“Are there secondary routes to the mountain?”
“Not really. Lots of little streets, but nothing straight that ain’t jammed with cars.”
“Okay, advise SWAT to get as close as possible then move out on foot. It’s the only way. Now someone has to intercept them and I don’t see anybody around so it looks like it’s me. You tell me my next move.”
“You’re it? You’re the whole FBI? A guy on a bike?”
“Better yet, an old guy on a bike. We have people incoming by chopper, I’m advised. Look, we’re wasting time. How do I get to that mountain? Up ahead’s no good.”
“Okay, sir, I’d fight my way down Volunteer best as possible. Too bad you don’t have a siren on that thing.”
“I liberated it from a civilian.”
“You go down and about a mile before the speedway, you’ll hit Groverdale Road. You left-turn on that, follow it to something called Cedarwood Circle. You can cut through somebody’s yard there and you want to find Shady Brooks Drive, it’s not much, but it curls around behind some houses that have probably given their yards up to parking, and that’ll take you alongside the hill before it heads back to the parkway. You may want to leave the road when you’re next to the mountain, as I’m thinking there’s nothing up there except fields and stuff and maybe you can move faster. I’m guessing that’s the only clear way.”
“Got it.”
“You want my body armor?”
“Thanks, officer, I don’t have time.”
“When this is over, I’ll have to cite you for no helmet and driving off roadways.”
“You do that. Mr. Hoover’ll pay the fine.”
“Who?”
“Never mind, son. You get on that squawk box and try and get SWAT where I told you.”
“Yes sir. Good hunting, Special Agent.”
“Thanks.”
With that Bob spurted ahead, trying to ease his way between fleeing citizens, at last finding a fairly clear path between cars on the wrong side of the road. He never got into third gear. Up ahead the disaster played out; it seemed all the squad cars in the world were on the perimeter while the sky above was filled with the lights of orbiting choppers. He became aware of glare against the darkness which could only signify something burning hot, eating up aviation fuel, and that stench seemed in the air as well. He could hear no shots because of the sound of the engine, and now and then a hard-moving foot patrolman would try to wave him down and get him out of there, but the FBI badge made these phantoms depart.
At last he hit Groverdale, which took him down a road lined with modest houses, where each homeowner had turned his land over to parking use. The rate, he saw from the remaining signs, was a hundred dollars a night. Most people had been glad to pay it, and now most of them were in cars, caught in a thermal stew of light, dust, exhaust, cigarette smoke, and body odor, the cars locked bumper-to-bumper. But Bob made pretty good progress just along the edge of the shoulder where the road dissolved into grass and the walkers had moved up a bit, giving him room.
He found himself in a bright cul-de-sac, where the illumination blocked out all sense of what lay beyond. He had a sense, possibly from a new, dead quality to the echoes, possibly from the imposition of a kind of dampness on the sultry air, of a mountain, a huge, green obstacle, close at hand. Between the houses he could see glimpses of NASCAR Village, jiggles of flame, and everywhere, it seemed, emergency service vehicles trying to penetrate the gridlock of wreckage, but hopelessly behind the curve, unaware of what was happening to whom. He thought it was better he had no radio contact with any of this, for the network would have been a crazed blur of garbled facts, glaring misinterpretations, wrong advice, command ego, reluctance. It was like radio traffic during a big attack in that far off fairyland called Vietnam, all but forgotten these days but still the crucible that burned in Bob and made him the man he was.
He cut between two houses, almost put-putting along, riding the throttle grip and clutch grip and the gears between first and second, really defying the bike’s true nature, which was to rush ahead, faster and faster. He skidded, found himself in a backyard where folks clustered around a radio and looked at him fearfully. A shotgun or two seemed to come his direction.
“FBI!” he yelled, holding up the badge. “Which way to the fight?”
A fellow in Bermudas with a beer in one hand and a Remington 870 in the other gestured onward, the direction he was headed.
“You go get ’em,” he screamed. “Let me finish this beer and I’ll be right behind.”
“You’d best sit this one out, sir. You need to protect wife and family and in-laws.”
“Yes sir,” said the guy, settling into a lawn chair. “FBI with a machine gun on a Kawasaki in my back yard. Goddamn, ain’t I seen everything now.”
