War Weapons (6 page)

“Copy,” Bull said back. Stone was getting to like the bastard he trusted least. At least the guy seemed to know what the hell
he was doing.

“Let’s do it,” he said. Slowly, moving an inch at a time, the treads of the two tanks edged slowly backward. There was a loud
groaning sound as the cables stretched so taut, Stone was afraid they would pop. But although it almost seemed that the fallen
Bradley III didn’t really want to come back up, hardly budging at first, as the cable reached its tension limit, the tank
started crawling backward up the almost sheer face of the drop. Stone could feel the engine of his war wagon screaming out
in protest, but it kept pumping out the power. And at last, after five heart-stopping minutes, the fallen tank reached its
balance point on the edge of the ravine and suddenly slammed down onto the dirt with a thunderous crash.

The men inside came flying out the hatch, as if it were on fire inside, and jumped out onto the earth. One of the men, Farber
got down on his hands and knees and kissed sweet terra firma. They came over and slapped Stone and Bull on the backs over
and over, their faces wide with the smiles that those who had just escaped imminent death wear. And though it took nearly
half an hour to convince them to get back inside, at last the whole show was on the road again. Hartstein promised to drive
more carefully. And Stone, only half in jest, told him he was going to take the son of a bitch’s driver’s license away “if
there are any more moving violations.”

S
OON THE three-tank convoy was moving again, Stone driving very slowly in the lead, hardly rising above fifteen miles per hour
for the first hour or so. He had been pushing them all too fast. Both Hartstein and Bull kept asking Stone questions over
the headset. “What does this do?” “What does that do?” Stone had decided not to show them how to work the missile system.
Each Bradley III had six ground-to-ground, or ground-to-air, heat-seeking missiles—with ninety-five percent kill performance.
But Stone, following the Major’s advice—”Always have a trick up your sleeve”—wanted to keep the operation of the mini-max
missile system to himself.

The tanks left the semi-mountainous area where Fort Bradley had been built and headed out onto a more prairie-like terrain.
Here, at lower altitude, the snow had left only a fine coating, and the tanks spat up huge funnels of dust that joined above
them, forming a cloud that followed behind for miles. Cacti grew everywhere, rising up like spiked fingers pointing to the
sky, to God, or whatever lay hidden up there. Fields of them, green and black, towering above the tanks on all sides. They
came to an incline from which Stone could see for miles in each direction over the flat terrain, and he called for the attack
convoy to come to a stop.

“It’s target-practice time, gentlemen,” Stone said. “Now, Zzychinski and Phillips, you’re both the gunnery men. Switch on
the speak switch on your headsets so you can ask me questions. I’ve shown you basically how to operate the 120-mm cannon system
and the 50-cal twin machine guns. But now I want to give you a little hands-on practice. We’ll do static firing first, then
mobile. Hartstein, come up alongside me on the far side, Bull on the near, and face the direction my tank is pointing.” They
followed his command, and after about thirty seconds the three tanks stood side by side, their cannons all facing forward
over miles of cacti and anthills.

“Now, whatever you do, do it slow and careful. ’Cause we’re working with live ammo—heavy-duty ammo, at that. The shells that
these Bradleys fire are superconcentrated high explosive—probably the most punch per square inch of anything short of field
nukes. Now, using your laser range-finding system, look into the sighting mechanisms until you have those three tall cacti
standing almost right next to each other. About a mile off. See them?”

“Yeah,” they both replied.

“Okay. Sight up. When you have the three red lines pinpointing it, fire.” Suddenly the tank to the left roared and emitted
a screaming projectile. The shell came down just short of the cactus trio and sent up a little tornado of dirt. Then Bull’s
tank rocked back on its treads, and the 120-mm burped out a mouthful of death. The shell slammed right into the top of the
cactus, but for some reason it didn’t detonate. Instead it sliced right through one of them like a scythe, about five feet
from the top, and then flew on past, exploding a good two miles off. The severed head of cactus slowly leaned over and then
tumbled down where it crashed into pulpy pieces on the ground.

