Hot Springs es-1

by Stephen Hunter

  Earl separated from the old man, and slid almost on his hands and knees along the shallow embankment where each member of the team crouched, low and ready, each man locked in his own private drama.

  "Okay?"

  "All set, Mr. Earl. You give the signal."

  "It'll be a bit yet, you just wait calmly."

  "I'm ready."

  He gave each man a tap on the shoulder, feeling their aliveness, their vitality. This was it. It would be over after tonight. They all knew it.

  The last guy was Carlo.

  "You okay?"

  "Swell, Mr. Earl."

  "Your mama okay?"

  "She's fine."

  "You get the word from D. A.?"

  "Yes sir. But I don't like it much."

  "I don't like it much neither but that's what the man says. When the men move out, you head on over to that shed and join up with me. We'll wait and see what happens."

  "I got it."

  "Good boy."

  Earl squirmed back to D. A.

  "It's not too late. I can lead 'em. You can come in where you're needed."

  "No, Earl. This is my party. I've earned this one."

  "Yes sir, but―"

  Suddenly, a hundred-odd yards away, a door flew open, throwing a slash of light across the yard. There were two quick shots. Figures seemed to scurry back and forth in front of the dark car in the middle of the train, and men climbed in. Another shot sounded.

  "Jesus," said D. A.

  "That's it," said Earl. "They've done made their move."

  "We should go now?"

  "I'd give it a few more minutes. Let 'em feel comfortable."

  "Yeah."

  The door slid closed, and the light went out. Time ticked by, nearly two minutes' worth. Finally, D. A. said, "Okay. Let's do it."

  "That's good," said Earl. "You want to be set up when they come out."

  Earl scampered down the line.

  "Time to move out," he whispered to each man, until he got to the end.

  "Come on, Henderson."

  "Yes sir," said Henderson.

  The men scooched forward, then rose. D. A. was in the lead. Visibility was limited to maybe twenty-five yards at most, but they formed up in good order, a skirmish line with ten feet separating them.

  D. A. moved to the center of the line, gave a wave that passed as a sort of signal, and they moved out, crouched, each with his.45 clasped in two hands in front of him, as they had been instructed.

  Johnny saw them rise in the green murk.

  "Okay," he said.

  He felt Owney tense with anticipation.

  Now they came. Seven men, like soldiers in the Great War, bent double, moving cautiously across no-man's-land. It reminded him of 1918 and the last big German attack, and the endless killer's ecstasy he'd felt experiencing the delights of the Browning.30 water-cooled, watching the bullets flick out and unleash a storm wherever they struck and in that turbulence knocking the advancing men askew like tenpins, so many of them, and the hot pounding of the gun, the furious intensity of it all, the star shells detonating overhead. This infrared thing: it was his own private star shell.

  He tried to pick out Earl. Earl will be in the lead. Earl would be heroic. But the instrument couldn't resolve such details; he could only make out blurs moving with the sure, steady pace of human animation.

  "Shoot 'em," hissed Owney as he watched the carbine barrel tracking ever so gently off Johnny's hold, as the Irishman measured his shots.

  But Johnny had nerves of tungsten. That's why he did so well at this business. He let them come onward because he knew that after the first burst, the formation would scatter, and he'd have to track them and take the survivors down running. That meant the further they were from cover, the more time he'd have and the fewer who'd make it back to the switching shed.

  He let them come on another minute. Then another. It had a curious, almost blasphemous intimacy to it. The men felt unobserved, he could tell, secure in their darkness. Now and then they'd halt and gently regroup and at odd moments in this process they'd strike poses so bored and languid and unselfconscious, it was as if he were observing them in the shower.

  "Shoot, fer Chrissakes!" barked Owney, as the pressure of the stalk proved too heavy for his more brutal and direct style of gangstering.

  "Now, now, boyo," crooned Johnny, "just another bloody second. I think I've got the leader all picked out."

