Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  Tom snorted slightly. It was grim humor, but that was the only type you were likely to get in a situation like this.

  “It’s the ones who’ll try and use little balls of it in their muskets that worry me,” he said lightly, checking his watch. The Indians should be nearly at their targets by now. Give them time to set the charges and get out….

  “That‘ll be a surprise, you betcha,” he went on easily. “You know, it would be interesting to see what did happen if you set fire to a pellet of Semtex under a wad and lead ball. I’d rather someone else did the experiment, though!”

  Simmons crushed out a cigarette and said something to Kolo in the Yokut’s language; both men chuckled. Adrienne went over to the Scout and his tracker. “Godspeed and good luck,” she said, shaking their hands. “See you again when all this is over.”

  They nodded and mounted, vanishing into the night. She took a long breath and looked at Tom.

  First time I’ve ever gone into action with someone I loved, the big man thought. Got some of the same drawbacks as doing it with people who you just like a lot, only worse.

  He put a fighting grin on his face, and shoved down absurd thoughts about talking her into going off somewhere else on an urgent mission.

  “If we pull this off, we’re heroes,” he said. “Thanks of a grateful nation. I won’t have to sweat when I finally meet your dad.”

  “If we don’t pull it off, we’re goats, of course,” Tully said, checking his machine pistol.

  “I don’t think that would be our worst worry,” Tom replied.

  Adrienne threw her arms around him. He could hear Tully murmuring to Sandra, but the moment was too intense for him to pay attention. Then he felt Adrienne stiffen.

  He did too, at the sound from the valley behind them. Engines, many engines—the transports were beginning to warm up their turbines. Turning, he could see the exhausts, streaks of red fire in the night. The landing lights of the airstrips came on, harshly brilliant across the miles of distance.

  “Looks like we didn’t allow quite enough time,” he said grimly, pulling down his night-sight goggles; the dimness sprang into silvery light. Adrienne did likewise and vaulted into the saddle.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  They poured down the wash and out onto the plain, riding at a hand gallop; they might be seen, but they would fail if they didn’t hurry.

  Damn, Tom thought, wishing he had a jeep or a motorbike. The great muscles of the gelding flexed between his legs, and the chilly wind cuffed at his face. You feel faster on a horse, but you aren’t really.

  Closer, and they could see the first heavy transport taxi out on to the runway and halt with the rear ramp lowered. A column of men were coming down the dirt track from the camp; they were insect-tiny in the distance, but it was getting close to ride….

  “Down!” Adrienne said, echoing his thought and throwing up a hand.

  They all dismounted, all except One Ocelot. He took the reins of the horses as they swung down, then turned south and rode fast, leading them. Tom felt a moment of envy, despite the Zapotec’s slim chance of making it anywhere near home. He was out of it, with nothing to worry about but his own survival.

  “All right,” Tom said. “Let’s go.”

  “We couldn’t possibly pull this off if they weren’t so short of manpower,” Adrienne said, settling into a steady jog-trot beside him.

  She was carrying one of the P90 machine pistols slung across her back. So were Tully and Tom; any fighting was probably going to be at close range. Sandra Margolin carried an O’Brien rifle. That was the weapon she was familiar with, and you didn’t change in midstream.

  “That’s not the half of it,” Tom said—thinking of personnel-detection radars, sonic sensors, drones, robot perimeter-guard guns. “They’re running so tight they can’t afford to take basic precautions. Everything has to work to ten-tenths or they get a chain of disasters.”

  Then he laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Adrienne said, her eyes fixed grimly ahead. At least one of the transports was going to get off the ground and under way.

  Well, we’re in exactly the same situation, for starters.

  “I was remembering our last date to go running,” he said aloud, and she laughed in turn… until the first Hercules closed its ramp and accelerated down the runway, dust boiling in the lights as its wheels cut the dirt. It lifted into the night and vanished; they could see its silhouette black against the stars as it wheeled overhead, and its riding lights blinking. Turbine throb echoed in their bones, and then another taxied out on to the strip, and men began to board.

