill the prisoners, they’ll be holding nothing to bargain with.”
“Damn!” Jones said angrily. “Have we been reading these bastards wrong all along?”
The three of them were silent for a while. Finally Hunter asked: “Can we do it? Do we have enough men and resources right now to risk it?”
“As of this moment, we’re more than evenly matched with them,” Jones said. “However, I think we’ve done a good job in fooling them that we are actually twice as strong.”
“Who are the closest reenforcements now?” Hunter asked.
Jones thought a moment. “Well, a big group of Texans are about six days away,” he said. “There’s a division of men right there. We got two brigades of Free Canadian Volunteers that are about ten days away, plus a reenforced PAAC division coming right from back home in LA. But they won’t be here for two weeks.”
Hunter shook his head. “It will be too late if we have to wait for them,” he said. “How about our equipment?”
This was Dozer’s department.
“They got the edge in armor; we’ve got the edge in airpower,” he said simply. “Luckily, they’re not holding many SAMs that we know of …”
“That’s another thing,” Hunter said. “I’m sure Ben and J.T. told you about the strange underground area we found on the imager the other night …”
Both men nodded. “You got down there to see what it was?” Dozer asked.
“Not exactly,” Hunter replied. He went on to tell them about the hundred or so tractor trailers and the strange elongated APC.
“And their doors were welded shut?” Jones asked. “What the hell for?”
Hunter could only shrug. “It’s been driving me crazy ever since,” he admitted. “What could be so valuable to them that they would not only go to such great lengths hiding it, but would weld it inside of a hundred tractor trailers? And this strange gold APC. It has a laser lock on it. Probably the most sophisticated piece of electronic equipment in the city.”
“Just another strange piece of this jigsaw puzzle,” Jones said, pulling his chin in thought.
Hunter checked the time.
“It’s going to be fully light soon,” he said. “I’ll have to get going …”
“OK,” Jones said. “I’ll put out the call immediately, to the Texans and everyone from here to the Pacific. We’ll have to get some troop airlift going, but even still I can’t imagine our getting more than five or six battalions before then.
“But it will have to do …”
Hunter shook hands with both of them. “That’s what I hoped to hear you say, sir,” he told Jones. “I’ll alert the underground and Elvis and the boys. We’ll have to work quickly, but I’m sure we can have the escape routes plotted by midnight tonight.”
“OK,” Jones said, checking his watch. “We’ll open up with the big guns at oh-four hundred tomorrow, just about twenty-four hours from now. I’ve got to start passing the words to the others. We’ll jump off at oh-five hundred ….”
“Well, I’ve got a lot of work to do before then,” Hunter said. “Not the least of which is to prevent them from cutting five hundred more throats tonight.”
With that, he turned and ran back to the helicopter, which took off immediately.
“He’s got that look in his eye,” Dozer said. “I don’t know how he does it—taking on all this. He’s just a pilot, for God’s sake …”
Jones nodded in agreement. “Well, if he’s so charged up now,” the general asked, “what’s he going to be like when they get his jet fixed?”
CHAPTER 21
YAZ’S BACK WAS ALREADY sore and he’d only been digging for an hour or so.
The problem with being an urban guerrilla, he told himself, was that if you worked in the day and planted bombs at night, you didn’t get very much sleep in between. The only thing keeping him going was the fact that he knew a hundred or so people inside the city—and tens of thousands waiting just outside of it—were working toward freeing him and the others.
That was a cause he could definitely rally behind …
Just then, someone poked him in the back. He turned to see a Circle Army guard, one he didn’t recognize.
The man didn’t say a word. Instead, he held both his hands up, palms out. Then he made two V-for-Victory signs and put them together. The four fingers formed a “W.”
Yaz was astounded. The “W” hand signal had originated back in the Med by the Moroccan desert fighters who had helped Hunter and the Brits fight in Suez. The Arab soldiers had come to admire The Wingman and, whenever they saw him, they would make the sign of the “W” and give a deep bow. Now this Circle Army soldier had done the same thing.
At least, he thought he was a Circle soldier …
“Follow me,” the man said, unlocking Yaz’s leg irons.
The other POWs digging nearby were studiously ignoring the encounter. Rumors had been flying around the work site all morning about The Circle staging mass executions of POWs. Therefore, many of them feared the tap on the shoulder or the poke in the ribs, thinking they might turn and see the Grim Reaper standing behind them.
But Yaz followed the guard without question and soon the man led him to the isolated part of the tunnel and the entrance to the pump chamber. He pointed to the crawl pipe, indicated that Yaz should go in, then he quickly walked away, back up to the front of the tunnel.
Yaz squeezed through the pipe and knocked on the door at the other end. It opened and he was surprised to see the chamber was filled with more than 100 fighters—some in POW garb, others in trusty uniforms, still others wearing black guerrilla outfits. There were more than a few people wearing Circle uniforms too.