  It was the bigger fellow in the middle, a drooping, long-armed hulk of a man, who led the boys onward, a little ahead of them. That would be Earl, of course. He was so large. Odd that he'd be so large; the kid had never said he was a large man, but just a fast, tough one, sinewy and quick and raw.

  He found his position, and the leader stepped into the crosshairs.

  Now, he thought.

  They walked slowly through the dark, seeing the train ahead of them in the dark, its flanks illuminated so slightly by the vagrant incandescence of Central Avenue far away, but filling the horizon with light.

  There was no movement from the train. Whatever was transpiring was transpiring in silence. These guys were good: very professional, D. A. was thinking.

  He glanced to either side, and could see the boys nearest to him and beyond that make out the shape of the boys further away. He was aiming to rally in the hitch of the armored car to the car behind it, then send two men down to the other end, and in that way set up a cross fire. He'd have one or two boys actually under the car too, in case Johnny's men tried to duck out that way. Those boys could nail them easily. He was quite willing to kill all of Johnny's boys. He knew in this business that you had to commit to killing early and stay committed. If you poisoned your mind with notions of mercy, it would cost you a moment's hesitation and that could destroy you in a flash. When the guns came into play, shoot fast, shoot well, shoot a lot: those were the rules.

  They were so close now.

  The line disappeared or at least got so indistinct Earl could not pick it out against the slight illumination of the train a hundred yards off. There was a sense of blur, of disturbance to the atmosphere, but that only.

  "They're going to be okay, I think," said the boy.

  "They're almost there. It's looking―"

  Five short bursts fired so fast it sounded unreal. In the clear part of his brain, Earl made the numb note that somebody had extremely good trigger control and that the weapon's signature had an aching familiarity to it, something he knew so very well, and a fraction of a second later he identified it as an American carbine. But that part of his mind was very far away from the other part of his mind, which was hot and shocked and full of anger and fear and terror at once.

  Ambush.

  Perfecdy sprung, perfecdy set up, brilliantly planned.

  Again the carbine: short, precise bursts, obviously an M2.

  "Jesus, Earl," the boy said, and made a move to run to the aid of his friends. But Earl's first move was to grab the boy and haul him to earth.

  "Stay," he hissed, for even though he had yet to articulate it in any meaningful fashion, a number of anomalies struck him at once. Why was the fire so precise? At night it was almost always a question of area fire, sweeping and intense; or it involved a star shell, throwing its illumination across the terrain, so that targets could be marked. Neither of these night-action features presented themselves and though, like the boy, he had a longing to run to the wounded, he knew too that to do so was simply to enter the killing zone as defenseless as they.

  And now he cursed the lack of a long gun. What he needed, he saw in a flash, was the BAR now locked in the State Police arsenal in Little Rock. With that powerful instrument he could suppress the battlefield, drive the shooters to cover, get his people a chance to get back.

  "We need to―"

  "No," Earl exploded, "you follow on me."

  And with that Earl ran not to the killing zone, but rather to the switching shed, and set up a good supported kneeling position behind it, with just his he
ad and shoulders and the pistol in a good two-handed position.

  His ears found the zone and in a second a flash located the position. He could barely see his front sight, but he cranked up a good ten feet from the source of the fire, for he had to throw rounds in long arcs to get them there.

  But it was a guessing game. He didn't know where you held to bring a.45 slug onto target from an unknown distance of about a hundred or so yards.

  He fired, seven times quickly, put the gun down, and took Carlo's, who, smart as usual, had immediately understood the gist of it, and had prepared his own weapon for Earl, who then, with it, proceeded to lay out another magazine, exactly as Carlo inserted another magazine into the empty gun.

  It wasn't much, but from far off came the splatter of shots hitting and kicking up dust and metal fragments, and maybe in that noise a kind of a sound of scurry or discomfort.

  Earl had it now, and knew what would come next. He withdrew, knowing that he had but seconds. The boy was baffled.

  "What are you―"

  Again the carbine snapped out a short burst, and the astonishment came in where the bullets struck. Not near them, but exactly where they had fired from. Three bullets bit into the wood of the switching shed in exactly the location of Earl's foray, and three more spat across the dirt, kicking up clouds and filling the air with gun spray.

