Savages (26 page)

Dawn came.

LaGrange found the device hidden in the hem of her jacket. Great Hawk held it in his palm and stared hard at Lena Smith.

“Did you know about this?”

“No.”

“Any idea how it came to be hidden in your clothes?”

Lena gave the Hawk a withering glare. An impressive feat, considering she was wearing a thin wool blanket as a poncho and her feet were wrapped in nylon fabric that used to be a duffel bag. Hard to muster a convincing level of scorn under those circumstances, but she pulled it off.

“I don’t know how I got it. But a lot of things are starting to make sense now.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how General Samson always seemed to know where I was going to show up, the smug bastard. I thought he had a network of spies…” Her gaze went distant, the look of someone who had been trying to solve a riddle for a long time and had finally figured it out.

“Where would he have gotten this?” Great Hawk prompted. “It is a complex device. Not the kind of thing one finds lying around.”

“Probably from Sandoval. He was the head of our secret police. Ex-NSA. If anyone within the Alliance’s inner circle knew how to find or make those things, it was him.”

“But why do it at all?” Gabe asked. “Why spy on you? Did Samson suspect you were a double agent?”

“We’ve been enemies since the beginning, Mr. Garrett. Our visions of what the Alliance should look like as a nation were very different. His included slavery, and torture, and rule by intimidation. I wanted no part of that. Others chose differently.”

“Like the people we assassinated?” I said.

The steady green eyes swiveled my way. “Yes.”

Great Hawk dropped the tracker against a large river stone and ground it under his heel. “At least you managed to break this thing before Samson’s men found you. Must have happened sometime after Anderson called me and before we met here at the stream.”

“I fell a few times along the way,” Lena said. “The ground was muddy, and I was barefoot.”

A nod from the Hawk. “That might have done it, but we cannot be sure. We need to leave this place. Hicks, you are the best horseman I have. Take Lena and go south as fast as you can. Stop for nothing. If anyone approaches you, assume they are enemies. Take this.” He handed Hicks the ruggedized tablet. “I will notify Central of what is going on. They will be able to track you using the tablet’s GPS signal.”

“Any clue how long until evac?” Hicks asked.

“My best guess is thirty-six hours, give or take. Go now, and ride fast.
Ka dish day
. Good luck.”

Hicks nodded, swung into the saddle, and helped Lena up so she sat in front of him. The former vice president of the Midwest Alliance, a powerful and dangerous woman until yesterday, looked small and childlike next to Hick’s tall, broad-shouldered frame.

“Watch your asses, fellas,” Hicks said before leaving. “Hope to see y’all soon. First drink is on me.”

“We’ll hold you to that,” Gabe said.

A kick, a pull of the reins, and the horse was off at a gallop. I was jealous. I wished I was going with them. My job was done, and I wanted to be away from this place. I wanted to be home with my wife. I wanted a stiff drink and a hot meal. I wanted to cut out General Samson’s withered black heart with a rusty nail.

I settled for watching Hicks ride out of sight. When he was gone, I looked at Great Hawk. “What now, chief?”

The obsidian eyes were calm. “Now we run, my friend. Far and fast.”

*****

Twenty minutes later, three reports split the air in rapid succession.

“Well that’s not good,” Bjornson said.

“They must have found our trail,” I said to Great Hawk.

He signaled for everyone to stop. We had been running at a steady pace since leaving the campsite. At best guess, I figured we had covered a little over two miles. I had at least eight miles left in the tank before I would need to slow down, so my endurance was not an immediate concern. My body’s reaction to sleep deprivation, however, was. It had been over forty-eight hours since I had slept last. The longest I had ever gone was five days, and at the end of it I was hallucinating and talking to my long-dead father. Right then, my brain felt like it was made of scrambled eggs, I had sandpaper for eyelids, and a gaping hole occupied the space where my stomach once dwelled.

“We cannot outrun them,” Great Hawk said. “We will have to set up an ambush.”

A grin split LaGrange’s face. “Now you’re talkin’ my language.”

The pilot from the other helicopter, whose name was Faulkner, leaned against a tree and slid to the ground. “I have to rest,” he said. It was the most he had spoken since we found him.

Anderson handed him a spare radio and extra batteries. “Keep going south. Don’t look back. We’ll call you when evac arrives.”

The pilot looked conflicted. “I have combat training. I can help.”

Anderson shook his head. “You’re too important, Major. Get going. We’ll hold ‘em off.”

The pilot took the radio, pushed himself to his feet, and said, “Good luck.”

Anderson wished him the same, and off the pilot went.

Gabe pointed back the way we had come. “I say we double back on our trail. Me and Eric up in trees, the rest of you on the ground. Set up a few claymores, hit ‘em with a LAW when they’re in range. Snipe as many as we can.”

“We’ll have to move fast,” Anderson said. “If they’re on horseback, they’ll be here shortly.”

Great Hawk checked his rifle. “Then we had better get moving.”

*****

I hate waiting for a fight to start.

I also hate sitting in trees. There is no comfortable way to do it, and something always stabs me in the ass. Nevertheless, I remained still and quiet and grateful that Gabe had grabbed my rucksack after the helicopter crash. If he had not, I would be without my ghillie suit. And while the ghillie was heavy and made me sweat in the growing heat, the concealment it afforded was too valuable to go without.

The sounds of men shouting to one another were getting louder. I peered through the scope and saw them coming over a ridge, about twenty of them, all on horseback. No infantry, which made sense considering how far we were from Carbondale. It was unlikely they would arrive for at least a few hours.

I keyed my radio. “All stations, Irish. I have visual on hostiles.”

“Irish, Hawk. How many? Over.”

I told him. He acknowledged. Gabe gave a report from his position confirming what I had already seen.

