it was Armand Teal.
"Look!"
"I see him," Rubenstein murmured to O'Neal. "No— no— look!" Rubenstein turned his head right, toward O'Neal, then past him. Wildmen behind them, wildmen on either side, heavily armed with assault rifles, spears and machetes, some of the wildmen standing like toy figurines, almost frozen, their spears poised for flight.
And at their head—"Cole— you son of a bitch!"
"Mr. Rubenstein— you and Lieutenant O'Neal— lay down your arms," Cole shouted.
"Bullshit!"
"Lay down your arms and you'll be spared— at least for now. I came for the missiles— not to kill you!"
Rubenstein worked back the bolt of the Schmeisser, pushing O'Neal aside, on his knees still, the submachine gun snaking forward. He saw it— the shadowy form in flight as he fired, Cole dodging, two of the wildmen with him going down.
Something— the shadowy thing that flew— was in his line of vision, tearing into him now, dragging him back and off his knees. He felt himself spreadeagling, his subgun still firing, upward, his left arm unmoving. He stared at his arm— a massive stick seemed to be holding him to the ground.
"The spear— my God, Mr. Rubenstein!" It was O'Neal.
"Spear—" Rubenstein coughed the word, his subgun firing out. He tried to move his left arm, felt the tearing, the ripping at his flesh. "No!" He screamed the word.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Bill Mulliner squirmed on his knees beside the right front wheel of the van— it was his stomach. His father— the Russians had killed him— had called it "butterflies," and Bill Mulliner had them every time before a raid. As soon as the raid would start, the butterflies left. He wondered if it was fear of death— or fear of what came afterward. In church on Sundays they used to talk about the glory that awaited you when you had been born again in Jesus Christ, the glory of Heaven when you never wanted, never needed, but were filled with the happiness of being in God's presence. He wondered sometimes how you could be happy with the life gone from you. Or was the life something that wasn't physical at all?
He gripped his M-16 more tightly.
He looked to his left and up. Just inside the slid-open door of the van he could see the heels of Pete Critchfleld's shoes— Pete would be hunkered down low, waiting, his M-16 with the collapsible butt stock— admittedly homemade— ready to kill Russians.
Bill Mulliner looked to his far right and down. In the drainage ditch on the other side of the fence, already penetrated past Russian security, would be Curly and Jim, Jim with a Thompson submachine gun. He'd been a police officer before the Night of The War and the weapon had been legal and licensed.
The others— fifteen additional men, making nineteen all told, were scattered along the base perimeter. All of them were waiting for the signal.
The base had been, according to Pete Critchfield, a recording company warehouse. The security system in use when the facility had stored the latest country western albums was the security system in use today. Only the manpower composition and numbers had changed. Two older, retired policemen had been the security guards on the day shift— this according to Jim Hastings, the cop with the Thompson. Now, however, there were thirty-six Russian infantrymen with KGB
supervision who patrolled the facility's fenced perimeter with guard dogs.
It would be Jim who would give the signal— waiting until a truck marked as carrying explosives would enter the compound. Jim would throw a fragmentation grenade— between the nineteen men, there were only four grenades. The battle would start.
Bill Mulliner watched now, a motorcycle escort rolling along the street ahead of a U.S. two-and one-half-ton truck, the truck over-painted with a red star on the door side, he could see. The motorcyclists were talking to each other, one of them gesturing to an abandoned Mercedes parked half across the sidewalk. The second cyclist laughed. A joke about capitalist Americans, Bill guessed.
His palms sweated, as much as they had sweated when Jim Hastings and Curly had smuggled themselves into the compound inside a garbage truck, then jumped from the truck— he had seen one of them barely at the far corner of the warehouse.
The deuce-and-half made a sharp, fast right— Bill Mulliner thought he would never drive that way carrying explosives— and turned into the driveway leading into the warehouse area, stopping in front of the fence, the guards there approaching the fence and opening it. The motorcyclists started through, the truck's transmission grinding audibly, black smoke belching from the muffler, the truck beginning to lumber forward.
Automatically, Bill Mulliner moved his selector from safe to full auto, then glanced to his right. He could see Jim Hastings starting to get up in the ditch, his right arm hauling back, then snapping half-forward. There was a small dark object— Bill watched it fascinated as it arced toward the truck through the late morning air.
The grenade fell— he could hear the noise it made hitting the concrete. It rolled, and he watched it, waiting for it to explode. Waiting.
The explosions were something that made his ears ring and his head ache, the first tiny explosion of the grenade swallowed by the roar and blast of the truck itself, a black and orange fireball belching skyward. He started to run from behind the van, the heat of the fireball searingly hot against his face as a wind seemed to generate from the fireball above and surrounding the explosives truck.
He was at the main gates— what was left of them, jumping from a fallen motorcycle, loosing a three-round burst from his M-16 into the already half dead cycle rider, the man's clothes and flesh burning as he rolled, screaming, on the ground. The tarred surface under Bill's feet stuck to his shoes, the tar melting from the heat of the fireball as he ran. He glanced behind him once—
he could see Pete Critchfield coming with the van, the van's front end specially reinforced, the van jumping the curb, across the sidewalk now and ramming through the chain link fence, a seven-foot-wide section of the fencing pulling away from the support posts— these bent almost in half— and stuck to the reinforced bumper, pushing ahead of the van, sparks flying from the fencing as it swept the concrete.
Bill kept running, seeing a sentry coming toward him, the sentry's guard dog bounding ahead. Bill pumped the M-16's trigger, the dog still coming. He pumped the trigger again, the dog going down. The sentry still firing, his AK47 hammering slugs into the warehouse wall beside which Bill ran, the concrete block powdering, chips of the concrete and a spray of fine dust powdering Bill's face.
Bill fired the M-16, hearing the heavier rattle of the Thompson submachine gun, seeing Jim Hastings running to intersect him. The Soviet guard went down.
Bill ran forward, jumping the dead guard, firing his M-16, two guards coming around the far corner of the warehouse wall, one guard going down, a long burst of automatic weapons fire hammering into the wall again, the second guard tucking back. Bill heard the scraping of the chain link fence section, the roar of the van's eight-cylinder engine, saw the blur of grayish white as the van cut past him and toward the corner of the building. There was a scream, the sound of tires screeching and a power steering unit being pushed too hard, then the blur of gray-white again, the van backing up. The fence was still stuck to the bumper, and hanging from it now was a body— the Soviet trooper, his hands flailing, his legs twisted at odd angles.
Jim Hastings— less than a yard from Bill now, raised his Thompson to his shoulder, firing a short burst, the Soviet guard's body stopping its thrashing— he was dead.
There was assault rifle fire all around him now as he reached the corner of the warehouse, the van already by the loading dock, some of the Resistance fighters there too, M-16s, pistols, riot shotguns— gunfire.