“You three, maintain cover fire!” Overton shouted from behind a timber from the fallen entrance of the limestone hill. The man was brandishing a huge hand-cannon, with the deadly M-60 lying near the campfire. “Shoot in shifts, one reloading while the others keep firing. You four, circle to the right, you and you to the left. Block his escape and chill the bastard on sight!”
Bullets drilled into the curved expanse of the antenna steadily, ricocheting off the metal support struts.
Staying low, Ryan didn’t dare stand, knowing it was certain death. Pawing through the bloody clothes of the dead men under the dish, the one-eyed man found the wrong half of an AK-47, a bent knife and a single gren.
Bullets zipped through the trees on either side, the cross fire closing in like the mandibles of an army of killer ants. Mentally, Ryan tried to gauge the distance to the fuel dump. The resulting blast would obliterate this whole outpost, chilling him just as surely as the blue shirts. But if Ryan Cawdor was going to die, then he would take Overton and his troops along for the ride.
Pulling the pin, Ryan stood and prepared to charge.
Chapter Twenty
A loud crashing in the trees behind Ryan made him turn, gren and blaster at the ready.
Incredibly, a flatbed truck festooned with sandbags smashed through the burning bushes. Trailing coils of concertina wire, the truck braked to a halt between the smoking wreck of the LAV and the battered satellite dish. Clem was at the steering wheel, with Mildred in the passenger’s seat. Throwing open the doors, both started to fire their blasters as the rest of the companions and twenty Front Royal browns cut loose from the rear of the bedraggled vehicle. A dozen blue shirts dropped before the rest could shift positions and return fire.
Suddenly, Nathan Cawdor jumped from the truck and pointed at the limestone hill. “Kill!” he shouted, and a pack of Front Royal hunting dogs surged out of the wag to silently charge across the clearing.
Screaming in fear, two of the sec men dropped their weapons and ran for the cave. The dogs tore them apart in passing and kept going. But the rest of the blue shirts stood their ground and cut the beasts to pieces. One bleeding hound managed to reach the sec men and leaped, burying its fangs into a man’s throat before the others could blow off its head.
The wounded man lay on the ground screaming, blood squirting into the air, until Overton himself shot the man. Amid the confusion, Ryan darted for the truck, pausing to throw the gren. It bounced off a wooden crate of MRE packs and sailed into the interior. A second later, the cave shook from an explosion, but again the fuel dump didn’t ignite. Then the halogen lights on the tall poles clicked off, plunging the campsite into darkness. Only the tiny fires of burning wreckage and the red embers of the dying campfire marred the black night.
“Nice to see you alive,” J.B. snapped, firing the Uzi at some darting figures in the shadows.
“Same here. How the hell did you find me?” he asked, dropping the spent Kalashnikov and working the bolt on his Steyr. “Use the dogs?”
“Indeed, my dear Ryan,” Doc answered, discharging two rounds from the LeMat.
Krysty stood and snapped off some rounds from her wheelgun, and a cry told of a hit. “The engine was leaking so much oil we could have followed your trail ourselves.”
Smoothly reloading the Uzi with a spare magazine from his munitions bag, J.B. gave a sideways glance at Mildred’s partially untangled hair for the hundredth time. “Can’t believe that fooled the blue shirts,” he stated incredulously.
“It was dark,” the physician answered, snapping off rounds from her blaster. “And Daffer helped divert their attention.”
“How?”
Squeezing the trigger carefully, Mildred chilled a sec man with a round directly into the jugular vein of his exposed neck. The man fell back, spraying blood over the others in the cave. “Details later!”
“Spread out,” Jak said, tossing aside his longblaster as the weapon emptied. “Truck big target.”
“Hey, look there!” Dean cried, pointing. There was an indentation in the line of trees, and in the center of the hollow was a large granite boulder. “That’s a great place to shoot at the cave!”
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