“Better not be a trap, Stone,” the judge said. “Or you’re dead too.”
“Not too many guys set a trap by bringing the enemy to the most strategically vulnerable point of his fortress and then tell them how to destroy him by using tank and artillery tactics formulated by Rommel and General Patton.”
“Everything is twisted right now, Stone,” the Mafia chief said, looking at Stone with those corpselike unmoving eyes, the skin stretched tight across his face as if it would crack and that flesh, so white, as pale as the flourescent face of the moon. “Who knows who to trust. You betray someone that we’ll kill for you. But will you betray us? Will we kill you? Who is enemy and who friend?”
“There are no friends,” Stone said bitterly as he started. up the ladder and unsnapped the hatch above. “Only enemies who work together—and enemies who kill each other. Today we’re on the same side. Tomorrow if I could I would probably try to kill you.”
“And me the same,” the don said with the first grudging little twist of his mouth indicating a smile. Somehow it was all humorous, a black joke beyond understanding. A joke played on the whole fucking human race.
“By the way, Stone, just for the record,” the crime lord said, “your General Patton ain’t no general. He’s not even related to the World War II Patton. We’ve had our run-ins with the bastard before, and were able to dig up some records on him. He was a lousy captain when U.S. forces fell apart. His whole trip… is bullshit. He’s a liar and a con man just like the rest of us. Just like you.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Stone said as he handed the controls over to the Mafia lord. “It makes everything… a little easier.” Stone climbed up to the hatch and exited. He jumped down from the edge of the tank and headed up a small hill about a half mile from the fort. He stared through his binocs, lying flat on his stomach, and watched for about five minutes—setting in his mind just where the guards were moving, and the speed of the searchlights that slowly swept back and forth across the wide fields that surrounded Fort Bradley. He would go in from the back, where he knew it was slightly less guarded. When one of the floods had just made its back-and-forth route past his hiding place Stone leapt out and ran straight for the wall as fast as his feet could carry him. It was four in the morning. Stone knew how it worked in Fort Bradley—those men in the observation towers would have been on sixteen-hour, perhaps twenty-four-hour shifts. There was a tremendous shortage of manpower lately as Patton had had the men working eighteen-hour days preparing an invasion force to sweep over the countryside. They’d be exhausted. If Stone could just move fast. Real fast.
He rushed through the dark funnel of shadows created by the lights reaching the ends of their sweeps a hundred yards apart on each side of him. Just ran as if he were sprinting the last hundred yards in the Olympics. Suddenly one of the beams was heading back toward him and he dove flat onto the ground, turning his head away so nothing would reflect off his dark camouflage flak jacket and pants. The search played over him for about ten seconds and then moved on. Hearing no gunfire or yells of intruder, Stone jumped up and was on full blast in just steps. He made it to the base of the fence and again flung himself flat on the ground as the lights turtled past. Stone knew from something the general had let slip when he had been drunk the other night that there was a section of fence ten feet long that was not electrified and that could be opened by merely releasing a catch. It was a quick-escape option for the general, should things explode. Only Stone was going to use it to break in.
He moved carefully along the bottom of the fence and found what he thought was the right section, without the little ceramic-coned electrical transformer on the other side and reached out a tentative hand. He touched the metal… and nothing happened. Stone rose carefully, searching for the release latch. He was directly below one of the guard towers now and suddenly heard pacing on the wooden platform fifty feet above him. Someone snorted in hard, far above, and then spat out a gob that landed on Stone’s boot. He didn’t move an inch. The spitter let out a contented snort and walked back to his chair, where he fell almost instantly into a doze.
Stone found the gate release and lifted it slowly. It made the slightest click and then the fence moved and Stone slipped through, closing it quickly behind him. He ran into the shadows created by the nearest warehouse and then started down one of the side streets of the fort. He knew his Harley was being stored in the main repair garage in the eastern part of Bradley and moved through the center of the fort, clinging to walls, edging around corners. There were always patrols, and who knew what other traps Patton might have set. But he made it to the garage without being spotted, a two-story building with the middle floor ripped out to create a thirty-foot-high space for the lifts to operate.
He entered through one of the back doors—it wasn’t locked—and let his eyes adjust to the dim light of the few orange bulbs that were on here and there. There were tires, and frames, bumpers and engines everywhere, in various states of disassembly. Stone prayed that they hadn’t done anything drastic to the Electraglide. It had kind of become his security blanket. But he was only about halfway through the place, walking on tiptoes as he though he heard strange clicking sounds everywhere, when Stone saw a row of ten motorcycles along one wall. His eyes lit on the Harley instantly and he rushed toward it, trying to see what shape it was in. And as he reached it and stopped just in front of it Stone was slightly amazed to see that it was in perfect shape. Even the machine gun and Luchaire mini-missile system built into the bike had been left untouched. They had probably just wheeled it in the day they brought him into camp with the intention of studying it further, and then had just forgotten about it. He looked close; there was still surface scum from the flood dried onto the seat and body. Not a hand had been laid on it.
Stone sat down on the seat and pushed the instant start. The Harley came to life with a dull roar and he let it settle down before clicking it into gear. He moved slowly out of the garage and back around the corner into one of the darker streets, driving with the lights off. There was just one thing left to do. He headed toward the pound.
