The Last President (38 page)

As they descended toward the airfield, Quattro noted that the brush windrows on the east-side roads were growing quickly, and that damming the drainage ditches and opening the irrigation gates upstream was rapidly flooding the cornfields. “There'll be some pretty effective sniping for the last few hundred yards,” he said.

“Has to be a lot, to make them care,” Asanté said. “Tell you two things right here, Your Dukeliness; one, I'm scared, more than I've ever been, and two, I'm glad my family's not here with me.”

They flew sorties for the rest of the morning, and each time the distance to the oncoming Daybreakers was shorter. “Do you think we're accomplishing anything?” Quattro asked.

“Man, worrying about stuff like that is a Ducal issue. Me, I work the gun, I load the bombs, and I figure I don't like these guys and I don't want them to think I do, and this definitely makes sure I get that across to them.” Asanté sighed. “Getting tired?”

“Yeah. You must be exhausted.”

“I can keep going as long as I have to.”

“Yeah. Well, up for another?”

This time, the Daybreakers were not even over the horizon, and since there was no other air traffic, Quattro just whipped the plane around in a steeply banked turn, dove to almost ground level, and headed straight up the road at full throttle. He had guessed right; the tribal horde was now between overflowing ditches, and some of them hesitated at the brink of the water for an instant too long; Asanté's gun cut them down.

As they pulled up from the shooting run, over the thundering engines, Asanté shouted, “Quattro, I got an idea!”

“Good, 'cause I haven't had one in a while!”

“All those guys further back with backpacks, gunpowder maybe?”

“Or just food or loot.”

Asanté climbed carefully forward and leaned in close so Quattro could hear him. “What if we bomb a bunch of big-pack-people between ditches? I mean, fly in a tight circle and keep dropping the bombs there? If it's gunpowder they either burn or take it into the water. If it's anything else, no big diff.”

“Worth a try. Let each one roll when I shout
release!
; if we're going to try to put fifteen bombs on one small target, we'll have to make fifteen passes, and we probably have to stay under a thousand feet to have any hope of hitting something we're aiming at. I'm going to sort of cloverleaf or figure-eight it so we don't become too good a target. Be ready in five; I'll go looking for a backpack group.”

Quattro flew in a sort of meandering S along the two-mile long column of Daybreakers.
Man, another place where we were stupid, way back, Arnie Yang was telling us to make poison gas. If I could have laid about a ton of that down on their camp and kept hosing them with it all morning, these guys would be about whipped by now. Sometimes it pisses Bambi or Heather off that James talks about how dumb it was to kill him, but James is damn well right. Or at least we should have listened to his advice. There's—ah-hah.
Below him, a couple hundred tribals were flinging themselves along the road, heavy packs reaching from their beltlines to a foot over their heads. Behind them about twice their number trotted; probably they spelled each other to keep moving at the same pace as the rest of the horde. Maybe those packs held the mattresses for Lord Robert's sacred orgies, maybe looted jars of peanut butter, but this was worth a shot. “'Santé, how we doing?”

“Ready when you are.”

“All right, here we go.” He put the DC-3 into a shallow dive across the pack-bearers, and trying to visualize how long it took a bomb to drop, shouted “release” when he thought it should work.

This first shot went way over, landing and bursting into flames on the other side of the ditch without doing more than startling the runners, but to judge by the reaction, they had reason to fear flame; they bunched and huddled. Quattro threw the Gooney into a tight turn, almost standing on its wing, came in at another angle, and shouted “release!”

Undershot this time, but not by much; the bomb splashed into the ditch. Around again, and now they were clearly bunching up, trying to find some way to get away from the plane. He aimed, he visualized, he let things be, and said, “Release!”

This one burst among the packs, and the panic was immediate. Whatever was in them was flammable, if not explosive, and fire blazed up from the road below. Two more bombs created a panic and an apparent riot.

“Let's try two more of those backpack bunches,” Quattro shouted. They flew farther down the line, and the results were identical; whether that was fuel, ammunition, sapper's supplies, or whatever, the stuff in the square white backpacks was obviously a bad thing in a fire. As they turned away from the last bomb, Quattro felt some grim satisfaction; he wished he had learned earlier, but now he finally knew how to hurt them from the air.

