Ever Onward (60 page)

Heller scrubbed his face. “Christ,
Scar, they just got lucky! We still got nearly a dozen men and
enough firepower to blow them to rat-shit!”

Scar sighed. “You think so? Then you
take the fucking point!”

Heller stiffened, unsure whether to be
really angry or just slightly pissed off. He decided on the latter
as being the more prudent course of action. “Fine. I WILL, and I’ll
hand you these two farmer’s balls myself!”

As Heller stomped away, calling for
Sergeant Cozens and Private Swan, Scar shook his head.
‘Shit-for-brains’ was one of the kinder names he silently called
Roy ‘Dick-Head’ Heller.

Chapter 47
: ‘THE LONG RUN’

Sequoia National Park

California, May
25
^th

Josh turned away from the rocky ledge
and waved at Cobb. The ex-cop, ex-special forces officer and all
round handy-man was up to his old tricks --- setting booby-traps.
He was on his fourth one since leaving the ranger’s cabin, now just
a smoldering smudge on the distant horizon. Josh marveled at the
younger man’s skill. Half-way down the rocky slope, Cobb was
setting a trip-wire. Anyone hooking the nylon fishing line would
dislodge a stick that would, in turn, dislodge a larger stick,
sending several large rocks cascading down on them.

“Think it’ll work?”, Josh
commented.

Cobb shrugged, putting the fishing
line and ice-ax into his pack. “If that bastard they’ve got
tracking us doesn’t spot it, one of them is bound to set it
off.”

Josh thought about the three other
traps Cobb had already set. The classic dead-fall, where, at the
slightest touch, a large, heavy log falls across the path; the leaf
and twig covered depression, complete with pointed stakes, but the
most deadly was the one Cobb had set at the base of this
ridge.

“You don’t want to know how I learned
about this one,” Cobb had said as he smeared fresh bear excrement
on the thin, needle-like stakes he had lashed to a tied back
evergreen. A simple forked stick triggered it, freeing the bent
tree and sending it whipping into the face, stomach and groin of
the man who tripped it.

“Nasty bit of work,” Josh had
commented.

“Isn’t it just!”, Cobb had
grinned.

Now, sitting on the ledge, Josh had an
idea. Instead of moving on and hoping the traps worked, he proposed
doubling back to the base of the cliff and waiting. When and if the
rocks came tumbling down, they would be there to not only see the
damage, but perhaps grab a weapon or two.

“Even if they don’t trigger the
slide,” Josh pointed out, “at least we’ll be behind them. That’s a
whole lot better than having them breathing down our
necks.”

Cobb’s smile lit up his usually sober
features. “I’ll make a Spook out of you yet!”

“’
Spook’?”, Josh
repeated.

“Special Operations
Killer.”

Josh would gladly have
settled for being the middle-aged father of a live
teenager.

Private Swan usually enjoyed tracking.
Pitting his skill against a cunning animal, man or beast, always
gave him a kind of natural high. Hunting and tracking as he was
fond of saying, was in his blood. He’d learned his skills from his
father, who’d learned from his father and so on down the line. For
the last eighty years the Swan family had run a small but
profitable guide business in the Pacific Northwest. The states of
Washington, Idaho and Montana had all used their services to help
track down escaped prisoners. Each time The Nose had gone out he
had always found his man.

This time, though, he wasn’t so sure.
A bad feeling was building in his gut, a feeling that grew stronger
with every trap he came across. The problem was that these bastards
actually knew what they were doing. Always before the men he’d
tracked were basically running scared. They blundered through the
woods, noisy, careless, predictable. These two weren’t any of
those. Also, the fire back at the cabin had shaken him more than he
let on --- even to himself. Finding the deadfall had brightened his
spirits, but when one of the men stumbled into the small pit-trap,
twisting his ankle and driving a sharpened stake through his thigh,
Swan’s doubts came rushing back. It didn’t help any when Heller
bawled him out in front of the rest of the men.

And now this. Thank Christ he’d
spotted the bent tree before continuing up the trail. Crafty
fuckers had even smeared the stakes with bear shit! He’d called a
halt and showed both Heller and Scar. Now, giving the bent
evergreen a wide birth, Swan cautiously moved to the base of a
steep ledge.