We had chosen a natural chokepoint for the attack, a cleft between two sloping hills that met at a shallow ravine. Our backtrail ran through it, as we had used the cleft earlier in the day to cross the hills without skylining ourselves. My perch was on the eastern side, and Gabe had taken position to the west. Everyone else lay under ghillie suits in the surrounding brush, arranged in a crescent to create a crossfire covering a fifty meter area.

The horsemen came steadily closer. A few of their trackers followed our trail in the low-lying sections, while the rest had fanned out into a broad skirmish line. Each rider held the reins in one hand and a rifle in the other. Their posture, expressions, and firm tones of voice suggested confidence, belligerence, the arrogant swagger of those who know they are the hunter, not the hunted. Good. It would be all the more satisfying when a well-coordinated hail of lead and explosives sent them scrambling for cover.

“Irish, Hawk. Range? Over.”

“Two hundred meters and closing. Over.”

“All stations, stand by.”

In a hundred meters, no less than seven of the horsemen would be right in front of the two claymores we had planted along our trail. They were the remote detonation variety, set off by a simple radio frequency trigger. Great Hawk held the button, and had instructed me to notify him when there were hostiles in range. We had been hoping the riders would approach single file so we could hit them in the middle, but no such luck.

Seconds ticked by. The riders were cautious, alert, eyes scanning the brush and the trees. I was well hidden from them, legs wrapped around a maple trunk with my rifle steadied on a branch. This caused the slight disadvantage of having to shoot through foliage, but considering the ranges I would be dealing with, as long as I did not hit any tree limbs, it would not be much of a problem.

“Hawk, Irish,” I whispered into the mic. “Enemy at one hundred yards standoff.”

“Distance from the claymores?”

“In range. Should hit seven or eight of them.”

“Irish, Wolfman, fire at will. All other stations, stand by.”

No more waiting. Two deep, calming breaths, and on came the rush that occurs in these moments, a sharpening of the senses, a clarity of thought. Every twist and crevice of bark under my legs became its own singularity of discomfort, each birdcall a distinct, clarion trumpet. The rough texture of the trigger was gritty as sandpaper under my finger. I centered the reticle on a horseman outside the range of the claymores. Gabe was probably doing the same.

Slow release of breath, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, nice and steady, and …
crack
. The shot surprised me, so I knew I had done it right. A hundred and fifteen grains of copper-jacketed lead rocketed downrange at over 2500 feet-per-second and hit its target in the sternum with close to 1700 foot-pounds of force. The man I shot looked surprised, then in pain, and then his face went slack and he felt nothing at all.

Next target. Big guy, dark brown skin, red headscarf over long hair, beard down to his chest. I aimed just below the beard and fired twice.
Crack, crack
. He fell out of the saddle.

I wondered if the insurgents could hear the shots from this range. Suppressed fire is not the same as silent fire, meaning even a suppressed rifle still makes noise. But between the steady drizzle of rain falling from the sky, birdsong, and the other natural sounds of the forest, there was a lot to cover it up.

I made one more kill before the shouting began, the signal Great Hawk had been waiting for. He knew Gabe and I would take out at least a few hostiles before the others noticed, and when they did, he triggered the claymores.

The explosion was enormous, a shockwave of force that hit me like a giant, invisible hand. Thousands of small metal balls tore into the insurgents and their mounts at incredible speed, ripping flesh, breaking bones, tearing off limbs and whole sections of faces and craniums. Horses screamed and reared and dumped their dead or dying riders, then bolted away, iron-shod hooves stomping a tangle of blood-soaked bodies. The ones who could not run fell where they stood, crushing fallen riders beneath their massive weight. Other horses nearby, those not hit by the blasts, began to panic, their riders struggling to control the beasts and, in many cases, getting thrown to the ground.

I had never seen a claymore detonate before. The guys in First Platoon had told me plenty of horror stories, but hearing about it and seeing it in person are two different animals. For a few seconds, all I could do was stare. The sheer volume of blood was staggering. The men who had been closest to the mines when they detonated were unrecognizable shreds of bloody meat. Organs and entrails and amputated arms and legs lay scattered like windblown leaves. The horses were in no better shape.

So deep was my shock, I nearly fell out of the tree when Bjornson fired the LAW.

This was a more familiar explosion, one I had seen and felt before. The blast killed two riders and their mounts and injured another. When the smoke cleared, of the twenty well-armed SS troops sent to find us, only four remained alive. And one of them was badly hurt.

Static. “All stations, do not let the survivors escape.”

A quick breath. Picked a target.
Crack
. A rider fell from his mount. Shifted to another one, but Gabe got him first. The survivor who was injured fell from the saddle when his horse stopped and started bucking. Gabe got him too. The last rider was at the top of the hill now, about to go out of sight. I aimed and fired four times. Maybe two caught him, high and to the right. I heard staccato cracks of the others shooting, and realized they were aiming for the horse. It screamed, thrashed sideways, and fell over the other side of the hill, tumbling out of sight.

Great Hawk sprang up from the ground and gave chase, running faster than I had ever seen anyone run. He seemed to flow over the terrain like water, trees and roots and fallen logs no obstacle at all. I did not see his rifle, but he clutched his knife in one hand and a pistol in the other. In less than twenty seconds, he was over the hill. I sat still, not sure what to do next. Maybe half a minute passed, and then Great Hawk walked back over the ridge carrying the insurgent’s radio.

I climbed down from the tree and started checking for survivors. Two of the troops caught in the claymore blast were still alive, barely. The first one I came upon was missing an arm from the elbow down, his right leg looking like a pride of lions had been chewing on it, and his torso was perforated like some sort of grotesque sieve. Blood frothed from blue lips and small, agonized screams tried to rip free from shredded lungs. I put two in his head and considered it a kindness.