“Nope.” Cox grinned. He pointed upstream, toward the towering Sierra. “We’ve got allies up there. About fifty Tule Indians, some of Christopher’s reinforcements. Tough bastards. Get some sleep, Randall. They won’t get through here, not tonight and not tomorrow. We’ve got a good position. We’ll hold them.”
“I think Cox is crazy,” Harvey told Marie. “I’ve… we’ve seen the New Brotherhood fight. He hasn’t.”
“They have our radio reports,” Marie said. She stretched in the back seat of the TravelAII. “Feels good to relax. I could sleep for a week.”
“So could I,” Harvey said; but he didn’t. The TravelAII was parked on the far side of the ridge from Deer Creek. He had sent the others back further, to a farmhouse where they could get proper rest, and he knew he should join them, but he was worried. Harvey had learned to respect whoever was in charge of the New Brotherhood. The enemy general hadn’t wasted a man, had never exposed his people recklessly, yet he had swept through eighteen miles and more in less than a day.
And he was using gasoline and ammunition recklessly. This was an all-out war; the New Brotherhood must have stripped their territory, must be gambling on taking the Stronghold for new supplies.
Dusk brought a chill wind, but no more sleet. A few stars showed through the overcast, blinking points of light too far apart to recognize as constellations. Harvey remembered a hot sauna followed by a cold swimming pool in hot sunlight; he remembered driving the TravelAII south through the blazing desert beauty of Baja California, finally to swim in an ocean warm as a bathtub; bellysurfing the bigger, more exciting waves of Hermosa Beach, and spreading a towel over sand too hot to walk on.
Down in the valley they could hear the sounds of Brotherhood trucks and men moving heavy objects. There was no way to know what the enemy was doing. Cox had patrols alert for infiltrators, but instead the enemy commander had his men fire weapons at irregular intervals, raise shouts, throw grenades and rocks across the creek, and often the ranchers responded, shooting wildly into the night, wasting ammunition, losing sleep.
Harvey knew that was what the Brotherhood wanted, but the knowledge didn’t help. He slept fitfully, awakened too often. Marie stirred in the seat behind him. “You awake?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Who was it? In the truck, with the binoculars. Do you know?”
“Probably the sergeant. Hooker. Why?”
“Put a name on him and he’s less frightening. Do you think we can win? Is Hardy smart enough?”
“Sure,” Harvey said.
“They keep coming. Like a machine, a huge grinding machine.”
Harvey sat up. Somewhere a grenade went off, and Cox shouted not to waste ammunition.
“That’s a frightening image. Fortunately it’s not the right one,” Harvey said. “It’s not a meat grinder. It’s one of those kinetic structures where the artist invites a horde of newsmen to stand around and drink and watch while the machine tears itself to pieces.”
Her laugh sounded forced. “Nice imagery, Harv.”
“Hell, I made a living off imagery, before I took up breaking rocks. And ruining roads. I used to think of battles as a chess game, but they’re not. It’s like those sculptures. The commander puts together this huge sculpture, knowing that the pieces will grind each other up, and he doesn’t control them all. Half of them are controlled by an art critic who hates him. And each one tries to see that he has pieces left when it’s over, but there won’t be enough, so it has to be done over and over.”
“And we’re some of the pieces,” Marie said. “I hope Hardy knows what he’s doing.”
In the morning there was new excitement in the Stronghold camp. During the night Stephen Tallman, Vice-President of the Tule Council, had come in to tell how his warriors were dug in to the east, and more were coming. The rumors grew. George Christopher was coming back, and he had a hundred, two hundred, a thousand armed ranchers he’d recruited from the hill country. Anyone who doubted it was shouted down.
But certainly there were fifty Indians to the east, and all the ranchers talked about how tough the Indians were, and what great allies they’d be. There were other stories, of an attempt in the night by the New Brotherhood to force passage of Deer Creek five miles upstream, and how Tallman’s Indians had beaten them back and killed dozens; how the New Brotherhood had run away. When Harvey talked to the others, he could find nobody who had seen the battle. He found a few who claimed to have spoken to someone who was in it. Everyone had a friend who’d talked to Tallman himself, or to Stretch Tallifsen, who was with the ranch force sent upstream to hold the western end of the line.
It was always like this. The new guys were demons incarnate; they would go through the enemy like so many mincing machines. The new guys always thought so too. But it could be true… sometimes it was true… maybe they would win this after all. The New Brotherhood could be stopped, and it wouldn’t even take the full strength of the Stronghold to do it.
Clouds parted in the east; the sun shone shockingly bright. Full daylight, and still nothing happened. The ranchers and the forward skirmish line of the Brotherhood exchanged sniping shots, with little effect. Then—
Over the opposite ridge trucks appeared. They didn’t look like trucks. They looked strange, for they had large wooden structures attached in front of them. They came down the hill, not too fast, because with all that weight in front they were hard to drive and unstable, but they came on toward the swollen creek.
At the same time, hundreds of the enemy came out from behind rocks and folds of ground where they’d been hidden. They began firing at anything that moved. The trucks with their strange towers advanced to the stream edge, and some drove across meadows that should have been too swampy, except that during the night the Brotherhood had laid down tracks of fencing wire and planks to get them across the mud.
They went to the stream edge and the towers fell, making bridges across the stream. Brotherhood troops rushed toward the bridges, began swarming across. Other Brotherhood units concentrated fire on any Stronghold defenders who dared show themselves. Harvey heard the sharp whump! which he recognized from Vietnam: mortars. The mortar bombs fell among the rocks where Cox’s ranchers hid, and each time they fell more accurately. Someone across the river was directing them, and he had good controclass="underline" Wherever Cox’s men tried to oppose the crossing, the mortars soon found them.
And more of the Brotherhood troops poured across the river. They fanned out and moved forward, along a line almost a mile wide, and Cox’s forward troops either fell back or were overrun. Suddenly — it had taken no more than half an hour — the river line was gone, and Cox held only the ridge; and even there the relentless mortars and machine guns, far out of range of effective rifle fire, sought them out, pinned them down, while more Brotherhood troops advanced up the hills, hiding behind boulders, dodging and leapfrogging and always moving on…
“Ants!” Harvey screamed. “Army ants!” Now he knew. The cannibals couldn’t be stopped. They’d been fools to think they could do it. And at the rate they advanced, Cox would lose most of his force. Already groups of men had begun to break and run, some throwing down their weapons, others grimly hanging on to them and stopping to shoot back at the enemy. But there was no organization to the defense any longer, and more and more saw it and thought only of saving themselves. There was no place to make a stand: Every position was threatened by a breakthrough at some other point, and these men had not fought together, lived together; they didn’t have confidence that the man down the line wouldn’t run and leave an opening for the yelling cannibals to pour through and cut them off forever.
A dozen men clung to the TravelAII, piled into it, hung on top or lay on fenders as Harvey drove away. Deer Creek, which Cox had expected to hold all day, perhaps even to break the Brotherhood and stop them permanently, had fallen in less than an hour and a half.