Over the years, Doyal also perfected his own version of jolt. He started by cultivating opium poppies, then traded the black-tar heroin he manufactured for a stockpile of predark pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals—the makings of crystal methedrine. His jolt recipe was a super addictive combination of narcotic and stimulant, with a little Mindburst mushroom thrown in for its hallucinatory effects. The rad-mutated fungus was one of the few living things that thrived inside the thermoglass monolith. The success of this product had earned Doyal the nickname of “Baron Jolt.”
To service and expand his operation, he maintained a fleet of gas and diesel powered vehicles, which weren’t cheap to maintain. The distribution of the goods and collection of the profits required a standing army of sec men. Minutes ago, it was one of the largest and most far reaching enterprises in Deathlands. Now it was history.
In the feeble, flickering torchlight of the concrete tunnel, Baron Doyal ran for his life. He ran past seeping walls lined with barrels and crates, his suddenly useless cache of arms, ammunition, joy juice and jolt. Capo Waslick was right behind him. At the mountain end of the corridor, a steel ladder led up through a vertical tunnel hacked into the rock. It was a long climb in darkness to the sealed hatch at the top of the shaft. Doyal turned the small locking wheel, shoved the hatch open and scrambled out into the bright sunshine, followed by his second in command.
Five hundred feet below their position, the black flying machines hovered above the casino, spitting shrieking bolts of green light. The aircraft had twin rotors, a large one on top of the fuselage, and a slightly smaller one spinning perpendicular to it, at the tail.
Waslick nudged the baron, pointing out the two sec men slinking along the back side of one of the outbuildings. Both carried fully extended, olive-green rocket launchers. Reaching the building’s corner, they shouldered the LAWs, stepped out and fired upward at nearly point blank range. The pair of rockets got within ten feet of their stationary targets, then abruptly veered off, corkscrewing away, and exploding harmlessly out in the green and pink poppy fields of Skull Valley.
One of the gyroplanes immediately broke off its attack on the casino, banked in a tight circle and swooped down. The unsuccessful rocketeers dumped the spent LAW tubes and took to their heels, back the way they’d come.
They didn’t get far.
As the flying machine swept over them, a black net dropped from its belly, scooping them up, then dragging them along the ground. Meanwhile, another of the gyroplanes stopped firing and abruptly climbed, heading straight for the baron and his second in command.
“They’ve seen us!” Waslick cried. There was no cover among the low boulders. Doyal turned and dashed up the narrow mountain trail. Before he’d climbed seventy feet, a dark shadow passed over him, followed by a gust of wind and a fall of stinging mist. When Doyal looked up, he saw the glittering spray jetting from a nozzle at the rear of the aircraft. As he ran on, he covered his nose and mouth with his good hand and tried not to breathe. It didn’t make any difference. After a few steps, he became tanglefooted. Then his legs gave way beneath him and he hit the ground, hard. He lay there fully conscious, heart thudding in panic, but unable to move his arms or legs, or raise his head. The flying machine returned, its propwash whipping his back as it slowly descended. A mechanical claw reached down and caught Doyal by the ankle. It jerked him up and deposited him in the waiting net. Moments later, both he and Capo Waslick were unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the casino parking lot.
It took twenty minutes for Doyal to recover the full use of his limbs. By that time, all of the surviving sec men and agri-slaves had been rounded up, either by gyroplane or ground forces, and deposited in the parking lot. Close to one hundred captives sat cross legged on the ground. Most of them kept their eyes downcast, afraid to look at the inhuman black figures that surrounded them. Though Doyal was afraid, too, more afraid than he had ever been in his life, he had to see—and understand—what had brought down his hard won enterprise.