  Her lips moved then, in a silent curse or prayer. That was a hundred armed men headed toward the heart of her nation and another hundred filing up the ramp and being handed full magazines.

  His country too, he supposed, if he lived and settled down here afterward; well, his great-grandparents had left Norway, hadn’t they? Daring the ocean and the Sioux for a chance at land of their own.

  I’ll worry about that later.

  What he wasn’t worried about was the increasingly brilliant haze of light ahead—they were running parallel to the northwest-tending dirt runway now. All those landing lights and searchlights would just kill the defenders’ night-sight and wouldn’t show them anything more than a few hundred yards away. His head turned north toward the ranch house. It was lit too, but more softly; at half a mile, its windows shone a gentler yellow into the night.

  Was the Batyushkov or this Giovanni Colletta there, watching? Frightened, or exhilarated, or murmuring: “The die is cast”? Odd to be fighting a man and never even have seen his picture.

  He might well be relaxing, sighing in relief, thinking I’ve done it! Tom smiled grimly. You shouldn’t feel the after-action buzz before the fat lady sang. Doing otherwise was an invitation to being the last casualty of an op and having your friends shake their heads over a beer and talk about how poor X nearly made it back.

  “Over to you,” Adrienne said when they came to the edge of the lights. “Your area of expertise, Tom.”

  “Right,” he said. “Everyone slow down. Take it at a brisk walk and look like you own the place. Sandy, catch your breath.”

  She was in hard good condition—all of them were, after crossing the Mohave—but she didn’t have as much practice running under a load as the rest of them. He made himself wait until her face was less red and the desperate whooping of her panting had subsided. That despite the crackling tension that he could feel radiating from Adrienne as the next C-130 took off; they were closer to the runway now, and the four big props kicked a torrent of dust.

  That made it natural to bend their heads and hold their hands over their eyes. Not only would this be impossible if the Bad Guys could set a proper perimeter guard, Tom thought. It would be impossible if they had any warning we were coming. The Batyushkovs and Collettas knew that any tall blond white men around here were on their side, and they were keyed up getting the Zapotec mercs onto the C-130s.

  It was a mistake to get too focused on what you had planned, but it was a mistake everyone made. Tom licked sweat off his lips and hoped they’d go on making it at least a little longer.

  The graveled surface of the road down from the camp crunched under the tread of soldiers’ boots, coming down in platoon columns. Behind them the searchlights from the guard towers played along the track, showing the endless rows of men in gray uniforms and peaked caps—a battalion was a lot bigger from ground level than you’d think, when you said eight hundred men. They marched in the rather stiff Russian style, swinging their free arms up across their chests from the elbow; from the look of it, the lieutenants and a couple of NCOs in each platoon were the men Batyushkov had brought in. A bit older than you’d expect men in junior positions to be, and a lot of them had Red Army medals jingling on their chests—Russkis were strange that way, wearing decorations on combat fatigues.

  The armored cars were spaced out along the north side of the road, a
t two-hundred-and-fifty-yard intervals, ten or twenty yards back from the verge; they and the thin scatter of men between them kept the business ends of their weapons pointed at the marching troops—but fairly casually, in the way of men taking a routine precaution they don’t think will be really necessary. They were probably feeling relieved too—they’d gotten the wild men trained and on their way without a major mutiny.

  The air was full of the sound of boots, of engines, rank with the stink of burnt kerosene.

  The six-wheeled car Adrienne had called a Catamount was in the center; not far from it two senior officers were taking the salute of the troops passing by, returning the salute as each company did an eyes-right. One of the pair made the gesture in Russki fashion; he was tall and blond and wore a beret. The other was shorter and darker, wearing a Fritz helmet with a gray cloth cover, and he used the American style.

  “Major Daniel Mattei,” Adrienne said softly, indicating him with a slight tilt of her head. “West Point, class of 1988, believe it or not. He’s commander of the Colletta Domain’s militia and the Prime’s household troops. A Family member, collateral. I don’t know the blond. Tom… that was the fourth plane.”

