“That was your satchel charge, Tully,” the black man put in. “You really pissed them off with that.” Then he took up the story: “Yeah, Piet Botha’s dead.” He shook his head. “Got to hand it to the big Boer, he was one baaad badass. Right at the end, when I was out of it—some Akaka got me with a sling-stone”—he touched the bandaged side of his face and winced slightly—“he was standing over his kid in this fold of rock, and man, he used his rifle like a club till it broke and then he picked up two of them by their necks and smashed their heads together…. I looked at the body afterwards; must have been like three or four arrows in it, and a couple of knives.”
“And then our Nyo-Ilcha friends arrived like… if you’ll pardon the expression… the U.S. cavalry,” Tully said. “The kid make it?”
“Yeah, though he’s probably going to limp,” Villers said. “Over to you, chief.”
Good Star chuckled, a harsh sound. “I’d been following you on general principles, and because one of my people finked you out to Swift Lance.”
His right index finger traces a shallow crusted cut along his bare ribs. “The stool pigeon tried for me, too, and missed. I didn’t. But it peeved me some, I can tell you, my own people getting impressed by Swift Lance’s so-called Dreaming. And the chance to take a slap at the Akaka while they were bent over and showing their butts was just too good to pass up. Figured I’d catch up with you and have a talk, but you ran too fast—and we had to take care of a few Akaka on the way, you know?”
Adrienne hissed in vexation. “You mean we were killing ourselves and zigzagging over half the desert running away from you?”
“Yup, that’s about it, boss lady,” Good Star said. “Then I got wind of this setup here—”
Villers looked embarrassed and spread his hands. “Filling him in seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“—and decided to come check it out. Guess we Water People aren’t the only ones got our feuds within the tribe, hey?”
Adrienne and Tom exchanged a glance. He could see her thought: It’s an advantage, but it’s a threat, too. How to make use of it?
He guessed that she took Good Star’s professions of friendship just as seriously as he did; the Indian meant them, in a way… and would cheerfully throw them to the wolves, or the Collettas, if he saw an advantage in it for his people.
Which is only fair, Tom thought. He doesn’t owe the Rolfes or their New Virginia anything but a kick in the balls.
Silence stretched; Good Star poured himself a cup of coffee and waited—grinning, not in the proverbial Indian impassivity. At last Adrienne spoke:
“My name is Rolfe, by the way,” she said, holding up her left hand to show the ring. “Granddaughter of the Old Man.”
Good Star shaped a silent whistle. “Masthamo’s dick,” he swore obscurely. Tom winced; if things went wrong, he could see a ransom situation shaping up real quick.
“You’re Johnny Deathwalker’s kin?” he asked, pushing back the lion headdress to look at her more closely. “Yeah, that’s what the legends say. Hair like an angry sunset, and eyes green like river rocks and colder than glacier ice.”
She sketched out the situation in simple terms. Good Star listened, nodded, and said:
“OK. Now, why should we Water People care which clan of the Deathwalkers runs things down by the sea?”
“The Rolfes have mostly let your tribe alone,” she said. “The Collettas are more ambitious.”
The chief shrugged; muscle moved under dark brown skin like angular snakes, on a body the Mohave had stripped of everything that wasn’t essential to life.
“So you say,” he said. “Do you say you won’t take the Mohave when you want it?”
“No,” she said. “I do say it’s a big world. You were thinking of taking your people down south, weren’t you? Well, help me and I’ll push for the Old Man to give you permission—and help. You know the word of the Rolfes is good, if you know anything about us.”
Good Star showed yellow teeth: “Yeah, boss lady. I also know all you’re promising is to do your best. You can’t pledge Johnny Deathwalker’s word, can you?”
“Not absolutely.” She hesitated for a moment, then steeled herself and went on: “But I have a lot of influence with him. And he makes a point of always rewarding people who help us and punishing those who hurt. And… incidentally, Good Star of the Nyo-Ilcha… how would you like to get your hands on hundreds of O’Brien rifles? And machine guns, and mortars…”
The Indian froze with the cigarette halfway to his lips. “Son of a bitch,” he said after a long moment when their eyes met. “You mean that?”