  "Jesus!" said the boy.

  "He can seeT croaked Earl. He thought for a second, realized he was zeroed in some sense. But he also figured the gunman would guess he'd move to the other side of the switching house. He didn't. He moved back to exactly where he'd been, took a sight picture, fired to the same point, and withdrew. A burst answered him, and he thought that was the last time that would work.

  But next they heard a terrible groaning sound, and two figures spilled into the hollow just behind them. It was D. A., blood on his face, supported pitifully by the husky Slim.

  "They done kilt us!" said Slim, and at that moment he made the mistake of rising too high out of the hollow as he addressed Earl, for three bullets popped dust, blood and hair off his head and he pitched forward.

  Johnny watched them come, wondered briefly if he should try and hit the leader first but then decided they would scatter at the first shot and that he'd get more of them by going from right to left, He watched the man furthest from him come, settled into his rhythm, tracked him.

  It was dead quiet.

  He squeezed the trigger and a three-round burst pierced the night. The muzzle spewed burning gas brilliantly but on the scope the flashes registered only as interference across the bottom; he pivoted slightly and in less than half a second fired another squirt, then another, and then another.

  It was not like killing.

  It seemed to have nothing to do with killing. It was like some kind of ghastly fun, a game, to put the reticle of the sight on forms that had been reduced only to the green light of their heat, squirt them, feel the gende shudder of the weapon and watch as they seemed to collapse into themselves.

  By the time he got to the leader, that fellow had figured out what was going on. It couldn't have been but a second or two. He fired, and the bullets were off mark, one out of three hitting, he knew, by the way the man fell. He was about to squirt him again when another man came into the scope; he diverted and fired again. A hero. Running to his fallen boss! Johnny liked that loyalty in a man, any man, even this man, as he killed him.

  Now it was mopping up.

  The living had fallen to the ground, presumably confused over the weird accuracy of their antagonist, but still believing themselves to be safe in the dark. They didn't know they were flanked on two sides, or that two more gunners from the train would be moving on them, with instructions to circle around behind, trapping them completely in the hollow behind the switching shed, toward which their own instincts would dictate that they retreat.

  He hunted and found a crawler in the dark.

  The three-bullet burst centered the boy perfecdy, kicking a spray of dust from his coat as the bullets skewered him. Another was intelligently moving not to the rear but to the extreme right, having figured that gunmen would cover the rear. Another good man; with pity in his heart, but not mercy, Johnny took this lad too.

  "Are you getting them?" asked Owney, an idiot who wanted a report in the middle of a battle.

  "In spades, bloody spades, boyo," he said, and veered back to the center, where the fallen, wounded leader must be. Another boy was now attending to the leader, one he'd probably missed.

  Ah, now you two and the night's work is done, thought Johnny.

  But detonations suddenly erupted too near them, with the sprang of bullets on metal, and worse, the spray of spattered lead, which lashed out and made them wince.

  "By Jesus!" said Johnny.

  "Where the fuck did that come from?" Owney said. "I think he hit me."

  "Nah, he's shootin' from far off, you just felt a whisper of tiny fragments. Stay cool, buster."

  The rounds had hit on the flatcar bed a good twenty feet from them, but enough to distract.

  Johnny looked into the gloom and through the darkness could only see the flashes far off, in the lee of the switching shed. These seven rounds, however, hit a bit closer, kicking up their nasty commotion but ten feet away.

  "He sees us!" said Owney.

  "Not a bit of it! He's shootin' blind, the bastard," said Johnny, returning to the scope. He put the reticle on the last flash and tripped a six-round burst. The bullets struck dead on, lifting dust from the ground, pulling puffs of debris from the wood of the house.

  "I may have got him," he crowed. "Right in the gizzard."

