War Weapons (12 page)

He had not only led them all into a death trap but had provided the coffins as well—and had arranged for burial. How thoughtful.
Stone could feel a fury rising inside that he knew he had to control quickly, a rage at himself that he had led these men
to their deaths. To slow, agonizing deaths through suffocation during which they would have hours to slowly hack their way
out of this life, seeing their faces grow bright red and then purple as they gasped for the precious air that wasn’t there,
for the tank’s oxygen supply was limited to three hours at best. Although he knew in a way that it wasn’t his fault, Stone
accepted the responsibility that all leaders must accept for the men they lead into battle. If a commander’s job is to keep
his men alive, then Stone had failed miserably. His own death he could handle. But all of theirs? He sat down in a huff in
the corner, for the first time at a complete loss as to what the hell to do. He could feel the eyes of Bo and Simpson on him,
even the dog. They knew something was up, and knew that he was as lost as they were.

“What the hell is going on?” a voice blared over the earphones that Stone had slipped back on. Well, he couldn’t avoid the
subject of just what had happened to them forever —as much as he would have liked to. “I’m going to open this hatch and see
just where the—” Bull’s voice went on from the other tank.

“No, don’t!” Stone screamed suddenly, pulling down the mouthpiece in front of his lips. “We’re—we’re underground. We’ve been
buried in sand. I—I don’t know how deep.” He could hardly talk and said the last words in a whisper, even though he knew it
was important to keep up a good front. He just didn’t have it all together right now, mat was all.

“Holy shit,” Stone heard Bull say, then Hartstein muttered some choice profanities from the other Bradley.

“Look, I don’t know what to say to you. To be honest, I don’t even know how to proceed. I—” Stone just kept finding himself
stuttering whenever he reached for words. There weren’t any words.

“Son of a rotten fucking son of a bitch,” Bull spat into the microphone, stinging Stone’s ears. The aura of deep depression
was palpable right through the walls of the three tanks. Every one of them was feeling the same horror, the same sickening
nausea in their very souls, that they were about to be buried alive—one of man’s oldest, most primeval fears, along with snakes
and things that go bump in the night. It wasn’t the preferred route of passage.

“Look,” Bo said with a little cough, off to Stone’s side. He was always too nervous to talk, thinking himself perhaps the
stupidest of the attack force. But since no one else was saying a word, he spoke up, self-consciously. “Why don’t we just
open the hatch a little and see what happens. We got nothing to lose, right? I mean, it’s not like we’re going anywhere, as
far as I can see.” Stone hadn’t even known Bo had brains enough to make a joke like that, and he looked at the big, pug-nosed
farm boy with mild respect.

“You know, I think you’re right,” Stone said, jumping up from the control seat. “Nothing to lose isn’t the half of it.” He
went to the ladder and climbed the few rungs so his hands could reach and turn the holding lock of the foot-thick circular
covering. The bolt moved, but as he pushed up, he couldn’t budge the cover an inch.

“Bo, get your ass up here. Lend me some shoulder against this fucker here, it’s stuck.” Bo was up the ladder in a flash, and
though it was a tight squeeze with both of them wrapped around the ladder, they both heaved up with all their might. Slowly
the hatchway opened a little—just an inch or two—and dark, grainy sand came pouring in.

“Oh, my God,” Simpson said from below them where he had been watching them. “We’re going to die. We’re going to fucking die.
Like this. I can’t believe it.” He started sobbing loudly, and Excaliber joined in howling, too, so the whole tank was quickly
filled with the merry sounds of the terrified.

“Should I close it, should I close it?” Bo screamed out as sand streamed down over his shoulders and head.

“Yeah, pull,” Stone said, and they pulled down hard so that the hatch closed partially again. Now it couldn’t be closed all
the way, as sand was already spilling in, nor opened. Like an hourglass, the sand started pouring down and onto the steel
floor of the Bradley. Even Stone felt an awful kind of icy terror gripping his heart.

