by Eric Flint
"No, let's get back to work." They set as many bombs as they had, just in time to make Rod's new deadline. Now, they had to leave. The first light of dawn would be appearing in less than half an hour. Once they got into the woods, they looked back. "How soon, do you think?"
Cook asked. "Don't ask me. I told Leffen I wanted detonators that, whatever else, wouldn't go off too quickly. But how that weird chemical setup he designed works, I have no idea. There wasn't even a fuse." "Burning fuse would've been spotted by the first man who saw them," said Kidd. "Way it is, even if somebody does see the bombs before they go off, they'll just think some lazy con left a bunch of jars full of piss lying around. And"-here came his shark's grin-"being lazy cons themselves, won't even think to haul them out." Rod understood why Cook had asked the question. He was tempted to wait himself, to see what would happen when the bombs went off. But that might take hours, for all he knew. They'd been up all night and they were all tired, especially Marie. They needed to get at least a mile into the woods-two would be better-before looking for a place to sleep. "Let's go," he said. "We'll know soon enough. Once Andy hears about those lockers, he's gonna go ballistic." "Andy Blacklock doesn't ever go ballistic," said Marie. Rod chuckled. "Fooled by appearances.
I don't mean ballistic as in blowing his stack. I mean 'ballistic' as in figuring out the same thing I did. Luff's regime is self-destructing. Best to help it along as fast as possible. Watch and see if I'm not right. This isn't going to be a slow war of siege and attrition." After a while, he added: "And there's something else. I don't really understand it, because it's not my nature. But Andy Blacklockcares about his prisoners. The word 'guard' means a lot of things to him, besides a paycheck and keeping the streets safe for politicians to go campaigning in."
Chapter 50 Adrian Luff leaned back in the chair in his office and gave the punk standing in front of the desk a long, cold stare. The punk shrank inside his paper coverall, the only thing Luff allowed men to wear any longer, unless they were one of his own. It was harder to conceal a weapon in the paper folds. And if anyone was planning to run, they'd think twice if even their clothes would be gone after one or two days out there with the dinosaurs. "Do you think I'll pull out the ankle shackles and put you on a chain gang clearing the side of the road?" Luff tried to remember the punk's name, but it wouldn't come. "Forget that. I won't lock your ass down, toss you into the hole for a month, or any of the nice things you would have gotten from Blacklock. You will die. Slowly, but not all that slowly." "Listen, boss. I ain't dissin' you. I don't know nothin'." "You were on the wall when the gate blew. If you didn't see something, you should have." The punk shook his head. "I don't be lookin at nothin' 'cept the cock in front of me. I just tryin' to stay alive." "You're just some poor bitch having to turn tricks to get by. Right?" The punk looked at the floor and nodded. "Well, you either remember something worth remembering, and give me a name-or you will spend the next six hours in a dentist chair. Ever had a healthy tooth pulled with no anesthetic?" Luff didn't wait for an answer. "It makes for a substandard day. On the bright side, having no teeth might be a professional help to you. Logan, take this dickwad to the infirmary.
Pull every tooth in his head. When you're done, bring him back to me.
I think he'll be more willing to chat then." "No!" The punk trembled, his face graying. "Wait! I'll tell ya, I did see somethin'. A man!"
"Too late. You can't miss a dental appointment. We'll talk afterward.
Or rather, I'll talk and you'll mumble." The punk didn't know anything, Luff was sure of that. But someone did. And when word got around about the dentist chair, those who did know would stand in line to tell him what was what. It has to be Bostic. And Cook, probably.
And they must have had inside help. Bostic had been gone almost a week. He'd disappeared the day of the riot, after hooking up with Boomer's boys. Cook had probably gone with him too, although no one had seen him. That was fine. Let the bastards leave. He hoped one of those things with the big teeth and big claws got them. But why would Bostic blow the gate, too? It made no sense. The man had wanted to tuck tail and run south, not run the prison. The armory had been stripped, which did make sense. Luff and his men still had pistols, but it wouldn't be long before the ammunition for the rifles ran out.
If another big riot broke out, they'd be in a real jam. After that, they'd be down to pistols, and cons weren't that afraid of sidearms.
