War Weapons (20 page)

She couldn’t hear and wrinkled up her face to show it, but Little Bear had, and he said to her in exactly the same phrasing
Stone had used, “He wants to know, what the hell is that?”

“It’s an—MTO, a missile trajectory overrider,” she said, stuttering nervously, hardly able to work the thing and hang on to
her minute amount of space next to the Cheyenne at the same time.

“She says it’s a missile something overrider,” Little Bear shouted back at Stone with something approaching a grin on his
usually inscrutable face. “Just what we need.”

“What the hell is a missile overrider?” Stone screamed back, steering a little closer to the other vehicle until they were
tearing along side by side near the back of the pack of the all-terrains but a good fifty yards ahead of the two tanks.

“He says, what the hell is a missile overrider?” Little Bear yelled at the woman, though she sat only inches away.

“It overrides missile commands,” she answered, hitting at the machine as she tried to make it respond to her commands, which
up until then it hadn’t been doing. “It’s experimental,” she went on. The Indian looked at her as if she were slightly mad.
“I can’t promise it will work—or even that I can make it work. But if I can, then it could…” She trailed off into mumbles
as she started working at the complex-looking portable device again, trying to get the right sequences of commands to make
it operational.

“She says…” Little Bear started to yell, turning to Stone. “Oh shit, I don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about,” the
Cheyenne said, waving his hand at her as if she were perhaps slightly cracked. “I don’t think she knows, either,” he added,
cupping one hand over his mouth so she couldn’t hear. Which she didn’t, but it hardly mattered, since she knew, as none of
them did, that what she was doing would determine whether or not they lived beyond the next ten minutes.

It didn’t even take that long for the moment of truth to arrive. Excaliber was the first to sense it. Stone felt the animal
jump around on the seat beside him. Then its paws were up on his shoulder so that it was standing almost straight up on its
hind legs, its muzzle pointing up at the sky in a hunting posture. Stone slowed the all-terrain slightly and twisted his head
around. He felt his heart tighten up into a nice tight little ball about the size of a BB, for the missile was coming straight
down on them. It was clearly visible, as big as a match head, leaving a long, thin trail behind it across the night sky, a
little tongue of fire spitting out behind. It was coming from due north and at the angle that it was descending from, about
ten thousand feet, it would go off just about between their eyes. Within seconds the rest of the crew saw it, too, the Cheyenne
fighters twisting around and looking with horrified eyes, the tanks in the rear being warned by numerous built-in defensive
systems that they were being tracked by a radar signal. They knew—every one of them—that they were about to be consumed in
atomic fire, their bodies turned into atoms screaming off at the speed of light. They each prayed to their own private god,
and those who had no gods wished that they did.

“Stop!” Carla suddenly screamed out to Little Bear. “Let me at least try to use this thing. We’re not going to outrun the
bomb now—that’s for sure.” She looked up and saw it starting its long, slow descent, as if it had all the time in the world.
One always came late to one’s own party.

“All right, all right,” the Cheyenne screamed back in frustration at being able to do nothing about his demise. He slammed
the brakes on, and she almost fell out of the thing, jamming her feet forward and wedging herself in. She jumped from the
three-wheeler and set the beeping, blinking device down on the ground. With both hands able to work on the thing, she suddenly
clicked the right sequence in. Saying a quick prayer and crossing herself, she pressed the “Command Override” button. Carla
stared up at the sky, her eyes again filling with tears. She just couldn’t help it. She wanted to be brave, but she didn’t
feel that way at all. Not at all.

Nothing seemed to happen—at first. The missile was definitely descending, making a long curve from the left like a jet coming
in for a landing. Now they could actually see its fins, the size of the warhead that was about to detach itself. But as the
entire crew stopped in their tracks and looked up, the missile suddenly seemed to pour on a little extra flame. The ICBM kept
curving over them, then past them. Now it was rising again, definitely rising, going higher up by the second and curving all
the way around so that it had completed a 180-degree turn. It was headed back north—back where it had been hatched.

The men cheered, standing on their vehicles, the Indians screaming out sharp Cheyenne war cries, the tank boys rebel yells.
But it all meant the same thing. Their assholes were still attached to their asses, which, all things considered, was doing
pretty good.

