Freedom Express (14 page)

Did he really think that he-and his pride-could actually defeat this overwhelming force? The train trip had seemed like such a good idea when they first started out: Just move across the country and show all those scumbags in the Badlands who's boss.

Had he really failed so miserably to expect the unexpected?

What had it gotten him so far? One blown-up locomotive and a completely freaky trip to Santa Fe during which he played with a strange woman's tits and mind. Some hero!

Back to the comic books, Hawk, he thought to himself

bitterly.

He was flying only a few hundred feet off the ground,

halfheartedly keeping an eye on terrain ahead and below. An hour before, the mountains and forests around Santa Fe to his left had given way to great stretches of and scrubland. Now just ahead, he saw a cluster of small mesas rising out of the desert.

Maybe it's just fate, he thought gloomily. His strange

dreams. His conflicting emotions. His less-than-focused instincts. The weird voices that were regurgitating up against his will.

Maybe it's just time to hang up the old flight helmet and check into the rubber room.

Suddenly he felt a familiar tingling along his spine. An instant later, the radar screen confirmed what he already knew.

There were two other aircraft in the vicinity.

Then he spotted them, five miles ahead and slightly to his south. They appeared to be attacking something on the ground.

In a burst of pure instinct, Hunter pushed the Harrier at top speed toward them.

As he approached, he saw that the two jets were Dassault Breguet Mirage III's. And there was something else he

recognized: On the tail of each plane was the same insignia that had been on the flag in Topeka... the sign of the Knights of the Burning Cross.

"Someone up there must like me," he murmured, arming his weapons.

In a matter of seconds, he was close enough to see what the two jets were attacking. He could hardly believe his eyes. They seemed to be chasing a single horseback rider across the desert, firing their cannons at him . . . and intentionally missing him!

Although the rider was using much skill to weave his horse in a zigzag pattern across the open desert and thus make himself a very elusive target, it was quite obvious that the jet pilots were merely toying with their victim.

This changed a heartbeat later. The attackers suddenly

spotted Hunter and hurriedly turned in his direction, their cannons blazing. Hunter avoided their fire by putting the Harrier into a sudden dive. He had been flying so low to begin with, he had very little airspace to work with. But it was enough.

When he was about fifty feet off the ground, he jerked the nose of the Harrier up into a hover, then looped around behind the two Burning Cross airplanes, both of which had overshot him by this time. As one started to turn back in his direction, the Wingman fired a Sidewinder that hit the Mirage dead center, nearly cutting it in half with a tremendous explosion.

The remaining aircraft obviously wanted no part of Hunter and turned to flee. Hunter knew that the Mirage was nearly three times as fast as his Harrier, so he didn't set out in pursuit.

Instead, he fired one long burst from his Aden cannons, just enough to wing the tail end of the Mirage's port wing fuel tank.

Then he took a careful reading of the enemy airplane's escape route. It was dead south.

Once the slightly damaged Mirage had disappeared over the horizon, Hunter swung the Harrier back toward the spot where he had last seen the fleeing horseman. The man and horse were standing near the base of a small butte, apparently unharmed.

The tingling of Hunter's sixth sense went to work again; something deep down inside was telling him that he should meet this man.

In this part of the desolate country, Hunter was guessing that the lone horseman was an Indian. He also wondered if the man had ever seen an airplane drop straight down out of the sky and land vertically, as he was doing now, kicking up a great amount of dust and making an ear-splitting racket.

Maybe this guy has never
even
seen any airplane up close before, Hunter thought, finally settling down and shutting off the airplane's main switches.

As Hunter climbed out of the cockpit, the rider approached.

Whoever the man was, Hunter was sure he was friendly-and therefore he didn't even bother to reach for his trusty M-16.

Instead, he wondered if they would be able to speak the same language.

The man pulled his horse up about ten feet from the still smoking jumpjet. He rode tall in the saddle, with jet black hair pulled back from his face. His high cheekbones and chiseled features indicated to Hunter that his hunch about the rider being an Indian was correct, as did his clothes, which looked like they came from Hollywood central casting.

The men just stared at Hunter and his airplane, his mouth open, but apparently too in awe to speak.

Hunter resisted the urge to raise his right hand and say,

"How!" Instead he called out, "Can you speak English?"

The man still said nothing.

"Spanish?"

Still nothing.

"
French
?"

Just when Hunter thought that verbal communication would be impossible, the man shook his head and started to laugh.

"My God, an AV-8BE Harrier?" he said in succinct English, his eyes darting up and down the jumpjet's fuselage in wonder.

"Please excuse me. I just never thought I'd ever really see one."

Duped again, Hunter thought.

The man dismounted and met Hunter as he climbed down from the cockpit. He greeted him with a long handshake.

"That was mighty impressive flying up there, my friend,"

the Indian said. "And you certainly couldn't have come along at a better time for me."

"Glad I was able to help," Hunter replied, somehow recognizing the man's voice. He was obviously very well educated.

"It didn't look like a very fair fight."

"My name is Michael Crossbow," the Indian said slowly, allowing a puzzled look to come over him. "Have we met before?"

"It would be a hell of a coincidence if we did," Hunter told him, sweeping his arms to indicate the utter desolation of their present position.

Suddenly a look of recognition came over the Indian's face.

"But you're Hawk Hunter, aren't you?"

Immediately Hunter went on guard; with the way his normally aligned instincts were skewing these days, he wasn't about to take any chances.

"What makes you ask?" The Indian laughed, letting out a kind of friendly war whoop. "Because, if you are Hawk Hunter," he said, "then you and I went to the same college."