“Word of a Rolfe,” she said. “They’re right there”—she pointed eastward towards the Colletta headquarters—“waiting for you.”
“Oh, sure, boss lady, all we have to do is to take ’em with our bows and smoke-poles!”
Adrienne smiled like a cat, and looked at Tom. Tom cleared his throat and pushed One Ocelot forward. The Zapotec firmed his shoulders and crossed his arms.
“Turns out,” Tom said, “that these particular… Deathwalkers… don’t trust their hired soldiers very much.” Good Star nodded. Tom went on: “In particular, they don’t trust them with any ammunition for their weapons, except when they’re on the firing range. It’s all under lock and key and separate guards—white men—until they launch their attack.”
Good Star’s smile matched that of the headdress he wore. It was an expression much like the one an antelope would see on the face of the very last lion it ever met.
“Tell me about this,” he said.
Overhead, light glinted on metal, and the throbbing roar of turboprop engines came insect-small through the clear sky. A Hercules transport was dropping down over the Sierras; the sound swelled as it approached, then it passed them only a few thousand feet overhead as it stooped for the valley floor. Another followed it, and another.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Owens Valley
August 2009
The Commonwealth of New Virginia
I don’t like the thought of splitting us up, Tom mused, looking through the light-enhancing binoculars down toward the Colletta ranch house and the mushroom of military base that had sprung up around it. The problem is, it’s the only way I can see us having a chance of pulling this off at all.
A plan was coming to him, and if he could sell Adrienne on it…
On the other hand, it’s a plan that requires a vastly inferior force to divide itself five ways from Sunday. A little… complicated. Too many point failure sources, as they said in the Rangers. If an officer had come up with something like this during the war, I’d have considered fragging the crazy son of a bitch unless he had a real good track record.
The binoculars gave the valley floor below an odd flat look, sharp-edged but carrying less information than his eyes would have taken in if the real level of light had been equivalent to what showed. It was oddly disconcerting, because his mind kept telling him the view was blurred, and objectively it wasn’t.
The view was good enough for his purposes; he ignored the distortion as he did the chill cold seeping through his jacket and sweater from the rock ridge beneath him. Tom counted the big Hercules transports lined up beside the runways to the south of the ranch house.
“Still eleven,” he muttered to himself ironically. “C-130J-30s, the stretched model. Colletta Air has sent its very best.”
Then he scanned over to the tented camp. Another company column was marching in to it from Cerro Gordo up in the Inyo mountains; that made six, and according to Simmons that was the full complement from the “mine.” Getting in there and getting back with the information had been a damned fine bit of scouting—evidently the Frontier Scouts really meant their title—and he’d done it fast, too, covering forty miles round-trip in a single day.
Six companies, about a hundred and forty men each; call it nine hundred troops, more or less, with the local TOE, and including some of the Collettas we saw down there.
The units were extremely spare even by the austere Ranger standards he was used to; a lot more riflemen, fewer technicians or support spots.
Well, they’re intended for one single action. And the armament is a lot simpler, too. Sensor systems are Eyeball Mark One.
“My guess is that they’ll load the troops in the morning,” he said quietly, glancing at his watch; just after sundown. The military reflexes were back in force… and I’m remembering why I was so glad to get out of the army. Oh, well, the company’s prettier this time.
Adrienne and the others lay on the ridge beside him; so did Good Star. He could barely see the Indian in the darkness, and he moved very quietly…. But the smell gives him away at close range, he thought. On the other hand, I wouldn’t wash the natural oils out of my skin either, if I had to live in the Mohave year-round.
The dryness and heat were bad enough, but the alkali dust was full of things that acted like chemical scouring powder—in fact, industrial abrasives and cleaning minerals like borax were the desert’s main products, back FirstSide.
“When will they give them their ammunition?” Good Star asked, ruthlessly practical.
