Freedom Express (21 page)

Heck was already hugging the ground, biting his tongue in an effort not to go into shock. A full quarter mile of the second half of the train had simply vanished into the frightening conflagration set off by the howitzer's shot. In seconds, a rain of murderous shrapnel and debris began falling all around Heck and his troops, killing and injuring scores of the prone, confused soldiers.

Heck's brain could not believe what had just happened. At first he thought some kind of terrible accident had taken place.

But then he heard more explosions. Twisting around to look back through the hell that had erupted on the tracks, he saw each of the remaining mini-fort cars blowing up in precise succession, likely an orderly detonation of a string of enormous

firecrackers. Anyone within twenty feet of either side of each car was instantly blown to bits, adding to the carnage already created by the monster blast from the howitzer.

Still, Heck searched his consciousness for some kind of rational explanation. But the horror was only fifteen seconds old when he finally came to the dire conclusion that the railway cars had all been elaborately booby-trapped and that his elite Skull and Crossbone battalion had blundered into an incredible ambush.

His fears were confirmed as he peered through the smoke and flames and death at the titanic howitzer. He could see men in distinct blue-camouflage uniforms-the colors of the accursed United Americans -rapidly reloading the gun.

"
No
!" Heck screamed just a millisecond before the enormous howitzer fired again.

The second shot only blew apart what little remained from the first. Still, it added to the confusion and the terror of the moment.

Heck felt like he was floating on a sea of blood. His brain was pulsating, and his tongue had gone thick. He closed his eyes and imagined that he was suddenly floating above the earth, which was hanging motionless in space. Then suddenly with the crack of a mighty thunderbolt, the huge globe began spinning again.

He managed to shake himself out of the terrifying

hallucination only to be hit on the forehead by a chunk of flaming metal an instant later. As he passed into true unconsciousness, he lifted his head one more time to see that the front half of the
Freedom Express
was slowly pulling away. . . .

Santa Fe Airport

Bull Sheehan was feeling lucky.

"This is the life," he murmured, taking a healthy slug from his bottle of beer. "I must have been crazy knocking myself out all those years."

Sheehan, a ground-attack pilot-for-hire, had spent the

previous two years fighting in Central America for whatever side was paying the most. The hours had been tough; but the money had been good, and his base of operations in Costa Rica-now known simply as Big Banana-had been a trading post for everything from drugs to white slaves to X-rated videos.

Everything changed however when the United Americans

stomped the Twisted Cross in Panama. After that, most of the air mercenary work dried up. A few months later, Sheehan decided it was time to get into a new line of work.

He had been gunrunning for only four months when he met the representative from the Burning Cross one night in the waiting room of a cathouse. The man was drunk and loudmouthed, but not so much that Sheehan wasn't able to arrange a meeting with him the following day. It was in the midst of this hangover-plagued get together that Sheehan was given his first assignment by the Burning Cross: locate and buy as many of the rare blockbuster bombs as he could get his hands on.

The job took him all the way to the enormous weapons markets of Algiers in North Africa. Using the bottomless sack of gold from his employers, Sheehan had made arrangements with a South African cartel to buy ten dozen of the extremely destructive, high explosive weapons. Like any other customer, Sheehan wanted to see some of the bombs in action, and once he was satisfied, he shipped the first dozen to the Burning Cross for their approval.

As he later understood it, the Burning Cross had used this first shipment of bombs in an attack up in northern New Mexico.

Just what the fight was all about, Sheehan didn't know-or care.

He'd received the OK to buy the remaining 108 blockbusters, and left Algiers in a rented Ilyushin 11-76 cargo jet, its belly full of the rare weapons.

That had been two days ago. Now Sheehan was sitting at a poker table in Santa Fe Airport's largest barroom, losing his shirt and not caring a whit. Locked in the strongbox between his feet was his payment from the Burning Cross for a job well-done.

It was more than eighty pounds of gold-so much bullion that he had taken to wondering if he would ever have to work again.

His daydreams were interrupted when he realized he was in the process of casually losing still another pot to the four bloodsuckers sitting around the poker table. They were a motley collection -no different from all the other air pirates, bandits and highwaymen who had been drawn to the airport like flies to garbage in hopes of getting in on the Burning Cross's largesse.

"Big doing up in the hills," an air pirate appropriately named Shithead kept saying over and over. "They'll need some air cover soon."

"Who will?" a scummy highwayman named The Scratch asked.

"You keep jabbering away about this, but you never provide any details."

"The Burning Cross, you idiot," Shithead replied, trying but failing to sound properly conspiratorial. "I'm telling you, they are bombing the living shit out of those United American heroes."

"The guys who have the train?" Scratch asked.

"The guys who
had
the train," Shithead corrected him, at the same time shuffling the cards and dealing out a hand of Jacks-or-Better. "They bugged out two nights ago. Left without a fight, the pansies. Now the word is that Devillian's going to get all his guys together and attack LA. If he does, he'll be offering top dollar for guys like us, and I want to be in on that."

Sheehan had just leaned back in his chair to admire the absolutely lousy hand he was holding. Another hour with these assholes and I'll go nuts, he thought.

But in the next moment, he knew he wouldn't have to wait that long. Shortly after completing the deal with the Burning Cross, he had bought himself a small T-38 trainer jet. It was being readied for flight at that moment, and quick check of the time told him he had barely a half hour to go before he could take delivery and get the hell out of Santa Fe forever.

"I call," Shithead declared after everyone had finished betting.

Sheehan drunkenly laid down nothing more than a pair of threes.

"I lost again," he said with a laugh.

Each of the four other men at the table eyed him

suspiciously.

