War Weapons (17 page)

“Yes—some. We’ve saved up things we’ve taken from them. Don’t think we’ve been doing nothing. We attacked several small convoys
recently and have a truckload of weapons and ammunition. We made explosive detonators from bullets and attached them to a
whole crate of antitank land mines—so they detonate on impact. They’re heavy-duty.”

“Then we’ve got to strike now,” Stone said. “Immediately—tonight, in fact. I know what Patton’s going to do—he’s going to
evacuate his base within twenty-four hours and send the ten-meg up, believing he’ll have me trapped within its kill zone.
This man is obsessed with my destruction. We must plan and mount an attack right now. Do you have any transportation?”

Little Bear pointed around to a clearing about twenty yards off, and Stone saw about a dozen or so three-wheelers, rough overland
vehicles with thick tires that looked like they could just about climb the side of a mountain.

“My father rented ’em out—had a whole little business before the NAA killed him. But we managed to take out these before they
came in a transport and carted away the rest. They’re fast—and we’ve got automatic pistols wired up on both handles so they
spit out a load of slugs as fast as you can pull the fucking trigger.”

“Well, you tell me,” Stone said, looking around the circle of denim-clad Cheyenne, some of them snapping their fingers as
they listened to the music of their headphones and Stone simultaneously. “Do we go for it? I can’t promise you that even one
of you will come out of this alive—or that I will. But I know we’re the last chance to stop that bastard before he launches.”

They looked around at each other, then each one took out a long-bladed knife and stabbed it into the log between his legs.

“We’re in, Stone,” Little Bear said. “To victory—or the Great Happy Hunting Ground in the sky.” Stone couldn’t tell if he
was mocking him or not.

A
S THE sun fell from the sky behind the peaks of the Rockies off in the distance, a fleet of three-wheelers spread through
the prairie that led to the general’s fortified silo. They tore through the cacti and the groves of small, stumpy trees with
ease, like porpoises through water. Ten Cheyenne and Martin Stone were all that stood in the way of the destruction of Colorado
and the grinding of America under the murderous thumb of Patton. The colors of the sky slowly faded away, and they switched
on their dimmed lights so thin beams fed out, pointed almost straight down, hardly visible from more than a hundred yards
off.

Meyra rode in one of the all-terrain vehicles alongside Stone, keeping a wary eye on him. She had cleansed and salved his
wounds, so only she among them knew how badly he had been hurt. She had given him an herbal powder to swallow, telling Stone
that “It will almost make you feel like new tonight—tomorrow you’ll tighten up and everything will hurt twice as much.” But
Stone gladly took the proffered substance. If there
was
a tomorrow, he’d be happy to suffer a little pain to see it. After an hour of riding the herb appeared to have helped tremendously,
for his muscles seemed to move almost normally. He had a few broken fingers and toes, but Meyra had splinted them. And to
his amazement Stone found his senses nearly functional—if not a hundred percent, then up there in high eighties. Even his
swollen eye was half open now. It was nice to see the world again in stereo.

They had gone about ten miles, Stone slowly getting more and more used to the three-wheeler, so that he started curving around
cacti, testing the vehicle’s balance—as well as his own—when there was a set of headlights coming toward them from about a
mile off. At Little Bear’s command they all slowed to just a few miles per hour and switched off their lights. Stone searched
frantically around on the dashboard of the thick-tired vehicle, as his was the only light that remained on, but after a few
fumbling seconds he found the switch and slammed it off. The ten three-wheelers spread out so they formed a sort of half circle,
hidden behind vegetation and cacti. Stone found himself a niche of cover at the right end of the line and sat there in the
slung-back seat, drowning in the thick black bear coat he wore, his finger resting on one of the triggers of his twin 9-mm
autopistols that they all had mounted. The thing looked sort of makeshift, and Stone wondered if it would actually work—all
held in place with wire and duct tape. But he had other firearms as well, tucked away beneath the engulfing fur. The Cheyenne
had let him go through their munitions truck, and he had selected an H&K 9-mm with 10-shot clip and an old U.S. Army Service
.45 that looked like it had been through World War II. He had tested the well-worn weapon; it had worked just fine and had
been a lot more accurate than a lot of later model .45s that he had fired. He kept his hand on the handlebars but opened the
coat for instant access just in case.