They both fired again, having shifted the long cannon barrels. This time both shells slammed dead center of the growth near
the base. All three cacti just seemed to disintegrate in the air as if bursting from the insides out, as pieces of them spun
off in every direction. When the noise and dust settled, there wasn’t a thing above the base, above a few feet off the ground.

“Not bad,” Stone said over the radio, swiveling the video around in search of some other targets. “There,” he said suddenly.
“Swing turrets around to the left, say about twenty degrees. See that anthill? Son of a bitch must be twenty-five feet tall,
over there about a mile and a half.” They both muttered assent, and again Stone had them open up. This time Zzychinski found
target acquisition the first time, with Phillips’s shell coming in right behind his, creating a second explosion within the
already boiling air of sand and scorched ants and forming a halo of particles a good hundred feet around. Stone had them take
out a few more structures of nature. He didn’t feel overjoyed about just randomly taking out all this stuff. But there was
more where that came from. If a ten-meg, or a few of them, went off in Colorado, there wouldn’t be shit. He had to teach these
guys to actually be able to use the tanks. They would be facing elite troops, elite armored units. In tank battle the first
shot was often the last.

“All right, you’re not too bad with stationary targets,” Stone said after they’d blasted various structures into nonexistence.
“Unfortunately none of the bastards we’re going to be fighting will be stationary. So now we’ll try some mobile firing. Drivers,
in combat situations the gunner takes command. You listen to him.” They started forward, Stone in the lead, going through
desolate flatlands with the fields of cacti and anthills off to their left. “Black cactus with three arms at a half mile,”
Stone yelled into the mouthpiece. Within seconds both gunners had found the target, and their cannons erupted almost simultaneously.
One of the shells crashed down about ten yards past, the second just a yard or so in front.

“Again,” Stone screamed. “You missed—that’s a tank—he’s going to blow your ass up. Take that motherfucker out. Fire, and don’t
stop until—” But he hadn’t even finished his harangue when both barrels screamed out tongues of flames, once, twice, three
times—a total of six high-explosive shells. Stone kept them moving ahead at about twenty miles per hour while he sighted up
to observe the damage. They had not only taken out the offending vegetation but had gouged out a swimming pool-size hole where
the vanished cactus had just stood.

They were doing a hell of a lot better than he had expected. And they were competing with each other—each tank’s crew striving
to do better than the other. Still, they’d have to do a lot better than that. He had no illusions about the enemy they were
facing, three Bradleys against perhaps fifty, against a heavily armored fortress—this time on the alert. It was insane, it
was impossible. Stone knew the odds against him were something no betting man would take. But if he had worried about the
odds, Stone would have just laid in a comer and gone to sleep.

N
IGHT FELL suddenly like a veil dropping over the earth. In the twilight even Stone found it difficult going. As the stars
started snapping on across the skies, Stone pulled his troops to a stop just as they approached more foothills. They had been
getting all the breaks so far, and Stone didn’t want to push it. He bivouacked them into a half-circle with their backs to
a sheer rock wall and set a guard. Then the men cooked, and after dinner a crate of hidden beer was pulled out. They looked
at Stone, wondering if he was going to nix the after-dinner imbibing. But he spat and looked away. Like he had told them he
wasn’t “that kind” of officer. He had seen enough rules-and-regulation asshole brass in his life to turn him into an anarchist
forever.

A bottle was thrown across to him, and Stone grabbed it from the air. He opened it with the hilt of his long, custom bowie,
having found the exact spot that created identical torques and angles to a can opener, and took a deep swig. He turned his
head and spat it out, but surreptitiously, so the other men didn’t see him and feel hurt by his rejection of their homemade
brew. Excaliber, who had been lying with his head on his paws, sniffed the air, and his eyes grew alert. He rose up, stretching
his back into a sudden hump and then back down again, and then moseyed the few feet over to Stone, who let the bottle dangle
at his side.

