Thunder in the East (9 page)

Hoover reached inside his pocket and produced a well-worn photograph. It was of a woman, dressed

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exactly like the two girls in front of him now.

As Kara stripped Angie naked and proceeded to seduce the young girl, Hoover tried his best to keep one eye on the live action.

But his attention was always drawn back to the photograph.

"She was once ours . . ." he murmured as he prematurely reached his first climax.

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The second air raid of the night came in at exactly 1:15 A.M.

Just as with the previous attack, Hunter was stationed on top of the Bell Building, armed with what looked like an oddly shaped rocket launcher. In reality, the device was a PAVE PENNY laser designator. His role in this raid, as in all the previous ones, was to locate targets of opportunity for the attacking jets. He did this by shooting a laser, beam from the PAVE PENNY at a target. A pod being carried on each of the attacking jets would detect the laser radiation being bounced from the target. Then, once the raiders'

Maverick missiles were released, they would seek out the laser designation track and follow it right down to the target.

The air raid sirens went up not thirty seconds before the two A-4 Skyhawks appeared over the city. They came in low, dropping no bombs on 100

their first pass but making the maximum amount of noise in the process. As the small jets flashed across the well-lit downtown area, their pilots routinely maneuvered away from the scattering of AA fire coming up to meet them.

Hunter checked that all systems were working in the laser designator. Then he leaned over the building's railing and, clicking on the device's low-light scope, started panning the city, looking for a suitable target.

His first was a gasoline storage facility the Circle had foolishly built on a stretch of flat ground near the now-abandoned massive Football City Stadium.

It was a perfect target: cutting the enemy's fuel supplies was important to the Western Forces' overall strategy, and the target was isolated and therefore away from any innocent civilians.

Hunter lined up the bottom of the storage tank in his viewfinder and squeezed the PAVE PENNY'S trigger. He heard a sizzling sound come from inside the device, as the internal CO2 laser guidance link went to work. The faintest stream of bluish light shot out of the front and he saw the reassuring red

"pop" show on his low-light rangefinder. This meant the laser beam was targeted perfectly on the base of the gasoline tank three miles away.

Both Skyhawks had circled the city and now the lead A-4 was swooping in for its bomb run. Hunter knew the pilot was monitoring the laser target acquisition reading on his cockpit's Head's Up Display. He watched as the A-4

banked toward the target and dropped down to 500 feet above the deck. All around the airplane lights bursts of

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small AA fire were going off, but nothing deterred the airplane's pilot from making his run.

About a half mile from the target, the A-4 pilot launched his Maverick.

Keeping the PAVE PENNY designator steady, Hunter could see the missile's fiery trail out of the corner of his eye. Then, with a brilliant flash, the missile slammed into the gasoline tank. Suddenly, half the city was lit up with the glow the good-sized explosion. The noise from the blast reached him a few seconds later . . .

"That's one," he whispered as he quickly sought out another target.

The sound of the explosion caused Viceroy Dick to wake up in a shot.

He ran to the window of his opulent bedroom and saw the flames from the destroyed gasoline tank leaping into the night sky.

"Jesus Christ!" he cursed, quickly putting on his satin robe. "Those sons-of-bitches . . ."

He picked up the phone and was punching in Major Tomb's headquarters when the woman in his bed woke up.

"Get out of here!" he yelled at her, just a second before he screamed into the phone: "Get me Tomb, now!"

"Can I get paid?" the woman asked, routinely gathering her clothes.

The Viceroy gave her the evil eye. "Hey honey, I heard you were the best lay in town," he said. "What happened?"

"What happened was you did so much coke you couldn't get it up . . ." she snapped back at him.

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He got up in an instant, grabbed her and slapped her hard across her face.

"That's a very foolish way to talk to me," he said harshly.

The woman played it smart. She fell to her knees and hung her head. "I'm sorry, sir," she said with a convincing sob. "I'm sure if we had . . . more time, I would have been able to please you."

