Conquistador (81 page)

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.”

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 hard 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.

“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.

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.”