Passing Through the Flame (24 page)

Of course, Saigon was hardly Acapulco, and even if it had been, who could have afforded it then? Which is the big difference between then and now: money. A couple more years of this, and it’s the States and Europe with a heavy bankroll for life, no more crapping around in these shithole Third World countries.

Good food that doesn’t taste like something no white man could survive on as a steady diet, good clothes and good places to wear them to, a fancy pad full of everything I’d ever want in the way of dope, booze, or gadgets, a Porsche Targa, and the women to go with it all.

Heaven is good dope, good booze, and a superfox in a Porsche Targa. And I know it exists because I had a taste of it. What a taste of it!

He had never seen anything like that car. A Porsche Targa painted like a rainbow, a low, sleek, tight machine gleaming in a sheen of colors like an oil slick. And inside, blood-colored velvet upholstery so thick and soft you felt you were swimming in it. A supercar for superwoman. A body like the dreams that haunt you in the jungle three days’ march from anything female, and that a crummy whore smelling of booze and other men’s sweat. Black hair tinted red cascading like a waterfall over her shoulders, huge green eyes you wanted to lose yourself in forever.

Out there in Jango’s parking lot, with the night air smelling like opium and woman’s perfume, and the hand of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his, Sargent drifted in unreality, in a fifteen-year-old’s wet dream. He couldn’t believe this was happening to him. He didn’t know exactly what
was
happening to him. He was following his dick and loving it.

“How did you manage to pick me?” he said foolishly. They were the first words he remembered saying to her since she had stopped him from tearing Beck to pieces, had made him forget what he came there for simply by stepping inta the light and offering herself to him. Was she one of these chicks who were turned on by violence, who couldn’t resist a man in a rage, who wanted that heat taken out on her sexually so bad she could taste it? What else could make a woman like this, a fantastic beauty and a record star to boot, throw herself at me at first sight? I’m not bad-looking, but let’s face it, I’m not instant turn-on to every woman who sets eyes on me, either. It’s gotta be that scene with Jango that she couldn’t resist. She really wants some hard sex. Well, I’m the boy that’s ready to give it to her!

“You needed me,” she said. “To take away your pain and turn it to love.” She put her arms around him and kissed him. Her lips were gentle, and her tongue in his mouth was tender, sweet, almost shy. Yet she had just told him she dug pain. She wanted it rough. But there was nothing rough in the way she kissed. It was really weird.

“Whatever you say, baby. I aim to please. Want me to drive?”

“Let me.”

“Okay.”

They got into the car, she turned on the engine, and the Porsche throbbed like a thing alive. Vibrations massaged Sargent’s tense body like foreshadows of what was to come. Relaxing back in the deep velvet upholstery, his flesh humming from the throb of the high-compression engine behind him, and a fantastic woman at the wheel eager to whisk him off to bed, Sargent floated on a crimson cloud of lust. I’ll rip her clothes off and fuck her till she begs for mercy. Till she passes out.

“Do you have a place we can go?” she said. “We can go to our house, but I’d rather not lay that trip on my old man if I don’t have to.”

“Your old man?”

For a moment, she seemed to be somebody else. Whatever was going through her head, it made her face look different: a little frightened, a little sad, a little tired. It was hard to say what the change was, except that it was there. But it passed as quickly as it had come.

“It’s okay,” she said. “He understands. I’d just rather not have to run into him. You and he might not get along.”

That
Sargent had no trouble understanding. It was about the only thing that was happening that he
could
understand.

“I’m staying in a motel in Studio City. Moorpark off Coldwater. Okay?”

She nodded, put the Porsche in gear, and they were off on a ragged sprint down Jango Beck’s drive to Lookout Mountain, then onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, up over the crest of the Hollywood Hills at Mulholland, and down toward the San Fernando Valley. She drove fast but not too well, shifting sometimes too soon and sometimes too late, having to brake sometimes in the middle of a curve, losing revs through sloppy gear changing, then sending the engine screaming toward redline in second gear before easing off into third. But Sargent felt strangely secure swaddled in the velvet bucket seat, lurching around curves in a car that, no matter how badly it was being driven, was never being pushed close to its edge. He liked the way she drove. She was trying to get him to bed as fast as possible, and her extreme horniness was making her nervous, was distracting her and screwing up her driving. It turned him on....

