“Tell me—my crew, the tanks, there was a dog…” The words spilled out of Stone’s mouth in a waterfall of worry.
“One of the tanks was destroyed. The men were taken away. As for a dog, sorry, Stone, I didn’t see nothing. But men I was probably two miles off, looking through these cheap-shit binocs.” He snapped his fingers against a pair that hung around his neck. “Name’s Little Bear—named after my dad.” He held out a hand. “Glad to meet you, Stone. I’ll be honest with you—I’ve never been a great fan of the white man. I mean, let’s face it, all the great killers were white, and you don’t need no Plato to tell you that. But any enemy of Genera] Patton is a friend of mine—especially someone willing to give his skin. We know of his missile too. Though just recently did we learn of his decision to use it. We have a contact on the inside there. A missile tech—a friend of Sis’s here.” He pointed with his eyes toward Meyra, who looked into the fire with deep concern. Little Bear spat into the flames, and the little droplets sizzled and popped into midair.
“He would destroy our entire land, Stone—if he sets that fucking thing off. A land we have inhabited for thousands of years—gone. But we’ve had no way to stop him—there are just these ten of us. The rest of the tribe is split up over the whole northern part of Colorado and up into Wyoming. The NAA bastards tracked down over half of what was left of my tribe and exterminated them—women, children, sleeping in their tepees. We must stay in small roving groups now to survive—never staying in one place for more than a week or two, always leaving false trails. They have been sending out their search-and-destroy teams of choppers and tanks on a monthly basis. You tell us—that’s why we called this meeting. Do you know of a way in—a way to destroy him once and for all? A way to avenge our people?”
Stone thought hard and looked down at the ground as if the answer might have been written in the hard dirt. He wasn’t quite ready for all this. He had been close to being ant pâté about ten hours before—and now they were asking him questions of military strategy that Napoleon might have gotten a stomachache from.
“You say you have a person on the inside,” Stone said without looking up as he got a sudden cramp in his neck and his gut started tightening with tension. He suddenly realized he wasn’t going to get another moment’s rest. He was going to be back in the fray—instantly. “What does he do—what’s his rank.”
“It’s a woman,” Meyra spoke up. “A friend of mine from high school from a nearby town who was recruited by the NAA about a year ago when they first started establishing their base. At first she hoped, as did many people in the territory, that they would be a positive force. But they weren’t, and soon she saw that. But there’s an unwritten policy of the NAA that they don’t tell their recruits, Stone —and that is, no one leaves. Alive, anyway. So she met with me several times, relaying information to us about the state of things in there. We know where the main munitions are, the missile silo, even Patton’s headquarters. But we just haven’t felt we had the strength to mount a full attack.”
“Do you have any explosives?” Stone asked, looking up so a sliver of sunlight caught him in the face and the entire band of Cheyenne could suddenly see just how badly Martin Stone had been beaten. Any lingering animosity they might have had toward the “white man” instantly vanished.
“Yes—some. We’ve saved up things we’ve taken from them. Don’t think we’ve been doing nothing. We attacked several small convoys recently and have a truckload of weapons and ammunition. We made explosive detonators from bullets and attached them to a whole crate of antitank land mines—so they detonate on impact. They’re heavy-duty.”
“Then we’ve got to strike now,” Stone said. “Immediately—tonight, in fact. I know what Patton’s going to do—he’s going to evacuate his base within twenty-four hours and send the ten-meg up, believing he’ll have me trapped within its kill zone. This man is obsessed with my destruction. We must plan and mount an attack right now. Do you have any transportation?”
Little Bear pointed around to a clearing about twenty yards off, and Stone saw about a dozen or so three-wheelers, rough overland vehicles with thick tires that looked like they could just about climb the side of a mountain.
“My father rented ’em out—had a whole little business before the NAA killed him. But we managed to take out these before they came in a transport and carted away the rest. They’re fast—and we’ve got automatic pistols wired up on both handles so they spit out a load of slugs as fast as you can pull the fucking trigger.”
“Well, you tell me,” Stone said, looking around the circle of denim-clad Cheyenne, some of them snapping their fingers as they listened to the music of their headphones and Stone simultaneously. “Do we go for it? I can’t promise you that even one of you will come out of this alive—or that I will. But I know we’re the last chance to stop that bastard before he launches.”
They looked around at each other, then each one took out a long-bladed knife and stabbed it into the log between his legs.
“We’re in, Stone,” Little Bear said. “To victory—or the Great Happy Hunting Ground in the sky.” Stone couldn’t tell if he was mocking him or not.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
AS THE sun fell from the sky behind the peaks of the Rockies off in the distance, a fleet of three-wheelers spread through the prairie that led to the general’s fortified silo. They tore through the cacti and the groves of small, stumpy trees with ease, like porpoises through water. Ten Cheyenne and Martin Stone were all that stood in the way of the destruction of Colorado and the grinding of America under the murderous thumb of Patton. The colors of the sky slowly faded away, and they switched on their dimmed lights so thin beams fed out, pointed almost straight down, hardly visible from more than a hundred yards off.