Something thumped and Asanté shouted “Incoming!”

“Hold on!” Quattro threw the DC-3 hard to the left, righted it, and opened the throttle into as much climb as the old plane had with far less engine power than it was designed for. To his right, he saw broad-headed spears passing, trailing long pieces of wire; same gadget they'd killed Nancy Teirson with. He heard two clanking thuds from the rear. “Did those penetrate?”

“Nope!” Asanté took the seat next to him. “Sounded like someone throwing a brick against a garage door, but nothing came in.”

At first he thought they'd gotten clean away, but then he noticed that the rudder wasn't responding. “Probably there's a spear jammed in the rudder, or maybe they cut a control line. No big one, I can land this without it. But we'll have to get the ground crew right on it and we might not get it fixed before we have to shut down for blackout.”

“Damn. You and me could end up mere ground-pounders.”

“You know it, dude.” Quattro glanced sideways at his gunner, who was grinning at him; he grinned back. “Actually that scared the piss out of me, you know.”

“Yeah. Well, they didn't get us.”

On touchdown the loud bang-thump made them both jump, and the tail wheel felt draggy. Sure enough, when they climbed out, they found a spear butt wedged in the rudder, and the tail tire was a torn cloth bag around the wheel. “Thirty minutes,” the ground chief said. “Go get yourselves something to eat. Might be a chance for one more mission before blackout starts, or we might have to start grounding and shutdown as soon as it's finished, but either way, we can do it, you've trained us more than well enough, and having you tired and impatient and pissed off and worried about your goddam baby here is not going to help a bit. Now go eat, breathe, maybe get a dump, we have work to do here.”

“You know,” Quattro said to Asanté as they gulped down bland, bean-laden chili that ordinarily he'd have thought a disgrace, “that guy was fixing lawnmowers and snowblowers three years ago. Now he's as high tech as it gets.”

Asanté nodded. “It ain't a very nice world anymore but it makes more sense.” He tore off a chunk of bread from the loaf between them, dipped it in the almost-chili, and gobbled hungrily from it. “At least I know how everything works. And I haven't had to look for work. How's that Duke job working out?”

“Better than I wanted it to,” Quattro admitted. Huddled over the little table in the corner of the improvised hangar, which had been a boarded-up church before its steeple was commandeered for a tower, they watched crew scurrying in and out, and let the food warm and hearten them. Part of his mind feared that he would look like the idle aristocrat eating while others did urgent work, but everyone here knew how they had spent their morning.

It was a quarter of twelve, almost an hour later, when the chief said, “You'd be good to go if we didn't have to ground it right this minute, for blackout. We've got—”

A clatter of gunfire from the east.

They all turned.

Smoke was rising high into the sky from the blazing brush windrows that were supposed to bar the roads and force the enemy into the flooded fields; the gunfire grew in intensity, and half a dozen donkeys and mules towing Gatlings and volley guns appeared on the far end of the airfield, headed for the noise.

• • • 

The road east ended in fire, and on each side it was surrounded by water. The soldiers on the low earthen wall were out of range of the tribals' weapons, so a great deal of their time was spent merely watching closely. A group of a hundred or so tribals would pop out from behind the burning windrow and splash into the muddy, ruined cornfields, trying to charge at the wall; the soldiers would shoot them down. Another group would emerge; sometimes a group from each side of the windrow; sometimes as many as four groups at once.

The Gatlings and the volley guns arrived, and then the reserve troops who waited behind the wall, plus snipers who climbed into the apple trees, and every few minutes there would be another massacre in the muddy field, until it was a wide scattering of corpses on mud.

Messages went back and forth to Colonel Birdsall for an hour.

No, no trace had been seen of the one-shot muskets that had done so much damage at Lafayette.

No, where guards still patrolled the walls facing the unflooded land, there was no sign of a flanking maneuver.

No, it was not possible to see anything beyond the burning brush; 150 yards of dry deadwood, piled four yards high, was too big a fire to see what lay beyond it.

Yes, everyone was staying ready.

