Freedom Express (31 page)

That's when its Aden cannons opened up.

Because of the velocity at which a 25mm cannon shell

traveled, they tended to ignite anything they hit, due to the tremendous friction upon impact. The massive barrage of cannon shells that rained down on the hapless fire teams seemed to almost seek out the barrels of gasoline, the fuel clogged hoses and the flamethrowers themselves as targets.

Suddenly it was as if the earth had opened up and let a little piece of hell poke through its surface. There were flames and explosions everywhere within the radius of the Harrier's deadly circle. The conflagration became so intense that the flamethrower teams' fire-resistant suits burned up like tissue paper. Men screamed as they watched their own skin melt away from them. Others tried to flee, but they couldn't escape the instantaneous firestorm the Harrier's cannon shells had created. Still others simply let the flame roll over them, succumbing to the fire that they had so many times created as an instrument of death.

"My God, what have I done?" the Tongue of Fire commander cried out as the flames engulfed him. In the eternal instant before death, a strange truth came to him: White or black, all men die the same way. Therefore, they all must
live
the same way, too. . . .

When the rest of the
Freedom Express
rolled through the area ten minutes later, the ground on either side of the half mile curve was still smoking. All that remained of the Tongue of Fire soldiers was a scattering of bones and pools of sticky burned skin.

The train quickly passed by the instant graveyard and

continued its journey west.

Michael Crossbow hadn't eaten in more than two days.

Yet, his stomach felt full and he had no thirst. His

reflexes, if anything, were sharper than before, and his eyesight was nearly as good now at night, as it was during the day.

Such were the ways of a ghost. He had been atop the mesa fortress for almost thirty-six hours, returning the same way he and Hunter had first come, that was, hand-over-hand up the formation's craggy northern side. Hiding out on top of the plateau had been fairly easy; the Burning Cross soldiers used the jagged collection of rocks on the mesa's north end-the place called the Spines-as a sort of garbage dump, and Crossbow had found numerous places to hide out during the day in amongst the junk.

He spent this time observing what he could of the enemy's activities. Then, once the night fell, he crawled out of the trash and resumed his one-man haunting of the mesa top.

For the most part his dangerous mission to disrupt the

Burning Cross from within was working very well. The fact that many of Devillian's men believed the mesa to be spooked in the first place had turned out to be an unexpected plus for him.

Anytime a mysterious fire broke out, or a sentry was found missing, the superstitious/drug paranoid Burning Cross soldiers tended to blame the mesa's ghost, and not a saboteur hiding out in their midst.

Ruining the fort's food supply had served as a major

disruption for the enemy. Contaminating their water supply had also resulted in many sick enemy soldiers over the past three days.

But facilitating the kidnapping of Studs Mallox had been Crossbow's greatest task so far-though he had had some help. A troop of Bad River's Piutes had been moved several days before to positions near the mesa itself, completing the grueling trek to the Ring of Fire desert on horseback in an unbelievably short amount of time. Their mission was to attack any resupply effort attempting to reach the mesa overland, and already they had destroyed one convoy and had driven another away. These braves had proved very helpful in spiriting the Skinhead leader far enough away from the mesa to the place where he was picked up by one of the Cobra Brothers.

Yet, Crossbow had run up against two factors he could do nothing about: One was trying to assassinate Devillian himself-a job that was virtually impossible due to the fact that the cross-eyed white supremacy leader very rarely emerged from his heavily guarded mansion headquarters. The second disappointment had to do with the mesa top's antiaircraft defenses. Try as he might, Crossbow could not locate a central point from which the fortress's multitude of SAMs and AA guns were controlled.

Destruction of such an elusive target -perhaps a fire control house or a computer bank - would have made a United American air strike on the Burning Cross base a less-than-suicidal

possibility. But eventually the Shawnee determined that there was no central point; the South African technicians who had set up the air-defense system had wisely diversified the fire controls and feeder lines for the dozens of SAM sites, making the whole kaboodle virtually invulnerable to sabotage and thereby thwarting any chance of a successful air raid.

Still, Crossbow
was
working on one last critical job: the neutralizing of the Skinhead's F-4 Squadron. Two of the most important components of this task-the kidnapping of Mallox and the subsequent meeting between him and his lieutenant, Duzz-had already been accomplished.

Now, on this night, Crossbow had to deliver the crucial third strike.

It was to his advantage that the Skinheads occupied an

isolated corner of the vast mesa top themselves. The fact that they were despised by their Burning Cross allies almost as much as by their enemies worked in Crossbow's favor. Once the sun went down, none of Devillian's other troops dared to go near the Skinhead camp for fear they would be snatched and stomped to death by a group of bored Nazis. Even the mesa's well-equipped sentry force steered clear of the area. And because the Skinheads saw absolutely no reason to deploy guards themselves, Crossbow had little problem moving through the shadows and gaining access to the barbed wire enclosure.

Once inside, he headed for the squadron's small fuel dump and was not surprised to see that unlike the perimeter of the camp, it was buzzing with Skinheads. Due to Hunter's strategy of striking at the mesa top's supply lines as opposed to the mesa itself, aviation gas was becoming more valuable than food or drugs on top of the mesa, and the Skinheads were protecting their juice like gold. But unlike Devillian and his command staff, Crossbow knew the 'Heads were keeping a close eye on their JP-8

in order to make good on Mallox's secret instructions to abandon the mesa and fly to Mexico City and thus gain his release.

Now, as he watched from the shadows, Crossbow could see the Skinheads were playing their part exactly according to the script, convinced no doubt that anyone who got Studs Mallox to dress up in a mumu meant business. One by one, their F-4's were being pushed to the fuel dump to have their tanks filled. The terms of Mallox's release hinged on the fact that the Skinhead squadron would have to be in Mexico City by noon the next day.