“When the aircraft take off, not before,” Tom said.
“But first, we have a little problem,” Adrienne put in, and pointed. Tiny boxy shapes at this distance; the glasses showed him the angular welded contours of light armor.
The Nyo-Ilcha chief grunted as she handed him the binoculars; he’d picked up on how to use them very quickly.
“Three of them. Killing Turtles. We know them—you Deathwalkers send them against us when you make reprisals. Bad medicine.”
Tom wasn’t quite sure if that last phrase was a joke, or not: Good Star seemed to have a keen ear for what the local white men expected of Indians, and an ability to play off it. Tom was sure that the sight of the armored cars made the Nyo-Ilcha chieftain uneasy. Tom didn’t blame him; none of the weapons his people had would make much impression on even thin steel plate, and armored cars were a lot faster than a horse.
Hmmm, he thought, distracted for a fractional instant. Of course, you could make a Molotov from alcohol and tallow, or lure one into a canyon, or put a lot of musket charges together into a satchel charge and throw it underneath. Determined men always had some chance, even against superior weapons. But that’s all we-regret-to-inform-you and posthumous Medal of Honor stuff.
“Two Cheetahs and a Catamount,” Adrienne went on to Tom. “Two light armored cars with twin Browning fifties, or one and a grenade launcher. And a six-wheel heavy with a Bofors gun in the turret and a coaxial MG. Probably manned by Colletta household troops—there to keep the mercenaries in line until they get on the transports.”
“But available for other purposes,” Tom said.
Like massacring our Indian allies here. That wouldn’t cause Adrienne any grief, I think, but I’m a bit more squeamish. Besides… hmmm…
Good Star’s men were skilled and tough and brave, deadly dangerous killers in their own warrior’s life of skirmish and ambush. His own brief experience with their Akaka cousins had vastly increased his respect for the Indian fighters of FirstSide history, who’d broken tribes like this with nothing better than single-shot rifles. But the Nyo-Ilcha war band weren’t disciplined soldiers, and they had a well-founded dread of armored vehicles and aircraft and automatic weapons. They weren’t going to do a kamikaze for the sake of the House of Rolfe, that was for sure, even if Good Star told them to. Which he wouldn’t.
He’d worked with… indigenous forces, was the polite phrase… before, during the war back FirstSide. The trick was to use their strengths, and avoid situations where their weaknesses were important. You couldn’t ask them to do too much.
“We’ll have to take out the armor ourselves,” he said. “And those guard towers will be a problem. If we can do that, and Good Star’s men can get stuck into the mercenaries before they’re issued a combat load, we can do this.”
Tully looked at him, a glimpse of movement in the dark. Have you been watching too many of my old movies, Kemosabe? went unspoken between them. Adrienne sighed; he could read that, too.
And I would so have liked to do that marriage and children thing. Or another thought as pessimistic.
In fact, he suspected that the only person on the ridge who wasn’t thinking something like that was Sandra, and that would be because she didn’t have enough experience at this sort of situation to judge the risks properly. He felt bad about her, in an odd way worse than he did about Adrienne. He was worried about Adri, but he also had a lot of confidence in her ability to take care of herself, and she was a professional whose trade involved deadly force, if not on this massive scale. Sandra was just a nice, brave kid who liked horses. He wished intensely that Henry Villers was available, but the head wound had left him with loss of balance and peripheral vision that would probably last for months, if not forever.
He turned his head to Good Star. “The only advantage we have is that all the enemy’s armed troops will be guarding the mercenaries. That’s where they expect trouble.”
Simmons snorted. “I’m surprised they can get their Russian cadre to get on the planes when the men are armed,” he said. “After the way they’ve been treating them.”
“They’ll be in the air, then,” Adrienne pointed out. “And the Zapotecs’ only hope of ever getting home will be to win and fulfill their king’s contract with the Collettas and Batyushkovs. If they did that and got home, they’d be the next thing to kings themselves, or at least rich nobles. His elite strike force. Their time in hell’s about over—they just have to get through a battle, and I don’t think getting killed in a fight is something any of them desperately dread.”