“Best let me check this out, Major,”
he said.

Scar nodded and began to unbuckle his
pack. Those behind him did the same. Roy Heller, however, still
pissed off with Scar, pushed forward.

“Cozens! Pick two men and follow me.
The rest of these pussies can sit around jerking off if they want.
I’m going to have a look-see from up top!”

Scar, sitting on a rock, casually lit
a smoke. Heller frowned, slung his rifle and began climbing the
jumbled rocks. Sergeant Cozens and two men reluctantly followed.
Half way up Heller called down to Scar.

“Hey! Fresh footprints! Get the led
out, girls; were hot on their trail!” Heller than began to scramble
faster, working his way up under an unstable looking
overhang.

Haskin, one of the men with Cozens,
wheezed in the sergeant’s ear. “Who the hell does he think he is,
sarj? The Lone Fucking Stranger?”

Cozens frowned. An army man for nearly
twenty years, he didn’t like it when grunts were disrespectful to
officers. Though there was no love lost between Heller and himself,
he did respect the man. Heller rarely sent out his men out to do
something he hadn’t done himself. Private Haskin however, was
another matter.

Turning to the pimple faced private,
Cozens smiled. “That’s right, asshole, he’s the Lone Fucking
Stranger and I’m the his trusty Indian sidekick, Chief Shit-Kicker!
Now, haul your sorry ass up there before I show you how I got my
name!”

Haskin shot him the Finger,
then moved off up the slope. Private Jerry Billings, the other
soldier Cozen’s had ‘volunteered’, quickly followed. In his efforts
to stay clear of the sergeant, Billings missed seeing the nylon
trip-line Cobb had set. The second his boot became tangled, he knew
he was up the infamous Shit Creek and with very few prospects of
ever having a paddle. As though in a dream, Billings watched the
fishline go tight, heard the scrape of the support stick being
pulled away, and felt the mountain above him begin to shift. First
one boulder, then another, came tumbling down. On the way they
dislodged others, creating a major
landslide.

The first boulder struck Billings on
the shoulder. The second one crushed his skull. Haskin, being
further up, had most of the larger rocks pass over his head. He was
showered by smaller ones, some of which left him cut and bleeding.
Heller, sheltered by the overhang, didn’t receive a scratch, though
the wet stain in his crotch would prove embarrassing. Cozens, the
furthest down the slope, managed to get behind a protective
outcropping just before the avalanche washed over him.

At the bottom of the cliff, Scar and
the remaining nine men scattered off the trail. All but one of them
made it. Corporal Lester Duglaw, a slow moving good old boy from
Alabama, had his back broken by the same boulder that crushed
Private Billings’ skull.

The fleetest of foot was Corporal
Nicoro Omoto. Before being kicked out of Golden Gate High for
dealing drugs, Nicoro had been a star runner on the track team.
After that his career really took off. At the time of The Change,
Private Omoto was known as Nico the Snake, third man in the Red
Dragon street gang that terrorized San Francisco’s Japanese
community. The morning after The Change, Nico the Snake found
himself the number one man; everyone else having dried up and blown
away. After a drug-induced binge of two or three weeks, Nico
drifted south, where he was picked up and recruited into Jocco’s
growing army. Amoral and sadistic, he’d risen fast, making sergeant
in four months; only to be busted back down to private for running
his own drug and prostitution scam. Not that Jocco disapproved of
either, it’s just that Nico conveniently forgot to give the
self-appointed king his rightful cut.

Now, as the boulders bounced their way
down the mountain, Nico the Snake slithered through the tangle of
brush and bodies and lightly bounded down the trail, his thin lips
forming a cunning smirk. ‘If Fuck-Face Fewster could see me now!’,
he thought, conjuring up a vision of Golden Gate High’s red-faced
track coach. The smirk turned to surprise, however, as he tripped
the line holding the bent evergreen. The tree, aligned to hit
someone coming up the trail, not down, almost missed. The
dung-smeared stakes at the bottom and middle of the tree swept
harmlessly by. The one at the tip, though, found its mark, punching
deep into his back, through his heart and out his chest. Driven to
his knees, he hung there like a overlarge Christmas tree ornament,
his running days definitely over.