“I think we’ve got something here....”

McCracken’s metallic voice over the radio from the truck snapped Sargent’s mind back into the here and now. “Three cars sittin’ in the turnoff up ahead of you with their motors running.”

Sargent snatched up the radio mike. “Keep on going past them, but slow your speed and let the distance between us drop. They make a move, back on down the road right away, don’t wait for orders.”

“Rog and out.”

“Slow down a little, Baum,” Sargent ordered. “As soon as they make their move, hit the brakes, kill the engine, and get your head down. Stop as far away from them as you can.”

“Right.”

Sargent flipped his M-16 to rapid fire, undid his seat belt, and gave final orders to the Land Rover. “Hostiles up ahead. Maintain distance till we’re stopped, then drop your flankers.”

“Rog and out.”

The boys in the Land Rover probably wouldn’t see any action. Two men with M-16’s and one with a bazooka would make their ways through the brush on either side of the road to provide flanking crossfire just in case the truck got pinned down or something else went wrong. Overkill was better than overkilled. Besides, Sargent wanted this to be a demonstration of overwhelming firepower. He wanted the organization to understand that they weren’t screwing around with half-assed gangsters or Mexican-style
banditos
when they took on the Green Mountain Boys, that they were asking for trouble from a well-equipped and well-led military force, a guerrilla army. If Jango won’t let me wipe the bastards out from top to bottom, I can at least show them that I can do it if and when I make my move. Should keep ‘em more polite.

The road made a long sweeping right turn around a hill, then glided down a slope, bottomed out, and took a long sweeping left up the next hill. Sargent could make out a dirt road trailing away into the countryside down in the center of the trough. The organization had picked a pretty good place for the ambush. The Toyota would be in full line of fire of anyone blocking the intersection for the whole downward run, and the only way it could get back into cover would be to back uphill around the curve while it was taking fire. Very pretty.

On the other hand, whoever was in the intersection would be a sitting duck from the upward slope of the road as it climbed the next hill, and Sargent could see that the truck had already passed the intersection and was slowly climbing the far slope. Whoever had planned this thing obviously hadn’t reckoned on having to deal with anything on the
far
side of his roadblock.

A strange manic calm came over Sargent as the Toyota came out of the right turn and started the downhill run, curiously like what he had felt reeling around the Hollywood Hills in Star’s Targa. In both cases, he was being borne along in a vehicle driven by someone else toward a preordained moment of violent physical satisfaction as inevitable as if he were moving toward it on rails. The sensation was not unlike that of sky diving, in the moment when the chute has already begun to blossom but not yet to brake your free fall. You know it’s about to happen, but you’re still falling free.

The moment in which she pulled the Porsche up outside his motel room was just like that moment when the chute takes hold or the moment that was approaching as the Toyota moved toward the ambush—the glide was over, the longed-for surge of physical force was there.

Quickly, he got out of the car, took the three steps in one bound, opened the motel room door, flicked on the light, and stepped inside, knowing without looking that she was dogging his footsteps. This sudden burst of purposeful motion, after the velvet-cushioned glide through the night, sent waves of animal energy coursing through his body, made him hyperaware of the tension of muscles beneath his skin, of unresolved angers and desires thrusting against each other in his inner core.

He whirled around, caught her in his arms, lifted her off her feet, carried her across the room, flung her on her back on the drab brown bedspread, all in one continuous motion. She gasped in surprise; her green eyes went wide with shock and desire; her hair fanned out across the pillow in disarray. Sargent tore off his jacket, flung it away, slipped out of his shoulder holster, let it drop to the floor, pulled off his shirt popping two buttons, and dove onto her body with a force that knocked the breath out of her and made the bed creak and groan in agony.

He crushed her lips with his mouth, sending his stiff tongue deep, deep into her mouth, thrusting like a piston, a foretaste of what she was going to get. She grunted and writhed beneath him, loving it, the hot pants bitch!