Bob lurched ahead, through a line of bushes, into another back yard, the bike grinding and chawing through a garden. Threading between houses, he found himself on a still-narrower road—this had to be Shady Brooks Drive, which was really only wide enough for one car, and which was jammed with them, all going the way Bob wasn’t.
But there was room on the shoulder, and he got all the way up into third for a while, at last running free of cars. Then he saw why. The road wound back to the right, toward the parkway, toward NASCAR Village itself, and that small metropolis now blazed like London in the blitz. Something had ramrodded through it, strewing wreckage and ruin everywhere.
But Bob saw clearly that proceeding in this direction would prove nothing, for it would take him only where his enemies had been.
He looked to the left, saw trees in pale illumination and saw that it had to be the base of the mountain. His thought now was to run the edge of the incline and see if he could cut trail, and where the boys had gone up, follow them.
It seemed to take for-goddamned-ever. He couldn’t run full out—the way was tough, and he had to wiggle this way and that off-road and around natural obstacles. He couldn’t see far enough ahead to make any speed at all, and though the land looked flat, it yielded up a bumpiness concealed in the height of the grass.
He came at last to some sort of installation in the lee of the mountain, a complex of corrugated tin buildings sealed off by cyclone fence, its approach from some other angle. He prowled around the perimeter and came upon a gate that had been smashed in. No lawman had made it this far. He pulled open the gate, found himself at last on level roadway, and followed the tracks of a heavy vehicle with born-to-raise-hell treads on the tires that had churned its way back beyond the buildings. At last he found an archway in the trees where a much-disturbed dirt road and dust in the air signified the recent passing of a major vehicle. The road had to lead up.
Bob circled, backtracked a hundred or so yards, then gunned his engine and jumped gears. He hit the road in a fishtail of spewed mud, slithered around a boulder, penetrated heavy woods, and began the stark upward climb, his bike fighting the mud below and the gravity that pulled it backward.
THIRTY-SIX
Brother Richard paused for a second, feeling the thrill of the moment, feeling the low hum of vibration running from the amped diesel to his foot on the pedal, feeling his fingers in barest contact with the truck through the wheel, feeling all the million little tingles of tremor and jiggle and bounce that signified a vehicle with a load, a lot of fuel, and a wide open road.
“Richard, boy, goddamn, time’s a wasting,” said the Reverend.
“No, no, just look for a second. Look at it now to fix it in your mind.”
“What you talkin’ about, boy? All this here don’t matter a frog’s fart, just get us to the mountain!”
“It matters to me, old man.” He smiled, turned and looked at the old man, and the Reverend saw for the first time how insane Richard was. He swallowed. The driver was one twisted visitor from beyond Pluto with his superiority, his mechanical and driving genius, and now this, his weird and furious insistence of enjoying the ride as if it were sex.
Richard winked.
“Remember Slim Pickens in Strangelove?”
What the hell the boy talking about? The Reverend thought this was crazyman talk.
“Remember ‘Yee-haw,’ the ride down to Armageddon, the sheer joy of it all? Well, old man, it’s yee-haw time!”
Richard punched it. With a lurch even its toughened-up shocks couldn’t soften, the heavy cash truck surged forward. First up was some sort of Jack Daniels tent, the center of which was a huge construct of whiskey bottles and cases. Richard aimed and hit dead zero. He felt the flimsy canvas yield without a whisper, devoured by the roaring bull of the truck, and the whiskey bottles shattered in a spew of brownish chaos, asparkle with the light, blown this way and that by the big vehicle’s velocity. It was a whiskey explosion. He emerged from the mess with a truck bathed in eighty-proof Jack, good for curing colds, relieving virgins of their burden, burying grudges or exposing them, as well as causing the ruin of many good men of high birth and low, and being a boon companion on a long flight through lightning.
“Richard, goddamn boy, you just git us to the hill. Don’t you be smashing things.”
But Richard had another agenda, and the Reverend now saw that this thing here, this glory-run through the civilization that was NASCAR, this was the point.
“See them feathers fly?” Richard shouted, eyes lit by the glare of superego blitzed on brain chemicals. “Well, they shouldn’ta run!”
He was truly insane, particularly to the narrow mind of Alton Grumley, who didn’t realize Richard was channeling Bo Hopkins from the first shootout in The Wild Bunch, nor that he had morphed into both Holden and Borgnine.