“We can’t rest,” Carla said, standing up and lurching over as if she were about to vomit. She collapsed in the seat next to
Little Bear. “I couldn’t direct it far,” she said, holding her head in her hands as if the pressure were about to make her
collapse.

“All I could do is send it back toward its originating command signal. That’s about twenty miles north of here. We’re still
going to get caught in the blast. Go, go, go—make this thing go, will you?” She burst into tears and bent forward so that
her head was between her legs. But they had all heard the outburst, and smiles quickly turned to frightened expressions as
they threw the many vehicles into gear and, tires and treads squealing out dust from beneath them, they shot forward like
rocket cars. There was no tomorrow and they drove like it—with utter disregard for life or limb. The all-terrain vehicles
hit speeds up to fifty, flying up into the air sometimes as they went over bumps, barely skirting cacti that reached out with
long spikes. The tanks hit forty, then forty-five miles per hour, everything inside being thrown around as if they were in
an earthquake, all the dials and panel lights blinking, warnings of every kind going off as if the tank was screaming at them
to get the fuck out of there.

Bull, in one of the Bradleys, saw it first, using the tank’s long-range sighting equipment—a drop-off ahead about two miles
to the left. It would be worth heading for, as his long-range radar showed the decline to be at least twenty feet. He radioed
to the other tank, and they each sent a man up to yell down to the Cheyenne and Stone what was up. The fighting column swung
to the left, following Bull, who guided the way using the electronics of the Bradley. Then, as they came out of a thick grove
of cacti, the tanks rolling over most of the smaller ones, they were suddenly looking out over an almost barren terrain and
the sudden and steep drop-off to it—about a hundred yards off. From the closer vantage point they could now see that it was,
or had been, a highway. An interstate with raised, four-lane concrete roadway that had been built right along the edge of
the thirty-mile-long rift in the earth running east to west. Now the highway was just an obsolete relic, collapsed, broken
down everywhere like a child’s fallen house of cards. But even in its disintegration it might help them, shield them—if they
could get to the other side:

The fleet made for the cracked highway, every man now accelerating for his own ass, the vehicles tearing along like they were
coming in on the finish line at the Indianapolis 500. They spread out in a long line, approaching the highway and the drop
beyond from different angles and speeds. Stone took his all-terrain to the limit, pushing and pulling every fucking thing
that made it go, and the engine screamed out in protest but seemed to shoot forward an inch or two faster. He reached the
edge of the interstate and felt his heart speed up, for it suddenly looked like a lot deeper drop on the other side than he
had thought. Stone slapped the dog on the head, warning it to hold on tight and then set his own body.

The three-wheeled vehicle shot across the cracked four-laner and then right over the edge of the precipitous drop in the earth
as if going off a ski jump. It soared through the air over huge chunks of jagged concrete set in the white, grainy sand below.
Stone swore he was airborne forever and thought he could see other three-wheelers flying wildly around him. Then the ground
was coming up fast and they hit—hard. Somehow Stone hung on to the vehicle with every bit of strength in his clenched fists
and brought it to a reeling stop, the pitbull slamming up against him. Stone wheeled the oil-smoking three-wheeler around
and searched for the others.

They were flying over the edge of the highway one after another, steel lemmings leaping in ungraceful, wheel-spinning arcs
into the rocks and the dirt below. As his eyes scanned across the bizarre airborne fleet, Stone’s head suddenly stopped short,
almost wrenching his neck. There, beneath the highway they were all departing posthaste, was a tunnel of some kind. It had
a few feet of sand in front of it and a door-sized slab of concrete, but inside it quickly disappeared into darkness—protection,
a shelter.

“This way!” he screamed out as he started forward through the rubble toward the opening, about fifty feet off. “This way!”
He tried to find them all, standing up on the footrests of the all-terrain. They had all landed, he could see, basically in
one piece. Even the tanks had hurtled off the side like overweight mammoths and come down after about forty feet of flight.
But suddenly Stone saw even from the fifty yards or so that separated them that one of the Indians had cracked up bad, his
three-wheeler coming down smack in the middle of a bad-ass boulder with sharp, poking edges. His brains and guts lay splattered
all over it, drenching the rock in red. But the rest of them, although they looked dazed, seemed okay.

