Freedom Express (25 page)

"No warning tones, no SAM radar emissions detected?" "I just told you no, shithead," Mallox grumbled.

"Have they launched their choppers or the jumpjet?"

"Jesus Christ -
no
!"

"Have they significantly altered their speed in any way?"

"Fuck you, I'm hanging up!" Mallox shouted, switching off his radio and ending the transmission.

He put his F-4 into another, long and lazy sweep and brought it high over the train once again. It was still another two hours before his relief was due on station.

"Man, am I getting sick of this," he said, lighting his pipe again.

Five thousand feet below, Hawk Hunter shivered as he felt another message spring up from his psyche.
Divide them. Destroy
their alliances.

Antonio Anthony Antonioni was sweating bullets.

He had never been so hot -not in Rome, not in Naples, not even in Tripoli. And all that crap about the heat in the American desert being bearable because it was "not the heat, but the humidity" was total bullshit. Hot was hot, and Antonio Anthony Antonioni -Tony Three to his friends -was, at the moment,
very
fucking hot
.

He sat down under the sliver of shade provided by an outcrop of rock and cursed himself for ever leaving Rome.

Back there, he and his men were practically kings, their every whim and fancy granted by the puppet government that served as the seat of the New Holy Roman Empire. Just like the old one, this rekindling of glories past was hardly holy, or Roman, and only an idiot would consider it an empire. Rather, the fiefdom barely stretched south from Rome to the end of the Italian peninsula. And in truth, it was run by Sicilians. And not one of them had been to church in years.

Still, Tony Three and his men had had a good thing going back there. Broads, booze and "booga sugar" had all been in ample supply. All they had to do was control production and

distribution of the hundreds of X-rated videos that were being made in the south of Italy every month. The post-war dirty movies were the New Holy Roman Empire's chief export in trade -and it was a very profitable business. Buying jerk-off films didn't go out of style just because the planet was turned on its ear by World War III. If anything, they had increased in popularity.

But somewhere along the way, Tony Three had gotten bored.

He had felt the need to strike out -not so much to make more money, but to see another part of the world. So when he heard that some guy named Devillian was looking for people of his skill and acumen, Tony Three and his boys simply hijacked a jumbo jet, filled it with the very latest in stolen movie-making equipment from Italy and Cannes, France and headed for New Mexico. Once there, they cut a lucrative deal with Devillian's underlings -a ten picture agreement, which would have included at least three bombastic X-rated extravaganzas directed by Devillian himself.

Their pockets filled with Burning Cross gold, they put the jumbo in storage, bought ten Chinook helicopters and moved the stuff to Devillian's mesa fortress.

Things started to go wrong shortly after their arrival.

First of all, Devillian turned out to be a total fruitcake.

In the Roman parlance, he was a gootz, meaning an idiot, or in this case, a man with power and money but absolutely no fucking brains or class. Rather than reveling in the pleasures of making young tit films, Devillian insisted on bizarre elaborations that De Mille or even Fellini himself would have scoffed at. It didn't take long for Tony Three and his boys to realize that despite his bluster, Devillian didn't know dick-shit about making a good porno.

Then this whole thing with the train popped up and it was something that Tony Three and his boys hadn't expected. Nor could they understand it all. If you wanted to go from the east coast of America to the west coast, why take a train? Wasn't it easier just to hijack an airplane?

Things got worse when Devillian insisted that the Romans'

Chinooks be made available to carry his troops here and there.

Then their jumbo jet got blown up in the air strike that obliterated Santa Fe Airport.

Since then, they had found themselves to be little more than prisoners of the cross-eyed madman. And that's why Tony Three was now sweating buckets in the middle of the Grand Canyon.

"Finally got one of the generators working, boss." One of his boys, a guy named Rico, climbed up the rock formation to tell him.

"Thank God," Tony Three replied. "Will it pump out enough juice to run the tools?"

Rico just shrugged. "I hope so," he said. "Or at least enough for us to get one of the other generators working. If we bust ass, we can probably have juice to the whole set-up in two days."

Tony Three wiped his forehead with his already soaking rag.

"Well, if we do it that quick, Devillian will be happier than a pig in shit," he said.

"I know," Rico answered. "The question is, how long will the diesel fuel hold out? Once we flick on those big lights, them generators are going to start drinking the stuff nonstop."

Tony Three thought for a second, then turned and studied the broiling landscape before him.

They were approximately three miles south of the

southernmost rim of the Grand Canyon. Directly below him were two sets of railroad tracks that ran straight for a full ten miles, the only section of track that did so for such a distance anywhere within one hundred miles of them. At the beginning of the stretch, about three miles to the east, was a bridge that crossed the Desert Point View River. The tracks ran through a small forest right after this bridge and then broke out into the straightaway that was bordered on both sides with various hills, cliffs and outcrops of rocks. Off to the west at the end of the uncurving railbed, there was a sharp hill that was steep enough to roll a train all the way into Las Vegas itself.

"Rico, take a look at them ledges," Tony Three said, thinking he'd found the solution to his fuel problem. "How about we put some big reflectors up there? That way, we can cut down on using some of the lights, and maybe the generators won't go dry on us."

"It's worth a try," Rico said, shading his eyes to view the cliffs. "If we can get a good f-stop reading, and protect against camera flash, it should work. That is, if we got enough sun when the train finally gets here. If not, we'll have to stop down a couple notches and throw on the auxiliary lights."

Tony Three spat in disgust. "That asshole Devillian will just have to live with it," he said. "Fucking jerk that he is.

We come to make porn flicks, and he has us in the middle of Gone with the fucking Wind."