In the middle of the crowd he saw a familiar face. It belonged to Hawk Hunter …
The morning found Colonel Muss meeting with his front line commanders.
“We sowed two hundred fifty claymores last night, Colonel,” one of his officers—the commander of the mine-laying squads—told him. “We will be able to put in another two hundred or so tonight, if you wish …”
They were standing on a bluff that looked out to the west. The terrain in this part of the continent was odd—the result, Muss knew, of a major earthquake that had hit the area in the 1800s, a quake so strong it had re-routed the Mississippi by more than a mile. The shake-up had left miles of flat plains, interrupted at irregular intervals by the high bluffs.
By using his high-powered binoculars, Muss could just barely see activity off in the distance. Trucks moving about, a helicopter dipping in flight, the smoke or steam from some unknown engine. It was the advance elements of the Western Forces armies he was watching, and he had the distinct feeling that someone way out there was watching him through their binoculars.
They are getting ready to pounce, he thought.
“You may have other things to do tonight,” Muss told the officer in charge of laying mines along the buffer zone. “Make sure your men are well-fed and carrying their full load of ammunition …”
The man snapped a salute. “Yes, sir,” he said confidently, without reminding Muss that most of his men were engineers and therefore of very little use if it came down to hand-to-hand fighting.
“What is our an
ti-aircraft capability?” Muss asked another of his officers.
“We have a dozen operating SA-7’s, sir,” the man in charge of AA told him. “They’re shoulder-launched models of course. We have twenty mobile radar-guided guns, plus four stationary SA-2 sites.”
“And what do we estimate their air strength to be?” Muss asked.
The AA officer glanced around nervously. “Three squadrons, sir, that we’re sure of,” he said. “Maybe more.”
“‘Maybe more,’ or definitely more?” Muss asked.
The man was on the spot and he knew it. “Probably ‘definitely,’ sir …” he answered. “But, I’m sure with time, I can convert some of our artillery pieces to do AA duty.”
Muss turned and addressed the man directly. “That kind of time we don’t have,” he said. “Can your fixed SA-2 sites be readily dismantled?”
The officer nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “But we just put them in place …”
“Be ready to break them down again,” Muss said. The order surprised all of the eight officers surrounding him, but no one dared ask the reason behind it.
Muss then surveyed the elaborate trenchworks that stretched out before him for a mile and as far as he could see both left and right. He knew they ran along the entire front.
“Our trenches, they hold how many men?”
“About two divisions, sir,” the fortifications officer answered.
“Close to twenty thousand men, then?” Muss asked.
The officer nodded. “Shall we dig more, Colonel?”
Muss shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “There’ll be no need for that.”
He turned and addressed the entire group. “There’s been a change in our … strategy, let’s say,” Muss told them. “We will now be working under a plan known as tactical defense. That’s all I want you to know at the moment. Please get all of your units ready to move out at a moment’s notice.”
This order openly shocked the officers. But once again, every one of them decided to keep his mouth shut.
“You will be getting reenforcements around noontime,” Muss continued. “Allied troops. Afrikaners, as well as North Koreans and Cubans.
“Pull your men out and let the new arrivals take up their positions in the trenches. When the allies get here, provide them with enough ammunition to keep them supplied for ten to fifteen minutes of fighting, but not a single bullet more.”
He took one last look at the enemy lines, nearly 20 miles away. He could almost feel activity on the other side, almost hear the hum of their work, like the noise of a beehive. How things had changed, he thought. Once he was convinced that The Circle would rule both Americas—north and south, and someday, other continents as well. Now he was telling his officers to count their bullets. Tactical defense indeed …
He turned to walk back to his staff car, then remembered one last item. “And gentlemen, when the allies arrive to take the trenches,” he said. “Don’t bother to feed them, either …”
CHAPTER 22
YAZ INFLATED 248 INNER tubes before the small motor on his air compressor ran out of fuel.
He waded his way through the rubber donuts that were now cluttering every square inch of the pump chamber, and out into the catacomb where a barrel of gasoline was available. Filling up a five-gallon can, he returned to his compressor and was soon inflating inner tube number 249.
His reunion with Hunter had been all too brief. The rumors about The Circle’s systematic killing of prisoners was true, the pilot had told them all. Now the whole timetable for releasing the POWs and evacuating the citizens from the occupied city had been drastically compacted into 24 hours. And still they had to move fast to prevent further mass executions.
So Yaz was given the job of blowing up 1500 of the inner tubes. Other members of the underground and the Western Forces guerrillas were distributing the life rafts to strategic points around the tunnels. Still others were quietly passing the word all over the city that midnight was the H-Hour for the escape to begin.