From the shadows a figure came, swift,
silent and deadly. It held a crude spear, the wood at the end
whittled to a narrow point. Lifting Nico’s head, the shadowy figure
looked briefly at the already glazing eyes, then quickly stripped
the body of weapons. Cobb had done this many times before and so
wasted little time. Seconds after he appeared, the forest once
again swallowed him, only now, besides the spear, he carried a
modified M-16, a Colt .45 Mark IV and ammo clips for both weapons.
Nico had had a long bladed combat knife as well, but Cobb had
decided against it. Too heavy for real fighting and too clumsy for
throwing. That shit about thrown knives only worked in the movies
anyways. Most of the time you’d do better to chuck a rock. Besides,
Cobb had another reason for not taking the knife --- he wanted to
leave Scar a personal message. The fact that it would scare the
shit out of the rest of them wouldn’t hurt either. The knife was
left buried in Nico’s right eye.

While Cobb was busy with Nico, another
form crouched in the shadows near the base of the cliff. Through
the swirling dust, Josh saw a soldier, desperately fleeing from the
avalanche, running directly towards him. As the man sprinted by the
large pine where Josh hid, the ex-history teacher thrust his spear
out into the path. The running soldier tripped and fell flat on his
face. Josh was on him before he could draw a breath. Knees on the
man’s back, Josh yanked off the helmet and, tangling his hand in
the long, thick hair, yanked back, exposing the neck to the blade
of his Tanto.

Piercing gray eyes, slightly slanted,
glared back at him. Pretty gray eyes and a woman’s oval face.
Private Mitsu Hikora’s attractive mouth formed a curse. “Fuck you,
farm-boy! Do it if you’re gonna!”

Startled by the contradictions, Josh
hesitated. That hesitation nearly cost him his life. Unlike Nico,
who was mostly all mouth, Mitsu Hikora was mostly all action. Her
hundred and eight pound body had been honed to a fine edge by years
of martial arts training. Even before she joined Jocco’s merry band
she had been a killer in thought, if not in deed. Jocco’s boys had
just given her the green light she had secretly longed
for.

Twisting to the right, she turned her
face from the blade and rolled. Thrown off balance, Josh was forced
to use his knife hand to stop from falling. In the split second
that took, Mitsu was all over him like a dirty shirt. Slender
fingers, hardened by countless hours at a practice bag, struck his
body, expertly seeking out vital parts and pressure points. Josh
felt his ribcage pummeled, his back pounded and his right hand go
numb. The Tanto fell to the ground. Wanting only to curl into a
protective ball, he knew he had to reach the knife before this
hell-cat on top of him did.

‘Fat chance of that, old buddy!’, a
rather sarcastic voice inside him said. Josh was neither in the
mood nor had the time to argue. Instead, he tried to make his
useless right hand move towards the knife. Naturally Cat-Lady
reached it first.

“Now, farm-boy!”, she hissed, raising
the knife high above her. “THIS will teach you to fuck with
me!”

As the Tanto swept down, Cobb’s heavy
boot struck her in the stomach. The air whooshed out of her slender
frame and once again the knife fell to the leafy floor. Cobb
followed up the kick with a right cross that sent the woman
flying.

Josh winced as Cobb pulled him to his
feet. “Rough date?”, Cobb asked.

“Ya,” Josh grunted. “I must be loosing
my charm.”

Cobb scooped up the Tanto. “You nearly
lost more than that. Let’s see what she’s got.”

Josh, the M-16 on full rock &
roll, stood guard while Cobb grabbed the woman’s weapons. The
sounds of yelling and cursing still came from the base of the
cliff. A minute later they were sprinting away into the
shadows.

Mitsu proved to be a walking armory.
From her unconscious body they had taken a Browning 9 mm. and three
extra clips, a 12 gage pump and a bandoleer of #4 shells, a wicked
looking boot knife and three grenades. Cobb had also brought her
shoulder webbing, complete with canteen, holster and first-aid kit.
Now, a good two hundred yards off the trail, they stopped to divide
up the loot. Cobb kept two grenades and passed the third to Josh.
“Take your pick of the hardware.”