“Let’s go,” he said. Then he answered himself, “Why not?” and let a little sliver of psycho’s giggle escape, just as Borgnine’s Dutch had in that movie all those years ago.
“Richard, Richard, we don’t have the time.”
Richard then hit the pedestal on which an orange Toyota Camry, Daytona subvariant, was mounted twenty feet above all as part of Toyota’s very polished pavilion. He didn’t hit it straight on; it was more of a glancer, the point being to knock the car to the ground. In this humble desire, he succeeded, and the sleek vehicle pitched nose first into the mud, then toppled like a flipped turtle onto its back. Richard continued his war on the Japanese by clipping the corner of the Toyota structure, a piece of airport-like architecture meant to suggest the future, and his blow was so well considered that half of the roof went down, shattering glass and burying display cars in rubble inside.
He accelerated, took out this or that little place, the details were unimportant to him, saw people flee before him in both terror and glee and—oh, boy, fun, fun, fun till Daddy took the T-Bird away—found himself lined up perfect dead-on zero angle for the concourse of driver retail outlets, those trailer-truck souvenir shops where each of the big guys had heroic portraiture, replica clothing, ball caps, leathers, books, and related vanities on sale.
Richard revved the truck, enjoying himself. It was here he noted with amusement a certain base human truth. It was not he alone who looked upon the organization of commerce, the standardization of currency, the capitalist system, and had a violent impulse to destroy it all. He liked to crush things, sure, but so did lots of Americans. Yep, and it seemed that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, watching him. The moms and the kids and the old guys had fled. Not the young ones, the key NASCAR demographic of fourteen to thirty-six, southern, male, employed, tattooed (at least three), smoker, drinker, carouser, fighter. These guys, in the thousands, had somehow sensed that a show was about to begin.
“Can you hear it, old man?” Richard asked.
The Reverend could. It was soft, a murmur at first, but it picked up, the chant, “Go, Go, Go,” until it became “Go, Go, Go!” and Richard was nothing if he wasn’t the fellow who knew how to play to a crowd.
He punched. The roar rose, the windshield blurred with speed, then jolted with impact after impact, pitching this way, then that, tossing stuff through the air either whole or in many pieces. He fishtailed and jackrabbited his way in a perfect, high-test zigzag of destruction, hitting and smashing the truck trailers, which yielded by tipping or jumping or simply collapsing in shame. In thirty loud seconds Driver’s Row looked like Battleship Row after the first wave of Japanese dive bombers. For good measure, samurai Richard-san pounded the snot out of a cash machine at the end of the formation, and dollars flew everywhere.
Richard heard the cheer of the crowd. He looked in his side mirror and was saddened to see that he had started no fires, though he’d knocked down some electric wires and they bled sparks in a few places, dangerous and beautiful and spectacular at once. Then suddenly one of them ignited something and the fire rose and leaped, at least on one half of Driver’s Row, and soon enough flames consumed a great many of the battered retail installations.
Damn, that was good! Do it git better?
“Richard, my poor Grumleys in the back. They ain’t got no seatbelt.”
“Their heads are too hard for injury. You can’t hurt a Grumley by hitting him in the skull. But okay, let’s go.”
He came next to a little bridge across a gully, initially cut off by traffic blocks set in the earth. But a less important Grumley job had been to wander down there during the race itself and pull them out. Richard rumbled across the bridge, pulled up an incline, and came again to flatness and temptation. Now the speedway was half a mile behind him, the mountain half a mile before him, and the structures on this side of the gully less substantial.
“Go, Richard,” shouted the old man.
This wouldn’t be as fun. It was all ticky-tack, tents and ramshackle lean-tos, all of it held together by aluminum and canvas and tape and twine, representing the lower end of the NASCAR money pyramid. Not corporate power but scavenging entrepreneurial nomadism.
“Ho hum,” said Richard. “Don’t think nothing’ll burn or electrify, sorry to say.”
“Richard, you don’t got to narrate everthing. This ain’t a damn movie.”
“Oh, it is, old man. You’re Tommy Lee Jones, avuncular and charming, but now old and weary. I’m the mean Kevin Costner, not the sensitive Kevin, Caleb is Marky Mark, and maybe somewhere there’s a hero who’ll bring us down, but Clint retired and nobody took his place, so I don’t think so.”