Hunter stared at the lean, handsome man standing before him in disbelief. "You went to MIT?"

"Graduated three years after the famous Hawk Hunter," the man replied. "Copped a degree in advanced aeronautics and used your thesis to study for my final exams. I graduated with honors because of you."

Hunter was dumfounded. The cosmos was really working

overtime today.

Crossbow took a few moments to admire Hunter's aircraft.

"Great airplane," he said finally.

"But I thought you flew an F-16."

"There's a good reason for the Harrier," Hunter said.

Although his instincts were now bombarding him with the message that this man could be trusted, he wanted to learn more about him before revealing any more information. "But first tell me something: How is it that an honor student from MIT winds up getting chased by two fighters across the middle of the New Mexico desert?"

Crossbow spied a small outcropping of rock nearby.

"Let's get under some shade, and I'll tell you all about it," he said.

Both men were carrying water, and in a simple, spontaneous ceremony, they drank from one another's canteens.

Then Crossbow quickly filled in Hunter on his life since he had left MIT, explaining how he came back from the war to find his Shawnee tribe nearly destroyed by the nuclear attack on the midsection of the country.

"I've spent the last several years just trying to help my friends survive," he said. "Step by step, we had managed to rebuild the life of the tribe. I thought we were going to make it. But now ... I just don't know anymore."

He told Hunter of the recent series of aerial attacks,

usually by Hind helicopters, that had wiped out many of the remaining members of his clan. "And the few who are left are terrified," Crossbow said.

"Where are they now?" Hunter asked. "They're still up in Oklahoma, hiding in the hills near our old village," Crossbow answered. "I decided that the only hope we had-and I know this is a long shot-was for me to hunt down whoever was terrorizing us. So I've been on the trail for several days now, but obviously they found me before I found them."

"But why are these people doing this to you and your people?" Hunter asked. "Certainly they don't believe that guys on horses pose a threat to Hind gunships and Mirage jet fighters."

Crossbow lowered his head. "They do it for sport," he said, almost embarrassed. "Whoever they are, they believe the Indian is more an animal than a man. We have heard from other tribes, and this is how we know it is so. They have hunted others down like a man would hunt a deer or a buffalo. They have killed them and skinned them and left their bodies to rot... and I have taken it upon myself to find who is responsible and stop him. Or die trying."

Hunter looked into the Indian's clear, direct eyes and made his decision. On this his instincts were correct: Crossbow was a man he
could
trust, a man who would be a valuable ally.

"I know who you're looking for," said the Wingman. "And I'm looking for him, too."

Near Cimarron, New Mexico

Captain Jesse Tyler eased the Cobra gunship down toward the Freedom Express, hovered over its special landing car for a few seconds and then set the aircraft down to a perfect landing.

It was early the next morning, and he and Fitzgerald were exhausted as they climbed out of the chopper, still wearing their fake German SS uniforms.

"First thing I'm going to do is have a stiff drink," Tyler said as he helped the railway crew secure the Cobra to the stationary platform.

"First thing
I'm
going to do is get the hell out of this goosestepper's uniform," Fitz replied.

Ten minutes later, wearing their usual fatigues and each sipping a morning pick-me-up of orange juice and vodka, Fitz and Tyler met Catfish in the Control car. Under Fitzgerald's arm was the videotape containing the drug-induced interrogation of Manuel the Giant and his brother, Carlo the Midget.

"Good God," Catfish remarked after seeing the video images of Carlo and Manuel for the first time. "Talk about misbehaving genes."

"Yeah, it's a regular carnival side-show down there," Tyler replied. "And these guys are the good-looking ones."

They watched the videotape in silence, Catfish taking a few notes along the way. However it was soon clear that the interrogation was less than a complete success.

"Nothing on the location of Devillian's headquarters?"

Catfish asked somewhat gloomily.

Fitz and Tyler both shook their heads. "Anytime we'd ask them, they got brain cramps," Tyler said. "Just like hypnosis, people under sodium pentothal usually won't reveal something their subconscious knows will cause them harm."

"So they must all believe that they'll be killed if they reveal where the hell this place is," Catfish concluded.

"The little guy
did
say something in Spanish the first time we asked him," Fitz said. "We caught him off guard, and he started mumbling something."

Catfish rewound the tape to the spot.

"There it is, hear him?" Fitz said.

Catfish replayed the segment several times.

"What the hell is he saying there?" he asked, watching the ghostly figure of the drugged-up midget repeat over and over.

"Sounds like:
'la caza de last est rell laz,
' " Fitz said, attempting to mix a murky Spanish with his Irish brogue.

"Whatever the hell that means."

" 'House of something or other,' maybe?" Tyler offered.

Both Catfish and Fitz shrugged. "There's got to be someone on this train who speaks Spanish," Catfish said, making a note.

"I'll check the duty roster."

Catfish then made arrangements to have the entire tape

transcribed and radioed via the scramblers to Jones, who had just arrived back in Washington.

This done, they discussed the situation with the train

itself.

"The tracks will be completely cleared within an hour,"

Catfish told them after checking with his work crew chief.

"Believe me, getting those mines deactivated was a bitch. There were more than three hundred of them just on the tracks alone."

At that moment, the Control car's intercom crackled.

"Harrier coming in," came the crisp, static-free message.

"Platform crew to your stations."

"So our clean-up hitter returns," Catfish said. "Maybe he's found something."

It was with great surprise that Catfish, Fitz and Tyler saw not one, but two figures emerge from the Harrier.