It was exactly what the Viceroy wanted to hear.

"OK, bitch," he said. "Get up and talk to the major of the guard outside.

He'll pay you . . ."

She quickly thanked him with a long French kiss and a gentle squeeze between his legs. "Let / me try it again some time," she cooed.

"Maybe," he said, returning to the phone.

As she was leaving, she heard him say into the phone: "For Christ's sake, Tomb, can't your antiaircraft guys hit anything?"

She walked down the long bedroom corridor and met the major of the guard.

"Two bags of gold," she told him. "Or ten bags of real silver."

The major whistled as he reached inside his desk and came up with the silver.

"You're an expensive piece of ass," he said.

"You'd have to pay to find out," she told him, slipping the ten bags into her purse. "But, frankly, I don't think you can afford it . . ."

The man's face turned a slight red. "Don't be so sure, honey," he retorted.

"Wait until pay day comes around."

She laughed in his face. "OK, big boy," she said. "If you got the money and you the guts to do it, just ask your boss for my number.

"The name is Jackie ..."

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Three minutes later, the major of the guard was dead.

As soon as the woman left, he had heard another elevator rising up to the penthouse. Assuming it was another woman or two for the Viceroy, he settled back behind his desk and waited for the lift to arrive.

But once it did, he was surprised, then shocked, when instead of a pair of teenage girls, a squad of Soviet soldiers trooped off.

He never even made it to his gun. Two bullets from a silencer-equipped AK-47

had caught him in the forehead and in the temple, the muffled shots making a sickening punching sound as they split his skull wide open.

The Soviet soldiers, five gunmen and one officer, marched down the passageway and kicked in Viceroy Dick's bedroom door just as the man was laying out several lines of cocaine.

"What the hell is this?" Dick demanded. He instantly recognized the officer as the younger of the pair that had visited him recently.

"You were told to do something and you failed," the officer said, as the five soldiers instantly surrounded the Viceroy. All six Russians were wearing the same black leather style uniform.

"If you are talking about the POW liquidation, we are taking care of that right now," Viceroy Dick said, his voice shaky.

"Too late," the officer said. "You have devoted far too much time to drugs and fucking little girls. My superior is a very impatient man. He's angry. And that makes me very angry . . ."

"So now what?" the Viceroy asked, a little shaken.

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He knew these were not ordinary Soviet soldiers-they were part of the Spetsnaz, the Soviet Special Forces, renowned for their brutal tactics.

"Now, you will do exactly what we tell you to do," the officer said. "Then we might allow you to select your way to die . . ."

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Kara gave Angle a long, hard French kiss.

"Good night now, sweetie," she said, helping the young girl into the small boat that had pulled alongside the yacht. "Maybe we can play together again sometime . . ."

"OK, maybe . . ." Angie said, settling down into the skiff.

The driver gunned the outboard engine and the boat moved quickly away from the yacht, heading in toward shore.

Kara lit a cigarette and checked her watch. It was 3:00 in the morning, almost time to get her own show on the road. She walked to the back of the deck and looked out toward the city. Four separate fires were burning-the largest being one in the heart of downtown, and the others near the old stadium grounds. She believed these were the result of the air raid they had heard go over about an hour before.

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She sat down on a deck chair, intent on relaxing before she had to go back down and jerk Hoover off for the third and final time. She had to admit that she had enjoyed their little dress-up show. There was something very pleasurable in dressing up like this woman the Circle officers called the Queen. All the high-priced girls were being asked to do it. In fact, it was becoming quite the rage among the paying clientele of Football City. Besides, she knew the act would be worth at least six bags of silver for her.

She finished her cigarette and was about to flick the butt off the side of the boat when she saw a floating object moving toward her. She leaned over the railing, trying to focus her eyes to the darkness and figure out what it was.

She did this not simply out of curiosity; criminals in Football City had been known to wrap all sorts of things-weapons, cocaine, stolen articles-in floating bales and set them free in the river for pickup by accomplices downstream. Perhaps Kara had found some kind of floating treasure chest.