After these important comments, Richard finally consented to do his job, and roared through the lesser precincts of NASCAR with much less pizzaz, as if he’d grown bored, having the attention span of a gnat. It was just snap, crackle, and pop, as the flimsy structures were eaten alive by the power of the Cash in Transit truck, and no pile of hats or Chinese Confederate flags or funnel cakes or barbecued ribs and sausages could stand against the onrush. Beer exploded, tables of goods were splattered, tents billowed as their ropes were cut, signs fell, but it lacked the FX grandeur of the previous few minutes’ work. As spectacle, it had fallen. His esthetic sense somewhat blunted, he glumly soldiered on.
But as tactical enterprise, the genius of the plan soon became evident. There simply was no way any four-wheeled vehicle could have followed them, because Richard left behind him so much more damage than had been there before, and whether or not planned, the dynamic of the crowd, ebbing this way and that, opening before him, then solidifying behind him, precluded penetration. Then too, of the few roads around NASCAR Village, all were impenetrable, because all were jammed with civilians headed out, not in. Many of those people had abandoned their cars upon seeing the panicked crowd and hearing stories of machine guns, armed guerrillas, terrorists, Klansmen, militia. So in the vast mess, only the armored truck had any maneuverability, purely on the strength of its ruthlessness. It could and would drive through anything, it could and had driven down anybody, it was without conscience, a Moby Dick on land, or a Godzilla or a Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms that regarded humanity as insects to be crushed. It was just diesel nihilism on four tires, driven by venality and psychopathology and the fury of sons who’d disappointed their fathe
rs, and it was unstoppable.
Richard drove on, he flattened, folks danced in delight, some throwing beer bottles at him, not so much to stop him but to participate in the wanton pleasure of the evening. Now and then a police bullet sounded a pitiful ping as it bounced off the heavy armor but failed to penetrate. At the far end, the anticlimax arrived with a whimper. Richard found a dirt road that led to a gated installation in the lee of the mountain, built up some nice speed and fragmented the cyclone gate with his Ford cyclone, and roared along the edge of the mountain, which presented itself to him as an incline swaddled in trees.
“There ’tis,” shouted the old man, and indeed, up ahead, an archway in the trees revealed a dark portal, behind which lay the serpentine of a switchbacked track to the top, glistening with perpetual mud from a dozen mountain springs, its existence all but forgotten, a relic left over from logging days. “Here’s where you earn all that goddamn money we done paid you!”
“Think there’s a man in America who could get a rig this heavy up a road this steep and sharp? Well there ain’t but one, and he took the Pike’s Peak hill climb three times running and some other uphills as well, and has done the trick on bikes and go-carts and destructo jalopies and tractors and big-daddy trucks and hell, even a kiddie cart or two.”
“You’d best have it, boy.”
“Hang on, Grandpappy. The elevator is reading Up.”
He plunged ahead.
A lesser man would have wept. Not Caleb. His shattered nose blossomed blood, and he felt like a piece of popped corn in a corn popper, floating this way and that, a hard trick with a thirty-pound rifle in his hands.
“Goddamn him, that sumbitch, gonna whip his ass!” screamed another flying Grumley, immediately before hitting the goddamned wall or sharp shelf or any of the dozens of hard surfaces inside the box.
“The fucking little prick, he doin’ this ’cause he thinks he’s special, it’s his little trick on us poor dumb Grumleys.”
“He thinks we ain’t human!”
It was, in other words, no fun in the box. The five boys each were made clumsy by submachine guns, their body armor, their spare magazines, the darkness, the claustrophobia. It was like a submarine undergoing a depth-charge raid by the Japanese. They were tossed this way, then that, without visibility. On top of that, shrapnel, in the form of thirty-pound bales of bills in tamper-evident plastic bags flew around the interior like really heavy pillows. They fucking hurt when they hit you, and they could hit you at any time from any angle. Then there was a lunch box or two, maybe a few cans of Diet Coke, and who knew what else afly in the dark atmosphere of the steel box and though the shocks supporting it were thick and strong, they did little to protect against the vicissitudes of crumple and crunch that Richard produced as he wreaked vengeance on NASCAR for the crime of being NASCAR. Back here, a hero was needed, a man of strength.
A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai Page 59