Freedom Express (28 page)

It had been a strange twenty-four hours.

The trouble had started early that morning when Studs

Mallox-the human slug himself-was first reported missing. She was there when Devillian got the word, and at the time, he calmly ordered the fortress to be searched. When this proved fruitless, several squads of Burning Cross guards repelled down to the desert floor where they found the half-eaten bodies of two Skinheads - Ant and White Smoke -but no sign of Studs.

This news served only to inflame the already rampant rumor that someone-or
something
-was running around the mesa top, scaring some people, killing others and making at least two disappear completely. But Juanita didn't believe in ghosts; so she just ignored these tattles, at the same time being happily amazed at how skittish the men around her were acting.

Then came the odd report from the Sangre de Cristo

Mountains. Devillian himself had bragged to her how he'd hired the toughest bunch of Mexican bandits in all of the southwest to "put the hurt on the train." These bandits the well-known Sin Dientes -had a reputation even worse than that of her brother Jorge's various gangs. They had been paid a fortune in gold to be the first bandit group to sting the train as it passed through the narrow trackbed next to Rio Grande Gorge.

Yet, for some reason, the attack never came off.

A pair of Hind gunships were dispatched to the location, and their pilots found all the bandits dead, most with their throats slashed. The Skinhead pilot that Devillian had ordered to strafe the bandits after they'd failed in their mission had for the most part expended his ammunition shooting at dead bodies.

Things got worse by mid-afternoon when it was discovered that a large part of the fortress food supply was infested with maggots. Although it appeared like a faulty switch on the mess hall's refrigerator was to blame, Devillian insisted that it was in fact sabotaged and, in a fit of rage, executed all of the fortress's cooks.

With the night came even more bad news. A supply train of helicopters flying in what supplies were left in the ruins of the bombed port of Desemboque had been attacked over the Sierra de la Madres, about one hundred miles away, by two jet fighters of unknown origin. All eight of the helicopters were lost.

The tension was relieved somewhat an hour later when

Devillian made several quick deals with a syndicate of black market suppliers located in El Paso to truck in supplies overland to the mesa. A three-week supply of food, water and diesel fuel would come first; ammunition, liquor, drugs and other

necessities would be trucked in the next day. At the moment the plan was to stockpile the stuff at the bottom of the mesa then lift it up to the base using one or two of the fortress's six working Hind copters.

Still, supplying the mesa by this overland route would not come close to replenishing the most critically short

commodity-aviation fuel. For that, Devillian had to make a separate deal with an old PEMEX refinery located near La Pesca on the Gulf Coast. The price was double what the Burning Cross had been paying for the aviation fuel via Port Desemboque.

Plus, the tenuous supply lines were not attached to an

endless spigot. Because these commodities were in demand everywhere, Devillian's new suppliers could only sell him enough material to keep the mesa operating for two weeks at the most.

Then they would have to shut him off.

But at this point, Juanita knew Devillian didn't care about what was going on inside the fortress. His total consuming passion was this new grand design of his-this massive production that he was planning in order to make the eventual destruction of the United Americans' train a well-recorded and highly publicized historical event.

But to her mind, it was all total madness.

She had begun to settle down around nine that evening,

drinking a bottle of champagne herself and splitting a huge chunk of crack with Jorge. He and his lieutenants were scheduled to leave for the Grand Canyon the following day, and so their routine intoxication turned into a going-away party.

Devillian was the spontaneous host, and he rewarded Jorge and the six officers of his entourage with their pick of the harem of love slaves. It was mildly amusing for Juanita to watch her brother attempt to get it on with two screaming teenage girls, but she sobered when Devillian insisted on sitting very close to her. She quickly shut him down, grabbed one of the girls for herself and insisted that she be flown back to her house in West Santa Fe.

Although aviation fuel was in short supply, Devillian bowed to her demands and had her and the love slave taken to Santa Fe by one of the Hinds.

Once there, Juanita drank another bottle of champagne and then ravaged the young beauty. But oddly, she quickly tired of this also, and soon sent the whimpering girl on her way, out into the cruel night.

Shortly afterward, she found the box.

It was the strangest thing. She had left her house to go to the nearby bar to get one last bottle of champagne. When she returned, there was a small box sitting in the center of her bed.

Inside the box was a photo of Studs Mallox wearing a dress.

This was when she began to get scared. She despised Mallox, but she also knew that he was a tough number to bring down, never mind get into a mumu. Anyone who was able to do that could only be tougher.

Plus, she knew the photo had been left as some kind of a warning for her-though it was a strange one. She loaded her two enormous guns immediately and locked the doors and windows of her place. Another few gulps of champagne served to settle her down somewhat, but not enough to prevent her from dousing all the lights in the place.

She longed for Manuel, the seven-foot giant who used to sit by her door whenever she was in town, screening the potential mercs for the Burning Cross and aptly scaring away anyone else who might have designs on her. But Manuel was no longer in West Santa Fe-she had heard that he and his midget brother, Carlo, were on their way to Italy to make movies.

The night passed slowly, Juanita climbing into a small, black tight bikini in order to cool off, and eventually wishing she hadn't dismissed the young love slave so quickly.

Then there was a knock on her door. She quickly retrieved both of her enormous guns, then walked carefully to the door.

"Who is it?" she asked, both pistols up and ready.

"I'm the one who delivered the photo," said the somewhat familiar voice in reply.

She drew the hammers to her guns back in unison.

"What do you want?"

This question was met with only silence.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

Again, silence.

