“Report,” I snapped. My cleared mind had suddenly suggested that we might be under attack, even though I couldn’t hear any gunshots. The Warriors might have sent scouts after us to try to find out where we were hiding. “What’s happening?”
Brent was laughing with delight. “We’ve got visitors,” he said, smiling. I wondered, from his tone, if we had actually made contact with the remains of the federal government. If they’d sent an army to assist us… “Sir, come and see who’s arrived!”
I pulled myself to my feet and allowed him to escort me around to the south of the warehouse. Our rearguard was dug in there, hoping to deter the Warriors from attacking, but I had only briefly inspected it when we’d arrived. We’d been in no shape for another battle so soon. There were three figures there – and a horse, decked out in the strange Warrior garments – and I realised with a shock that I recognised two of them.
“Mac,” I shouted, forgetting my dignity and running towards him. He looked equally pleased to see me. The horse regarded the pair of us with dull unconcern. “Mac, you dumb son-of-a-bitch! What the hell happened to you?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Wives come and go, but friends go on forever, unless they steal the wives…
-Ed’s Iron Laws #23
“Easy, Ed,” Mac said, hugging me back as hard as I was hugging him. “You’ll have me in traction.”
“What traction?” I asked. I doubted that we had the facilities to help someone who had been crushed anyway…and I wasn't crushing him that hard. “What the hell happened to you?”
“It’s a long and complicated story, full of daring deeds of daring do and spectacular stunts that no one would believe a word of it if I told you,” Mac said, patting the side of the horse, which regarded him with dull tolerance. It would make a useful addition to our breeding stock, if we took it back to the stables, but it looked as if it had been trained to be a warhorse. “I’d much rather discuss what happened to you and everyone else.”
“Oh, there’s not much to tell,” I said, shaking my head in awe. All of my previous dismay had been blown away by their miraculous return to our side. “We fled down the road, reached here and set up camp. We thought that you had bought the farm, Mac.”
“I hope that the girls were crying over me,” Mac said, dryly. He gave me a wink that was held just long enough to make me smile. “So, you want to know the dread story of our daring commando raid?”
I nodded. “Well,” he said, as I escorted them both into the warehouse, “I found myself being taken prisoner by the goons, so I leapt into the air and found that I could fly. I came down amongst them, snatched up Dutch and this rat bastard here” – he snapped the third figure, who glared at him with incoherent rage – “and flew back towards Ingalls. When I got halfway, I found that my flying powers were fading, so we landed, picked up Trigger here and rode the rest of the way. Great story, huh?”
I had to laugh. “And the truth?”
“How dare you not believe my lies?” Mac demanded. “It’s all true, apart from the lies…”
“Which is most of it,” Dutch put in, unhelpfully. “In fact, only one of those statements was true.”
Mac shrugged. “All right,” he said. “I found myself being taken prisoner, where this rat bastard identified me as one of the leaders of Ingalls, and ordered me to be tortured. They tied me up in a chair and sent in a hundred naked women to start torturing me with great enthusiasm, but I convinced them that I really suffered every time they sucked me off, so I screamed every so often to convince them that I’d actually been telling the truth. Finally, I told them a few lies, but the men didn’t believe me and sent in male torturers with the branding irons. It was then that I decided that I’d had enough.”
He paused, dramatically. “I broke out of my chains and snatched up a sword, waving it in the air and shouting a battle cry into the air,” he continued. “Instantly, I felt myself transformed into a barbarian hero with muscles on his muscles, so I knocked the torturers out and smashed through the tent, where I saw Dutch being lowered slowly into a bowl of boiling water. I think they were going to have him for lunch.”
“I would have given them indigestion,” Dutch said, deadpan. “And what happened after you woke up?”
Mac ignored this. “Naturally, I would have saved Dutch at once, but I was slightly distracted by a set of hot babes in underwear, so I spent about an hour making out with them, ignoring Dutch’s increasingly loud screams until it was almost too late to save him. I leapt into the boiling water myself, punched my way out of the bowl, and saved him in the nick of time. I then grabbed a horse, transformed it into a winged beast like Pegasus, and captured this bastard before we flew out and back here.”
I frowned. “Shouldn’t it have been a unicorn?” I asked, finally. “I think that that would have suited you better.”
“He’s on to you,” Dutch put in. He grinned, suddenly, rubbing his arm. I gave him a quick once-over and saw the bruises. Whatever else had happened, he had been badly mistreated by the Warriors. “Yep, you definitely qualify for riding a unicorn.”
“Fuck you,” Mac said, affably. I laughed. The general qualification for riding a unicorn was virginity. I knew that Mac was no virgin. “You want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” I nodded. “Well, you’re not going to get far.”