Not afraid enough, anyway. Sooner or later, some of them would work themselves up to rush Luff's reliables. When that happened, they'd get their hands on at least a few of the pistols and there'd be all hell to pay. There was only one solution. It was time to tighten the screws again. This time, hard and fast. Break everybody's spirit all the way down, including that of his own people. He couldn't take the chance that another Collins might emerge. That was the reason he'd had the four guards watching the main entrance immediately executed. The armory had been plundered right under their noses! No second chance, no mercy. Do as you're told, do it now, and do it right. Or you go into the freezers. Or wherever else Luff figured to put them, once the freezers finally filled up. Which would be by tomorrow morning, he reminded himself. At first, he'd thought maybe Blacklock and the guards had done it. But that didn't make any sense, on at least two counts. First, the whole operation had been too ruthless. Everybody knew Blacklock and Schuler were softheaded. And maybe they'd died and now Hulbert was running the show out there, but Hulbert wasn't bright enough to have figured out something like this. For Christ's sake, the man was one of those survivalist goofballs. Spent his weekends voluntarily doing what no one in his right mind would do for money. A guy like that was hardheaded, sure, but he had a brain the size of a walnut. Besides, Luff knew from Collins what Blacklock and his people had taken out of the prison when they left. They'd had no explosives.
Whatever had been used to blow the gates had been something jury-rigged. Probably from the kitchen locker room supplies, from the looks of things. What upstanding officer of the law would know how to do that? Answer: None. Even Collins had been a dummy, that way. But Bostic might very well know. And if he didn't, one of Boomer's boys would. Carter Leffen had been one of the men spotted leaving the prison in that faked "plague" caravan. Everybody knew he was a wizard at making things go boom. Adrian enjoyed solving puzzles. It was the only pleasure he had left.
Chapter 51 "No," Andy said firmly. "We go as fast as possible. We wait just long enough for that one catapult to be finished. That'll be enough to send over the smoke bombs that Leffen's making up. To hell with anything fancier." Rod scratched his jaw. He'd known Andy would want to move quickly, but he hadn't foreseen anythingthis quick. They hadn't gotten back and given their report but three hours ago. "A smoke bomb won't hurt anybody." "I know that," Andy said patiently.
"But it will confuse them-and by now I'm sure that regime of Luff's is held together by nothing more than chewing gum and baling wire. I mean, Jesus. Three freezers stuffed with corpses and severed heads?
And we already knew from James here that Luff started his killing spree almost immediately. By now…" His normally ruddy face looked ashen. Rod knew that the news that hundreds of the inmates had been slaughtered was affecting him. The problem was that he thought it was affecting his military judgment too. But, to his surprise, Chief Watkins spoke up in support of Andy's plan. "I agree with the captain," he said. "Most forts get captured because the defenders are caught unprepared. That's how the Red Sticks took Fort Mims." He chuckled. "That backfired on them, of course, once Andy Jackson got into the act afterward. But that fucking asshole's nowhere around to save this Luff fellow's bacon." A big grudgingly, he added: "Not that he probably would have anyway." Cook weighed in, then. "Yeah, let's just do it. But I don't agree with one thing in your plan, Captain Blacklock. Just rushing the main gate seems… well, silly, to be honest. We should go for the armory again, too." "Thearmory? No matter how crazy Luff is, he's bound to have that well-guarded by now.
And that door w
asn't…" Blacklock trailed to silence, his eyes widening. "Sure, we didn't blow it up. So what? We got the key, still.
And I can guarantee you that whatever else Luff has, he doesn't have a locksmith with his tools to have changed the lock." "He might have it barred or chained from the inside, though." "So? Worst that happens, we create a diversion. But I'm willing to bet he doesn't. In fact, I'm willing to bet my life-Iwill be betting my life, since I'll volunteer to lead the attack-that Luff still isn't worrying much about what sort of threat might come from the outside. He'll have analyzed our raid on the armory and come up with exactly the wrong conclusion. There must have been somebody on the inside involved. And he doesn't know who it is. That's what he'll be fretting over." Blacklock studied him, for a moment. "Is he that crazy?" Cook shrugged. "It's just the way the man's mind works. He's amanipulator, Captain. He doesn't lead a gang, he engineers one. He's smart, but I remember what the Boom said about him. Luff will always ignore a straightforward answer if he can find a complicated one. Look at that attack on me he told Butch Wesson to do.
