“Harland, I think you should see this,” Percy said, motioning his friend toward the window.
In the parking area of the coop and along the tracks, the big earthmovers were scrapping the earth clean and piling up long windrows of volcanic ash eight and ten feet high. The machines were building banks on both sides of the railroad track. Harland realized immediately what was unfolding.
“They’re building a blind, a screen. Do you see that, Percy?”
Percy nodded.
“They must have taken me seriously, you know, about outflanking them.”
“What do you think they’ll do when they get that done?”
“I think they’re fixing to try to restore that rail.”
“It’s going to be dark in an hour. You think they’ll try the rail tonight?”
Harland stood pondering Percy’s question, but he was distracted. His mind was racing, trying to come up with a strategy that would keep the train frozen in its tracks. Rather than rely on the simple bluff that Harland had revealed to Jim Bottomly, he now felt the two of them needed to put some teeth into the ruse.
“I’ve got an idea, Percy.”
“What’s that?” said the older man, now sitting against the wall with a coat over his legs to keep warm.
“Can you stay here and cover me?”
“Cover you? Where are you going?”
“Once it gets dark, we won’t be able to see too good what’s going on down below. They’ll probably use the cover of darkness to work on the rail. Don’t you say?”
“Yeah, that’s a good bet.”
“I’m thinking, I’ll drop down and find a place where I’ve got a shot at the tracks. If you hear me fire a shot, you fire a shot. That will make them think that what I told Jim was the real thing, that there are hostiles in hiding around the coop.”
“You going to shoot somebody, Harland?” asked Percy with a look of alarm on his face.
“All we want to do is get them the hell out of here, go someplace else, that’s all. If we make it uncomfortable enough for them, maybe they’ll move out.”
Percy agreed to Harland’s Spartan plan and made preparations by the window for an all-night vigil. Harland shouldered his rifle and left the headhouse as darkness seeped into the structure.
Harland retreated into the bowels of the towers, slipping into the night and making the long trek to the far end of the silo cluster. He ran behind them and came out to the far corner by the tracks. Now the train was many hundreds of feet away and barely visible. Before him the rail line was clear but invisible beneath the ash.
Harland crouched down, inched across the railbed and climbed the crumbling slope of a great mound of ash. At the top, he stretched out, perched an elbow atop his pack and sighted down his rifle toward the train. He’d have a shot, if need be, although he could barely make out details in the dark.
The evening temperatures dropped quickly and fell well below freezing. Harland shivered but kept his watch. In the headhouse, Percy pulled on a heavily insulated snowmobile suit, a hat and gloves.
Hours after sundown, the first sounds of activity swept by on the cold prairie breeze. A grunt fired up one of the pieces of heavy equipment. Others roared to life. Harland’s heart rate soared. Maybe the Guard was going to move out of Sweetly after all. Straining to see, he noticed a big mechanical form move and disappear behind the edge of the coop office. Suddenly it appeared again, running down along one of the tall ash windrows in the direction where Harland was posted. When the machine cleared the end of the windrow, it turned abruptly and came to a halt. The driver left the unit where it stood.
“Shit!” Harland swore to himself. The machine blocked his view completely. He decided to leave his perch and move forward. The farmer scrambled to his feet and, as he took his first steps, heard the clamor of voices, the clank of tools, and the ring of metal on metal. Just as he expected, a Guard crew was moving up the tracks with gear to mend the missing rail.
The piled ash was unstable, like sand in a beach dune beneath the farmer’s feet. Harland stumbled, regained his feet and stumbled some more. More noises tumbled down the tracks, the rap of heavy hammers and the groan of metal, too. The farmer was alarmed now. He needed to do something.
Harland sank to his knees in the ash, steadied himself and raised the rifle to his chin. Eye sighting along the barrel, he decided to aim at the cab of the big bucket loader and blow out the glass. That would get someone’s attention. If Percy answered with a shot, then the Guard would know they had an enemy force to contend with.
Harland took a deep breath and held it. He closed his eyes and pulled back on his trigger finger. A flash of light and a loud report sent the bullet hurtling down the tracks. Instantly the glass in the cab disintegrated and rained atomized splinters of glitter into the night.
There was a second of frozen silence, pure nothingness. The next moment the atmosphere roared with automatic weapon fire. Percy had not wavered from his post. He would not disappoint. When he heard Harland’s rifle shot, he leaped from behind the wall into the window frame. Bullets cascaded into space, the shots echoing loudly in the headhouse superstructure.
Commander Hampstead had spent the evening calculating, just as Harland had. All he needed, he decided, was one well-placed projectile from one grenade launcher. The trajectory had to be steep so that once the explosive device detonated in the headhouse it would do so at the very end of the structure. That would silence the antagonists there but leave the critical equipment in the headhouse intact so the train could be loaded.
The officer had stationed a single man with a shoulder-held launcher at the southwest corner of the coop office. The sharpshooter had been given a simple order. Should there be any gunfire from above, he was to step into the clear, take aim at the headhouse window on high and fire. Even if the launched grenade missed the opening, it would surely slam into the eaves of the building and explode. The job would be done.
When Harland fired the first shot, several armed Guard members ran forward to take positions at the crippled bucket loader. The shot was the cue for the grenade launcher specialist to react. As the soldier stepped out of the building’s shadow, he could see gun barrel flashes as the rifleman in the headhouse unloaded a volley of bullets into the darkness.
Percy ducked away from the window. He did not see a flash of propellant from the lot below as a grenade swept aloft. At the periphery of his vision, Harland sensed a light trail streak toward the heavens.
The night ripped open and let the sun out. A pulse of incandescence lit up the environment as if an emergency rocket had been launched. In the light pulse, fragments of structure somersaulted away into the darkness. The concussive sound wave of the explosion slammed down on everyone below.
The man who fired the grenade knew in a moment he had hit his mark. Hampstead managed a little nod as the initial flash began to fade.
In the headhouse, white hot metal fragments sliced into steel and wood and the heavy coating of ultra dry grain dust that infested every nook and cranny of the structure. The hot fragments in the dust were as a spark to a munitions dump.
An unholy light swallowed the dying strobe of the grenade whole. The streets of Sweetly, South Dakota flared bright as midday. The little 40mm grenade unleashed a monster. The headhouse roof peeled up and disappeared into the night sky. Panels of corrugated steel from the walls scissored through the air, some traveling a thousand of feet.
The superstructure buckled and tons of heavy machinery, suspended in the disintegrating headhouse, fell, sheering away the spidery run of grain distribution tubes running to each of the coop silos. The falling equipment slammed into the elevator tower roof caps and breached several, and white heat raced into the interiors of the half empty spaces.