The object was now about five feet off the bow and gradually moving closer. It was tied with several length of rope and was bobbing with an irregular motion.

Then she saw another one, about 15 feet off the bow. Then another just slightly further away.

She grabbed one of the yacht's docking hooks and after a few attempts, managed to snag the floating object. Despite some difficulty provided by the river's current, she was able to pull the object right up to the back of the boat, close enough for her to reach down and turn it over.

When she did, she thought she had suddenly been thrown into a nightmare . . .

It was a body. She thought it was a man, but she

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couldn't be sure because its throat had been horribly slashed, and this had caused the facial features to scrunch up.

She screamed and immediately three crew members were standing beside her. One of them used the hook to snag another of the objects floating by and this too turned out to be a dead man.

The soldiers turned on the yacht's rear beacon lamp and aimed it out over the river. Even they were horrified to find that the yacht was surrounded by literally hundreds of floating bodies.

Each one, they were sure, with its throat slashed . . .

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The big helicopter set down outside the abandoned town of St. Charles just as the sun was beginning to rise.

Waiting nearby, sitting atop an armored personnel carrier, was General Dave Jones and Marine Captain John "Bull" Dozer. They were about 21 miles from Football City, right at the southern junction of the Free Canadian front lines.

"This has got to be serious for him to risk blowing everything to come here and talk to us," Dozer said to Jones.

"So serious he didn't want to send it even in a secure transmission," Jones agreed. "I'm almost afraid to hear what he has to say . . ."

Just then the sliding door on the big Sea Stallion opened and Hawk Hunter climbed out.

The two officers jumped from the APC and met the pilot halfway, vigorously shaking hands

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with him.

"Jesus, Hawk, you look none the worse for wear," Dozer told him, seeing his friend for the first time in weeks. "We've been taking bets on how many sewer rat bites you'd have by this time."

"I wish I was living in a sewer back there," he told them, his voice fraught with worry. "It would probably be safer."

"What's up, Hawk," Jones asked. As commander-in-chief of all the Western Forces, he knew that Hunter's report would affect everyone from him on down.

"We've got to attack the city at once," Hunter told them. "We can't possibly delay any longer. . ."

Jones was stunned for a moment. "But why?" he asked.

"They've started killing the prisoners," Hunter told them bluntly. "Mass executions. In the middle of the night. Elvis and his guys stumbled upon one two nights ago when they were blowing up the dock works. Without realizing it, their action postponed the killings. But now, last night, a friend of mine saw at least five hundred bodies in the river. All of them wearing prisoners'

uniforms. All of them bound hand and foot. All of them with their throats cut

. . ."

"Good God . . ." Jones whispered. "Five hundred? Is your source reliable, Hawk?"

"Believe me, she has no reason to lie about it," he said. "In fact, she was in a near state of shock when she told me. I checked with a couple of my other sources. They confirmed that a few hours past midnight, Circle guards went into one of the

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POW compounds and just randomly selected five hundred prisoners."

Jones shook his head. "We expected something like this when the battle started," he said. "But why in hell are they killing those guys now?"

"I know it doesn't make any sense," Hunter said. "It's almost as if Viceroy Dick suddenly stopped giving the orders. But they're doing it."

"They're dealing away their only trump card," Dozer said. "If they kill the prisoners, they'll be holding nothing to bargain with."

"Damn!" Jones said angrily. "Have we been reading these bastards wrong all along?"

The three of them were silent for a while. Finally Hunter asked: "Can we do it? Do we have enough men and resources right now to risk it?"

"As of this moment, we're more than evenly matched with them," Jones said.

However, I think we've done a good job in fooling them that we are actually twice as strong."

"Who are the closest reinforcements now?" Hunter asked.

Jones thought a moment. "Well, a big group of Texans are about six days away,"

he said. "There's a division of men right there. We got two brigades of Free Canadian Volunteers that are about ten days away, plus a reinforced PAAC