Ryan. “Number Four truck. Blown, that’s what’s happened. Land mine maybe. The
rear end, I understand. Now they can’t move, and neither can the rest of the
train. Can’t pass ’em, either. Too damned narrow.”
Ryan sprang up the steel ladder into the MG-blister, squeezed himself up behind
the gunner’s chair. O’Mara, the gunner, was training around, weaving short-burst
tracer patterns up and down the road and across, kicking up dust and blacktop
chunks, then easing himself back to angle high into the rocks each side. Ryan
stared back along the war wag’s roof, saw the convoy as a drunken line of lights
stretching away and down, those vehicles at the rear still moving slowly,
closing up. Three vehicles back from the war wag, fire could be seen, not
strong, a dull red glow that flickered feebly against the bright spot shafts
from the cab-mounted searchlights on each land wag and truck. But Ryan could see
nothing else. No movement, no human presence. No sudden and erratic stabs of red
muzzle-flash. He turned to stare frontward again. The road was picked clean for
yards ahead, empty of anything.
He said, “Cool it. Don’t waste ammo.”
He scrambled down the ladder and strode to the radio op.
“What gives?”
Cohn shrugged, puzzled,
“No alarms. Just Number Four’s blown. Lost all traction. Everyone else is saying
no problems. Four’s starting to burn but they reckon they can contain it.
They’ll have to step outside. I’ll tell—”
“No. Wait.”
“Hell, Ryan. S’just an old land mine is all. Coulda been there since the Nuke.
Been waiting for years. Or maybe fell off a land wag, I dunno. Into a chuckhole.
That dink McManus just happened to steer his truck right atop it. Wham!” Cohn
stared up at him. “Number Four’s gonna burn up unless they get outside to it,
and—” he gestured at a clipboard of papers by his side, “—she’s got bang-bangs
on her.”
“Wait!”
Cohn shrugged and went back to his mike as the tall man swung away. Ryan didn’t
like the explanation about a land mine waiting all that long a time before
deciding to blow. It was perfectly possible, but he didn’t like it. This pass
was too damned narrow. It should have blown years ago. There must have been a
hundred vehicles of one kind or another traveling this stretch over the past
century. This was the main trekline to Mocsin. It ought to have been triggered
before.
Nor did he like the idea that a mine had fallen off a truck grinding up this
wrecked road in the recent past. Because if it had simply bounced off somehow,
it wouldn’t have been primed and ready. In any case, landies were too expensive,
too valuable, to leave on a truck where they could pitch over the side or off
the back.
“Still nothing?” he said.
Cohn said, “Still tight. ‘Cept for Number Four. They’re getting a mite twitchy,
Ryan.”
“Tell ’em to hold on.”
There were six exit points on the war wag. One, a hatch to the roof; one at the
rear, presided over by two MGs; two toward the rear, one each side, above the
back portions of the port and starboard rocket tubes; an escape hatch below the
driver’s chair, very tight, very secure; and one that opened out, portside,
opposite though back from the radio table.
Ryan knew without needing to check that now all four main doors were surrounded
on the inside by weaponed-up men, ready to sell their lives dearly, five-man
squads for each. Nor did he need to check whether all of these doors were
primed, for he knew that Ches would automatically have triggered the internal
locks electrically as soon as the alarm, now silent, had started yowling over
the sound system. That killed the carefully engineered boobies set into the
locks themselves. But still no one could simply open up from outside and walk
in—door control was on the inside.
The Trader was seated in Dix’s chair, ready to take over if Ches caught it
somehow. Dix was at the rear, in command there. Two runners were ready, two kids
in their late teens, positioned one each end of the long vehicle, in case radio