It didn’t take long for the NAA patrol jeep with a back-mounted machine gun to find them. And when they did, they wished they
hadn’t. For the Cheyenne let the jeep move right into the trap. And when the prey was caught, they opened up from all sides.
The three soldiers in the vehicle barely knew what hit them as the silencer-equipped autopistols burped out a whole wall of
firepower. There were but sharp little sounds as if hundreds of small animals were whispering at once. And when the whispers
stopped after a few seconds, three bodies tumbled out onto the ground, riddled with dozens of holes, blood pouring out like
fountains from every one.

Without a word Little Bear started up his cross-country vehicle again, and the rest followed suit. Within seconds they were
moving forward. Stone felt slightly more confident. He hadn’t really believed inside of himself that these guys could really
do it. But they could. Perhaps they actually had a fucking chance, though he wouldn’t have bet the bunker on it.

The two guards atop machine-gun towers at the eastern side of the fort about a hundred yards apart from each other yelled
back and forth. They had heard mat Patton was pulling them all out in the morning, and behind them, in the center of the two-hundred-man
fortress whose sole purpose was to guard the missile in its midst, there were all kinds of activities going on—trucks being
loaded, supplies being girded up. The two guards stood in little wooden boxes, like something a kid might build as a tree
house—and not much better made—about forty feet above the ground. The towers ringed the half-mile-wide fort with its steel-mesh
fence, Pat-ton’s standard defensive fortifications for all his bases.

“What do you think?” one of them screamed out to the other, cupping his hands into a flesh megaphone. “I heard we’re going
to be sent South again—maybe even into New Mexico.”

“Son of a bitch,” the other yelled back through the dark night air, the moon hidden behind clouds like a low-watt light bulb
at the far end of a basement. “I can’t even tell you what I think.” But he wanted to relay his information, so he screamed
out what to him were hints and therefore more acceptable should any of the general’s Elite Corps officers hear. “The A-thing,
you know. The
M
.” What he meant were the atomic device, the missile, but the other guard hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.

“What the fuck are you—” He never got to finish the question. An arrow ripped into his throat and clean through the back of
his neck. The guard threw his hands around the arrow with a look of infinite horror on his suddenly pain-racked face and tried
to pull it out. But as it started to come free, the backward-angled hunting arrowhead pulled into the back of his neck, just
ripping more veins and nerves to shreds. He stumbled backward and then tumbled right over the yard-high wall of the tower.
The body spun end over end and crashed to the dirt with a wet sound.

The second guard could hardly make out what was happening in the dark. There were supposed to be searchlights at every tower,
but things had gotten tough lately, and supplies were limited. The nearest spotlight was three towers away. He lifted his
binoculars and had just sighted up the other man as he started his fall to the ground when another silent Cheyenne arrow whispered
a good hundred yards from behind a boulder. The NAA’er took the yard-long arrow through the side, slicing right between his
ribs. The razor-sharp head sliced into the bottom part of the heart, cutting it in two. The heart literally exploded in his
chest as if a bomb had gone off, and blood poured out of his mouth and eyes and nose in a violent spray of red. The body spun
around three times, as if doing some kind of insane little dance, and then fell to the floor. Somehow it slid through the
trapdoor that led to the stairs and managed to tumble nearly halfway down them, flopping wildly along the metal steps, leaving
a trail of red from top to bottom. Then the corpse came to a rest, its feet caught between two steps so that it hung beneath
the stairs upside down, like a deer being bled.

The three-wheelers bolted from the darkness and up to the gate. The double mufflers they had installed made the things about
as quiet as a gasoline-powered motor vehicle could get, and with the noise floating toward them from the far end of the fort,
they could hardly be heard beyond a few-hundred-foot radius. One of the Indians jumped from his all-terrain vehicle and was
at the padlocked gate in a flash. He took something from his pocket, slapped it onto the huge lock, and stepped back, turning
his head. There was a muffled pop and a little cloud of white smoke that quickly dissipated. The Cheyenne just touched the
lock, and it fell to the ground in pieces. He pushed open the gate, which swung all the way back, and jumped back onto his
bike. They were in.

