The Vengeance of the Tau (36 page)

“That way no questions are raised.” Blaine told him. “Military might have left a small transition staff in place, so people see a little added activity, it doesn’t stand out.”

Belamo swept the binoculars across the base’s length. “I count a dozen guards on the perimeter. ’Bout what I figured.”

Livermore Air Force Base was one of the first of nearly a hundred such bases to be closed down in the latest round of military cost cutting. In its heyday it had had upwards of 3,700 servicemen in its population and been home to a wing of B-52 SAC bombers. Blaine gazed down and imagined the roar of engines shaking nearby walls and spirits at all hours of the day and night. Neighbors must have learned to bolt down their china.

The living quarters, apartments, and small homes rimmed the fenced-in base’s perimeter. Centered between them were ten runways, at least that many hangars, a control tower, and a three-story building that served as the base’s headquarters. But what had commanded most of McCracken’s attention from the time they scaled the hill were the eight small transport planes laid out in neat rows across the edge of the tarmac.

“This what you were expecting?” Belamo asked him, as he lowered the binoculars.

“Pretty much. Some sort of massive distribution’s about to get under way, by the look of things. What Johnny latched on to with those killings was just the preliminaries.”

Belamo fingered his binoculars. “Wish we could find the big fella with these.”

“He’ll be here, Sal.”

“Yeah, but meanwhile …”

“Meanwhile, we get started without him.”

Blaine waved the first team of commandos into position. They worked their way forward toward the fence enclosing the entire base complex, making sure they were well out of line of the nearest guard’s vision. The weapons they had brought along had been part of Nineteen’s stockpile. Accordingly, the bulk of their inventory was composed of M-16s, Galil machine guns, Uzis, and sidearms, along with limited supplies of grenades and a small complement of Stinger missiles. The element of surprise was the best thing they had going for them, and if that broke down, the battle might be over in a hurry.

The women pulled themselves along through a stretch of high grass the
last bit of the way. The grass covered not only their approach, but also their slicing through the chain-link fence that was rimmed with barbed wire. Livermore had been closed for nearly two years now, and the grass had been cut only sporadically since then.

“You read me, Sal?” Blaine said into his hand-held walkie-talkie.

“Loud and clear, boss,” Belamo returned from the opposite side of the base. “All team members in position and cutting through.”

“Almost showtime.”

“Rock and roll. Hey, McBalls.”

“I’m here, Sal.”

“I was born for this shit. When this is over, no way I go back to a desk.”

McCracken watched through his binoculars from a position of high cover across the
highway, as the women of his team began to slither through the holes they had snipped in the fencing. There were eight in all, eight in Sal’s team as well. That left four with him to cover phase two of the
plan.

Sufficient communications gear for all of the women had not been present in the Nineteen stockpile, so once inside the base they were on their own. Each had a patrol area. Each knew the rules. The kills had to be silent and quick. Once these were completed, they would take up positions around the airfield perimeter and wait for Blaine’s fiery signal to move in.

He swept his binoculars across the fence once more.

“My team’s in, Sal.”

“Boy,” Belamo’s voice returned, “these babes are good.”

“Nothing they haven’t done before.”

“Us either.”

McCracken pulled the van off the main road at the sign reading
RESTRICTED AREA. OFFICIAL PERSONNEL ONLY
. He drove down a narrow chopped-up roadbed where two guards waited at the base’s main gate. He stepped down out of the van, and the camera looped around his neck bobbed a little. Two of the female commandos, scantily dressed in the clothes of tourists in the midst of a long drive, fell in behind him.

“Hey,” he said, as he neared the gate, “we get a look inside?”

One of the guards shook his head. The other hung back, hand not far from his M-16.

“Sorry, sir,” the closer one said. “No visitors.”

“But they been letting people in ever since it closed up. I lived here ten years and never saw the inside. I’m just back for—”

“Sir,” the other guard said, coming forward now, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Come on. How ’bout a break?”