"What the hell are you so happy about?" The Scratch asked him. "You haven't won a hand in two hours."

"Can't help it, I guess," Sheehan responded, downing a shot of bad whiskey. "Just not my lucky day."

"You don't seem too upset," Shithead told him. "Must be a reason, unless you just like losing."

"Maybe I just don't give a fuck," Sheehan told him, kicking the strongbox between his legs for luck. "And maybe I just completed the biggest deal of my life."

Suddenly Shithead's ears perked up. "You doing some work for the Burning Cross?" he asked.

"Maybe" was Sheehan's coy reply.

"Big money?"

"Maybe," Sheehan repeated.

Shithead let out a whoop that attracted the attention of just about everyone in the bar.

"So it's true," he said, banging the table with his fist.

"The Cross is paying big bucks to everyone."

"Yes, but you've got to have a brain to get hired on,"

Sheehan snapped back at him, effectively silencing the big mouth air pirate.

"How'd you do it, Cowboy," asked the third man at the table, a drug runner named Twix. "Kill somebody?"

"Nothing that messy," Sheehan boasted. He then went on to describe his adventure in Algiers, taking note not to mention that his grandiose payment was sitting at his feet.

"There's plenty for everyone" is how Sheehan ended his story. "You've just got to know what they want."

Three hands later, Shithead and The Scratch cashed out. A minute later, Twix bought a hooker who just happened by, and he too was soon gone.

This left only Sheehan and the fourth man, a small, dark character who had spoken not a word during the entire card game.

"So tell me, Mr. Sheehan," the man said through a thick Irish brogue, lighting up an enormous cigar. "Just where were you able to store all those blockbusters?"

An hour later, Bull Sheehan was sitting in the cockpit of his T-38, literally chewing his lip in nervousness, waiting to get clearance to take off.

"You've always been too greedy," he whispered to himself.

"Someday it's going to catch up with you."

He fervently hoped today was not that day. Stored behind the cockpit seat was his trunk full of Burning Cross gold.

Sitting in the sack between him and his parachute was an additional forty pounds of bullion, the result of a quick and very dangerous transaction he'd made with the last man at the card table.

All the guy wanted to know was where in the complex of

hangars and bunkers that made up the Santa Fe Airport did the Burning Cross store the 108 blockbuster bombs.

Sheehan had haggled the price up from twenty pounds to forty pounds of gold in less than a minute-astronomical figures that had blinded him to the foolishness of the deal. If the Burning Cross ever found out that he had pinpointed the storage bunker on the west side of the field as the resting place of the blockbusters, he was certain that a squad of Skinheads would be dispatched to track him down and kill him-slowly.

"Damn that fucking Mick!" he grumbled, as he heard another two airplanes get clearance before him. "I should never have listened to him."

The fourth man had been all too persuasive-and forty pounds of gold was hard to turn down.

Still, Sheehan continued to curse him, even though he would never find out the tempter's real name was Mike Fitzgerald.

Sheehan finally got his clearance and executed the quickest takeoff of his life.

It was just in time as it turned out. No sooner was he aloft and turning south when his early-warning radar started flashing.

Looking out to the northeast, he could see at least a dozen specks of light heading right for him. Before he knew it, the specks turned into aircraft: two F-4's, two F-5's, several old F-105 Thunderchiefs and a handful of hot-shit F-20 Tigersharks.

Leading the pack was a AV-8BE Harrier jumpjet.

Even before Sheehan had a chance to alter his course, the jets were peeling off and screaming in on the airport. He watched in a mixture of fascination and horror as the Tigersharks strafed row after row of fighter planes and cargo jets, all of them belonging to the Burning Cross. One of the first airplanes to go up was the black Boeing 707 that Sheehan knew belonged to the Burning Cross's top dog himself.

Meanwhile, the F-4's and F-5's were firing barrages of

air-to-ground missiles into the airport's most important structures, such as the control tower and main terminals. As this was happening, he could see the antique F-105 "Thuds" flying low over the airport's runways, their underbelly weapons dispensers crackling as they deposited thousands of asphalt-cratering bomblets up and down the landing strips.

Just where the airport's air defense crews were all this time Sheehan didn't know. However, he wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Mike Fitzgerald had paid them off too.

Meanwhile, the Harrier was doing slow orbit of the base.

Suddenly it went into a screeching dive and, at about five hundred feet, released a large, pencil-shaped missile.

Sheehan watched as the missile went through a series of wild gyrations, weaving back and forth in such a way that he knew it was most likely being guided to its target by a laser aimed by someone on the ground.

When he saw the missile do one final twist and streak toward the bunker containing the blockbusters, he realized his worst fears had come true. Undoubtedly, the man who he'd sold his soul to for forty pounds of gold had shot a laser designator at the bunker, and the skill of the Harrier pilot was enough to deliver the missile on target.

Sheehan couldn't bear to watch as the missile slammed into the bunker. He had turned the T-38 around and was now fleeing west as fast as its rather smallish engine would carry him.

Still, despite his speed and altitude, the airplane was buffeted by the enormous shock wave resulting from the 108 blockbusters igniting at once.

He dared only one more look over his shoulder before he set out for the Fiji Islands or someplace equally distant. The glance produced a vision he'd never forget: All that was left of the Santa Fe Airport was one big, smoking hole in the ground.

Few places on the post-war world were as isolated as Port Desemboque, Mexico.

Located on the north western edge of the Mexican mainland, the city looked out on to the Gulf of California and the Baja beyond. No more than two thousand people lived there, and just about all of them worked on or around the docking facilities that provided the settlement's total flow of income.