Freedom Express (15 page)

At first they wondered just how Hunter had been able to accomplish this, especially with the extra seat on the Harrier being taken up by the multitude of equipment he'd transferred over from his F-16XL. They began to catch on when they spied some of the F-16's equipment strapped to the hard-points under the Harrier's wings. Still, it had been a tight fit for the two men.

"Pick up a hitchhiker, Hawk?" Fitz yelled to the pilot as he and his passenger climbed down from the jumpjet.

"More like a tour guide," Hunter replied, quickly introducing Crossbow to the others. "And I'll save the discussion on meaningful coincidences for later. First tell me, how'd you guys do?"

Fitz gave Hunter the lukewarm report as the group headed for the Control car.

"Everyone seems very convinced that they'll go belly up if they breathe a word of where Devillian's HQ is located," Fitz told him. Hunter was momentarily disheartened.

"If we don't hit the jackpot on this soon, Jones will have us backing up all the way to Football City," he said.

"Well, your friends Mutt and Jeff did say something in Spanish," Fitz said. "We've got to get it translated, but it sounds like 'la caza day lez est rellas.' "

"La Casa de las Estrellas?"
Crossbow suddenly asked.

"Could be," Fitz replied. The Indian closed his eyes and said, "The House of the Stars."

"Do you know what it means, Michael?" Hunter asked.

Eyes still closed, Crossbow smiled slightly. "Yes," he said. "I think I might."

Duke Devillian leaned back and thought of his aunt Thelma while the young girl between his legs went to work.

"You're getting better at this, aren't you, bitch?" he asked the girl harshly, her only reply coming as a series of muffled slurps and gurgles.

Devillian's aunt Thelma had been run over by a truck years before. It was a nasty, particularly bloody accident that Devillian happened to witness as a young boy of five. Thelma had been his favorite aunt ever since.

Devillian was about to climax when the phone next to his thronelike chair started buzzing.

"I'll kill whoever is on the other end," he swore, his stiffened excitement instantly petering out.

The girl between his legs was confused. She looked up at him as if to say: What happened? Angrily, he kicked her away from him.

"Get out of here, you ugly bitch!" he screamed.

The girl stood up and fled the room in tears.

"And if that happens again, honey, I'll feed you to the Skins," Devillian called after her in a familiar rage of sexual frustration.

Finally he answered the buzzing phone.

"What the fuck is it?" he screamed, pulling his pants up.

"I left orders that this phone should not be used unless it's an emergency."

The voice on the other end, that of Devillian's top

communications officer, was terror-stricken.

"The men from Rome are here, sir."

Instantly, Devillian's mood changed. "Are you sure?" he asked, checking the time.

"Yes, sir," replied the voice, gaining some strength. "They just arrived with ten helicopters full of equipment."

Devillian was positively delirious with excitement. He

quickly hung up the phone, picked up his Polaroid instant camera and went out the front door of the Play Pen. Grabbing one of the six guards always on station outside, he proceeded to walk down the corridor until he reached the top communication officer's small office.

He kicked open the door, and then pointed to the man who had just called him on the phone.

"Shoot him," Devillian commanded the guard.

The soldier unquestioningly raised his rifle and shot the terrorized man right between the eyes.

Devillian smiled as he snapped a picture of the

still-twitching body. Ten seconds later, the photo appeared, and ten seconds after that, Devillian felt the lower part of his body go pleasantly moist and numb. Mission accomplished, he thought.

His climax had simply been delayed.

He then pointed to the messy corpse.

"Now clean that up," he said to the guard.

Ten minutes later, he received the trio of "Family" men ; from empirical Rome, Italy.

"You have brought everything?" he asked them.

"Everything and more," one of the men boasted. "We were able to get into the best warehouses in Rome, Naples and Florence.

Then, as an extra favor for you, we stopped in Cannes, France and raided two more."

"Ten helicopters full," one of the other men said.

"You will be very pleased at what we can do for you," the third chimed in. "We have the best equipment of its type in the world."

"You'd better," Devillian snarled back at them.

It was somewhere around noon when the Freedom Express

lurched forward and started moving down the tracks once again.

For everyone on board, the sensation of motion came as a great relief. They had been stalled on the tracks for more than a day and a half, a two-mile-long sitting duck just waiting for any enemy who had the gumption to launch a major attack against them. Now that they were moving again, they all knew they presented a much more formidable target.

A scrambled report back to Jones in Washington informed the general they were under way. His reply message confirmed that they had his permission to continue at least to the next mini-fort drop-off point, which was the small town of Eagle Rock, New Mexico.

Barely a crossroads on the edge of a small lake of the same name, Eagle Rock had always been considered a very important junction in the train's journey. From this point on, the tracks left the flat desert terrain and began a long twisting passage through the Sange De Cristo Mountains. The switchover from desert to mountain terrain meant that should the train continue, it would be faced with at least a half day of continuous climbing, thus slowing its speed. Plus, the mountains would also give an enemy an infinite number of hiding places from which to attack the train.

Hunter was able to catch a few hours of troubled, fitful sleep, and by six PM, he was back in the Control car, pouring over a map of the American southwest with Crossbow, Catfish and Fitz.

"House of the Stars is what my ancient Shawnee ancestors used to call heaven," Crossbow explained to them. "Actually, I suppose it was more like a Mount Olympus to them."

"A place where the gods resided?" Fitz asked.