This meant the entire twelve-plane unit would have to start preparations to launch from the mesa shortly after dawn to make the eleven hundred-mile journey south in time and do so either without letting Devillian on to what was happening, or ignoring the terrorist leader once he learned the 'Heads were bugging out.

How the Nazi pilots handled Devillian was not Crossbow's concern; everything from doing nothing to an all-out battle within the Burning Cross was possible. Right now, all the Shawnee had to concentrate on was the 'Heads fuel supply.

He watched the refueling operation for two hours, not

moving, barely even breathing. By silent calculations, he determined that it took nine and a half minutes to push a Phantom into position, another twenty to fill its tanks and then another nine to get it out of the way. Yet he knew that the procedure would have to be repeated again the next morning-though in quicker intervals. The warming time for a cold F-4 engine was a half hour and used up as much as a fifth of a tank of fuel.

This meant that when the F-4's were started up for real at daybreak their tanks would have to be refilled for the flight to Mexico City.

And it was this necessary topping-off procedure that played right into Crossbow's plans.

As was typical of operations like this one, the Skinheads were more concerned about getting the job done quickly rather than doing it securely. Therefore, the guards surrounding the

'Head fuel dump were not walking the line or even guarding anything. In fact, they were pitching in to push the F-4's into position next to the large fuel pump, and then pushing them out of the way when the fueling was complete. What they should have been guarding-the small semi-elevated fuel storage tank and the nine-inch fuel hose that ran from it to the fuel pump -was virtually ignored.

Instinctively knowing when to move, Crossbow made his way to the back of the fuel tank and ducked underneath one of its support bars. Working in the nearly pitch-black conditions, he withdrew a small rubber tube he'd been carrying very gingerly ever since arriving on the mesa top. The tube contained a highly concentrated amount of a rare chemical called titanium oxide.

Just where Hunter had dug up the stuff, Crossbow had no idea.

But being an MIT grad with a minor in chemistry, the Shawnee knew what the titanium oxide -TO for short-could do when mixed with jet fuel.

Moving slowly and carefully, he retrieved a syringe from his utility belt and expertly filled it with the TO. Then he found a weakened spot in the nine-inch fuel hose and injected the chemical into it.

Once this was done, he refilled the syringe and repeated the procedure. It took him twelve injections to use up the titanium oxide, coincidently one injection per Skinhead airplane.

Once the TO was expended, he buried the syringe and the tube and slowly moved out from under the fuel tank and back to his original position near the refueling operation. Here he sat for the next two hours, watching the Skinheads huff and puff the F-4's in and out of position.

Then, with the first indication of dawn, he stole away out of the Skinhead camp and back to his hiding place in the Spines.

It was around nine the next morning when Hunter drank his first can of beer in three days.

It had followed a plate of powdered scrambled eggs and

rock-hard toast, not surprisingly easing its way down his throat with smooth abandon.

"Been awhile since I had beer with breakfast," he said to Fitz, who was quickly polishing off a lager of his own. "Then again, it's been awhile since I had a breakfast."

Sucking down a victory beer seemed appropriate for Hunter.

For the first time in what seemed like years, his head was fairly clear. He knew that his side trip to West Santa Fe as well as his successful action against the enemy flamethrowing unit had worked to bring him back to reality, so to speak. He no longer felt odd leaving the incense-laced cabin. He had begun to recognize the voice coming from his lips to be his own. And just as something deep inside of him had told him to listen to the voices and use them for what they were worth, now something was telling him the period of channeling was over.

Now was the time to use the knowledge he'd received.

What had caused it all -or where the strange voices had come from -he still had no idea. But he was never without the small notebook that he had used to take down all of the adages. In fact, it had taken its place among his other articles of honor, inside his left breast pocket, wrapped within the small American flag he always carried with him, right next to the faded photograph of the lovely Dominique.

And although everything inside the notebook was committed to his memory, he still studied the writings in every spare moment he had.

The bad news was those moments were getting few and far between. The train had successfully foiled the two ambushes Devillian had arranged -and they owed a debt of gratitude to Bad River and his Piutes on both accounts. Without their help, the
Freedom Express
would have been in a lot worse shape than it was at present.

Juanita's information said that Devillian had stationed the bulk of his troops and their weapons along a ten-mile stretch of track just south of the Grand Canyon. The comparison to that of running a murderous gauntlet was inescapable. And strangely enough, somewhere back in his psyche, Hunter had always had the feeling it would come to this -one gigantic battle in which the last one standing wins.

After draining the last sip of the somewhat-symbolic beer, he, Fitz and the Cobras gathered around their planning table, examining the terrain that lay ahead of them. They were gradually passing out of the forested mountains and back into the northern New Mexico desert landscape again. The change in topography helped in one respect: The wide-open spaces reduced the chance of further surprise ambushes. Except for the occasional mountain pass, the train would be traveling through almost absolutely flat country.

Once they'd scoped out their hoped-for progress for the day, the four men turned to the task of attempting to interpret the bits of intelligence that were coming to them over the scramblers from Washington.

During the night, JT and Ben had led yet another raid out of LA against Port Desemboque. According to their preliminary damage report, the harbor would not have to be attacked again.

Not only were its docking facilities near totally destroyed, but on the last mission, they had sown several strings of high-impact mines along the harbor mouth, effectively sealing off what remained of the port from the open water of the Gulf of California.

Fitz read the next item of business, this one concerning the recent movement of the 1st Airborne. A short report from Catfish said the troops-and their horses -had reached the highly secret second location. Now, with the new information from Juanita on hand, Hunter prepared a message that would instruct the airborne cavalry to deploy to its third and last location.