Meyra rode in one of the all-terrain vehicles alongside Stone, keeping a wary eye on him. She had cleansed and salved his wounds, so only she among them knew how badly he had been hurt. She had given him an herbal powder to swallow, telling Stone that “It will almost make you feel like new tonight—tomorrow you’ll tighten up and everything will hurt twice as much.” But Stone gladly took the proffered substance. If there was a tomorrow, he’d be happy to suffer a little pain to see it. After an hour of riding the herb appeared to have helped tremendously, for his muscles seemed to move almost normally. He had a few broken fingers and toes, but Meyra had splinted them. And to his amazement Stone found his senses nearly functional—if not a hundred percent, then up there in high eighties. Even his swollen eye was half open now. It was nice to see the world again in stereo.
They had gone about ten miles, Stone slowly getting more and more used to the three-wheeler, so that he started curving around cacti, testing the vehicle’s balance—as well as his own—when there was a set of headlights coming toward them from about a mile off. At Little Bear’s command they all slowed to just a few miles per hour and switched off their lights. Stone searched frantically around on the dashboard of the thick-tired vehicle, as his was the only light that remained on, but after a few fumbling seconds he found the switch and slammed it off. The ten three-wheelers spread out so they formed a sort of half circle, hidden behind vegetation and cacti. Stone found himself a niche of cover at the right end of the line and sat there in the slung-back seat, drowning in the thick black bear coat he wore, his finger resting on one of the triggers of his twin 9-mm autopistols that they all had mounted. The thing looked sort of makeshift, and Stone wondered if it would actually work—all held in place with wire and duct tape. But he had other firearms as well, tucked away beneath the engulfing fur. The Cheyenne had let him go through their munitions truck, and he had selected an H&K 9-mm with 10-shot clip and an old U.S. Army Service .45 that looked like it had been through World War II. He had tested the well-worn weapon; it had worked just fine and had been a lot more accurate than a lot of later model .45s that he had fired. He kept his hand on the handlebars but opened the coat for instant access just in case.
Without a word Little Bear started up his cross-country vehicle again, and the rest followed suit. Within seconds they were moving forward. Stone felt slightly more confident. He hadn’t really believed inside of himself that these guys could really do it. But they could. Perhaps they actually had a fucking chance, though he wouldn’t have bet the bunker on it.
The two guards atop machine-gun towers at the eastern side of the fort about a hundred yards apart from each other yelled back and forth. They had heard mat Patton was pulling them all out in the morning, and behind them, in the center of the two-hundred-man fortress whose sole purpose was to guard the missile in its midst, there were all kinds of activities going on—trucks being loaded, supplies being girded up. The two guards stood in little wooden boxes, like something a kid might build as a tree house—and not much better made—about forty feet above the ground. The towers ringed the half-mile-wide fort with its steel-mesh fence, Pat-ton’s standard defensive fortifications for all his bases.
“What do you think?” one of them screamed out to the other, cupping his hands into a flesh megaphone. “I heard we’re going to be sent South again—maybe even into New Mexico.”
“Son of a bitch,” the other yelled back through the dark night air, the moon hidden behind clouds like a low-watt light bulb at the far end of a basement. “I can’t even tell you what I think.” But he wanted to relay his information, so he screamed out what to him were hints and therefore more acceptable should any of the general’s Elite Corps officers hear. “The A-thing, you know. The M.” What he meant were the atomic device, the missile, but the other guard hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
“What the fuck are you—” He never got to finish the question. An arrow ripped into his throat and clean through the back of his neck. The guard threw his hands around the arrow with a look of infinite horror on his suddenly pain-racked face and tried to pull it out. But as it started to come free, the backward-angled hunting arrowhead pulled into the back of his neck, just ripping more veins and nerves to shreds. He stumbled backward and then tumbled right over the yard-high wall of the tower. The body spun end over end and crashed to the dirt with a wet sound.
The second guard could hardly make out what was happening in the dark. There were supposed to be searchlights at every tower, but things had gotten tough lately, and supplies were limited. The nearest spotlight was three towers away. He lifted his binoculars and had just sighted up the other man as he started his fall to the ground when another silent Cheyenne arrow whispered a good hundred yards from behind a boulder. The NAA’er took the yard-long arrow through the side, slicing right between his ribs. The razor-sharp head sliced into the bottom part of the heart, cutting it in two. The heart literally exploded in his chest as if a bomb had gone off, and blood poured out of his mouth and eyes and nose in a violent spray of red. The body spun around three times, as if doing some kind of insane little dance, and then fell to the floor. Somehow it slid through the trapdoor that led to the stairs and managed to tumble nearly halfway down them, flopping wildly along the metal steps, leaving a trail of red from top to bottom. Then the corpse came to a rest, its feet caught between two steps so that it hung beneath the stairs upside down, like a deer being bled.
