They swapped seats without missing a beat, and Melissa took over the controls. Determined to succeed, she frowned in concentration and bit into her bottom lip with her front teeth, struggling to mimic McCracken’s moves. Her hands squeezed into the T-bar, but it took all her strength to keep it steady. Her arms began to throb, then shake. She bit her lip harder.
The jeep’s driver noticed the oncoming tank and shot forward before the gunner was ready. The man was nearly thrown from the jeep and was actually the first to notice the tank wavering out of control toward a small storage shed.
“Watch out!” Blaine screamed, raising the shell he had pulled from the rack to the loader.
Melissa tried with all her strength to force the T-bar to the left. It barely budged, and the tank began to list even more severely to the right. Nonetheless, Blaine had managed to work the turret control himself and then waited for the rushing jeep to enter his crosshairs. He fired on timing this time.
The tank’s rightward heave threw him off a bit, and impact came several yards in front of the target vehicle. The percussion of the blast, though, was enough to strip the driver’s control away, and the jeep slammed into a tree, its occupants left to Nineteen’s commandos.
“Uh-oh,” Blaine muttered.
The right side of the tank tore the side of the storage shed away, and McCracken managed to close his hands over Melissa’s on the T-bar before the rest of the structure perished as well. There were just two jeeps left now, both toting machine guns. The open view plate provided no sight of them, but the sounds of gunfire crackling in the wind gave him the bearing he needed.
“They’re behind a row of low buildings over there to our right.” Blaine gestured, replacing Melissa in the pilot’s seat. “Heading toward the fields.”
“Where the residents would have fled to …”
“Let’s get this thing turned around.”
The grinding of the tank’s engine almost drowned out his words, as McCracken worked the controls hard. It responded sluggishly. McCracken spun it to the left and demanded of it all the power it would give.
“Come on,” he urged. Then to Melissa, “Grab another shell!”
The tank jolted forward as the gears finally caught. The engine was screaming, and the smell of oil was thick in the air. Blaine didn’t ease back, the speedometer nearing thirty and the engine warning gauge well into the red. The only way to reach the fields and cut off the jeeps’ attack angle in time was straight ahead.
Through the buildings.
“Hold on to something.”
But Melissa chambered the shell she was toting first, just as she had watched McCracken do.
Blaine never hesitated. The old tank crashed through a small dormitorylike building, chewing up wood and plaster en route and rolling over the debris it created. The last of the building’s remains were still being spit from its treads when one of the jeeps passed fifty yards before it. The jeep’s machine gun hammered away at those kibbutz residents who had abandoned the precarious cover provided by buildings for a dangerous dash through the fields. McCracken looked to his right and saw Melissa’s eyes pressed against the targeting sight.
“Turret, twenty degrees right — I mean left!” she called to him.
There was no time for Blaine to argue, nor was there time for them to switch places. She realized it and so did he. He worked the controls as she had instructed.
“Got it!” she said, feeling for the firing button.
She pressed it. The shell thumped out.
“Yes,” Melissa said softly. “Yes!”
The explosion rocked them. Before him, Blaine could see that the jeep was gone, in its place flaming charred metal with no real shape, scraps of bloodied clothing lifting off it in the breeze. Then black, rank smoke filled the inside of the tank’s cabin.
“We’ve lost the main gun,” Blaine realized, swiping the smoke away from his eyes.
“Still one more jeep to go.”
“Where? Can you see—”
“There! A hundred feet dead ahead.” She looked his way. “Running away.”
McCracken smiled and pushed the tank’s engine till the smell of oil was added to the other noxious vapors already filling the cab.
The jeep’s driver saw the onrushing tank and turned quickly to the right. The suddenness of the move caught the jeep’s tires in the mud, and the tank gained the last bit of ground it needed. The jeep’s occupants managed to lunge free to be rounded up by Nineteen’s commandos, just before the tank rolled up its side and compressed it to half its former size. Tires blew out in blasts as loud as the shell explosions had been.
The tank sputtered and died. Black oil smoke belched into the cab, then followed McCracken upward as he threw open the hatch and helped Melissa out ahead of himself.
Arms over each other’s shoulders, they approached Tovah, whose wheelchair was being pushed through the soft dirt to meet them. Her face was deathly pale. She was still trembling.
“Such a concerted attack,” the old woman muttered. “Never before, I tell you, never before …” She stopped, then started again. “The Tau …”
“A safe assumption,” Blaine acknowledged.
The old woman’s eyes sharpened with realization. “They came for you! They must have!”
“No, Tovah,” Blaine said, with an icy stare fixed upon her.
“Then who — Me? No, it can’t be, I tell you. It can’t!”
“This operation didn’t come up overnight. It’s been planned for some time, days at the very least. They couldn’t have known I would be here.”
“Why?” the old woman posed desperately.
“Because you’re the only one who can identify all the members of the original Tau, and one of them is behind the return. Now we’ve got to find him.”
“How?”
“Get me to a phone.”
Chapter 31
“Welcome to my home, warrior,” the Old One said proudly, as morning rose over the place she called No Town. “No phone, no electricity, no running water. This place has been unchanged since I grew up here when people thought the Civil War could never happen. Got us some generators now and propane tanks. That’s about it.”
Wareagle nodded knowingly. The woods to which he had retreated for a dozen years were equally infused with solitude and a sense of timelessness. Once situated in such places, it was difficult to leave.
No Town stood close enough to the shores of the bayou for its sounds and smells to linger forever in the air. They had walked over land the last eight miles of the way after the waterway they were traveling on became too shallow for their boat. After abandoning it at around one A.M., they had found shelter in a nearby abandoned barn. Heydan had made beds out of straw for herself and the Old One. Johnny rejected her offer to make one up for him and maintained a vigil long into the night. Whether he slept or not, she could not say; come morning he was the same stoic, tireless figure he had been the night before.
Catching first glimpse of No Town two hours after dawn was like taking a giant step back in time. Homes and small farms dotted the town’s outer perimeter. Drying laundry flapped in the breeze on clotheslines strung up behind the houses. Even at this early hour, plenty of people were out doing chores. Johnny could see a number of larger farms occupying the outlying land and figured, as the Old One had suggested, that almost all of No Town’s food supply was grown right here.
The buildings in the town center itself were formed of unfinished wood and clapboard. The signs above the few businesses were hand-painted or, in a few instances, simply scrawled. There was a general store, an outdoor produce market, a bakery that was already pumping the scent of fresh bread into the air, and a combination restaurant-bar-roominghouse that didn’t bother hanging a No Vacancy sign. Johnny could find no trace of a post office, but a small sign drawn in scratchy letters did advertise BANK. A sign carved in wood with a star above and below it revealed the sheriff’s office.