“Want some dog?” Stone asked, holding the amber bottle up to the pitbull’s mouth. The fighting dog had enjoyed Dr. Kennedy’s
brew—maybe he’d like this. The huge sandpaper-like tongue darted out like a snake’s as Stone poured a little of the foaming
liquid onto it. Excaliber slurped it back in, paused a second while the taste buds and like-dislike judgment centers of his
brain argued things out for a moment. The “like” clearly won as the dog shot back to the bottle and his tongue lapped in and
out quickly over and over again like some kind of pink suction device. Stone poured a steady stream of the brew out, and though
half of it bounced off the slapping tongue, Excaliber quickly finished the bottle off. He stood back and burped, then turned
unsteadily and headed back to where he had been and lay down again getting into nearly exactly the same position he had been
minutes before. One eye closed, the other half open, his tongue hanging slightly out of his mouth like a flap out of a shoe,
he looked all in all the picture of pitbull contentment.

Stone’s mind was boiling. The responsibility of saving the whole damned state was on his back now. And he didn’t like it.
April too. He hadn’t even thought about her for the last two days—he’d been too busy just surviving, just keeping the wolves
at the door. He was just a mortal man. A
nadi
— yes, the term the Ute Indians had given him after they saved him from violent death. He with the gift of death. Yes, Stone
had it, but he also had a heart and a gut. And they both felt like they were about to explode. From the moment he had left
his father’s mountain bunker, Stone had been fighting. And though so far he had won them all, the battles had gotten bigger
each time, the stakes higher. It was as if he were rising in some kind of hierarchy of war. Some unknown battle plan taking
him somewhere he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

“April, April,” Stone sent out from his trembling mind into the star-riddled sky above, flashing with meteors, slivers of
light that slashed across the black and blue skies like swords leaving long, ethereal trails in their wake. “I’ve got to do
one thing first. But I swear I’ll get you. Hang on, baby. Hang on.” He did something he hadn’t done for years, and he felt
like a fool as he did it. But pulling a blanket up over his chest as he lay, head back against his rolled-up jacket, Stone
put his hands together in prayer, closed his eyes, and asked whoever ran this sick show to give his sister a break. To let
her live. And if she had to die—if it was her time—to not let her get raped or mutilated. But just take her—fast. With a bullet
or a bomb.

When he awoke with a start the next morning, Stone heard something growling at his feet and discovered his hands still clenched
tightly against each other, his teeth sore from having ground against each other throughout the chilly night. His eyes opened,
and he saw the pitbull about three feet directly in front of his face. It was staring straight down at something right in
front of Stone. He looked sleepily down, raising one hand to rub his swollen eye and froze in the air. A rattler! A big son
of a bitch too. This one looked to be six feet long. It was coiled back not two feet from Stone’s shoulder, coiled like a
spring, its head balanced up on its swaying body, tongue snapping in and out. It stared at both of them, unsure of which was
the more dangerous, and flicked its eyes back and forth, trying to keep both of them at an equal distance.

Stone was in no position to move fast, his entire weight on his side where he had been sleeping. But the serpent seemed more
concerned about the growls coming from the pitbull and the incisors that glistened in the rays of the morning sun. The snake
had probably been slithering by after night hunting, and Excaliber had seen it. It would have been better just to let it go
by. But then, growing pitbulls had to have their fun. Stone stayed absolutely still, as if he were a statue. Excaliber’s head
suddenly moved fast from the right, and the snake launched itself right up into the air, its jaws opened wide, fangs dripping
with poisonous venom. But the pitbull’s charge had been just a feint. As quickly as it started from the right, the dog twisted
his back and around like a Slinkie, and came in from the left. The timber rattler sensed the change in direction at the last
second, but it was too late. It had already launched—and there was no turning back.

The entire length of the black-and-gray diamond-patterned snake seemed for an instant to spread straight out as its fangs
closed on the spot that the pitbull had just been inhabiting. But the canine jaws ripped up from underneath, coming into the
thing sideways. His teeth closed cleanly around the head, and he bit hard. Then just as quickly he opened the white mouth
and spat out again, and the snake flew off in pieces. Stone pulled himself out of the way of the whipping, but now harmless,
body of the thing that fell across his shoulder. With disgust he ripped it free and flung it off and then glanced down at
the ground where the head and but a few inches of the body still writhed around, the jaws still opening and closing. Excaliber
slapped his paw against the thing, and damned if it didn’t try to bite him. But with nothing to propel itself, the dying animal
jawed feebly at the air like an old man without his dentures.