What was the purpose of it? I spent some time trying to figure that out, and finally had the sense to ask Boomer. He said Luff was trying to get me to be cooperative with him, since I had access to the infirmary. But instead of just asking, or figuring out some way to bribe me, he went about it ass-backwards." Blacklock thought about it.
"All right, I can see your point. But he'll still have at least a dozen men guarding the armory. Some outside, but most probably inside." Cook smiled. "You still don't get it, Captain. Luff won't haveanybody inside the armory. He won't trust anybody in there. He'll have it locked inside and out-with him having the only keys. The guards won't be in the armory. Some of them will be on the outside, and some might be guarding the inside door-but not inside the armory itself." He glanced over at the Boomers sitting a distance away from the leadership conference. "We can handle the guards on the outside easily enough. Kidd alone could probably do that. What happens next, I don't know. If the guards on the inside are steady enough, we'll pretty much be stymied. Opening that second door and just rushing out would be dicey as hell. But by then you'll have started the main attack and I don't think they'll stick around. They'll be too rattled.
Those guys aren't what you'd call Delta Force, you know." Rod had been thinking about it, while the two talked, and the more he did, the more he liked Cook's plan. If nothing else, even if Cook and his men couldn't get out of the armory, they'd have taken it. Luff wouldn't have access to it either. And he was pretty sure Cook's assessment was right. Whatever guards were assigned to watch the inside door probably would abandon the assignment, once the crap hit the fan. Andy, apparently, had come to the same conclusion. "All right. I take it your proposal is to turn the whole job over to you Boomers?" "Seems sensible. Look, let's face it. Some day we may all be good buddies and make jokes about Botany Bay. But right now, your guards and us Boomers are about as comfortable together as cats and dogs sharing a lifeboat.
With the dogs getting hungry and the cats in a foul mood. Trying to mix us together on the spot into a single combat team is just pie in the sky. You know it, and I know it. So you take one assignment-you and the Cherokees-and concentrate on getting through the main gate.
Meanwhile, we'll see what we can do at the armory." "I think he's right, Andy," Rod said. "To be honest, if you were to add the Boomers to my platoon, I'd just scratch my head and tell them to keep out my way. I wouldn't know what else to do." "Yeah, I can see that. All right, Cook. No, I guess I'd better start calling you James, huh?"
That came with a little smile. "But what do you propose to do assuming you succeed and get out of the armory? We need to be careful we don't wind up shooting at each other." Cook chewed on his lower lip for a few seconds. "We'll go for the watch towers. You'll have enough on your plate as it is." "All right. I'll make sure all my people know.
But keep in mind that we're almost certainly going to be taking fire from those towers before you can take them. If you can even try at all. So if you do get into any the towers, we need some sort of signal that lets us know they're now in friendly hands." "Those Spanish blankets are distinctive-and it's one thing we know Luff and his people can't possibly have. We'll cut some strips and take them with us. If you see one hanging from a tower, pretty please stop shooting at it." "Okay." Andy looked around the small circle gathered at the campfire. Him, Hulbert, Watkins, Kershner and Cook. "Sergeant, how are you and your men doing with the new rifles?" "Very well-except I think Susan Fisher's niece will be getting jealous. Pitzel is talking about marrying his new rifle." In his heavy Swabian accent, he added, "I am struggling against the temptation myself. Fortunately, unlike Pitzel, I have read the Bible and know that such a joining is forbidden by the Lord." Between the accent and the young man's solemn face, it was hard to know if he was joking or being serious. "Uh… where does it say that in the Bible?" Rod asked. "Leviticus. Somewhere in there, almost everything is forbidden." It'd been a long time since Hulbert read the Bible; even then, he'd only read parts of it. He was pretty sure he'd skipped over Leviticus because-well, yeah, it had seemed like page after page of you can't do this and you can't do that or you must do this and do it exactly this and that a way. Still, he thought it unlikely that God had said anything specifically about. 223 caliber semiautomatic rifles. "I guess," was all he said, though. Arguing Biblical interpretation with a nineteenth-century German-American was probably as pointless as arguing it with Brian Carmichael. "Let's get going then," said Blacklock. "Edelman tells me the catapult will be finished today, and Leffen will have enough bombs put together. I want us moving out at dawn. Two days from now, we take Alexander back."
