“You’re going to invade Aztlan, sir?” asked the lieutenant with a bemused chuckle. “That’ll be what, only the third time this year?”
“Yeah, I know, I’m getting out of practice,” growled Vitale, buckling on his web gear and strapping on his coal-scuttle helmet. “Don, you and your sarge feel like participating in a little international incident?”
“Nothing like an international incident before breakfast to work up an appetite,” agreed Don, standing up. Vitale tossed both of them a pair of Schmeisser machine pistols and a canvas bag of magazines apiece.
“These are Wilkerson Kine-modified!” exclaimed Nel, noticing the odd squarish bulge at the back of the receiver group.
“Yeah. You never fired the GW Schmeisser?” asked Don.
“Not the Schmeisser, but I have the range course on the Mark
7,” said Nel. By now they were sprinting down the pathway towards the helicopter pads, following Vitale and the lieutenant. They could hear the whine of the Valkyrie gunship engines starting up.
“They handle like cartridge weapons, Just load the magazines like you normally would,” panted Don. “Instead of the normal fifty rounds in the clip, you’ve got two hundred plain copper-jacketed slugs, with butterfly twists on the tip of each slug to make sure anything Mexican you hit turns into guacamole. Jack in a round, it
will chamber against the kinetic energy plate, pull the trigger and you’ve got a burst with very little recoil. Easy to aim and control, no hot brass flying about to roll down inside your collar and sting hell out of you. You can make like a Steve McQueen German from an old movie, spraying endless bullets from a bottomless magazine and yelling “Macht schnell!’ Unless you’d rather glom a standard issue Mark Seven rifle?”
“I learn fast, sir,” said Nel, slapping in a magazine. “Hey, General, if I bag a spic with this, can I keep the weapon?”
Vitale had no time to answer as they leaped into the cabin of a hovering Valkyrie gunship. The aircraft were floating like lazy dragonflies four feet off the ground, their light but bulletproof plastic fuselages painted in camouflage and sporting circular green-white-and-blue rondels on the tail assemblies. Nel and Redmond quickly strapped themselves into the rear rumble seats behind the door gunners, which was lucky for them since the minute they were on board the Valkyrie’s pilot tore away from the landing zone. Vitale swung into his seat like a monkey, strapped himself in with one hand, and was immediately on the com, demanding a sitrep and issuing orders. Don looked up over the pilot’s head and saw the Valkyrie’s traditional runic inscription burned into the metal above the visor. Nel saw it as well and asked, “What is that, Colonel?”
“The NDF Air Cav’s official motto,” explained Redmond. “It’s an old Viking expression in some ancient Norse dialect that European archaeologists found in the ship-burial mound of a king, in Denmark I believe. Those are runic letters. It means: Hurry to meet death, before your place is taken.”
“Is this where they start playing the Wagner through the loudspeakers?” shouted Nel over the roaring slipstream.
Vitale overheard him. “The TLI doesn’t use Wagner,” he called back to them. “They have a couple of old country songs from a hundred years ago they like.” As if in response there was a sudden burst of sound from speakers embedded in the copters’ landing skids. Don couldn’t catch most of it, but it was some jaunty tune about there being beer in Texarkana, thirsty in Atlanta, and watching a bandit run. It seemed an odd song to ride into battle with, but then Don had always believed privately that Texans were a bit odd. There were three gunships and two larger armed transports to ferry the refugees
back, both of which carried a team of medics. The five choppers zoomed in and out among the hills and canyons, over the trees of red and gold foliage, and all of a sudden they broke out over a spreading, flat plain matted with sagebrush and scrubby vegetation, the old country song blaring in the air around them with a twang of banjos. “What is a smokey?” asked Nel.