The attack unit immediately split up into the three squads, each composed of three men—one group to take out the munitions
depot, one to try to find and kill Patton, and the third to rove around the camp wreaking havoc, keeping them off-balance,
so they wouldn’t even know where the attack was coming from. They were also to try to locate and release Stone’s men, who
might tip the balance enough to win the battle, especially if they could get to their tanks. Stone, Meyra, and Little Bull
would take the silo. They’d all use bows and silenced autopistols—try to stay as quiet as possible until the shit hit the
fan. At least, such was the plan.

But plans have a nasty habit of falling apart the moment they’re hatched, for Stone, Little Bear, and Meyra had hardly gone
a hundred feet or so into the fort, along a narrow street between long rows of supply dumps, when they heard a sound that
Stone didn’t like at all: the sound of a man counting down from ten. A firing squad. And there was only one bunch of people
Patton would be killing off now—what was left of Stone’s teams. The words were coming from behind a wall of truck tires a
good ten feet high, and Stone could hear that the officer was down to eight. Stone motioned frantically over at the wall,
and the Cheyenne followed him over so that their three-wheelers slammed right into the base of the thing. They were off and
up the big rubber doughnuts, climbing to the top in a flash. Stone reached the top first and lay flat on the tops of two side-by-side
stacks of tires.

His men were directly across from him, staring back at the squad of men who were about to do them in with the most fearless
looks they could muster, though most of their eyes were moist. Stone’s men were young, had hardly lived. None of them wanted
to go. And then Stone saw something that filled his heart with an electric jolt of joy—the dog, Excaliber, sitting on his
hind legs, with a somber, resigned look on his muzzle. His front right leg was covered with blood and looked to be at an odd
angle. The pitbull must have gotten hurt when Stone’s tank was taken. And the bastards hadn’t even splinted it or anything.
Just put him against the wall, along with the rest of them. Stone looked quickly down, and right below him, almost close enough
to touch, were a firing squad of ten men. Five of them stood straight, the other five in a row just in front of them, kneeling.
All held their Ml6s straight out, waiting for the magic number to be reached.

“Four, three…” the officer went on, standing by the side, his hand raised up, ready to descend like a guillotine. There was
no time. Stone lifted both of the impact-capped land mines he was holding and, rising to his knees, flung one of them in each
direction, like ten-pound Frisbees. He screamed to his men to duck and then fell backward onto the tires just as the two Cheyenne
were coming up. Stone somehow grabbed hold of both of them as he tumbled back so that he took them with him. And barely in
time. There was a great roar that seemed to go off just beneath their feet, as if the earth itself were erupting upward. Then
a flash of yellow and orange that blinded them temporarily, so that everything was just a blinking orb of light. The entire
wall of tires seemed to slowly tilt away from the explosion, and they felt they were all in a dream, almost as if they were
floating. And then everything speeded up and the tires crashed forward and down onto the ground, sending them flying as huge
truck wheels bounced off in every direction.

Stone was the first to his feet, his eyes still having difficulty adjusting to the dimness of the night. He leapt forward,
jumping across some of the sprawled tires and could see enough to know that it had worked. The land mines were meant to take
out vehicles, tanks, not men. They had been torn to ribbons, pieces of them sprayed around the place as if they had gone through
a grinder. Not one of them moved. He raised his head and started forward through the still dissipating smoke, anxious that
his own men might have met the same fate. But they were rising already, groaning, some with busted eardrums and burned legs
and back, but all were alive. Stone counted six. So two more had died in the tank attack.

“It’s Stone,” Bo shouted out, a trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. But he was smiling. They all were.
Excaliber rushed up to him, his tongue trailing out of his mouth like a big pink rug. He hobbled along on three legs, though
he moved fairly well considering, and slammed his head into Stone’s leg, butting him again and again in thanks. The belief
that it had in fact picked the right master was confirmed forever as far as the terrier was concerned. Even Bull rose and
gave Stone a big grin. Now that Stone knew the man he had suspected all along had not in fact been the traitor among them,
he felt guilty and totally different toward the rough, but well-intentioned, fighter. Stone held out his hand, and Bull took
it as the remainder of the attack force gathered around them, all reaching out to touch the son of a bitch who had just snatched
them from the very drooling jaws of death.