I rolled my eyes. “All right,” Mac said. “The truth…
“I climbed onto the side of the last vehicle as it prepared to leave the FOB for the redoubt here,” Mac began. “It might have been a bad choice, because bullets started to whip through it seconds later and nearly took off my balls.” He laughed. “A target like my pair. How could they miss? A second after that, the entire vehicle shook and I fell off the side, which saved my life as it exploded a second later. I was badly stunned for a few seconds and lay still; the Warriors who searched the wreckage, looking for any survivors, missed me. I crawled in the direction of the pond as darkness started to fall and finally managed to get enough water to revive myself, along with the candy bars.”
“Good thing you had those with you,” I said. Mac had stockpiled a few dozen different types of candy bars, all his favourite types, and guarded them jealously. I had stockpiled a few myself, but I’d almost finished them when we made first contact with the Warriors of the Lord. “And then what happened?”
“They were sending pairs of searchers around to pick up everything they could, including the bodies,” Mac continued. “I don’t know if they were actually eating them, as I joked, but I lay still until the searchers came up to me, and then went after them with a knife. The poor bastards didn’t stand a chance. I took the pair of them out before they could raise the alarm, confiscated everything they were carrying that might have been useful, and stole their clothes.” He nodded at the outfit he was wearing, a drab collection of greens and blacks, rather like a civilian’s idea of a military uniform. “This is the uniform of one of their lower level soldiers.”
I smiled grimly. Mac had high marks for knife fighting and was deadlier with a set of knifes than many men were with assault rifles. The Warriors of the Lord wouldn’t have known what had hit them until it was far too late; I had a vision of Mac sneaking through their encampment, wearing their colours, killing as he moved. He’d be caught, of course, in the end, but holding him would be difficult. He had also aced the escape and evasion course…and had actually operated undercover in very alien environments. The Warriors, for all of their fanatical certainty in their rightness of their course, didn’t have half the resources of the Iranian government when it came to population control. I doubted that their senior officers knew all of their juniors by sight.
“Anyway, I wandered around for an hour, watching everything I could without drawing unwelcome attention,” Mac said, smiling slightly. “I didn’t dare pick off a few of their other officers, until I realised that they had a small collection of prisoners from the rearguard, including Dutch.” He nodded at Dutch. “They also
had them under guard by a pair of incompetent assholes in silly black SS uniforms so I took them both out within seconds. I doubt that the Waffen-SS would have tolerated such nincompoops in their ranks. I killed them both quickly and quietly and smuggled them both into the stockade.”
He sounded pleased with himself, I saw, and it was clear that he had reason to be delighted with his own performance. “I freed Dutch and the other five and they stole their uniforms. We were just getting ready to leave when this rat bastard” – he nodded towards their prisoner – “arrived with a pair of guards and a bunch of sadistic instruments of torture, or sex toys. Looking at them, it was hard to tell the difference and judging from the expression on his face, he found it hard to tell the difference as well. We took him prisoner and put the guards in the stockade and, holding him at gunpoint, forced him to take us to the horses. We’d just gotten Trigger here saddled when someone raised the alarm and we had to run for it.”
His face darkened. “Two of the men chose to stay behind and hope to blend into the Warriors as later agents of retribution,” he said. “The rest of us ran as they came boiling after us, shooting at us…luckily, as the targets, we were the safest people in the area. We lost the other two along the way. They both volunteered to try to hold them off long enough for us to get this bastard back to Ingalls. I think we should ask him a lot of very pointed questions.” He shrugged. “The rest you know.”
I bent down to examine their prisoner. He had once been a very fat man. I could see the telltale signs, even though he had been on a forced diet for the last few months, and he positively radiated moral corruption. Perhaps I was imagining it, but I was sure that I could see the darkness in his soul, a sense of pure evil and depravity that hung around him like a stink. His piggy eyes glared up at me, trying to give voice to words that wouldn’t escape the rag stuffed into his mouth, making it hard to breathe.
“I think that he’s definitely one of their senior leaders,” Mac said, glaring down at his captive, who glared back at him. A real hard case, I decided; someone who really believed in his Cause, or at least in his divine right to do as he pleased. He might break easily, with the right sort of pressure, or he might refuse to break for hours, even under the worst pressure that we could devise. “Everyone allowed him to lead us down to the stables, even though the merest MP would have sensed that something was badly wrong; hell, boss, they were scared to death of him.”
I nodded slowly, watching the piggy eyes as they tracked back to me. A sociopath-type personality, then, one that would never be allowed to reach high levels under normal circumstances. He acknowledged no limits, no restraints on his power, and now that law and order was just a memory, had the ability to snatch as much as he could from the crumbling world. Prophet Zechariah had found an excellent servant, just as Hitler – I remembered Thomas’s lecture and winced – had found one in the unprepossessing Himmler or Ribbentrop. He would probably have plans to overthrow the Prophet, one day, but until then he would be the most loyal and craven person in the Prophet’s force.
I came to a decision, one that I hated.
