The man smiled; he had to smile.
The notion that Gretchen Betancourt, the brilliant, driven, beautiful — even just out of hospital wearing a pirate’s eye patch, sitting in a wheelchair with a leg in plaster she was completely beautiful — force of nature who had addled Dan’s mind from the moment he first made eye contact with her across a crowded garden party in Quincy the summer before the war, was ever going to be any man’s trophy wife was so implausible that he had to smile!
“What?” Gretchen demanded, perplexed. A lot of things about Dan Brenckmann perplexed her which was odd because most men were open books to her.
“Nothing,” he chortled uneasily which further vexed her.
“Anyway, I told Joseph that the engagement was off,” Gretchen announced, her tone quietening.
“Okay…”
“He wanted to get married before I was on my feet again. Probably, because that would have made him look even better. The van Strattens like to pretend they’re the Saints of Wall Street.”
Dan did not trust himself to speak.
“I was never his type even before,” Gretchen hesitated, “this,” she waved with her free left hand in a strange throwing away gesture.
“This?”
“I’m a mess and I will be for a long time.”
“But not forever,” he pointed out. “You got blown up, had half the Main State Department Building fall on you and then some scrum bag rebel shot you in the back,” Dan continued wryly.
“Twice,” Gretchen agreed, forming a very un-Gretchen like coyly girlish smile on her lips for a split second.
“Twice,” he agreed.
“You’re going to tell me things could be worse next?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’d hate for you to think I was that predictable.”
“But you are,” Gretchen informed him; but not in a bad way. “In some things, leastways.”
“Name one?” Dan challenged her, loving it that she was so playful. Very nearly flirting, in fact. Loving it that despite everything she had been through she was still Gretchen.
“However badly I treat you, you always come back for more?”
Dan made every pretence of giving this his weightiest consideration, furrowing his brow as if he was struggling to unravel some impenetrable metaphysical conundrum which had thus far defeated the minds of the greatest thinkers of past ages.
“Yes,” he confessed earnestly, “I think that would be about right.”
Chapter 61
Michael Cheney watched the two columns of black cars crawling across the ruined cityscape in the pre-dawn twilight. He was lying on his belly with the binoculars jammed to his face. There was no doubt that the columns, with no vehicle showing lights, were cautiously converging on the deserted Cheney family compound approximately two miles from where he had laid up overnight. He had sent the women and girls to the old shack in the swamps down the coast; they would be safe there or at least as safe as anybody was in this Godless world.
Dwight Christie had walked into the camp out of the darkness around midnight demanding to speak to his father. Pa and Isaac were long gone and the stranger had greeted this news with scarcely veiled contempt. In his Pa’s absence the women and the girls had come out of their sleeping quarters and started asking questions; none of them were afraid of Mickey so there was nothing he could do to stop them talking to Christie.
‘The FBI and the Texas Rangers will be here in a couple of hours. The women will be safe but you have to go, Mickey. NOW!’
The women had gone away in two of the cars while Mickey had holed up at a safe distance and waited.
Christie had ignored him when he had asked how he knew the government men were coming and the anger still burned hot. Distantly, a flare popped high in the grey sky illuminating the heart of the urban wilderness.
There were the flashes of explosions, the delayed muffled booms of the detonations rumbling through the gloom like faraway thunder. It was a little hazy, the pre-dawn breeze often stirred up dust and grit, and he could not be sure if he was actually seeing the muzzle flashes of several automatic weapons.
Had Christie betrayed them?
The former G-man had been as angry as Hell over that thing in Dallas with that little guy Oswald. Oswald has been supposed to shoot out the tyres of the Presidential limousine, not try to put a round through the window. They knew the windows were over an inch of armoured, multiple-layered laminated glass; nothing short of an artillery round or a shaped charge was going to penetrate that sort of protection and an ex-Marine like Oswald ought to have known that. If the little prick had done was he was supposed to do the President’s car would have been slowed down enough for the truck the other side of the bridge to block it off or ram it. Five tons of high explosives surrounded by two hundred gallons of kerosene might actually have destroyed the President’s car. But that idiot Oswald had taken a couple of aimed shots at the back windows of the limousine even though Pa had told him what would happen if he disobeyed his orders.
That was the trouble with traitors like Oswald.
Any rational country would have put a turncoat like Oswald straight into the electric chair the moment he stepped back onto the hallowed soil of America after he had defected to the Soviets. People like him did not suddenly turn back into good Americans just because life in the Russia was not everything he had hoped it would be. And as for allowing him to bring his Commie wife back with him. Well, sometimes Mickey despaired of the ruling class!
Why would Christie warn him if he had been the one who had sold the family out to the FBI?
That made no sense at all.
It was much more likely that Pa had got careless.
They had a right to their faith but there was a time for preaching and there was a time for fighting, and if it came to it, killing. Mixing the two things together was a bad idea.
Christie had wanted to know where Pa and Isaac had gone with the long guns; even if he had known Mickey would not have told him. Christie was not family and he did not share the faith, he was on a different mission. Mickey would pray for his eternal soul; otherwise, he was done with the onetime FBI special agent.
Christie had disrespected him in front of the women folk.
Uttered un-Christian blasphemous oaths taking Pa’s name in vain.
He had asked if any of the women wanted to ‘leave the family’ and come with him!
The harlot Sarah Jane would have gone with him if Mickey had not promised her that her eternal soul would burn in Hell.
In the distance the family compound was on fire.
Sometime soon Pa’s Greek fire ‘sump’ would light off.
Pa had always said that if anybody ever tried to take him alive he would ‘rain flames upon their cursed heads’. He had primed the booby trap before he took Isaac away; he always primed the ‘sump’ when he departed the compound for an ‘action’.
Mickey was a little surprised the ‘sump’ had not exploded yet.
Pa called the ‘sump’ a ‘fuel-air bomb’ like the ones the Militias had used at the beginning of the Washington uprising. Explosives surrounded by gasoline, preferably fixed like ‘Napalm’ so when the device went off it did not just generate a huge explosion and over-blast shockwave but everything and everybody within hundreds of yards was drenched with sticky, oily impossible to beat out ‘Greek fire’ that would burn a man’s flesh down to the bone in seconds.
From the north he detected the thrumming of rotor blades.