"Do you know I could have you killed in a second?"

Still, nothing.

Juanita raised her pistols heart-high and slowly opened the door.

The figure on the other side was dressed in all black. He was wearing a heavy overcoat, with the collar turned up and a black fedora pulled low over his eyes, so much so that she couldn't see his face. She raised her guns to shoot, but in one lightning move, the visitor knocked them both away.

Only then did he raise his head so that she could see his features.

"You?" she blurted out.

"Yeah-me," Hawk Hunter replied.

Near Petaca, New Mexico

The bulky, awkward Transsail C. 160 cargo plane had been circling the small field for thirty minutes, its pilots cautiously waiting for the first rays of sunlight to break through the early morning gloom.

Finally, low on fuel and anxious to get on with their

mission, the pilots decided to go in using what little predawn light was available to them.

"Get ready back there!" the pilot yelled into his intercom microphone, alerting his flight crew in the rear of the ship.

"This one's for real."

The plane circled the tiny clearing once more, then went into a shallow dive.

"Christ, here he comes," grumbled the commander of the South African mercenary unit as he and his men watched from the ground. "Let's see if they can get it right this time."

"Everybody down!" the unit's second-in-command yelled to the group's fifty specialist soldiers.

Without further prompting, every man in the unit known by the perversely romantic title "Tongue of Fire"- lay facedown in the small grove of trees next to the field and covered their heads. They knew the next fifteen seconds would be very dangerous, and hearing the sputtering engines on the approaching cargo plane only underscored that danger.

The C. 160 was only about twenty-five feet off the ground now and heading a little shakily toward a large X that had been marked in the field with flour by the Afrikaners. The airplane was not trying to land -rather it was attempting a low-altitude cargo drop. Two large pallets of supplies for the Tongue of Fire sat in the rear of the plane's hold, a tangle of wires, ropes and huge rubber bands just barely holding them in place. Squeezed in between the pallets, three members of the aircrew waited nervously for the word to kick the cargo out the door.

"God, don't fuck this up," the unit commander muttered as he too lay flat out on the ground and covered his head.

The Transsail came down to about fifteen feet when one of its engines began to stall. The plane's pilot quickly applied throttle, and the engine coughed back to life. Trouble was his aircrew was pushing first one, then the other of the pallets out the back of the airplane at the same moment.

The combination of actions caused both pallets to hit the ground much harder than intended. Each one kicking up as much dust as a small bomb, the cargo loads slammed into the rocky desert ground and immediately split open, scattering their contents all over the field. At the same time, the plane's pilot yanked back on the control column and put the aging aircraft into a dangerously near-vertical climb. Despite the drastic

maneuver, the airplane just nicked the tailplane of another Transsail-the one that lay burning and charred at the end of the clearing.

"Well at least they didn't crash," the Afrikaner commander said sarcastically as he watched the airplane climb unsteadily to about five thousand feet, then immediately turn south, the very first rays of the dawn glinting off its nearest wing.

"They'll probably ask Devillian for a raise."

The Tongue of Fire had been hiding in the very inhospitable forests of the South San Juan Mountains for more than a week.

When they were first hired by the Burning Cross to attack but not destroy the
Freedom Express
, the Afrikaners had been under the impression that they would be airlifted in and out the same day. But the events in Eagle Rock-first the United Americans'

evacuation and then the destruction of the Skull and Crossbones battalion-had caused them to stay in the field for eight long days.

Trouble was, the unit had only brought along enough

equipment for thirty-six hours; so they had to be resupplied by air by the Burning Cross. The resupply effort was a tricky operation from the word go, as the wreckage of the Transsail at the end of the field clearly attested. This was not helped by the especially volatile cargo the Tongue needed to stay effective-that was, gasoline.

True to its name, the Tongue of Fire was a flamethrowing outfit. Their profession was strategic and tactical burning of buildings, military equipment, people, whatever. Their

speciality was rooting out hardcore cases from caves, mountains and deeply dug fortifications, and their reputation of ruthless efficiency was well-deserved.

But they had never been called on to attack a train before.

"OK, guys," the second-in-command yelled. "Let's pick up all the salvageable stuff on the chop-chop.
Hustle
!"

Immediately, the troopers jumped up and took to the field.

In a minute they were sorting out the usable goods from the ones that were damaged in the drop.

"Tell me again," the unit commander said. "How much are we getting paid for putting up with all this crap?"

"Not nearly enough," the second-in-command replied bitterly.

The officers walked out to the field and did a quick count.

Seven of the gasoline barrels dropped by the airplane had burst open upon impact. That left eleven relatively intact.

"Some of the barrels are leaking," a sergeant reported to them. "But we can draw the gas out before they drain away."

"Well, get to it," the unit commander ordered.

Due to the nature of their work, the Tongue almost literally drank gasoline. Their flamethrowers were custom designed jobs that mixed the petrol with a gelatin base that created a kind of highly fluid napalm. Anyone or anything on the receiving end of a "tongue blast" would be covered with a fiery jelly substance that would stick to anything: wood, concrete, metal or skin. And because of its congealed gasoline property, the flames took minutes, sometimes hours to completely burn themselves out.

But the eight days in the desert had drained them of some of their already critically small supply. Gasoline was not easy to keep in the field; some just naturally evaporated, some went bad, and some was just simply spilled. Plus the daily necessity of testing their thirty-five separate weapons burned up about two barrels alone per day. Now, with the drop, they were up to twenty barrels, just one barrel over the prescribed amount needed for a successful operation.