Hunter had told him and the others that he had finally completed mapping the catacombs, and at that moment, two squads of guerrillas were spray painting directions in the tunnels all over the city, while others were hastily erecting water barriers which would direct the flow of water correctly when the water lock was opened at H-Hour.
All of the major POW holding points had been located from below, and guerrillas within their ranks were ready to direct prisoners to their escape hatch when the time came.
The same held true for the 500 or so citizens remaining in Football City. Just about everyone of them knew that nearly every restaurant, nightclub and bar in the downtown area had a hatch leading to the catacombs, courtesy of the St. Louis 1930s gangsters. Many of these had been sealed up by the police in the 1940s, but the Football City underground had been working for the past few weeks unsealing the ones that remained, about 100 in all. Those civilians who could be trusted were being told to go out for a drink around midnight—and be prepared to get wet when they did so.
It was three in the afternoon when Yaz finally inflated his 1500th inner tube. Throughout the day, guerrillas and members of the underground had been carrying the tubes away at regular intervals. Now that they’d all been dispersed, Hunter himself climbed into the pump chamber.
“What’s next, Hawk?” Yaz asked him.
“Believe it or not,” Hunter told him. “Eat, then sleep.”
He had a gunny sack with him, which turned out to be holding several loaves of bread and some warm milk.
“God only knows when we’ll get our next meal,” he said to Yaz.
CHAPTER 23
COLONEL MUSS HAD NEVER felt better …
He hadn’t slept in nearly 24 hours, his throat was dry, and his stomach empty. His nose was also running. But none of this bothered him—just 30 minutes before, he had done four long lines of Viceroy Dick’s best cocaine and now he was feeling like he was on top of the world. And the plastic bag of the stuff he had hidden in his shoe insured him that the feeling would continue, at least through the night, possibly even into the next day.
He was riding in the lead car of a long column of troop trucks, 22 vehicles in all that was heading for the river’s edge on the eastern fringe of Football City. They were slowly making their way down the crumbling road known as Route 70, and would soon turn off to 1st Street, which would bring them down to the river. Then it would be a right turn onto the entrance ramp to one of the recently-reopened bridges.
Loaded in the back of the troop trucks were 500 more prisoners, selected at random from one of the POW camps inside the city. Just as the night before, they were to be lined up on the bridge railing, 25 at a time, blindfolded and legs and arms tied. Then—and this was the part that Muss promised himself he would not watch—their throats would be slashed and their bodies thrown into the Mississippi. It had gone off like clockwork the night before, due in no small part to the presence of five Soviet Spetsnaz troopers, who not only oversaw the whole operation, but wielded the knives when the time came to slit the prisoners’ throats.
Muss reached down to his stash of cocaine just as the convoy turned off Route 70 and onto 1st Street. He hadn’t seen Viceroy Dick in nearly two days—and didn’t even know whether the man was alive or not. He didn’t really care. A Spetsnaz officer was giving the orders in Football City now. One of his first acts was to make Muss the coordinator of the executions. In return, the Soviets had given Muss the run of Viceroy Dick’s former digs, including the drug-stocked “recreation” chamber. This is where Muss had found and used the cocaine and this is where Muss had made arrangements to have four teen age girls waiting for him after the executions were carried out.
The convoy moved along the darkened river road, the lights of the bridge just visible ahead of them. Muss had just snorted two more loads of coke, when he looked up and saw a man standing in the middle of the roadway.
“Who the fuck is that?” he asked his driver as the man slowed the
car down, caused the convoy trucks behind him to squeal their brakes.
The man was dressed in what looked like a black flight suit and he was wearing a baseball cap over his hooded mask.
He was also armed with what looked to Muss to be a rocket-propelled grenade launcher …
“Jesus Christ, run him over!” Muss screamed to his driver.
But it was too late …
The man quickly raised the RPG launcher and fired directly at the car. The projectile hit the radiator grating and exploded, lifting the car off the ground a full five feet, and instantly killing the driver with a chunk of shrapnel in his chest.
Muss went out through the windshield and was thrown off to the side of the road. Even while he was in the air, he caught a frightening glimpse of many men, dressed like the one who had fired the RPG, running up from both sides of the road, firing weapons.
Muss landed hard in a clump of grass and sticks, breaking his left arm and leg. His face and chest were covered in blood pouring out of deep cuts he received when he crashed through the windshield. Yet he was still conscious and shock had set in, effectively, if temporarily, blocking out the otherwise excruciating pain of his wounds.
From the clump of grass he watched as the armed men made short work of the Circle guards who had been driving the troop trucks. The sharp firefight lasted all of 30 seconds. Then he was suddenly aware of people running over him—stepping on his face and back, stumbling over his body in the dark. They were the POWs—they were being freed from the trucks and running toward the river. All of the troop trucks were now ablaze and Muss could hear the black-suited men yelling and talking to each other.
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