“Brent,” I called, sharply. Brent came running over at once. He looked just as pleased to see Mac as I was; Mac had been popular among the army, even though some had called him a slave driver behind his back. I didn’t care; easy training, hard mission, or vice versa. It wasn't a real choice for anyone with a commitment to building a real military. “Detail off a platoon and one of the trucks to transport this piece of shit to Stonewall. Once you get there, inform Richard that he is to be kept in solitary confinement and on full suicide watch; I want him strapped down, unable to move except under full supervision. He’ll know what to do.”
“Yes, sir,” Brent said. He looked past me at Mac. “May I say, sir, that it’s good to see you again?”
“It’s good to see you too,” Mac said, wryly. “Now, you have your orders, so get on with them. We’ll have a proper party to gloat over my…”
“Our,” Dutch put in.
“Great escape later,” Mac said. He winked at me. “We’re going to need something to keep our morale up after this.”
I grinned. “It’s good to see you back,” I agreed. “I missed you.”
“I’d take another shot, if I were you,” Dutch said. We shared a laugh. “I’d better get back to my people. Once Mac’s story starts being told, everyone will think that he took on and defeated the entire army of Warriors on his own, without any back-up at all. Next year, we’ll discover that he did everything, without any help from us, and that he has an admiring horde of teenage groupies who do everything he tells them to do. A century from now, he’ll be…”
“Arrested for strangling a fellow officer if he doesn’t shut up,” Mac said, wryly. His voice darkened. “Ed, they did have teenage love slaves at the FOB, serving some of their soldiers. I saw some of them being forced to…service some of the men, those who survived the battle, in any way they wanted. Whatever these bastards are, Ed, they’re not religious at all. They’re monsters.”
I shuddered inwardly. The needs of most men are basic. They wanted sex and security and the Warriors offered both. The system might end up being run by a group of hypocrites who didn’t believe in the faith, but were adept at promoting it, by any means necessary. It was oddly comforting, in a way, to know that the Warriors would probably go that way. Every other religion on Earth had gone the same way.
“I know,” I said. “Dutch, go get medical attention and then see to your men. I’ll debrief you later on what you saw while you were a prisoner.”
“Yes, sir,” Dutch said, touching his head in what could charitably be called a salute. “I’ll see the nurses at once.”
I watched him go and then turned back to Mac. “For God’s sake,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Don’t do that to me again.”
Mac smiled. “Don’t do what to you again?”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “I thought that you were dead! I thought that I had abandoned you to your fate! I ran in the damned convoy and all I could think of was ‘brave Sir Robin turned about, and gallantly he chickened out’…”
“Bravely taking to his feet,” Mac put in, “he beat a very brave retreat.”
“You introduced me to that,” I said, angrily. He had, too. His fondness for British television had kept us both entertained while we’d been in hospital. “I thought I’d left you behind.”
“You care too much,” Mac said. “You’d make a lousy General.”
“I had noticed,” I snapped. “Mac…”
“Listen,” Mac said, firmly. “I went into battle knowing the risks as much as you did, maybe more. I knew that I could get killed back there, or if not there, somewhere else. I knew the dangers and I went to do it anyway. You know that as well as I do. I took the risk of sneaking around their encampment because it had to be done; you left me, also, because you had no choice. If you had stopped to pick me up, you would have lost the remainder of the convoy and the entire force. As it happened, you saved them to fight again. Honestly, Ed, you can’t carry the whole weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“I know,” I said.
“Good,” Mac said, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s go inspect the survivors, shall we?”
The interior of the warehouse was coming alive as the soldiers picked themselves off the floor and stood to attention when Mac entered. As I might have mentioned, he was popular and had been sadly missed when he had been reported missing. The wounded looked as if they wanted to stand up as well, but the nurses told them firmly to remain lying down. Some of them were within their power to heal, but others would never recover without the use of a proper hospital, which we didn’t have. Kit would be able to do something for some of them, but not for all of them. In Iraq, we’d been able do amazing things for soldiers who hadn’t been killed outright, but now…now, we were back in the days of the First World War. The living might envy the dead.
“We can’t stay here, of course,” Mac said,
afterwards. I nodded in agreement. The redoubt was useful as a rendezvous, but it didn’t have half the natural defences of the FOB the Warriors had booted us out of, although with heavy casualties. We couldn’t have held it without more weapons and supplies. “We may have to pull all the way back to Ingalls.”
“Or Stonewall,” I said. The prison would be easier to defend, but if we were trapped there, we were screwed. There wouldn’t be a second escape under fire. The Warrior rank and file might have been composed of fanatics, but the leaders would probably learn from experience. “I don’t know how long we can hold out, Mac.”
“Depressed, Ed?” Mac asked. He frowned at me, genuinely concerned. “That’s unlike you. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
“We don’t know enough about the Warriors,” I said, grimly. I didn’t want to think about what we’d have to do, but we didn’t have any choice. Kit was going to hate me. So was pretty much the entire population when – if – they found out about it. “Now, however, we have someone who does. It’s time we asked him a few questions.”
The Living Will Envy The Dead Page 32