“Uh, not sure, it used to be some kind of bear, I think,” replied Redmond. Don never ceased to be amazed at how quickly the terrain could change here in the border country, both here and along the Montana salients where he had done his own military service with the SS. One minute they were flying through mountain forests of golden autumn foliage and now they were over flat prairie. Don twisted around in his seat and tried to catch a glimpse of where they were going. Ahead he could see fountains of earth erupting from the red ochre desert floor, and he understood that the choppers were swinging wide and coming in from the south at a high angle, in an attempt to avoid the artillery barrage. He couldn’t tell whether the shells came from the enemy or from the NDF’s .88-millimeter batteries. He could not see any sign of the bus full of Mormon refugees, or indeed any motion on the ground of man or vehicle at all. Several bullets clacked and whined off the outer skin of the choppers. “We’re being shot at!” he told Nel. The distance was short now, and all of a sudden the NDF choppers were over the bus. Redmond saw that an SS man in camouflage fatigues was lying prone on the top of the battered bus, a bipod-mounted splat gun against one shoulder. The splat gun was outwardly modeled on the Browning Automatic Rifle of the previous century, although it weighed about five pounds lighter. Instead of ordinary ammunition it chambered 18-inch long Wilkerson KE rounds of cadmium steel rod, sliced lengthwise from the top into eight slender, needle-like sections. When the kinetic energy plate hurled this projectile from the barrel at over seven thousand feet per second muzzle velocity, the sections opened and were thrown into a spin, resulting in a spread of eight whirling buzz saws that would be three to four feet in diameter by the time a target was reached. A tank or armored vehicle would be sheared through, and by the time the shards tore through the armor plating the heat of air and matter resistance would have turned them molten. As for a man, the kinetic force would literally dismember him, hence the weapon’s name.
“Ugly Birds downrange, five each, two miles and closing!” someone squawked over the coms. The two transport choppers began settling down on either end of the bus. The door of the bus opened, and a brown-skinned, shirtless, Hispanic-looking man with a heavy black moustache and wearing patched jeans leaped out.
“That’s Mooney! Hold your fire!” shouted Vitale into his com. Medics leaped from both transports and ran to the bus in the swirling dust and sand. Wild Man Mooney began pulling men and women off the bus and sorting them toward the copters, one left, one right, one left, one right. Two of the medics grabbed women carrying babies in arms and hustled them towards the open loading doors of the choppers. A rocket plowed into the ground about fifty feet away from the bus and shook the earth, sending a geyser of soil and sagebrush into the air. “Ladies, hit those Uglies! Keep them away from that bus!” snapped Vitale into his mike. The Valkyrie surged forward and the bus below them was gone from view. Don looked forward just as the copter pilot leaned hard starboard and soared, then suddenly dived, bringing one of the Chinese helicopters into view in the open door. The door gunner cut loose with his twin machine guns, the
1000-round drums feeding slim and deadly .180 bullets against the energy plates and spitting them like a water hose. The pilot suddenly barrel-rolled out of a spray of Chinese fire that pattered against the fuselage like deadly raindrops. One of the machine gun bullets came through the door and slammed into the bulkhead a couple of inches to the left of Don’s head, making his left ear ring. From that point on Don lost all track of what was going on. There were long minutes of twisting, soaring, diving and rolling accompanied by the clatter of machine gun fire, the thud of explosions, and incoherent voices coming out of the com, and then suddenly the Valkyrie dropped like a stone, hovered briefly a few feet above the desert floor, and set down. “Let’s go!” yelled Vitale, jumping to the ground as the starboard door gunner covered him with a long sweep of fire. Redmond and Nel ripped off their harnesses and stumbled out after him.
“Go where?” Don shouted. Then he saw that one of the Valkyries w
as down, black smoke pouring from its methane engine, its fuselage battered almost shapeless by hundreds of bullets and a hole from an RPG or some kind of shell in the pilot’s windscreen. Through the open side door he could see the starboard door gunner
firing at something in the distance. The port gunner hung in his harness, bleeding, and one of the pilots was crawling toward them, right leg bloody and smashed. Vitale and Nel ran for the wounded man on the ground. Redmond slung his submachine gun and leaped up onto the stricken copter. One glance was enough to show him the first pilot was dead; his helmeted head was hanging off his shoulders over the back of the seat by a few white sinews. Don pulled open the portside gunner’s harness. As the man slumped forward Redmond shouldered him, hoisted him into a fireman’s carry and began lumbering back towards his own Valkyrie. The starboard door gunner there unhooked, jumped out, and helped Don load the wounded man onto the deck and hook a safety line onto his belt. “I’ll take care of Harley, sir!” the soldier shouted. “Help the General!” Redmond whirled and saw Hennie Nel staggering back towards the gunship, half-lifting the pilot with the wounded leg whose arm was around the Afrikaner’s neck, half dragging him. Bill Vitale was in the portside door of the downed Valkyrie, standing tiptoe on the now empty gunner’s seat, and firing at something over the roof, his head hunkered down beneath the still turning rotor blade. Redmond unslung his Schmeisser and chambered a round. Other than a few brief glimpses of the black Chinese helicopters, he hadn’t seen an enemy yet.