Stone could smell the animals blocks before he actually reached the place. He was downwind and the thick animal scents mixed pungently into the moist air. He turned the engine to neutral, letting himself glide the last few hundred feet, which angled slightly downward. Stone came to a stop just feet from the building and jumped off the bike in a flash, letting the autostand snap out and hold the Harley up. He was running out of time. He opened the side door and slipped inside to the huge animal pound and the rows of pens and cages spreading off as far as the eye could see. Blue light bulbs lit the scene with a dull light as Stone made his way carefully inside. He could hear the snores and slobbering, the sudden growls in sleep, the scratching and farting of over a thousand animals. He headed toward where he remembered the dogs were penned at the far end of the place, praying that he wouldn’t set the place to barking when one little turd of a poodle woke up and started squealing shrill poodle barks. But they only lasted a few seconds, until Stone was out of range, and the thing settled back down into sleep.
Then he saw Excaliber, lying with his face pressed tightly between the bars of his holding pen. If he had once seemed content in his little prison—the last time Stone had seen him—he sure as hell had had a change of mind. The animal looked positively forlorn, its ears down at their sides, its eyes drooping down at both ends with a most depressed expression. Even the dog, given all the food it could eat, wanted its freedom more. Stone suddenly emerged from the shadows and the pitbull’s eyes lit up as if they’d hit paydirt on a slot machine. The demonic white face pressed harder against the bars as if it had forgotten it couldn’t go through them and it let out a whine that quickly grew in intensity until it threatened to turn into a siren.
“Shh, shh, dog, quiet,” Stone whispered harshly through the blue half-darkness. “I’ve come to rescue your goddamned ass; don’t get me killed.” The pitbull clawed wildly at the bottom o
f the metal bars but kept its mouth shut, getting at least part of the message. Stone kneeled down beside the pen. “Little bastard. I shouldn’t even rescue you. Thought you liked army life. Don’t mind living in a cage the rest of your life.” The canine gave him a hard squinting look that said cut the bullshit or I start barking and Stone searched for the catch on the cage. Only there wasn’t any.
“You won’t find it down there, Colonel Stone,” a voice said suddenly from behind him. Stone rose with a sinking feeling in his gut. He turned slowly, wondering how long it would take him to reach the Uzi autopistol hanging around his shoulder or the Ruger .44 strapped inside his jacket, which he’d taken from the Harley. Too long, he could see as he came face to face with a chrome-plated .45. And Sergeant Zynishinksi who held it.
The sergeant looked at Stone through the blue luminosity of the gray air. “All the pens are controlled electrically from this panel here.” The sergeant’s other hand rested just above a long row of buttons set on a wide control panel built into the wall.
“Well, why don’t you just press the button for number 257,” Stone said as he read the number off the front of Excaliber’s cage. “And I’ll just get my dog out as General Patton promised I could after the last mission. Didn’t he tell you?” Stone asked, dripping sincerity.
“It’s all over, Stone. I know what’s happening. You’re setting us all up. I had my own man in on your operation, Sergeant Ferris. He was supposed to contact me every six hours and the messages stopped half a day ago. Stopped after you had signalled the general that the bosses had agreed to surrender. You shouldn’t even be here. According to your message you were working out surrender technicalities down there and needed more troops. And yet here you are, sneaking into camp.”
“I can explain,” Stone said, slowly moving his foot to the right as he set himself to dive into the shadows created by a large water trough set in the center of the room several yards away.
“Explain, shit,” Sergeant Zynishinksi spat in disgust. “A traitor to your own people. After the general promoted you above all his others, after I trained you.” A look of real pain came over his granite face for a second. “I should have known from the skills you showed that you weren’t the regular asshole. You knew too much. Way too much.”
“Look, Sergeant,” Stone said, moving fractions of an inch at a time, keeping one eye peeled on the pistol to see if it wavered even a millimeter. “I like you. Believe it or not. The training was… interesting, and I learned a lot of things from you. But I tell you, General Patton, although he is a brilliant general and a good soldier, is wrong. The world he would create is a nightmare, more like Hitler’s dreams than Washington’s, more like Stalin’s slave camps than Lincoln’s free society.”
“And your own father was a military man of such great honor,” the sergeant said with a sad shake of his head. “To have a son who would betray his country to a bunch of scum-sucking pigs.”
“My father only said one thing to me about choosing sides,” Stone said, his voice like ice, his face flushed, a little angry at the insults. “And that was to fight only for that which made men more free, not that which enslaved them more. I’ve made my choice.”
“And chose to die,” Sergeant Zynishinksi yelled, his whole face suddenly contorting in rage at the betrayal he felt by Martin Stone. He pulled the trigger hard but Stone was already in motion. He sprang off his coiled legs right through the air the moment the D.I. pulled the trigger. By the time the first .45 slug reached him it found only air. Stone hit the ground hard and rolled behind the water trough without stopping. The second he came to a rest, he ripped out the .44 Ruger and hefted it in his hand. It felt good to have his own firepower back in his hands after all the standard and substandard weaponry of the NAA. The .45 barked twice more, little puffs of dirt puffing up just a few feet away. The dogs were already starting to bark. Stone ran in a half crouch behind the trough as Sergeant Zynishinksi came in low on the other side and hit his last shot on the pistol. Stone stood up in a flash, leveling the thirteen-inch Red-hawk at the sergeant, right between his eyes from about a foot away. The big man’s own freshly loaded pistol still hung at his side.