  They were still too far away to really distinguish features. One of the men by Mattei did look over his shoulder toward them, but casually. With just a little luck, the Collettas would think they were Batyushkov men, and the Batyushkovs would think the same in reverse. Everyone being in the same uniform, with minor variations, helped a lot—and the uniform was the same gray fatigues Tom and the rest were wearing.

  Still, they were going to need a distraction real soon now. And that was the fourth plane of eleven. Four hundred and eighty men; they probably intended to put the armor on the last two, to land after the infantry had seized enough ground. The whole thing was sort of pointless if they all got off….

  “Sandra,” he said, without turning his head. “When the balloon goes up, you hit the deck and try for those two guys. Got it?”

  “Go flat, take out those two,” she said. “Got it, big man.”

  She was an excellent shot—as a hunter; he’d seen that. Whether she could actually pull the trigger when a human was in front of the sights was another matter, but it would sure help.

  “Roy. On the count of three. One.”

  He took a long deep breath; worry and thought went away as he exhaled. The commander of the Catamount was sitting on the turret, his left elbow hooked over a pintle-mounted Bren gun.

  “Two.”

  The details of the armored car came clear; six equally spaced wheels, a wedge-fronted box with a slab-sided turret. The driver was at the front in the center, three armor-glass windows in a semicircle around his position, with movable steel shutters and vision slits to cover them at need. Engine and transmission at the rear, turret in the center… and the Colletta tommy gun on the side of the hull.

  “Three!”

  Tully pulled a box the size of a paperback book out of a pouch. It had a handgrip in the center, and above it a covered button. His thumb flicked up the cover; he squeezed the grip safety and mashed his thumb down on the button.

  Things seemed to move very slowly after that.

  Jim Simmons waited patiently, the rifle snuggled against his shoulder. Fire and thunder woke in the night to the northeast, toward the mercenaries’ camp. He didn’t turn his head; no point in looking at a bright light.

  He was flat on the dirt on one side of the runway; the wind from the propellers of the last Hercules had blown off his hat. The crack of his rifle was lost in the greater chorus of shouts, shots and screams that broke out closer to the ranch house, where the troops were marching down to embark. Somewhere a dog was barking, which was just what was needed to add the final touch of lovely chaos. Not that a dog could have smelled anything besides the stink of fuel burning. The spent cartridge spun away to his right and tinkled on a rock.

  And two hundred yards away, where the two runways met and the control shack stood, a guard crumpled. The man beside him glanced over sharply; he’d have heard the splitting twick of the bullet, perhaps even the flat smack of its impact on flesh. Simmons shifted the crosshairs—two hundred yards was a clout shot, even in the bad light—and stroked the trigger again.

  Crack.

  The second man dropped, shot cleanly through the upper breastbone, blood splashing on the plank wall behind him. The impact wasn’t quite dead center, and the force of the blow turned him around and slammed him face-first into wall. He slid down it, smearing the blood.

  “Go!” Simmons said crisply, snatching up the rifle as he bounced to his feet.

  He dashed forward, running across the blunt nose of the next transport taxiing into position for takeoff. Kolo went before him, running with an elastic bounding stride and howling like a wolf every time his feet hit the packed dirt. He gained with every stride too, carrying nothing but the knives in his belt and the tomahawk in his hands. Simmons followed, eyes flicking over the windows in the long shed.

  Motion, left two. He halted, the butt swinging smoothly up to his shoulder; crosshairs on the window… target backlit by lights in the room behind…

  Crack. Glass shattered away from the .30-06 round. Crack. Just in case the bullet had been deflected by the glass or the frame.

  He ran forward again. A dozen paces and Kolo was nearly at the door; it opened, and someone was standing there with a machine pistol in his grip—

  Simmons halted again, and the rifle made the same smooth transit to his shoulder. This is going to be a little more tricky….

  But Kolo was already diving to one side, not to escape the stubby muzzle that tracked him, but to give the Scout a clear shot. The crosshairs leveled on a face—it had to be a head shot, to make sure the man didn’t have enough time to fire.