Then he did. Four, then five, then six men in khaki uniforms and OD green helmets came over a small slope at a dead run, then stopped to spray automatic fire at the Northwesters. Redmond hit the dirt, slipped the cuff over the firing chamber of his Schmeisser and quickly rotated the long magazine ninety degrees up and to the left so he could better fire from the prone position, snapped it back into place and cut loose. He saw one of the Mexicans drop, and then others as they were hit by fire from Vitale and the starboard gunner on the downed bird. “Don! Let’s go!” came a shout. Vitale and the door gunner were now running towards him. Don scrambled to his feet. They reached the door of their own copter. As they leaped in Vitale yelled at the crewman, “You set the charge?”
“Yes sir, she goes in another thirty seconds…shit!”
Some sixth sense seemed to warn Don. He whirled just as another group of Mexican soldiers leaped out of the whirling dust from nowhere. Vitale was on the starboard door guns in what must
have been microseconds and Hennie Nel opened fire with his Schmeisser. All of them twirled and twisted and tumbled except one huge mestizo who leaped onto Don with a long dagger or bayonet in his teeth. The Valkyrie began to rise rapidly into the air, as Don and the Mexican grappled, half in and half out of the door, the Mexican trying to draw back far enough to stab Don around the protruding machine gun barrels while Don tried to twist his gun muzzle inward enough to fire and hit the man who clung to him like a leech. A hand holding an old-fashioned BOSS issue 7.65 Walter PPK leaned out and fired, sending a bright brass cartridge casing into the air. The Mexican’s skull popped open like a piñata, bloody crimson and white bone and brain fragments spraying, and he twirled back down to earth. Just as his corpse hit the downed Valkyrie exploded into a ball of flame.
Strong hands pulled Don into the copter. “Thanks, partner!” he yelled as he strapped himself in.
“Dit maak niks,” said Nel.
* * *
The Mormon refugees all made it Home safely. They had been fed and warmed and clothed, and the transport copters were revving up to fly them to the reception center in Twin Falls. A gaunt and weary man with a battered slouch hat, a long yellow beard, and wearing patched denim coveralls appeared out of the gloom. He saw Vitale’s general’s stars among the men standing by one of the campfires drinking coffee and eating field ration meals from tin plates. He spoke. “General, my name is Carter Jurgenson, elder of the stake you rescued today. Our bishop was murdered in Provo when they came for us. The man who was killed today, your helicopter pilot. What was his name?”
“Warrant Officer James Lawson,” said Vitale somberly. “Born in Nacogdoches, Texas. Died a soldier of the Northwest American Republic.”
“My son was born at four o’clock this morning. Warrant Officer Lawson died to make sure he lived, and lived in freedom. Now my third sister wife and I know what his name is to be. James Lawson Jurgenson.”
Vitale and the men around him raised their canteen cups. “I hope you don’t mind a toast in coffee, Elder Jurgenson,” he said. “Long life and prosperity to your son, and we appreciate your naming of him for Jim Lawson. In the circumstances, I think the TLI can consider him to be a son of the regiment, so to speak. Do me a favor, will you? In the years to come, keep me posted on how he’s doing as he grows, and if I’m still around when he comes of age, and he feels it is the right path for him, I can promise him a berth in the military academy at Sandpoint. For personal reasons I won’t get into, I am highly interested in his situation. It parallels…another such, long ago.”
“The Saints pay their debts, General,” said Jurgenson. “He’ll be there.”