“Don’t make me do it,” Stone said softly. “Don’t make me kill you. You’re basically a good man. Leave now, and raise a family, live somewhere out in the forests away from the rot and decay of humanity.”
“You dare ask me to betray my men, the Third Army. You’re an insult to the very uniform you wear, Stone. I’d rather die in my boots than sully the honor of Patton’s Fighting Third.” Stone saw his eyes tense up and he pulled the trigger as he closed hisown eyes. When he opened them, the sergeant didn’t have a face anymore. Only he was still standing. The bloody, gouged-out hole that had once been where his nose stood was now just a pit of dripping gray brain matter oozing down over his lips, his chest, like the thick frothy water that boils off rice. Then the sergeant’s dead knees collapsed together and the corpse fell to the ground like a straw scarecrow suddenly losing its nail on the pole. “Son-of-a-bitch,” Stone whispered down at the spasming body. Not that he or anyone could hear the words. For the whole place had awakened from the gun battle and every dog, cat, laboratory rat and other non-human guest was letting loose with its own ear-splitting and repetitive squeals of fear and anger. The result was quite loud.
CHAPTER
Twenty-One
BUT IT got even louder as Stone heard the first whistling cannon shell fly overhead and erupt in a thunderous roar several blocks away. He looked at his watch. They were a half hour ahead of schedule. Either they had double-crossed him, or they’d heard the shooting and decided to go for it. Stone ran over Sergeant Zynishinksi’s body and frantically scanned the release panel on the wall. At last he found the number and pulled it and Excaliber’s cage snapped open with a ping. This time the dog flew out and ran to Stone, where it rubbed its head against his leg by way of thanks. Stone looked around at the other barking and squealing animals. They’d all be consumed in the firestorm that was about to descend. They hadn’t done shit. He searched for the master release switch and found it.
“Get ready to move, dog,” Stone said, pointing toward the front of the place, “’cause the fur is about to fly.” He pressed the button hard and there was a loud whirring sound. Suddenly every gate in the animal holding center opened and a flood of fur, fangs, claws and stiff tails such as the world has never seen erupted onto the floor. Stone and the pitbull made their way at full speed back through the warehouse, just linebacking their way through whatever got in the way. By the time they reached the back door the tank attack had begun in earnest and jeeps were already roaring around the base, men running around tucking in their shirts as they slammed magazines into their rifles. Stone leaped atop the Harley, turned it on, kicked into gear, all in one motion. He felt the weight of the pitbull land on the back of the bike and started forward at full throttle, doing a half wheelie before the front end slammed down and shot ahead.
Stone glanced around for a split second as they started down one of the streets and a smile streaked across his mouth as he saw the tidal wave of animal life pouring from every opening of the warehouse. The terrified creatures quickly spread out through the city on a mad dash for freedom, running through the legs of the rushing men, beneath the wheels of the streaming vehicles. The rats were deserting the ship and nothing better get in their way.
Stone headed toward the general’s quarters as shells began going off everywhere. The crime bosses had been able to fire the damned things after all. From what he could see, the barrage was coming from all three sides of the fort, unrelenting, shell after shell, sending up whole buildings at a time. A blast went off just ten yards to the right of Stone and he nearly went over but caught the bike with the weight of his leg, pushed with everything he had on his boot, skidding along the asphalt, and righted the Harley without falling. The artillery units of the fort located at numerous sites around the encampment began opening up and soon shells traveling in
both directions virtually filled the air overhead as if it were D-Day, or something pretty damned close to it.
Suddenly there was a terrific explosion at the north end of the camp, in one of the munitions buildings, that shook the road beneath the Harley. A ball of flame shot out hundreds of feet in every direction as a tower of burning debris flew straight into the sky as if Vesuvius were once again erupting. Vehicles careened by wildly all around him, but no one paid Stone any attention. In the smoke and flames already rising everywhere, it was hard to tell who anyone was.
He reached the corner that turned toward the general’s headquarters and slowed down to a halt. Moving the bike an inch at a time he peered down the street toward where he knew there were machine-gun emplacements. But now, there was just smoking ruins. The entire building had taken not one but two hits at each end. Burning timbers, flaming masterpieces, melting sculpture lay in smoking fragments everywhere. Stone edged the bike slowly down the street, his hand on the trigger of the .50 caliber machine gun built in above the front fender. Not that it looked like much of anything could have survived the blasts. But as if to prove him wrong once again, a figure coated in black ash rose from the ruins, and whipped up a rifle, taking a bead on Stone. He slammed his finger down on the bike’s handlebar trigger and the bike shook slightly back on its shocks as ten slugs big enough to take out an elephant slammed into the man, sending him spinning backwards like a top. Stone got off the bike and walked forward, searching for the body.
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