The guards were almost close enough to touch through the gate now.

“Sir, this is still a restricted area. You are trespassing on—”

The guard’s head snapped back before he could say another word, his eyes turning upward toward the crimson hole in his forehead. The second guard hadn’t even had time to register what had happened when a similar shot dropped him. A third bullet from the markswoman perched behind the van took out the video camera that hovered over the gate.

“Cutters!” Blaine called.

Instantly one of the women came forward and sliced through the latch that affixed the gate into place. The other two shoved it open just before a rented 4×4 pickup with covered cargo bay pulled down the road, driven by the final commando. The pickup came to a halt just outside the gate at the same time as the two largest women finished pulling the dead guards’ uniforms over their clothes. They moved quickly toward a jeep parked alongside the guardhouse and made sure that their helmets covered as much of their faces as possible.

The plan now was for the jeep, apparently driven by the gate guards, to lead the 4×4 onto the base. McCracken would ride in the pickup’s enclosed rear. The two other commandos would ride up front. The precision of all the women, especially considering there had been no opportunity for rehearsal, was incredible. He realized that these particular women, at least, had come to Nineteen not to forget, but merely to wait for the time when they were needed again.

In all, the time lapse between the downing of the gate guards and the point when McCracken climbed into the back of the pickup was barely thirty seconds. Excellent under any conditions.

“Go!” he called.

The driver of his pickup hit the horn lightly. The signal given, the woman in the driver’s seat of the jeep drove off toward the center of the base with the 4×4 right behind.

“Sal, you read me?”

“Loud and clear, boss.”

“I’m in.”

“No more signs of guards. I’m following now. These women are beautiful, ain’t they?”

“No question about it.”

“See ya in a few.”

“Showtime, Sal.”

The most important weapon in Blaine’s arsenal remained confusion. He had to hope that the fact that the jeep was leading the pickup in would assure him of getting close enough to the tarmac to accomplish what he had come for.

The two-vehicle procession cleared the last rows of residential buildings. The runways and official base structures came clearly into view now. The transport planes looked like big fat birds lined up to await feeding. Well, Blaine had just the meal for them. In the covered rear of the 4×4, he brought the first Stinger missile into his lap.

A number of armed guards patrolled the open area, many of them concentrated around the transports. Still more hung back by the hangars, and a half-dozen were posted in the area of the three-story building that had served as Livermore’s headquarters. McCracken could just make them out through the small window that looked into the 4×4’s cab. The firing of his first Stinger would serve as the signal for the rest of the commandos of Nineteen to move in. His primary objective was to prevent the White Death from being evacuated during the battle. Take out the transports, and the rest would fall into place accordingly. Blaine was readying the Stinger when he felt the 4×4’s brakes being applied.

“Company,” one of the women called back to him.

He gazed through the glass again and saw that the jeep with the women inside had stopped when another jeep being driven by three armed men approached it. The width of two runways still separated him from the transports, but that distance would be simple to cover for the Stingers. He knew what was coming next and readied for it.

The approaching jeep came to a halt and its passengers climbed out. The guards still had their guns shouldered when the women dressed in the uniforms of the dead men sprang outward. The pair of staccato bursts were brief but deadly. The three guards were dropped where they stood.

At that point, Blaine threw himself out through the truck’s rear with the first Stinger already at shoulder level. He sighted and pulled back on the trigger in the same motion, even as a hefty complement of the guards closer to the transports opened fire on the Israeli women.

The missile slammed into the first transport in the line just above its wing. The blast lifted the plane up onto its side and then toppled it over to be consumed by a flurry of flames.

Blaine’s ears rang from the Stinger’s percussion. Around him the four women had taken cover behind the nearest vehicles. Then, as he reached into the 4×4’s cab for another Stinger, he could make out the steady bursts of gunfire that began streaming into the main area from all directions at once.

Nineteen’s commandos were working their magic!

