They topped a rise, and there was another roadblock before them.
Mitchell saw the lead vehicle start down the evening-shadowed slot of the highway cutting. It was a van, crowded with people, and there were pickups and sedans behind it. He swallowed as he counted the odds, but he felt strangely disinclined to run from the rabble sweeping towards him.
"All right, boys," he said calmly, "spread out and get under cover."
The others obeyed with alacrity, and he noticed that the senior trooper carried an M16-the old A1 model rather than the A2 with its limitation to three-shot bursts-not a shotgun.
"Let 'em come in a little closer," Mitchell told himself softly. "Just a little closer."
The Troll fed the humans' frenzy, fanning it to furnace heat with his own rage. The surging, hating creatures charging down on the roadblock weren't a mob; they were no longer even human. They were extensions of the Troll, his weapon, vessels of his hunger, and they swept forward snarling.
"Now!" Mitchell shouted, and triggered his first round into the van. He heard Farmer's shotgun echoing his own, smelled the gunsmoke, and saw shattered safety glass sparkle through the sunset light like bloody rock salt. The corporal was firing semi-auto, deliberately, picking his targets, and the windshield of the pickup behind the van exploded. Klansmen and Nazis boiled out, and Mitchell stroked the slide with deadly smooth speed. Screams and shrieks answered as the Troll's minions were cut down by the merciless fire, and the M16 went to full auto. Writhing bodies and dead men littered the asphalt while others scrambled as far as the side of the cutting before they were shot down, and others crouched behind their vehicles, returning fire.
The Troll writhed in fury as his column recoiled. They were only humans, but they were his. Their pain and death was sweet, but not as sweet as the taste of their killing. He lashed them with his hate, whipping them forward.
"They're coming over us, Dispatch!" Mitchell yelled into his radio. "Where the fuck is the Guard?!" His cruiser sat flat on its rims, riddled with fire, and the State Patrol car belched inky-black smoke and flame. One trooper was dead, but the corporal was bellied down in a culvert, and his M16's flash suppressor glowed incandescent as it spewed fire into the mob.
"Pull back, Four-Two!" the dispatcher was shouting.
"How?" Mitchell laughed into the mike hanging from the driver's window as he fed fresh cartridges into his smoking shotgun.
"Help's on the way, Four-Two. Hang on!"
"Gotta go, Dispatch," Mitchell said, and rolled under the car beside Farmer, shooting into the gathering darkness.
When the National Guard M113s finally arrived, their crews counted forty-one dead and nineteen wounded in front of the burned out roadblock and found deputies Mitchell and Farmer lying side by side. Mitchell clutched an empty service pistol, and Farmer's empty shotgun, the butt smeared with the blood and hair of his enemies, was still in his hands.
Aston and Abernathy watched Lieutenant Colonel Clara Dickle, CO of Marine Air Group 200, squint at the map and calculate distances. She and her ops officer were engaged in a low-voiced, arcane conversation, but if they were uneasy about flying into the Appalachians in total darkness, they hid it well.
Abernathy, on the other hand, was visibly unhappy, and Aston didn't blame him. They had no clear idea of enemy numbers or weapons. All they knew was that Ludmilla thought their target looked like a typical Kanga-style encampment. If she was right, they could make certain assumptions; if she was wrong, those assumptions might prove fatal.
Abernathy's staff was as large as that of most battalions, and they'd known all along that planning time would be minimal, but they hadn't counted on anything quite like this. They were rising to the occasion, but no one knew better than they how problematical their ops plan might prove.
"All right, Admiral," Dickle said finally, "we make it forty-five minutes, give or take. I'll have that refined before takeoff." She paused and frowned, rubbing the map with a fingertip. "What worries me most, Sir, is where we'll put you down."
"I know." Aston thumbed through the map sheets for a large-scale map of Sugarloaf Mountain. "This looks like the best LZ we've got, Colonel," he said, and Dickle peered dubiously at the location. It was on the outer face of the valley's western wall, and the contour lines were discouraging.
"I know you can't set down," Aston said, "but this is a burn-off from last summer-nothing but a little scrub that's come back in. We can deplane from a hover, then go in on foot."
"What about the Herky-birds, Sir? We can't drop vehicles in there."
"We couldn't use them if you did, Colonel. Instead, I want them here." He tapped the junction of the valley road and NC 212. "It'll be a bitch to get them in, I know, but it's as close as you're going to make it."
"They'll be five klicks out, Sir, and that's line-of-flight, not ground movement," Dickle pointed out.
"Agreed. That's why I want you to be as noisy as you can about dropping them in. Flares, landing lights, the whole nine yards. They won't be a lot of use in the actual assault, but I want them dropped before the infantry comes in on the slope. With a little luck, they'll distract the bad guys from our LZ."
"I see." Dickle frowned some more, then nodded. "We can do it. I just wish we could put you closer to the objective, Sir." The projected landing zone was over a thousand straight-line yards from the nearest end of the horseshoe of enemy positions, and Dickle knew what was going on. She knew how critical seconds could be, and too much of that heavily overgrown thousand yards was up and down.
"Count your blessings, Colonel." Aston smiled grimly. "There's no telling what kind of SAMs they've got in there. And at least-"
He was interrupted by a quiet knock on the door and looked up as Abernathy's commo officer entered.
"Sir, Governor Farnam's just changed his mind about the Eighty-Second," the lieutenant reported. "It sounds like things are getting out of hand in the target area."
"Damn," Aston said softly.
"All right, people." Major Abernathy stood facing his officers and senior NCOs. "I know you've all heard rumors about what's happening in the target area. I'm here to tell you they're true. The last reports say there's heavy fighting along the northern and northwestern edges of Asheville. The Guard is doing its best, but they're not up against normal rioters. We, of course, know why that is."
He paused, watching the outrage in their eyes. It was strange, he thought, how professional American military men reacted to the notion that any hostile force might ever touch American soil. He often thought it was that belief in the inviolability of North America which set the US military apart from its allies. It gave them a certain naivete and parochialism, but also a sort of inner strength. Confidence. Perhaps even arrogance. Whatever it was, the notion that an invader was responsible for death and destruction in an American city brought it to fiery life, filling his men with pressure, the physical need to attack.
"Now for the good news," he continued calmly. "We believe we have satellite confirmation of Grendel's location." A ripple of almost-motion went through his listeners. "We are going in tonight, gentlemen."
A barely audible growl of approval arose, and Abernathy smiled thinly.
"We've put together an ops plan. I stress at this time that our information is fragmentary, and I have no doubt Murphy will appear on schedule." Someone chuckled, and the major grinned. "But we're Marines, gentlemen. When it hits the fan, we'll do what we've always done: adapt, improvise, and overcome." He paused for a moment, then nodded. "Captain Ross will continue the background brief and outline the ops plan."