“Silencers?” Cal asked.
Mackinnon spread his arms wide and said, “But of course.”
Cal grumped a little more then said, “Sounds okay, Mr. Hansen, but I think we better test a few of these things before we turn any money over.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Mackinnon answered. “I’ll need to show you how some of this stuff works, anyway.”
He stepped around to the back of the truck and started to lift the door. Cal followed him and looked inside at the crates. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and held it out to Mackinnon.
“No thanks,” Mackinnon said. “I’m trying to quit.” He hopped into the truck and said, “Cal, you want to send some of your men over here to unload this stuff?”
Cal waved the gang over and set them to work. He asked Hansen, “What about the prisoners?”
Carter stepped in. “I’ll deal with the prisoners.”
“Yes, sir.” That was fine with Cal. He was far more interested in the weapons Mackinnon had brought, and there was plenty of time to have some fun with that one-armed wise guy and that smart-ass Carey. With any luck they might break Harley’s three-week record. So let them wait.
“So far we’re winning,” Graham repeated to Neal. “We kept them talking for a half hour and now we’ve caught a break with this arms shipment arriving. With any luck they’ll be busy playing with their new toys for a while, which means more time for Ed to wake up and come get us out of here.”
“I wish he’d hurry,” Neal answered. He didn’t think Graham could survive much longer, not with the cold, the pain, and the shock. “You were great, Dad.”
“Hell with these guys,” answered Graham. “We’re not dead yet.” But we’re going to be, son, he thought. And the only thing I can do for you now is to try to keep the terror out of your mind. Stop you from imagining what the pain is going to be like. “Have you started working on your story yet?” Graham asked.
“Not really.”
“Get on it,” Graham snapped. “Think up layers on top of layers.”
“You got it.” I know what you’re trying to do, Dad, but I’ll play along. It gives us something to do, and I think we’re in for a long wait.
Then Carter and Randy came back in.
“Where’s Dad?” Shelly asked her mother.
They were standing at the kitchen counter. Karen sat at the table, peeling potatoes.
“On the roof,” Peggy answered.
“Again?” Shelly laughed. “Who does he think he is, Santa Claus?”
“Honey, your father has always thought he was Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Peter Pan all rolled up into one. He’s still working on this big surprise of his.”
Karen asked, “When do we get to see it?”
“Tonight, he says.”
Shelly rolled her eyes dramatically and said, “It’s going to be a long afternoon.”
Up on the roof, Steve held the last of the wires down with one hand and pounded the U-nail down with the other. He wanted to finish up before the storm came in and made him stop.
He looked up to check out the clouds again. Yep, he thought, looks like we’re going to have a white Hanukkah.
Then he heard the far-off crackle of rifle fire coming from the Hansen place. Knock yourselves out, boys, he thought. Because I’m going to knock you out tonight.
Shoshoko heard the gunfire too. He looked up from the rabbit he was skinning and listened closely. The sound was coming from the valley, close to the base of the mountain. But what could they be shooting at, using so many bullets? Or was it just the white man’s silly habit of constantly testing his aim? A wasteful, childish game, Shoshoko thought.
Yet from his dream, he knew that the white men would be coming up the mountain and that the bullets would be for him. He went back to skinning the rabbit. They needed the meat, and it was not his fate to die in the daylight. The white men would not come until the night.
Cal could tell that the constant popping sound of the boys trying out the sample M-16s was annoying Mackinnon. The man didn’t like working with explosives anyway; his fingers looked numb with cold, and he was sweating profusely even though he was lying in the snow. But the arms dealer sure as hell knew what he was doing, Cal could tell that. He watched as Mackinnon finished arming the mine, then brushed some snow over the top of the metal disc that looked like a large dinner plate.
“Mark this down as ‘AV, RC 3,’” he told Cal, who stood above him making sketches in a notepad.
You don’t have to tell me, Cal thought. It was critical to record the location and type of the mines. This one was “antivehicle, radio-controlled number three,” the last of the mines they’d planted on the road. They’d put one right on the turnoff from the main road, another one about halfway down, and this last one right under the compound gate itself; if anything ever managed to ram the gate in, they would blow the hell out of it right there.
They’d laid a dozen ‘AP, CD’-antipersonnel, contact-detonated-mines in an irregular pattern around the outside of the compound. These were the sweet little puppies that exploded as you stepped off them, giving you the cheerful choice of standing perfectly still and getting shot or hitting the dirt with whatever was left of you after the mine blew up underneath you. They also planted twenty-four dummy mines. The only way you could tell they were duds was by stepping off them and seeing whether you were alive or a memory.
The idea was to force any attack into narrow unmined lanes that you had covered with presighted rifle fire. This would equalize the firepower of your small force against your enemy’s larger one. With discipline and training, one good man with an Ml 6 could take care of his own lane while a centrally located heavy machine gun could sweep the entire field of fire. Your best marksmen stayed up in the towers with their sniper rifles and picked off the enemy’s leaders. A good fire team could turn an enemy attack into a debacle in moments. It would take trust, of course. Every man was literally betting his life that every other man was doing his own job. And Cal was going to make goddamn sure that was the case.
“Let’s go up the tower and label the switches,” Mackinnon said. “Then let’s call it a day. I’m beat.”
They’d put in a full one. They’d unpacked the crates of rifles and test-fired half a dozen of them. Then Cal had set the men to assembling and cleaning the rest and they hiked down near the base of the mountain, set up some targets, and started sighting them in. Then Mackinnon took Cal and Randy and talked them through the intricacies of the Schmidt Rubin 31/55 sniper rifle, a Swiss beauty with a bipod stand, capable of delivering a 190-grain bullet with great accuracy at long range. Then he and Cal started the long, sweaty work of laying the mines.
Now they walked back into the compound. The late afternoon sky had turned a sullen, threatening gray.
“Why don’t we put the switch box in the southeast tower?” Cal asked. “That gives us the best view of the terrain.”
“We can put a box in each tower and one in the bunker, if you want. It’s a simple matter of override switches. That way you don’t have to worry about being in one particular place to detonate the mines.”
“Sounds good to me,” Cal said. He was impressed. Mackinnon had put some thought into this deal.
So Mackinnon charged four battery-run toggle-switch boxes and set the frequencies. They taped one into each guard tower and another one into the main bunker room. He showed Cal which switch detonated which mine. By the time he was finished it was dark out.
“Now you can blow the hell out of any ZOG bastard who tries to come in here,” Mackinnon said.
“That’s good,” Cal answered. “We might be needing to any time now.”
Mackinnon’s eyes went flat and cold. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, we have a couple of prisoners who…”
Cal saw Mackinnon’s jaw drop in disbelief and his face flush with anger.