Tom nodded; from what One Ocelot said, they were all veterans—and of a school where combat meant facing edged metal at arm’s length.
She turned to him. “Tom, you’re the field man here. What’s your advice?”
“OK,” Tom said easily. “Here’s what I think we should do.”
She listened, nodding now and then. Tom wished he hadn’t been aware of Tully’s eyes going wide with horror as he laid out the plan.
“These are—” Tom stopped and looked at the Nyo-Ilcha warriors as Good Star translated his instructions. “Like gunpowder. Only much stronger.”
He held up a one-pound brick of the plastic explosive. Semtex had the consistency of stiff bread dough, and it was about as safe; it could be rolled, pinched or pushed into any shape you wanted. You could set small pieces of it on fire with a match, and it burned very hot—but didn’t explode. Ditto hitting it with a hammer. Bury a detonator in it, and it went off like TNT, only better. One version or another was used by every army on FirstSide for demolition and engineering work, and terrorists loved it because it was cheap and hard to detect.
“Take each one and plant it against the legs of the wooden towers. Where the beams come together—in the crutch of the beams. Do that very quickly—you must not stop between here and there. The men in the towers will be looking inward, toward their own soldiers, but you must be quick and very quiet.”
He demonstrated with his arms how he wanted the charges placed; if you crammed it into a joint, one charge should be ample to sheer twelve-inch beams and the steel bolts that held them together.
“Then leave them there. We can set them off. You just pull back, and when the towers fall, attack. That will be no later than—”
He gave the time to Good Star; the chief said something in his own language, and all the shadowed heads followed his arm as he pointed to a star, named it, and drew his finger down to the horizon. Not as accurate as a watch, but Tom would be willing to bet that it would work within five minutes or so.
“Everyone understand?” Tom finished.
Oh, Jesus, help us, he thought, as the half-seen ranks of faces nodded eagerly, scars and tattoos and animal-skin headdresses, braided hair and massed stink. On second thought, maybe Old Scratch would be more helpful.
> They filed off into the darkness; there was a dull jingle of harness padded with scraps of leather and cloth, a surprisingly muted drum of hooves, fading as they split into small parties and rode east through the canyon mouth and into the valley plain. The ones with the explosive would dismount and crawl in like leopards when they got closer. There was no use in worrying about it, and sneaking around in the dark with hostile intent was something well within the nomad warriors’ area of expertise. Now they could only wait.
He looked up; the sky was dense with stars through the clear cool high-desert air, more than he’d ever seen before. They wheeled above as the others waited in companionable silence; a quiet murmur told him that Sandra was praying—which couldn’t hurt and might possibly help. Some of the more robust psalms would fit in right now, and he wished he had enough faith in the stern Lutheran God of his ancestors to take comfort from reciting them.
Or even going Ho-la, Odhinn, he thought, his teeth white as he grinned in the darkness. Old One-Eye would be a natural for help in a setup like this… except that he loved to get heroes killed so he could stockpile them in Valhalla.
Adrienne stood by her horse, stroking its nose to calm it as the beast caught the fear-scent in the humans’ sweat.
Always the hardest, waiting, Tom thought. Abstractly, I couldn’t object if I died—I’ve lived better than most human beings, and seen more. He met her eyes, and she winked and shaped a kiss. Concretely, I would object. Got too much to live for right now. Maybe that’s why armies prefer teenagers!
Tully broke the quiet at last, when Sandra murmured an amen and crossed herself.
“Anyone want odds on how many will pocket the explosives instead of setting ’em as directed?” he said sourly. “Or possibly just throw them away?”
Adrienne shrugged. “Hopefully enough will use it the way they’ve been told. As to anyone who wants to keep the stuff… they’re going to get an awful surprise when the detonators go off, aren’t they? A very brief surprise, if a pound of plastique goes off in a hip pocket.”
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