Bringing the second Stinger up to steady his aim, he could see a number of the enemy falling to the barrage of the sixteen additional members of his party. Still more of the Tau faithful, dressed as soldiers, lunged desperately for cover. McCracken fired his second Stinger.

He heard a heavy thump as the second missile shot outward. A second transport was turned into a corpse of flaming metal before his eyes. It slammed into another one, shredding it, and leaving Blaine with one less target to worry about in the process. He pulled a third Stinger from the 4×4, and this time the explosion blew his target straight into a nearby hangar, the front portion of which collapsed on impact. Numbers four and five were on target as well, but he had only one Stinger left to deal with both of the two remaining transports. No matter. With the women moving in to secure the strategic center of the base, blowing the final transport with traditional explosives would be a simple task.

As it turned out, his concern was needless. The transport that his final Stinger struck spun madly with the explosion, and its wing cut straight through the fuselage of the final plane. The fire’s fingers reached high and spread fast, as the loosed gas fueled them. Secondary explosions coughed huge shards of metal into the air.

Blaine charged into motion across the tarmac, holding an M-16 in place of a Stinger now. His priorities had changed. With the transports destroyed, his next objective was to find the leader of the Tau and, short of that, secure the reserves of the White Death. He was nearing the center of the battle when powerful automatic fire began raining down from the twin control towers at either end of the complex.

Vulcans!
Blaine realized, recognizing the distinctive metallic clacking of a minigun.

The 7.62mm shells chewed up three of the commandos who were trapped in the open, and threatened to turn the tide of the battle all by themselves.

“Sal!” he screamed into his walkie-talkie, throwing himself into a dive.

“Ripe and ready, boss.”

He saw Belamo emerge from between a pair of hangars. Blaine realized he had never seen Sal in battle dress before, much less holding a belt-fed MK-19 grenade launcher. He pumped three rounds into the right-hand tower and snapped the remaining three into the left. The explosions, separated ever so briefly, tore the tops of the towers clean off and sent them to the ground in showers of rubble and debris.

McCracken rolled onto his stomach and fired a burst at an enemy stronghold in a second-floor window that the commandos of Nineteen hadn’t yet been able to penetrate. The angle required to hit the window meant firing in the open with no cover nearby, an easy target for the opposition. To minimize his chances of getting hit, Blaine spun into a roll before draining the rest of his first clip, as asphalt was coughed all around him by enemy bullets. He knew that Nineteen’s commandos would seize the opportunity his move had opened up for them, and true to form, they launched an all-out attack that caught the remainder of the base guards in a crossfire.

Some of the women fell back into positions of cover. Others advanced cautiously toward the headquarters, from which no return fire was coming any longer. Directly before him, Sal was poised against one of the hangars, slamming home another grenade belt into his MK-19. He bounced away from the hangar suddenly, as if jolted by a surge of electricity. He went for his walkie-talkie, but it was too late.

The hangar doors burst open behind the savage thrust of a pair of armored personnel carriers. The APCs rolled over the chewed metal in their path, the heavy-caliber machine guns mounted atop them firing incessantly. The commandos of Nineteen were caught totally by surprise. A flood of troops poured out from the hangar in the vehicles’ wake and opened fire on the fleeing women. Sal Belamo managed to knock out one of the steel killing machines with a fresh grenade from his MK-19 before a barrage slammed him against the hangar. He slumped down clutching his shoulder.

McCracken closed into the very center of the battle, hurling a pair of grenades into the oncoming troops. Bodies were tossed airborne in great plumes of smoke, which provided him limited cover to open up on the troops that were still emerging from that damned hangar.

He had fallen into a trap, goddammit! Somehow they had been expecting him!

Blaine tossed another grenade as he darted for cover behind a sturdily built maintenance shed. He snapped a fresh clip into his M-16 and gritted his teeth against the apparent certainty of defeat. What screams he heard now between the lessening gunfire were clearly those of the women of Nineteen being slaughtered.

“Alive!”
a voice chimed through a loudspeaker somewhere.
“I want him alive!”