Paz wasn’t about to let a fourth mishap ruin this command.
McCluskey spoke as Blaine inspected the crates full of grenades and Laws rockets Sheriff Junk had retrieved from their hiding place.
“Way I see it, friend,” explained Mayor McCluskey, “the only chance we got of disablin’ that monster gun is to borrow some of the explosives those bastards got stored in town. Means we gotta launch a raid. Might as well save the townspeople while we’re at it.”
Blaine nodded. “Your strategy’s not far off. We’ve got to knock the gun out all right, but we won’t stand a chance of even getting close until we eliminate Paz’s troops. Not that the three of us have a prayer of accomplishing that by ourselves….”
“Don’t like your attitude,” snapped Junk.
“You didn’t let me finish. There’s a whole church full of reinforcements waiting for us — if we can free them. Way you boys have described it, there’s plenty of people in your town who’ll know what to do if given the opportunity.”
“And the rest might not have until ten days back.”
“Especially since a few leaders, example setters, will be all it takes,” Blaine explained. “That’s what subversive activities are all about to an extent: making people rise up and be noticed themselves.”
Dog-ear almost laughed. “So we become the subversives in our own town.”
“I’ve been all over the world,” Blaine told him. “It’s not as strange as it seems.”
“So all we need now is a plan,” advanced Heep.
“The progression’s simple,” Blaine told him. “We take the town back first and then use whatever we can to blow the fuck out of that generator gun.” He checked his watch. “A lot to accomplish in just under ninety minutes.”
“Three of us ought to give ‘em a run for their money.”
“I’m starting to think we just might, Sheriff. Let me lay it out for the two of you….”
Blaine explained the details of the plan to them as quickly and simply as he could. The operation had several independent components, each of which must be successful if all were to work. McCracken’s job was to infiltrate the town and free the residents trapped in the church, so that they might join the battle. To accomplish this, he would need plenty of distraction and cover in the form of grenades and Laws rockets. This task was given to Sheriff Junk, whose specialty was munitions. First, he would use grenades on the soldiers in the railroad yard. Then he would fire his Laws rockets down into the town, hoping to create total havoc. He would then use the rest of his armaments to disable the still intact western battery of guns. With those still functional, they stood no chance of reaching the gulley, no matter what else transpired.
Similarly, Blaine could not let the fifteen soldiers remain on the mountainside. Not only could they provide a strong defense of the stronghold from that position, but they also could rush back into the town to lend support from the rear. The mayor, a crack shot, would come in here. As soon as Junk began hurling his grenades, McCluskey would begin picking off the soldiers guarding the gulley. He would remain up there to shoot any more of the soldiers who rushed to the gulley’s defense after the battle began. Junk, meanwhile, would join McCracken in the town center, once his rockets were expended, to take charge of the eager mob freed from the church.
McCracken calculated that little more than an hour remained for them to accomplish their plan before the generator gun fired its beam of death. The mayor and sheriff of Pamosa Springs nodded their understanding.
There were fifty-four minutes left by the time Blaine worked his way around to the other side of town. He had circled to better his position in relation to the church. He expected to find a rear entrance, guarded but not nearly as well fortified as the front.
The best he could do for proximity was fifty yards, his cover being a doghouse in somebody’s front yard, which, thankfully, was empty.
The guards posted around the church were superfluous when measured against the huge mounds of C-4 plastic explosives that had been packed close enough to the windows for all to see. Clearly if his plan was to be successful the explosives had to be disabled. Cutting the fuse line at any point would do the job since a continuous current was required to set this type of plastique off.
Blaine checked his watch. It was 3:26. In four minutes Dog-ear would begin shooting and Sheriff Junk Heep would start hurling his grenades. The rest would be left to him. He had anticipated the timing up to this point and took that as a good omen.
Omens … Ah, to have Johnny Wareagle and a team of Indian warriors to help him now….
He was glad the timing provided him only a few minutes to be alone with his thoughts. He had spent so many years living with violence that he believed he had become inured to it. He could excuse such acceptance in himself because he realized his actions were necessary. But now he was using innocent people, and was willing to sacrifice their lives.
To rid the world of senseless killing, he had become a killer. The knowledge chilled him. But in this case, he told himself, the only hope the people had was to fight back themselves. In the complex code of ethics he lived with and so often had nearly died with, nothing was clear-cut; there was plenty of gray but almost no black and white. And now he was having trouble with the gray.
He could see the whole world in Pamosa Springs. He would save Pamosa Springs.
His watch moved to 3:30.
Dog-ear and Sheriff Junk had taken cover within sight of each other to ensure their assaults would begin simultaneously. Heep had left all his rockets and most of his grenades in the brush twenty yards back because there was no sense in lugging them with him, and his damn creaky joints forced him to rest every other yard, or so it seemed. He’d stuffed his pockets and shirt full of grenades to hurl, even slid one into his mouth and dangled another from the dogtags he had never shed since Korea, jingling in soft counterpoint to the creaking.
A simple nod from Dog-ear was all it took for him to yank the pins out of his first pair of grenades. They were in the air an instant before McCluskey began picking off the soldiers watching over the gulley and the promised death it contained.
Lyman Scott was reaching for the phone even before Sergeant Major Cleb Turner was finished relating the story passed to him by Johnny Wareagle.
“Get me NASA, Ben,” he said nervously into the receiver. “Now!”
Turner stopped. The President eyed him.
“I’m not sure what to make of what you said, Sergeant, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to check it out. An Indian named Warbird, you say….”
“Wareagle, sir.”
NASA came on the line.
The President knew there was trouble as soon as NASA failed to report back that they had carried out his orders. Four minutes passed before his phone rang again.
“Sir,” the NASA mission chief of the satellite launch said at last, “we have lost control of the satellite.”
“I didn’t tell you to control it, son,” the President snapped. “I told you to blow it up.”
“Yes, sir, I’m aware of that, but the problem’s a bit more complicated. The satellite isn’t responding to any of our commands, including self-destruct.”
“Then just abort, damnit, abort!”
“We tried, sir. No response on that one either.”