"Exactly," the Indian confirmed. "It was where the Sun and the Moon lived, and the whole universe spun around it. The myths say it was a great city that just floated in the air. It was up so high that it looked like it touched the stars. That's how it got its name. My grandfather told me about it, and as a kid all I could imagine was this great village just hovering in the sky.

I used to have dreams about it. Of course, these legends went back hundreds, even thousands of years. More recently, say from 1900 on, my people assumed it was all just a fable-and not an actual place."

"Civilization kills another myth," Hunter murmured.

"Yeah, that's right," Crossbow replied. "But get this: I can remember, when I was a teenager, a team of anthropologists came to visit our tribe. They were asking us what we knew about La Casa de las Estrellas. Our chief at the time was a stubborn old goat; he wouldn't let anyone talk to them until they told him why they wanted all this information. Finally they gave in and told him that House of the Stars might not be just part of a legend. They said they knew where it was."

"Fascinating," Fitz said.

"Not to our chief," Crossbow declared. "He became very angry and threw them right off the reservation."

"But why?" Hunter asked. "You would think he would have been pleased."

"He wasn't-for two reasons," Crossbow said. "First, he hated the fact that the white man was tampering with the Indian gods."

"And second?" Catfish asked.

"Well, he didn't like it when they told him the House of the Stars wasn't anywhere near where our people originated."

"Wasn't in Shawnee Territory?" Fitz asked.

"Worse, it wasn't even in the United States," Crossbow said. "In fact, they claimed it was down in Mexico."

Bad news arrived a few moments later with the buzzing of the Control car's phone.

Catfish took the message and wearily hung up, by now very tired of his role of bearing unpleasant tidings. "JT and Ben just called in," he reported. "They flew out of Dodge this morning,looking for serviceable airfields that we could use along the way."

"And?" Hunter asked. "And they report that every abandoned field between here and LA has been sabotaged. Blown up.

Destroyed."

"By the Burning Cross?" Crossbow asked.

"That would be my good guess," Catfish replied.

"Those fucking bigoted bastards," Fitz groaned. "So they are intent on nipping us to death."

"What about JT and Ben?" Hunter asked. "They're flying on to LA," Catfish said. "They'll contact Jones, and maybe he can get some long-range aircraft out there fast. Then they'll have to cover us as best as they can from there."

"With only the entire Rocky Mountains in the way," Fitz said disgustedly. "They've nearly succeeded in completely isolating us."

Hunter found himself simply shaking his head over the

latest news. He couldn't help thinking that a noose was slowly tightening around their necks.

Hunter and Crossbow had spent the entire day flying back and forth along the old Mexico-Arizona border looking for something that was supposed to be invisible.

After consulting every map of northern Mexico available to them, Crossbow could only make an educated guess as to where the location of the mythical
Casa de las Estrellas
might be. He remembered the anthropologists mentioning something about the Ring of Fire, and there was a section of northern Mexico close by the Arizona border that went by that name. However, even in the pre-war days, this part of Mexico had been utterly deserted; these days it might as well have been on the moon.

Their first notion was to look for some kind of mountain base. To an ancient Shawnee, a tall mountain might appear to reach up to the stars. But the few mountains in the Ring of Fire area were all sharply peaked, barren and extremely

uninhabitable. Giving up on this tactic, they checked out several hidden valleys and canyons-places surrounded by high mountains. But again they came up empty. Finally they just found themselves sweeping back and forth across the desolate area, hoping they'd get lucky.

They didn't-at least not right away.

It was getting dark by the time they'd taken off from the train after their third refueling stop. Hunter planned to return to the search area, set the airplane down for the night and resume the search in the morning.

They found a wide-open stretch of scrubland, one that

featured a rare tree in its midst, and set down next to it. Both men were tired and frustrated; so after a quick supper and a couple cups of wine, they turned in-Crossbow sleeping under the protective cover of the tree. Hunter bedding down atop the Harrier wing itself.

Despite the long day, the Wingman found sleep was still hard to come by. Many things were troubling him -not the least of which was the prospect of the whole
Freedom Express
mission going down the drain. If more information on Devillian and his army could not be found, then he knew Jones would order the train turned around when it reached the junction of Eagle Rock within the next twenty-four hours.

So a clock was running, and it was almost as if Hunter could feel every second painfully ticking away.

On top of all this, his own psyche continued to act somewhat unruly. It felt like his mind was beating to a very strange vibe, but he couldn't put his finger on what was causing it. Odd thoughts kept bubbling up from deep down in his gray matter and shooting up through his mouth without stopping first in his consciousness.

The overall result-a less than infallible trust in his

normally right-on instincts-was somewhat frightening.

He finally drifted off to sleep and immediately plunged into a very strange dream.

He was all alone, out in the desert. It was the middle of the day-high noon, in fact-and the sun was beating down on him without mercy. High above-improbably more than one hundred miles up in the sky-a large airplane was circling. In one moment it looked like an airliner, in another like a vulture. And someone in that airplane was laughing at him.

Then in an instant the day turned into night. Suddenly, he was looking up at the stars and imagining that a group of them had formed into a huge city-an enormous constellation connected by thin streams of red light.

A second later, he was wide awake.

"Airplanes," he murmured, sitting straight up on the wing and feeling his sixth sense clicking back on track. "Right near by. . . ."

He scanned the moonless clear sky, and moments later his extraordinary vision detected the silhouettes of two fighters passing about fifteen miles to their south. Just then he saw something else in the southern sky. A bright flash of red-like a laser beam-shot out toward the two airplanes and stayed on for less than a second. But it was visible long enough for Hunter to figure out its purpose.