Stone searched for some kind of horn on the cross-country vehicle and suddenly found it, slamming his hand down and holding
it. That got their attention as angry faces looked up, their still vibrating heads filled with pain from the earsplitting
air horn. Stone pointed ahead toward the tunnel with an outstretched arm.

“The tunnel! Now! Move, man, there’s no fucking time. Move! Move! Move!” With that he started forward and into the tunnel.
He had a feeling the weather was about to get really bad. He saw that the single chunk of concrete that sat in the center
of the entrance was barely balanced against another piece to its side. Knowing there wasn’t time to play around, Stone accelerated
right toward the flat side of the eight-foot-high slab, slamming into it with the left side of the all-terrain. The bike and
Stone’s head seemed to shake and ring, as if they were slamming around inside the bells of Notre Dame. But the rock moved.
Slowly the two-foot-thick square slab of roadway fell over and slammed to the ground with a roar of dust and sand.

Stone coughed and wiped his eyes free of the grit as he started slowly in, not sure of just what was inside. But it was almost
clean; the sand from the wind hadn’t pushed the outer soil and dust in more than about ten yards or so. It must have been
a secondary service road or some goddamn thing that ran under parts of the highway. Off in the dim darkness he could see rusting
frames and what looked like a line of the trucks that laid down salt when the snows came. There was enough room for his men—even
the tanks. Maybe they were going to get through this damned thing, after all. Stone let himself feel just a glimmer of hope
in his heart, an organ that had felt as cold as ice for the last few hours.

He spun the all-terrain around, amazed that the thing even ran, so banged up and bashed in was its entire outer frame, and
shot back toward the entrance about ten yards off. The rest of them were tearing toward him now, and Stone came right up to
the edge of the tunnel, pulled the all-terrain to the side, and stood up on the leather seat to cheer them on. His heart was
beating like a cricket’s legs, and Stone knew something was about to happen. Just knew it. Something real bad.

“Come on, come on, you goddamn sons of a bitches,” he yelled, waving his hands forward frantically like a cop directing traffic.
Behind him on the seat, Stone could hear Excaliber growling under his breath, and he knew the animal sensed it, too—the feeling
of something dreadful almost upon them.

One of the Cheyenne came shooting in on his all-terrain, then another. They whizzed by him, and Stone yelled as they flew
past.

“Keep going—there’s room. Aim your lights so the others can see.” They shot on into the innards of the tunnel, switching on
their beams so that the wide, curved chamber was illuminated with dancing shadows for hundreds of feet. Another of the Indians
tore in, and then one of the tanks, which had to slow down as it lumbered past Stone, sending out a spray of dust from its
cranking metal treads. Stone gave the thumbs-up and a thin smile, knowing they could see him on the video scan—if it was still
working.

“Damn, we’re gonna make it,” Stone spat out through dust-coated lips. But the moment he turned back toward the entrance and
his eyes picked out the two roaring shapes—one tank and one three-wheeler, the moment he saw Little Bear’s face through the
darkness of the two
A.M.
night, riding for his life with Carla beside him, the entire sky lit up like nothing he had ever seen. The light was absolutely
white, like the very face of God, too powerful for the human eye to take. And at the very second that he saw the light of
darkness, Stone instinctively flung his hand over his eyes to protect them. Even through the fingers he could see the light—the
bones of his hand showing white, like looking at an X ray through his own skin.

“Fuck,” Stone said with a groan, not believing this was all happening. But he had little time to get depressed about the situation.
For the shock waves, the sound waves, the thousand other waves of the ten-megaton superbomb that had gone off twenty miles
away came streaming out over the countryside in every direction like an atomic flood, a waterfall of pure death. There was
a roar, as if a train were running over him, and then a curtain of dust and rock seemed to completely fill the opening of
the tunnel, and he was flung backward from atop the all-terrain. Stone felt his body slammed down into the concrete, as if
the hand of God were pressing him down, squeezing him into the earth. There was a tremendous heat, and then the very earth
beneath him seemed to vibrate with such intensity that it felt as if his bones were being shaken free of his body, his brain
from out of his skull. And as Martin Stone lay half buried in falling dust and chunks of the cement ceiling, he passed out
for the third time in two days.