Chapter 52 Margo stared up at the ceiling, her hands clasped behind her head. Given that her body was only covered by the sheets from the waist down, Nick found the sight distracting. Which was odd, perhaps, given that he could hardly claim to be sexually frustrated.
In fact, he was feeling a little exhausted. Margo made love with the same enthusiastic verve she drove her SUV. "Do you ever wonder what's happening to those poor people, Nick?" "Yes, I do. At least three times a day. But I start by reminding myself that they aren't 'poor people' to begin with. They're my kind of people, actually. I grew up in an Ohio town not that much different from the towns that produced the guards and nurses at Alexander." He reached for a cigarette, and shook one loose from Margo's pack when she extended her hand. Both he and Margo smoked, which was bad for their health and getting less and less socially acceptable as time went by-but was very handy, from a romantic standpoint. No matter how different they were in other ways, they shared the smoker's sense of withstanding a bitter and relentless siege shoulder to shoulder. After he lit hers, and lit his, he lay down next to her-shoulder to shoulder-and looked up at the ceiling also. "As for the Cherokees, I think they'd resent being called 'those poor people.' I know some Cherokees. Even today, after all that's happened to them, they're a proud people. At least, the ones I know are." "Well, yeah. But… most of them are convicts. Maximum security type convicts at that." She exhaled cigarette smoke and chuckled. "Of course, I guess that just reinforces your point. Not even knee-jerk bleeding heart liberals like me really think felons are hapless waifs." They smoked in silence, for a while. Then Nick sat up, stubbed out his cigarette, and offered her the ashtray to do the same.
Like most things in Margo's quarters in the facility, the ashtray was simple and utilitarian. Aside from her politics and her knuckle-tightening disregard for each and every principle of defensive driving, the only extravagance the woman seemed to have was a devotion to ice cream that bordered on idolatry. She'd had some sort of enormous mostly ice cream dessert after dinner, and had then insisted on stopping at a Dairy Queen on the way back to the mine. How she managed that and kept her slim figure was a mystery. Just one of those people with a furnace for a metabolism, he guessed, rather enviously.
Nick gained weight easily, if he didn't watch his diet and slipped on his exercise p
rogram. That had been a problem for him even as a young man, much less at the age he was now. "We just don't know, is the only answer," he said. "And we never will know what happened to them-or is happening to them. Malcolm says it's theoretically possible, with enough data-which we might even have, with this event-that we could someday send a probe of some kind that might find them. But theoretically possible and technologically feasible are two completely different things." "As any physicist can tell you, especially particle physicists like me. The experiments we could do-ifwe could generate the energy." She gave him a look he couldn't quite interpret. "Do you pray for them?" she asked abruptly. "Yes. Every night." She nodded.
"I'm not religious, as I think you know. But if you want to say prayers now, please feel free. Or any time you're with me. I won't join you, but I won't mind, either." "Thank you. I will, then."
After he finished, she stroked his arm. "This is going pretty well, I think." "Yeah. So do I." "But I'm not budging on the driving. Forget that crap about the man taking the wheel." Nick chuckled. "I can live with that. Or not. But I noticed that Alex included a very nice life insurance policy in that package. So I guess I can't plead mercy for my poor kids left orphaned." "Poor kids! One of your sons is a lawyer, one of them's a computer technician with his own consulting business, and the third is studying to be doctor. And both your daughters look to be doing well for themselves too." "Well. True. I did pretty good by them, for a trash-hauler whose father was a steelworker." He lay back down next to her, cupping an arm around her shoulder, and stared at the ceiling again. "It's too bad we'll never know. Because if we could, I'd bet you dollars for donuts those 'poor people' will do just about the same, give 'em three generations. Including a fair number of the inmates."