Through binoculars and spyglasses, some of the officers on the wall were able to observe that at the far end of the fire, there was occasional movement. Their best guess was that the tribals there were slowly dragging or knocking the burning brush into the overflowing ditches, perhaps advancing into the fire by throwing buckets of water ahead. It might take an hour or two for them to clear the fire; then they would have to come straight up the road, and the heavy weapons were already trained on it and waiting.

Birdsall himself came out to that stretch of wall. “We haven't seen five percent of their force,” he said. “But from the steeples and the trees, we can see for miles all around. The nearest place they could hide a force that big would be on the other side of the bluff itself, three miles away, and at least on the map, I don't see how they'd get there.” His officers all nodded. “This Lord Robert is smart; possibly much smarter than I am. There's some reason he would keep launching these futile attacks, but it doesn't seem like a diversion for a flanking attack, because I don't see any way he can get at the flanks. And as for—”

Shouts from the watchers on the wall and in the trees.

When everyone looked, they saw that tribals had become visible, through the flames and smoke, beyond the burning windrow. So big and hot a fire could not have lasted in any case, but it was clear now that Daybreakers had simply attacked it with shovels, buckets, and sticks, putting it out, shoving burning matter to the side, and splashing water to cool the road. Snipers took shots at some of the clearing crew, but it was clear that in a few minutes, the road would be open again.

Birdsall looked around at his officers again. “What did this Lord Robert character want us to focus on instead of—”

Drums began to boom, and from each side of the dwindling fire, many hundreds of tribals swarmed across the field of corpses, led as always by spirit sticks, in long, thin lines. Gunfire rattled and banged from the wall and the trees, and the defenses were shrouded in their own black smoke; the Gatlings and volley guns swept the field, adding to the smoke and noise.

There were so many of the oncoming tribals that a few lucky ones almost reached the wall before two and three soldiers in a group would shoot them down.

Birdsall tried to see through the smoke; then he realized there was no longer a plume above the burning windrow, that the Daybreakers had at last cleared the road, and though he didn't know what was coming, he suddenly knew what they had to do. “Reload!” he shouted. “All weapons! Now!
Reload now!
”

A dark shape moved through the blue-black smoke of that immense volley, on the road, and a few soldiers shot at it; it was big, perhaps the size of an old-style two-car garage, and rested on enormous spoked wheels, something from some strange museum piece. The shots screamed off it in a shower of sparks; it was armored with pieces of sheet metal on it every which way, several thicknesses of them—there must be fifty or more people pushing it—

Birdsall realized, “It's a bomb! Shoot, shoot, we can't let them push it here!”

The troops who had reloaded shot at whatever they could see or find; as the juggernaut rolled in toward them, with the pushers now actually running, some pushers went down clutching a shattered knee or ankle, or fell out of the pack where a lucky shot had found a way through the armor.

Behind the juggernaut came a sort of huge metal turtle; men running with corrugated metal sheets held out to the sides or over their heads, and something in between and under. Birdsall shouted for someone to take some shots at whatever that was, as well, but in the din of gunfire he couldn't be heard, and most of the troops who could fire were concentrating on the onrushing bomb.

As it rolled up to the thick log gate that closed the road into town, Birdsall screamed, “Down! Take cover!” Most of the soldiers did; the explosion that knocked the log gate flat killed very few of them. They were deafened and stunned, but on their feet. There had been a carnage, but it was of the Daybreakers pushing the wheeled bomb; their remains stained the road red.

“Reload and fire on that next target!” Birdsall shouted, again, but he could not hear his own voice; when he touched his ear, he found blood running down. The metal turtle came on; when shots felled one shield carrier, someone else within grabbed the shield and closed the hole.

Birdsall shouted to them to shoot low, to try to get under the shielding metal, and he shot there himself, but the defenders had simply been overwhelmed, first by the suicide rush, then by the bomb cart, and now with this. Many were fumbling to reload, some were trying to clear jams, and most were deaf from the blast and blind from the smoke. So the turtle was almost at the gate when the metal sheets were thrown aside, and from beneath it, almost a hundred tribals rushed—each clutching a Newberry submachine gun.