“Let’s try to open it again,” Stone suddenly yelled out, as be couldn’t stand just watching the porous grains fall down on
them. “Our only chance is that the top of the tank is only covered by a few feet of the stuff. If we push hard, maybe we can
dislodge it.” Bo looked at Stone skeptically, but he knew they had to do something fast. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of time
left. They set themselves and heaved up, and this time the hatchway went up nearly a foot. And as it did so, a wall of the
stuff started pouring in, all over their chests and legs. Before he knew what was happening, Stone felt Ex-caliber suddenly
leap up from the tank floor and grab onto the edge of the hatchway where the sand was pouring through. The English bullterrier
seemed to take a deep breath, then its second, protective eyelids closed over its eyes and it shot into the dark, shifting
sands above like a torpedo.

Stone could hardly believe his eyes but had little choice as the animal started kicking and digging up a storm. The sand flew
into his mouth and face and down past his shoulders. Stone gagged for a second but held his end of the hatch. He could feel
the pressure of tons of sand trying to press it down from above. Bo caught his glance for just a second, and they both had
to grin—even in the very jaws of death—at the digging machine that the pitbull had transformed itself into. Its back legs
just churned away, almost in a blur, as its head and front paws disappeared into the sand. It dug and it dug, straight up
for the surface, knowing instinctively through the moisture and scent it picked up in its sensitive nose just where the nearest
air was. As if it were digging a hole into the ground to bury a bone—only this was one straight up instead of down—Excaliber
headed inexorably through the sand.

Suddenly the pitbull’s head broke surface, and he shook it to clear the sand from over his eyes. Then the slits opened and
the canine looked quickly around to make sure it had really done it. It could feel its master grabbing around its back feet,
ready to pull it back in, but instead the canine surged forward, pulling itself up onto the sand that covered the tank, nearly
dragging Stone along behind it. Feeling the animal move so freely all of a sudden, Stone had to assume it had made it up,
and taking perhaps the biggest leap of faith he had ever made in his life, Stone gave Bo a weird grin, closed his eyes and
mouth, and followed the dog, letting the pull of its legs as it guided itself out help suck Stone toward the surface. Halfway
up, he lost his footing as Ex-caliber jumped free. Stone nearly panicked, feeling himself stuck nowhere in the middle of a
universe of silence. But then he felt Bo push hard from below, and before he knew it, Stone found his head popping free of
the grit and he was looking at desert. The two other tanks, just yards away, were totally covered, as were the boulders that
had once stood next to them. There was sand as far as the eye could see, as if they had been transported to the Sahara. Stone
wiggled his foot below to signal Bo to follow and then set his elbows up on the sides of the sand walls that were slowly falling
down the hole his body had created. Slowly, as if pulling himself out of quicksand, Stone lifted his body up and out onto
the ridged waves of sand that blanketed the world.

“Thank God,” he muttered, looking up at the sky with a quick glance of gratitude. Far to the east, the storm of total death
moved on, blocking out that whole portion of the horizon as if a black wall had been erected. But it was past them. Bo came
up next. Then the whimpering Simpson. By then so much sand had fallen into the five-foot path they had to travel to the surface
that they could pretty much climb in and out of the tank directly, though the thing was two thirds filled with the grit inside.
Stone had them take out some shovels from the supply box. Then it was lots of digging as the three of them first shoveled
out the top of Bull’s tank, men, joined by that crew, freed the men of Hartstein’s tank. They all stood around in a kind of
daze, just staring at the sand, which stretched off like an endless black beach all around them. After a few minutes of letting
their pounding hearts start heading back to normal, Stone spoke.

“Okay, let’s take these shovels—and dig. Ws got three tanks to uncover.” It took them nearly six hours of nonstop digging
to be able to get all three war machines completely free of their sand tombs. Then another two hours to clean them up, as
they had all become inundated with sand. But fortunately the makers of the Bradley III foresaw just about everything, and
the armored vehicles came equipped with wet/dry power vacs on the insides, which sucked the sand up and poured the stuff back
out into the world from whence it came. As shaken up as the men were, they were all in a good mood. There’s something about
walking away from the Grim Reaper mat puts a twinkle in a man’s eye.

T
HEY WOULD never get all the sand out of these tanks—no one would. But the things seemed to be basically functional, and soon
they were moving across the recently created desert. They traveled over a good thirty miles of the loose-packed black dirt,
the tanks spitting out trails of soot behind them, which rose like the waste of a chemical plant. At last the deposits of
the sandstorm came to an end, and they were once again on the hard-packed prairie surface. It felt good just to see living
things, even scraggly, flea-bitten cacti, after the sterile lifelessness of the sand world behind them.