He fumbled his belt buckle open, unbuttoned his pants, zipped open his fly. His hands were all over her breasts, kneading them, feeling her nipples harden as he pinched them through the tight silky fabric of her navy pants suit. He quickly moved his hands over her body and between her legs, pummeling, clutching, massaging, while she thrashed under him, groaning and whimpering into his hard, open mouth.

His hands searched fruitlessly for buttons as his tongue bored deeper and harder into her mouth, teeth pressing into lips until he could taste blood. Cursing wordlessly, Sargent lifted his face from hers. Her eyes were wild with lust, her lips thickened and bruised, and there were little patches of reddened skin around the edges of her mouth.

She gasped for air, rolling her head around the pillow. “Jesus, oh, Jesus....”

“Like it, don’t you, you bitch!” he grunted. He grabbed the bottom edge of her tight navy blouse, yanked it out of the band of her pants, and with one savage motion, tore it up over her breasts, ripped it up over her head, catching her hair for a moment as he pulled it clear. She gave a little scream as he pulled it away from her long, tangled hair.

He buried his mouth in the valley of her breasts, nipping his way up one, then the next, biting the hard flesh of her nipples until she shrieked. At the same time, he found the zipper of her pants, opened them, yanked them down to her knees.

“Jesus, Jesus, stop, stop....”

He pried her thighs apart and entered her with a hard thrust that sent waves of pleasure surging through his lower torso, rocketing him to the edge of climax.

“Ohhh... ohhhh... ohhhhh....”

He put every ounce of muscular power in his back and legs into it, every bit of pent-up tension, every quantum of rage that had been boiling through his system, channeling ii all to the point where his hardness and power intersected her helpless softness. It didn’t take long, and when he came, it nearly tore the top of his head off....

“Here it comes!” Baum shouted, slamming on the brakes, downshifting, killing the engine, setting the hand brake, and diving down behind the cover of the firewall. Below, three cars had pulled out into the intersection: two American sedans on either edge of the roadway facing the Toyota and between them a laterally placed station wagon, steel plating blocking its rear windows. Four men poured out of each car, six out of the station wagon. They dashed around behind cover of the roadblock; Sargent could make out three rifles with scopes, and a number of old-looking submachine guns. Up on the slope of the far hill, he saw the old Ford truck backing downhill unnoticed toward the rear of the roadblock, figures on the bed tossing aside straw, pigs, and chickens, revealing the M-60 machine gun, the stovepipe shape of the bazooka.

That was all he saw, because by then he was diving down behind the armored fire wall with Baum, and the men behind cover of the roadblock opened up. The staccato pop-pop-pop-pop crackling of automatic weapon fire went off like Chinese New Year inside his head, and, at once the windshield of the Toyota was smashed to pieces around dozens of impact points, showering Sargent and Baum with bits of glass. Just as rapidly, bullets hissing over their heads took out the rear window. Cuush! The car suddenly listed toward the left front wheel as that tire was taken out. Cuush! The right front tire went, and the Toyota settled in level nose-down position.

“Jesus Christ...” Baum muttered.

Sargent, snuggled down under the dash behind the reinforced firewall, only grinned as bullets continued to roar through the air above his head, as scores of ricochets pinged off the armored hood.

WHUUP! He heard a soft, strangely tender explosion. WHUUP! Another bazooka shell exploding, WHUUP! WHUUP! WHUUP! For a moment, the automatic weapon fire tapered off, and he could hear screams, shouts, and curses. Almost at once, bullets began peppering the Toyota again, but with nothing like the former force.

And then the hostile fire was drowned out by the deeper, louder chuddering of the M-60 machine gun. WHUUP! WHUUP! Then a loud secondary explosion, as of a car’s gas tank going up. The M-60 continued to shudder, and the sound of massed automatic weapon fire was, if anything, louder, but hardly anything seemed to be hitting the Toyota now.

Sticking up the muzzle of his M-16 before him, Sargent cautiously peered up over the lip of the dashboard and through the jagged hole where the windshield had been.

Down in the trough, the two sedans flanking what had been the station wagon were smoldering hulks, blown half apart by direct hits from the bazooka. The station wagon itself had exploded and lay in three or four major pieces and dozens of minor ones under the thick black smoke of a gasoline fire.