  But he reasoned that the boy, if not hit, would move to the other side of the switching house, so he pivoted slightly, found that locality in his sight. The image was not so distinct as it was at the very limits of the infrared lamp, but he knew it was good enough to shoot. But the next seven shots came from the same side as the first fourteen, and he knew the fella had outguessed him. He pivoted back, saw nothing, but then a flash of motion. Something had slithered into the hollow behind the switching house and in a second, as if on cue, a boy rose, and Johnny potted him, three-round burst, head shots all.

  "By Jesus, got another!"

  "Is that all of 'em?"

  "No, there's one, maybe two more at the shed. They don't even suspect that where they are now there's men all about them, ready to open up on command."

  "Let's finish it."

  "Give 'em a moment to think. They'll realize they're fooked, then they'll make a break and me boys will do them good and it'll be over. There's no place for them to go, except into the ground."

  "You can't hit them from here?"

  "From this range I doubt these little carbine bullets can carry into that shed. Herman's Browning rifle will make Swiss cheese of it, though, and de Palmo's Thompson should write an exclamation point to the night's fun."

  The three men lay on the bottom of the switching shed, curled around the big levers that controlled the track linkages, breathing heavily.

  "Oh, Christ," said D. A. "Oh, Jesus H. Christ, they had us nailed. They ambushed us perfectly, the bastards. Oh, Christ, all those boys, Earl, Earl, I lost all those boys, oh, Jesus forgive me, all those poor boys, such good boys, oh―"

  "Shut up, Mr. Parker," said Earl. "Think about here and now!"

  "He's hit bad," said Carlo. "He's losing blood fast. We've got to get him to a hospital or he'll bleed out."

  "There's always a lot of blood. Stanch the wound. Apply pressure. It'll coagulate. If he's still kicking and he ain't in shock, he's got some time yet."

  "Yes sir."

  "Earl, they had us."

  "Yes sir, I know they had you."

  "What're we going to do?" asked the boy.

  "Hell if I know."

  "We could fall back on the low crawl."

  "Nah. This old man can't crawl none. And they got boys on each side of us, and probably behind us by now. He ain't no dummy, w
hoever done put this thing together. The bastard."

  "Earl, I am so sorry for getting all them boys killed."

  "It's a war. War ain't no fun at all, sir," said Earl.

  Carlo said, "We low on firepower too."

  "Yes I know," said Earl, and reached to see if the old man still had his.45 but he didn't. He did have two full magazines in his coat pocket, however.

  Earl calculated quickly. He'd fired three magazines, meaning twenty-one rounds were gone. He had one left, the boy had two left, and the old man two. That's thirty-five rounds in five magazines, with two pistols.

  Shit, he thought. We are cooked.

  "What're we going to do, Earl?"

  "I don't know! Goddammit, I am thinking on it."

  We could split up, go in two ways. One of us ought to make it. We get cops and―"

  "They ain't no cops coming," said Earl. "Don't you get that? They'd be here by now. This is it. This is all there is. And don't you get it yet? He can see in the dark."

  "Earl, I am so sorry about them boys I―"

  "Shut up, the two of you, and let me think."

  Above them, the wall on the left-hand side of the shed exploded, spewing fragments, high-velocity dust, and twenty.30 caliber bullets in a kick-ass blast, which went clean through and blew twenty neater holes in the right-hand side of the wall. The noise banged on their eardrums till they rang like firebells. The smell of pulverized wood filled the air, mingling with the kerosene and the oil.

  "Browning," said Earl. "He's about twenty-five yards away over on the left. He can cut us to ribbons if he's got enough ammo."

  "Oh, Christ," said Carlo. "I think we bought it."

  "Not yet," said Earl. "Not―"

  Another BAR magazine riddled the wall, this time six inches lower. A few of its shots spanged off the potbellied stove.

  Then a voice called out.

  "Say chums, we can finish you anytime." It was Owney, not far away, with that little twist of fake English gent in his words. "You throw your guns out, come on out hands high, and you can leave. Just get out of town and don't ever come back, eh? That's all I'm asking."

  "You step out," said Earl to his companions, "and a second later you're dead."

  "I'll give you a minute," said Owney. "Then I'll finish you. Make the choice, you bold fellows, or die where you stand."