As triple peaks lined up along the horizon, Stone brought up the mag grid for this part of the territory and searched for
Livermore.

“Distance from present location to Livermore,” Stone keyed into the control panel.

“17.587 miles,” the computer read out on its display monitor. It flashed the correct compass heading on another panel, and
Stone slightly reset the course they had been following, off by less than a degree. The flat land ended, and they came to
low foothills that rose up and down like jagged breasts. Rising to the top of the first hill, Stone suddenly was alerted to
a radio transmission on the same frequency as the tank’s by a panel readout. He had the receiver zero in and through the earphones
heard men shouting orders to each other.

“This is K Captain, reporting to L base. We are in pursuit of intruder in Sector-Seven. My force consists of three Bradleys,
two Hercules light tanks, two armored vehicles. Intruders are three late-model cars—there should be no need for additional
force.”

“Copy, K Captain. This is L base.” Stone heard the counter signal sweep back through a little bit of static. “Carry on attack
but report back every hour—and advise if additional armor or chopper assistance is needed. Out.”

It was Pattern’s boys. Without question. No one else had that military mode of operation. Stone slowed the tanks down until
they were moving at only about ten miles per hour. They went down a long, flat slope and then up another mat followed some
sort of trampled-down migration trail and was just wide enough for a single tank to fit by at a time. At the top of the next
slope Stone could see ahead for miles as the land once again dropped off dramatically and formed a five-mile-square plain
before rising into high mountains at the far side. And below, Stone suddenly saw through the video monitor, were tanks, rows
of them, over two dozen standing side by side. He slammed the brakes on, screamed into the mike for the others to stop, and
started backing up before the other two had a chance to throw then-big war wagons into reverse, so that Stone was half pushing
them back down the hill.

But he didn’t want to be seen. If the bastards were really so unprotected—all their heavy armor just waiting there like sitting
ducks—Stone and his men might have a chance. He pulled the Bradley off to the side and through a passage in some woods until
they were several hundred feet inside, snapping off branches everywhere around them. He came to a clearing just big enough
for the three tanks and swung the big machine around as the others followed suit.

“I’m going to check it out on foot,” Stone said. “It could be a trap. Keep the systems shut down. And don’t broadcast between
tanks—they may be tracking us already.” With that he climbed the ladder and stepped out the hatchway. As he hit the ground
Stone heard a sound right behind him—Ex-caliber. The pitbull felt like taking a little constitutional. They moved through
the woods, and then, rather than going along the open pathway, Stone edged his way up a series of boulder falls until he reached
a peak of solid granite, the highest point for miles.

Below he could see it all—the tanks laid out, the jeeps, cannons pointing outward from within a barbed-wire barricade, the
same prefab aluminum huts that Fort Bradley had been built with. Stone scanned the base with his field glasses, and then he
saw it—the missile silo. Unmistakable, even from a distance. The cone-shaped head that rose six feet out of the earth, the
protective shielding over the missile that lay beneath. Stone could hardly believe his luck. The place didn’t even seem that
well guarded, other than the usual machine-gun posts at all four corners and a jeep that periodically drove around the perimeter,
checking the vegetation to make sure that no one was trying to sneak in.

He watched the camp for about two hours, getting all the locations of its sections clear in his mind. Then he searched the
surrounding slopes and hills for a possible attack site. There—about two miles off—a flat plateau several hundred feet above
ground level. It would give them a perfect trajectory of fire from about three-quarter-mile range. Perfect. Stone set the
location of the plateau in his mind, then squirmed back through the thick bushes he had crawled through. He wouldn’t wait—there
was no need. The sun was just starting to fall, the twilight would be upon them, the night cries of the birds would drown
out some df the sound of the tanks. Yes, they would move—and fast. And men when darkness came, they would open up with prearranged
firing angles. The New American Army officers wouldn’t even know what was hitting them or from where. He prayed that Pattern
was down there as well. And that the Fascist madman would die in the hail of fire that was about to descend on them. For he
was the problem. With him gone, the whole rotten Utopia of mindless, robot citizens would fall apart—just another bad dream
from some sadistic little man who would be king.