  Crack. The youth with the Uzi toppled backwards, a round blue hole in his forehead and the back blown out of his head. Crack. Crack. To discourage anyone thinking of following him out.

  He pounded forward again. Kolo waited until he was nearly there, then dove through the open doorway. Simmons hurdled the body lying there.

  “Eddie?” someone called, from a door to the right down the corridor. “Eddie?”

  Kolo went through; Simmons followed just quickly enough to see his hand chop forward. The hatchet moved in a blur, and the technician in the swivel chair behind the radio spun with the blade sunk three inches deep between his eyes, the .45 flying from his hand. His boot heels drummed on the plank floor as he pinwheeled across the room, the chair rattling on its casters. Simmons stopped the chair with a slight grimace of distaste at the huge spastic yawn on the dead man’s face and pushed the sprattling body out on the floor. Then he set his rifle against the table and sat down before the shortwave set himself. It was a powerful unit, and there was a relay station on Mount Whitney; it would reach the coastal valleys without a problem. His fingers twisted the dials to the frequency that would be listening twenty-four hours a day, and he flipped the transmission switch:

  “Climb Mount Etna. Climb Mount Etna. Climb Mount Etna.” That code had been John Rolfe’s idea, and for some reason the ghastly old bugger had thought it was hilarious. “Climb Mount Etna. Climb Mount—”

  Something very heavy struck James Simmons on the point of the left shoulder. Cold flashed along his side; he clawed at the radio with his right hand, but still fell out of the chair. His legs buckled as he tried to rise, and then he was on his back, half under the table, mouth opening and closing as he tried hard to breathe.

  Kolo was fighting with two men, shrieking like a mechanical saw going through a millstone as he leapt and slashed. A third lay curled around himself in the entranceway, trying to hold his rent stomach closed and screaming. The other two were close to Kolo, too close to shoot, trying to hit him with the butts of their rifles or stab with their bayonets. The Yokut moved between them as if they were in slow motion and he in real time, and red drops trailed from his knife. One man folded over with the blade buried in his gut
; the other staggered back, firing blindly, blood flooding across his face from a cut that stretched from the corner of his mouth across an eyeball.

  Two of the rounds punched home into Kolomusnim’s torso, and he dropped limply, the war scream cut off.

  The room was suddenly empty except for the crackle of the radio speakers and the moans of the wounded. Simmons tried to breath again, but his insides felt wet. There were voices in the corridor outside, shrill with alarm. He fumbled behind himself, and found the toggle of the explosive charge.

  Supposed to throw it in when we left, he thought, as he doggedly fought to close the numb fingers. So damn cold. Mother—

  One last sharp tug.

  “Three!” Tom said.

  Tully’s thumb came down on the button. Half a mile away, the Semtex exploded where the Nyo-Ilcha warriors had crawled through the night to pack it around the bases of the watchtowers.

  The light from the flashes came a fractional second before the sound, a multitude of thudding, snapping barks. Sound and flashes rippled like a strobe light, the explosions overlapping but distinct. The towers were thread-thin at this distance, the three he could see; their searchlights went out all at once, lowering the ambient light by about half. The blockhouse at the top of one tower seemed to fall straight down; the shock must have blown the four heavy pine logs away from the cross braces, and they’d opened out like someone doing splits. The other two shook, trembled, and then fell inward like hammers—which was exactly the effect the logs of the blockhouses at their summits would have on the machine gunners inside, and any Zapotecs in the tents beneath, when they hit the ground. Dust billowed up, cold under the starlight and the distant floods.

  “Well, well, Good Star’s men did place all their charges,” Tom said quietly, as he began to walk briskly toward the armored car.

  Behind him Sandra Margolin dropped to her belly in the dirt. Of the three of them, she was the mostly likely to make someone twig that instant too soon—nobody was going to miss the fact that she was a woman, not even in fatigues and not even for the half second that the rough baggy clothing might fool someone looking at Adrienne’s taller, sleeker curves.