The three-wheelers bolted from the darkness and up to the gate. The double mufflers they had installed made the things about as quiet as a gasoline-powered motor vehicle could get, and with the noise floating toward them from the far end of the fort, they could hardly be heard beyond a few-hundred-foot radius. One of the Indians jumped from his all-terrain vehicle and was at the padlocked gate in a flash. He took something from his pocket, slapped it onto the huge lock, and stepped back, turning his head. There was a muffled pop and a little cloud of white smoke that quickly dissipated. The Cheyenne just touched the lock, and it fell to the ground in pieces. He pushed open the gate, which swung all the way back, and jumped back onto his bike. They were in.
The attack unit immediately split up into the three squads, each composed of three men—one group to take out the munitions depot, one to try to find and kill Patton, and the third to rove around the camp wreaking havoc, keeping them off-balance, so they wouldn’t even know where the attack was coming from. They were also to try to locate and release Stone’s men, who might tip the balance enough to win the battle, especially if they could get to their tanks. Stone, Meyra, and Little Bull would take the silo. They’d all use bows and silenced autopistols—try to stay as quiet as possible until the shit hit the fan. At least, such was the plan.
But plans have a nasty habit of falling apart the moment they’re hatched, for Stone, Little Bear, and Meyra had hardly gone a hundred feet or so into the fort, along a narrow street between long rows of supply dumps, when they heard a sound that Stone didn’t like at all: the sound of a man counting down from ten. A firing squad. And there was only one bunch of people Patton would be killing off now—what was left of Stone’s teams. The words were coming from behind a wall of truck tires a good ten feet high, and Stone could hear that the officer was down to eight. Stone motioned frantically over at the wall, and the Cheyenne followed him over so that their three-wheelers slammed right into the base of the thing. They were off and up the big rubber doughnuts, climbing to the top in a flash. Stone reached the top first and lay flat on the tops of two side-by-side stacks of tires.
His men were directly across from him, staring back at the squad of men who were about to do them in with the most fearless looks they could muster, though most of their eyes were moist. Stone’s men were young, had hardly lived. None of them wanted to go. And then Stone saw something that filled his heart with an electric jolt of joy—the dog, Excaliber, sitting on his hind legs, with a somber, resigned look on his muzzle. His front right leg was covered with blood and looked to be at an odd angle. The pitbull must have gotten hurt when Stone’s tank was taken. And the bastards hadn’t even splinted it or anything. Just put him against the wall, along with the rest of them. Stone looked quickly down, and right below him, almost close enough to touch, were a firing squad of ten men. Five of them stood straight, the other five in a row just in front of them, kneeling. All held their Ml6s straight out, waiting for the magic number to be reached.
“Four, three…” the officer went on, standing by the side, his hand raised up, ready to descend like a guillotine. There was no time. Stone lifted both of the impact-capped land mines he was holding and, rising to his knees, flung one of them in each direction, like ten-pound Frisbees. He screamed to his men to duck and then fell backward onto the tires just as the two Cheyenne were coming up. Stone somehow grabbed hold of both of them as he tumbled back so that he took them with him. And barely in time. There was a great roar that seemed to go off just beneath their feet, as if the earth itself were erupting upward. Then a flash of yellow and orange that blinded them temporarily, so that everything was just a blinking orb of light. The entire wall of tires seemed to slowly tilt away from the explosion, and they felt they were all in a dream, almost as if they were floating. And then everything speeded up and the tires crashed forward and down onto the ground, sending them flying as huge truck wheels bounced off in every direction.
Stone was the first to his feet, his eyes still having difficulty adjusting to the dimness of the night. He leapt forward, jumping across some of the sprawled tires and could see enough to know that it had worked. The land
mines were meant to take out vehicles, tanks, not men. They had been torn to ribbons, pieces of them sprayed around the place as if they had gone through a grinder. Not one of them moved. He raised his head and started forward through the still dissipating smoke, anxious that his own men might have met the same fate. But they were rising already, groaning, some with busted eardrums and burned legs and back, but all were alive. Stone counted six. So two more had died in the tank attack.
“It’s Stone,” Bo shouted out, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. But he was smiling. They all were. Excaliber rushed up to him, his tongue trailing out of his mouth like a big pink rug. He hobbled along on three legs, though he moved fairly well considering, and slammed his head into Stone’s leg, butting him again and again in thanks. The belief that it had in fact picked the right master was confirmed forever as far as the terrier was concerned. Even Bull rose and gave Stone a big grin. Now that Stone knew the man he had suspected all along had not in fact been the traitor among them, he felt guilty and totally different toward the rough, but well-intentioned, fighter. Stone held out his hand, and Bull took it as the remainder of the attack force gathered around them, all reaching out to touch the son of a bitch who had just snatched them from the very drooling jaws of death.
“He’d gotten to three,” Bo said, slapping Stone on the shoulder for the third time.
“Two—I think it was two,” a voice said as the two Cheyenne dropped down. The men reached for nonexistent weapons at their sides, but Stone reassured them that the Indians were friends. With the explosions of the land mines the rest of the fort knew something was up. Stone had blown their silence trip within about twenty seconds. But then he’d had no choice. They’d just have to change the screenplay a little in mid-shooting.
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