“I think there’s room, sir.”
“Remember what you’re carrying, soldier. It’s bad enough to be on a road like this. With this sort of cargo, you can damned well bet we stay on the road.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. Yes, sir, you damned fool of an officer is what he meant. But he wouldn’t give it voice in a million years. Major John NMI Walker might be dead, but his uniform still commanded respect.
“We have to move the car,” I said. “Then we can get the truck started and run it off the road. Where are the four boys from the Amarillo truck?”
“They refused to leave their post sir.”
“Tell ’em to get the hell out here!”
Two men mumbled together. One, a PFC, spoke up.
“They said they were under orders to remain at their post, sir.”
I scanned the road to the rear. George was approaching in my car. By now the detour signs were all posted, the road sealed in front of us and to our rear. I started for the Amarillo truck. Would they refuse to obey a direct order?
They might, I decided. And they might tip, and I might have four M-14s pointed at me.
“Well, those are their orders,” I said, reconsidering. “How many of us are there? Eight of you men, is that right? Maybe we can do it without them. You, Corporal, get on that side, and—”
I posted them around the convertible, then slipped around it myself so that I was standing by the rear of the van.
“Everybody get a grip,” I said. “We’ll try to put her right side up so she can roll. Lift on three.”
I knocked sharply on the back of the van. A bolt snicked back.
“One. Two.”
The tailgate of the van dropped.
“And freeze,” I said. “Not a sound. Nobody move.”
They looked up, shocked. They saw me with the Magnum in my fist, and, behind me, Sprague and his boys, guns in their hands, piling out of the back of the van.
“That’s right,” I said. “You boys just hold onto the car, you won’t get in trouble that way.” To Sprague I said, “Good work, citizen. Keep them covered, no talk and no shooting. It’s not over yet.”
I headed back toward the Amarillo truck. I stopped on the way when George pulled up next to me. I told him about the crew with the M-14s. He nodded shortly, followed me to the truck.
There was a peephole in the back of the truck. It was at eye-level if you happened to be standing inside the truck. I was on the ground, so it was a couple of feet over my head. I stood too close to the truck to be seen and ordered the men out.
“We were told not to move, sir. No matter what.”
“This is Major Walker talking,” I said. “We’ve run into an overturned car and we need more men to get it out of the way.”
“We were told—”
My stupid mistake; I was an officer reasoning with an enlisted man. That wasn’t according to book. I said, “Who am I talking to, soldier?”
“Sergeant Lewis Flint, sir.”
“Sergeant Flint, I order you to pile out on the double. That’s a direct order, Sergeant.”
There was a moment of silence. I glanced over at the convertible. The eight soldiers were in place. Sprague and his men had them well covered.
Then Flint said, “Sir, begging your pardon, sir, but we were instructed to disregard all future orders until arrival in Omaha. Begging your pardon, sir—”
I started to say something but George had a hand on my arm. I turned to him. He had a tin can in his hand. It was about five inches long and an inch in diameter and looked like a container for butane lighter fuel. He whispered to me to give him a hand up.
I locked my hands. He put one foot in the stirrups, hopped up, caught hold of the peephole with one hand. With the other hand he held the can to the opening. There was a hiss for ten seconds, a couple of muffled coughs, then silence.
He hopped down, shoved the can into a pocket. “We open that truck last,” he said. “Leave the doors closed for the next ten minutes, then open ’em and get out of the way. Let it air for another ten minutes before anybody goes in to unload.”
“What was it?”
“A kind of nerve gas. Lightning in closed quarters, but it disperses rapidly in open air.”
“I didn’t know you had anything like that.”
He grinned. “I’m full of surprises. That was nice shooting back there. I was afraid you might be rusty, but that was pinpoint plinking. How come the change in procedure?”
“I told him about their radio. “We’d better keep it moving,” he said. “They may have been scheduled to call in periodically. I love your man Sprague, incidentally.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I kept it vague. As far as he’s concerned, you’re in command. I’m an errand boy. So I didn’t want to get in your way.”
“Fine.”
We stopped at George’s car. He had the Thompson assembled on the back seat. He brought it out, and we went on to where the patriots were guarding the soldiers. I said, “Mr. Sprague, citizens. You’ve met my colleague, Mr. Gunderson?”
They had.
“Good. The operation’s running smoothly but time is short. Mr. Gunderson will take charge of our prisoners.” George waved the Thompson at them and marched them off to the rear. “They won’t be hurt,” I told Sprague. “They’re good American boys. It’s not their fault that they’re dupes, pawns in a leftist conspiracy. We’ll have to put them out of action for a few hours. We already used gas to knock out four guards. It will wear off before too long, but for the time being they’re dead to the world.”
Sprague grunted. His four helpers were all considerably younger than he, tall rangy men in their middle and late twenties. They wore dungarees and heavy soled boots and jackets with sheepskin linings. One of them went in for sideburns in a big way. Otherwise they were clean-cut types.
“Let’s get with it,” I said. “Time’s short.”
Sprague got into the cab of his van. He started the engine, put the huge truck in reverse and eased the upset convertible off the road and into a drift of snow. One of his helpers got into the lead army truck and maneuvered it carefully around, positioning it back to back with the van. He dropped both tailgates, and the rest of the men swung into action, lifting the heavy crates one by one, carrying them out of the truck and across the tailgate bridge and stacking them in the van. I looked at my watch. It was 7:06.
When I looked again it was 7:19 and I was opening the back of the Amarillo truck. I dropped the tailgate and got the hell out of the way, my hand over my face. There are dozens of different kinds of nerve gases and they all work in different ways. Some hit the respiratory system and kill you if you breathe them in. Others work through the skin; one drop on the back of the hand is enough to put you away. I didn’t know what kind this was or how it worked or how long it remained effective, so I got out of the way fast.
At 7:30 I climbed into the truck. The M-14s I had worried about lay on the floor. They had never been fired. The men who would have fired them were also on the floor of the truck, their arms and legs at grotesque angles. Their faces were blue, which meant that the gas had probably been one of the respiratory types. I couldn’t imagine anyone believing that they were only sleeping, so I carried them one at a time out of the truck and over to the side of the road. I stripped off their field jackets. They would never feel the cold, and Sprague’s men would need them later on.
I went back to the truck for the M-14s. I scooped up the four automatic rifles. The M-14 was a weapon I knew well, and for all the bitching we had done about it, there were plenty of combat situations where nothing else could come close. There was a newer weapon in use overseas now, and the scuttlebutt had it that they jammed in action. We had said the same thing about the M-14 at first, I remembered.