* * *
On the flight back Nel was silent until they were coasting downward into Olympia. “What now?” he asked.
“We now have to deal with the possibility that Tom Murdock thought he was going to combine forces with the Port Townsend Flying Column for a major joint attack on every ZOG facility in Port Orchard,” said Don. “If that is the case then it would explain quite a bit about his seemingly odd behavior on that morning, why he kept the whole column together instead of splitting into three or four mobile sections. I would be extremely interested to learn just how Commandant Murdock came by that impression. I do know that in the almost four decades since the ambush at Ravenhill, there has never been the slightest hint in any history of those events ever written that the Port Townsend Column might have been in any way involved.”
“And since President Morgan was at that time the commandant of the Port Townsend column, then he would of course know if there had been any such plan. And he said nothing, before or since,” said Nel.
“No. Nor did he make any statement to that effect when he was leading the official inquiry into what happened at Ravenhill,” said Redmond. “This is the first we’ve heard of it, and that only by accident.”
“It seems that we have a few gaps in our information,” said
Nel neutrally.
“Gaps that John Morgan seems curiously reluctant to fill in. There is something else going on here we don’t know about,” said Redmond. “I should have mentioned this to you before, Hennie, but I wasn’t quite sure of what it meant. Charlie Randall told me that about twelve years ago, President Brennan called off the WPB’s search for Trudy Greiner. He did so at the personal request of none other than the Old Man himself.”
“Called it off? What on earth for?” asked Nel in astonishment. “I don’t know. I can only assume that at some point, someone discovered something that made it more politically inexpedient than otherwise for the truth to come out. Whatever that reason might be and however unofficially, the government abruptly brought the search for Trudy Greiner to a halt. They must have hoped to hell that she was dead or at least that she’d stay the hell away from the Republic. Then we get that letter saying she’s coming back and somebody’s ass needs covering, fast. Brennan is dead, and I have to face the fact that I can no longer rely on the State President to tell me the truth, or at least the whole truth. The fact is, I think we’ve probably got about all the information we’re going to be able to get after the lapse of so many years. There is only one more avenue of information I can attempt to explore, and that is to find out what happened back in Brennan’s administration. I’m going to try to get permission to speak with the
Old Man.”
“How will you do that?” asked Nel. “I understand he is in complete seclusion and retirement now.”
“Hey, it helps if you’re married to the Pr
esident’s little girl,” said Redmond. “I can go straight to the top without cutting through too much red tape and inform the head of state that it is necessary to my investigation that I speak with the President Emeritus.”
“What if Morgan refuses to let you see him?” asked Nel skeptically. “I say again to you that in the real world there are certain limits to BOSS’s power. General Capshaw could sign an order getting you in to see the Old Man, to be sure, but he would want to know why. And would he do so if President Morgan objected?”
“If Morgan objects, then we’ll know,” said Redmond with a
shrug.
“Know what?” asked Nel.
“We’ll know that Morgan knows more than he is telling and that there is something he doesn’t want to come out. Why he gave me this assignment to begin with if that is the case I don’t have a clue, except maybe I’m supposed to act as a plumber. Test for leaks, so to speak.”
“And if that happens, then what?” persisted Nel.
“We wait for Trudy Greiner to arrive, if she does, and we see how it plays out,” replied Redmond. “If she ends up as fertilizer without a public trial or any public admission that she was ever here, that will tell us what we want to know as well. And don’t ask me what then? Because I don’t know what the hell then!”
When they got back to Olympia it was past nightfall. Don sent Nel home, but he himself returned to his office in the Temple of Justice. He typed up and printed two copies of a short document, put one into the file folder on the Greiner investigation, slipped the second copy into his vest pocket, and then called over across the street to Longview House. “Is the State President still in his office?” he asked Morgan’s aide and secretary.
“Yes, Colonel,” replied the young man. “He’s a workaholic, as you know, but he should be knocking off for dinner around eight. Mr. Nash is cooking up some kind of sausage and greens and mashed potatoes dish. It looks disgusting but I’ve eaten it before and it’s quite good, and I’m sure President Morgan wouldn’t mind some company.” “This is official business, Captain Barringer, not family and so
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