The Mexican bandit nicknamed Sin Dientes - literally "No Teeth"-couldn't believe his good fortune.

In the sack on his back there was more gold than he had seen in his life -fifty pounds, in coins and in chips. Best of all, most of it belonged to him.

All he had to do was attack a train.

The money-as well as his orders -had come straight from Devillian himself. The cross-eyed terrorist had hired Sin Dientes and the hundred-man bandit gang that bore his name to set up an ambush in the vicinity of Arroyo Honda, the pass that ran through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near the Rio Grande Gorge, approximately thirty miles west of Eagle Rock. Train tracks passed hard by the gorge itself, and a dense forest bordered the other side of the railway bed.

Their orders said that the
Freedom Express
would soon be passing through and Sin Dientes should attack it.

"But do not disable it or blow up the tracks," Devillian had told him. "Or I will personally make you bleed to death. Kill as many men on board as you can, but let the survivors continue on their way."

Sin Dientes did not question the strange orders, nor the fact that Devillian had provided him with several video cameras on which to record the bloody action. The leader of the Burning Cross had signed up the bandit gang just a week before, and already Sin Dientes knew the penalty for challenging the man's slightest whim. If Devillian wanted the bandit gang to simply sting the train, then Sin Dientes and his men would do just that.

It had been two days since the bumpy helicopter ride from Sin Dientes' hideout near Palomas, Mexico to the place called Arroyo Honda.

Devillian had provided ten big Chinook helicopters for the airlift, as well as new rifles and plenty of ammunition for his men. However, the pilots of the choppers - Roman Empire gangsters who seemed bewildered that they would be making such a flight

-got lost several times on the way. What was worse, the holds on their helicopters were already filled with big black boxes and huge lights and other strange things, so much so that No Teeth and his men could barely squeeze aboard. Finally, Devillian had to dispatch two F-4's to guide the dangerously overloaded Chinooks to the correct coordinate. After all that, unloading the Sin Dientes gang and their meager equipment proved easy.

No Teeth carried the gold himself. There was not one of his men that he could completely trust, and just watching over the treasure would be as hard as attacking the train itself. Still, each man knew he was in for at least a quarter of a pound of the stuff, and that was more than most of them had been able to rob and/or steal in the past three years. They also knew that if they failed, Devillian would send the Skinheads to hunt them down -and there was no fate worse than that. In fact, they had spotted at least three Skinhead F-4's flying over their position just in the past few hours alone, and even a cutthroat like No Teeth got nervous with people like the Skinheads circling above him, like so many vultures waiting to rip into the carcass of some still-squirming prey.

No Teeth had taken a full day to examine the terrain around Arroyo Honda, starting soon after the Chinooks had departed for the Grand Canyon. He found the place exactly as Devillian had described it a long sloping hill next to the Rio Grande Gorge that the train would have to slow down and climb before proceeding over a bridge that spanned the Rio itself.

The bandit leader finally decided to position his men in clumps of twos and threes along the edge of the thick forest that skirted the railway bed. Most of the men were equipped with either a brand new AK-47 assault rifle or an M-16 with an M203

grenade launcher attached. A half dozen were manning

flamethrowers, and three would be shooting the videotape. There would be no use of heavier weapons, and the men launching the grenades were ordered not to shoot at the wheels of the railway cars, although most of these were thought to be protected with armor-plating anyway.

Once his men were dug in and the ambush was set, No Teeth sat and counted his gold again. Around midnight, he'd heard from Devillian's communications officers that the train was expected to pass through Arroyo Honda sometime before dusk the next evening.

That gave No Teeth enough time to count his gold at least ten more times.

"When is it my turn, boss?"

Studs Mallox spun around and confronted the whining man.

"You ain't going to get a turn, you pansie," he told the transgressor, a less-than-dedicated Skinhead named Ant. "We decided to cut you out."

Mallox turned back to the matter at hand. He was sitting in his barracks headquarters, it being a heavily camouflaged building on the far end of the fortress mesa. Sixteen of his men were there; two others had pulled night duty flying over the train.

The entertainment for the evening was a gang bang of two of Devillian's pretty young love slaves. The girls were already there-tied up and ready to be violated. They'd been properly pumped full of speed and crack and were now unwittingly titillating the Skinheads with their authentic whimpering.

Mallox had just drawn lots for the order of penetration when one of his group the man named Ant-realized he was being left out.

"But what the hell did I do to deserve this?" Ant foolishly demanded of Mallox. The evil squadron commander smiled and took a toke of crack.

"You just fucked up one too many times, Ant," he said. "We don't want a candy-ass like you in here anymore."

"That's right!" one of the other 'Heads screamed.

"Fairy!" yelled another.

"Pansie!"

"You prissy fuck!"

Ant started sweating at this point-and with good reason.

After belonging to the Skinhead squadron for nearly a year, he knew that deep down the ‘Heads were really just a bunch of cowards

-
dangerous
cowards. They were only brave when they were together and the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor. It was a total group-think situation with them. When frustration set in -like of late after having spent the last two days doing little more than flying over that stupid fucking train and bombing railroad tracks-their release valve was to gang up on one member, usually with fatal results.

And they had just picked Ant on which to work out their infantile unfulfillments.

"Why me, Studs?" he asked in a jittery voice. "I've been doing OK."

Mallox laughed. "You're right, Ant, you
have
been doing OK," he replied. "But I guess the guys and me just don't like you anymore."

"What are you going to do to me, Studs?" Ant foolishly asked.

"Stomp him!" someone yelled.

"Yeah! Stomp the shit out of him!"

Suddenly the room was filled with the bloodcurdling cries of