“I never did like being the center of attention,” Geronimo said, and sighted the SAR. He fired a half-dozen rounds and one of the spotlights went out. The choppers swerved and danced in the sky.
Shadowy forms were bearing down on the Warriors from the rear.
“Drop your weapons!” a raspy voice commanded.
In response, Blade spun and squeezed the trigger, the Commando booming and bucking.
Someone screeched.
The pursuing Russian soldiers dove for cover.
Blade nudged Geronimo’s right shoulder and took off, racing to the east, a feeling of impending doom gnawing at his consciousness. Sooner or later the Soviets would hem them in. He needed a bright idea, and he needed it right away. To the left were idling vehicles and a block or two of condemned buildings. To the right was the L.R.F. facility. Scores of soldiers were to the rear. The persistent helicopters hovered just out of effective gun range. One of the choppers still had a spotlight trained on them. Frustration and a sense of helplessness welled within him.
“Surrender!” bellowed the raspy, metallic voice.
The speaker must be using a bullhorn, Blade deduced, and ran at his top speed, his flinty gray eyes narrowing when he spied a stand of trees far ahead and to the left. What better spot to make their last stand? The trees would allow them mobility while sheltering them from the enemy. He thought of Jenny and Gabe, and sorrow racked his heart as he realized he might never see them again.
An elderly couple appeared ahead, standing near their dark brown sedan, both of them well dressed. They were gazing to the west, obviously wondering about the cause of the delay and the uproar. The man spotted the Warriors first and recoiled against his car, his arms around his wife.
“Look out, dear!” he cried.
Blade swung around them. “We won’t harm you,” he said.
“Nice night for stargazing,” Geronimo added courteously.
The elderly couple gaped at the Warriors, and when the giant and the Indian were five yards past them they looked to the west at the advancing Russian soldiers.
“Here!” the man yelled.
“The ones you want are here!” the woman elaborated.
Geronimo glanced back at them and chuckled. “They certainly know how to make a stranger feel welcome.”
“I have an idea,” Blade commented.
“I’m open to any suggestions,” Geronimo said, straining to match his friend’s speed.
“We should separate,” Blade stated, inhaling loudly.
“Forget it.”
“We’d have a better chance of one of us coming out of this alive,” Blade noted.
“No way.”
“This is an order.”
“I can’t hear you,” Geronimo responded, huffing and puffing.
“I never pegged you as a dummy.”
“That’s Hickok’s department.”
Blade went to argue, then reconsidered. Geronimo knew the stakes, and Warriors were trained to always be loyal to one another. A Warrior never deserted another Warrior. The Elders instilled a profound appreciation for supreme values in every man and woman who served as a defender of the Home and a guardian of the Family. In the 105-year history of the Warrior order, only one had ever gone astray.
“Why aren’t they shooting?” Geronimo asked.
Blade’s thigh muscles were beginning to hurt. “My guess is they want us alive.”
“Lucky us.”
“I just hope they’re so busy concentrating on us that they overlook Hickok.”
“He probably stopped to take a leak and couldn’t find the zipper in the dark.”
They sped onward, cutting the distance to the trees in half, attended by the choppers and chased by scores of soldiers.
“We’ve got to reach those trees,” Blade said.
“Don’t tell me you need to take a leak too?”
“Are you still considering quitting the Warriors?”
“I can’t imagine why.”
Another 25 yards were covered, and then the growl of a jeep motor arose to their rear.
Blade glanced back.
Two jeeps were after them, both straddling the sidewalk on the south side of Delhi road.
“May I?” Geronimo inquired.
“Be my guest.”
Geronimo halted and whirled, lowering himself to his right knee and aiming the SAR. “I wonder if their windshields are bulletproof?” he queried, and sent a burst into the foremost jeep.
The windshield shattered and the jeep veered sharply to the right, bouncing up and over the curb and barreling for the L.R.F. wall. A man in a uniform tumbled from the driver’s seat mere seconds before impact. The crash was tremendous. A fireball enveloped the vehicle and billowed skyward.
“One down,” Geronimo said, and pointed the SAR at the second jeep.
“If you pull that trigger, you’re dead men!”
Blade spun toward the speaker, to the east, astounded to behold 11 Soviet soldiers blocking the route to the trees. Ten of the troopers were ready to fire, their AK-47’s leveled. The eleventh stood in the middle of the road, his hands clasped behind his narrow back, his angular features inscrutable. “Put down your weapons this instant,” he ordered calmly.
“What do we do?” Geronimo whispered.
“I will repeat myself only this once,” the Soviet officer informed them.
“Lower your weapons or my men will kill you where you stand.”
Blade frowned and deposited the Commando at his feet.
Reluctantly, Geronimo did the same with the SAR.
The officer stalked forward. His hair was black, his eyes blue. Four rows of ribbons decorated his chest, aligned neatly above his left shirt pocket. A red star adorned each slim shoulder. “I’m pleased to see that you are reasonable men,” he said. “I’m a reasonable man myself. My name is Ari Stoljarov. General Stoljarov. Some of our more imaginative citizens like to refer to me as the Butcher.”
Chapter Thirteen
What was the blasted critter doing?
Taking a snooze?
Hickok stood as immobile as a statue, scarcely daring to breathe, feeling the weight of the creature on the top of his head, his neck muscles twitching.
How long had he stood there?
A minute?
Two?
He was tempted to give a yell, to let his pards know he was in trouble, but the slightest motion might agitate the thing perched on his noggin, might provoke it to bite him. Being bitten wasn’t a big deal. Being bitten by a potentially poisonous spiker was. And Hickok believed the critter was a spider.
A mutant spider.
From the pressure on his hair, he knew that eight appendages were gripping the sides of his head, and spiders sported eight legs. Plus there was the matter of the cobwebs all over the place. By his reckoning, a spider was the only candidate. From the size of the thing, it must be a mutant. But if so, where did the midget monster come from? Cincinnati had not sustained a nuclear hit during the Big Blast, so the radiation levels shouldn’t have climbed very high, definitely not high enough to permanently pollute the environment. Genetic deviations, as Plato liked to call the varmints, were usually the result of radiation or some other toxin disrupting the inheritance factors in the genes. If radiation didn’t produce the creature on his head, what the dickens did? As far as he knew, no chemical weapons were used in the vicinity of Cincinnati.
Wait a minute.
He was forgetting something.
The fallout.
Think, you dunderhead! he chided himself. What did he know about fallout? What had the Elders taught him? Whenever a nuclear doohickey detonated at ground level, the explosion sucked all kinds of dust and debris up into the atmosphere. The winds would then scatter the radioactive particles all over the landscape. The important distinction to make was between a ground blast and an air burst. Air bursts hardly produced any fallout, and the Soviets had wisely employed primarily air bursts during World War Three. Exclusively blanketing America with ground-level strikes would have been a drastic case of overkill and defeated the Soviet Union’s purpose. The Russians wanted to conquer America, not reduce it to a smoldering cinder.