But the warrior was already climbing down, feeling with his feet on the steel ladder.
“Tell my brothers I count the first coup,” he said. Now only his head and shoulders were visible. “This is a good day to”
With a startling violence, the young man disappeared, cut off in midsentence.
“Fireblast!” Ryan cocked the SIG-Sauer and stared into the dark interior of the war wag, helpless to do anything to save the young man from whatever had seized him.
“What’s happened?” Krysty shouted.
Jak had turned and was already running back toward the wag, the steel gleaming cold in his hand.
But all of it was too late to help Man Sees Behind Sun.
Out of the stillness, floating up to the listeners, came a bubbling laugh, gentle and loathsome.
“Nice trick, you ‘pache bastard! Suck on this.”
They heard a cry of pain and bodies moving against each other.
The voice of the warrior sounded thin and strained. “He’s got a gren. Pulled pin!”
Life was suddenly measured in tiny splinters of time.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A deaf man wandering by would have been amazed at the scene, wondering what could possibly be happening to trigger such terminal chaos.
Jak reacted fastest, turning and sprinting toward a dip in the ground about fifteen yards away, throwing himself into it in a perfect racing dive.
The others all moved with varying degrees of speed, most hurling themselves straight onto the ground, curling up, hands over ears.
Ryan was stranded.
He knew that one of the General’s men had played it double cunning, sitting tight and still in the fetid blackness of the wag, hearing the confusion and the killing of his companions, taking out Man Sees Behind Sun by dragging him down the cockpit and chilling him there.
But he’d done more.
The dying cry of warning from the Navaho told them that the man had pulled the pin on a grenade.
Grens came in all shapes, sizes and colors. A scarlet and blue band around the dull top would mean that it was an implode. But it might be a burner, a frag, a high-ex, a shrap, a stun or a smoke.
All of that raced through Ryan’s mind when he heard the shout from the warrior.
Since he wasliterallysitting on top of the bomb, it didn’t much matter to him what kind it was.
It mattered what sort of a fuse. Normally they had a delay of between five and eight seconds, assuming they worked properly. Many of the grens around Deathlands were, amazingly, from before the long winters. Hundred-year-old pieces of weaponry weren’t always that reliable.
“Pulled pin!”
Combat reflexes took over.
Ryan kicked out at the open hatch, seeing it start to fall in agonizingly slow motion.
But he was already moving.
Dropping the SIG-Sauer for a second time, he started to roll backward, jolting himself as he came off the turret, keeping going in a clumsy somersault.
It was only about four feet from the rear of the LAV-25 to the furrowed earth, but it felt like forty feet. The breath was driven from his body as he landed awkwardly.
A clock was ticking in his brain.
Three and half seconds gone.
Part of his mind screamed for him to get up and run like smoke for cover, but the cool, considered part knew that might be the best way to buy the farm.
If the gren was high-ex, then the effect in the confined space of the wag’s interior could be catastrophic. The force of the explosion would come close to destroying the vehicle, the burst going up and outward.
Ryan burrowed down, keeping his body as flat as he could, head away from the war wag. He cupped his ears with his hands, closing his eye, letting his mouth sag open, knowing from years of experience that this was the best chance of avoiding terminal injury when the gren exploded.
Six and a half seconds gone.
Seven seconds
The ground trembled with the power of what sounded to him very much like an implode. They had been invented in great secrecy, using antimatter, in the last years before the nuke holocaust. When an implode was detonated, everything around was sucked instantly into its heart, as though a sudden, immensely violent vacuum had been created.
The wag behind him vibrated in the enfolding mud, and the hatch of the turret flipped backward with a dull clang. There was a hissing of air and the bitter scent of the gren as it destroyed the interior of the LAV-25. Overlaying it was the never-forgotten stench of burned meat.
Ryan’s ears were ringing from the implosion. He touched them and found that he was bleeding a little, with still more blood dribbling from his open mouth. He realized that he must have blacked out.
“All right?”
The voice was familiar, but it had a weird metallic ring, as though it had been electronically reprocessed, the words echoing again and again. Ryan wondered whether it might be the man called the Armorer.
Someone held him by the left shoulder, shaking him hard as though they imagined him to be locked deep in sleep. “Come on, lover.”
“Awake,” he tried to say. But a thief had somehow stolen his tongue from his mouth and replaced it with a large, moist feather pillow.
“Stunned,” J.B. said.
“Awake,” he said again, this time relieved that his tongue had been replaced.
“He’s coming around.” It wasn’t a voice he recognized at all, sounding slightly guttural, as though English might not have been the man’s first language.
“He trapped Man Sees Behind Sun inside the wag.”
“No.” Ryan knew that wasn’t true. Well, it had a kind of partial truth to it, which he could easily explain if they gave him a chance.
He opened his eye, finding that he was lying on his back, about eighty yards from the burning wreck of a small war wag. There was plenty of smoke filtering from every orifice in the military carcass, but very little flame. The sky was still dark, with the first pallid fingers of dawn light barely visible away to the east.
“Implode,” he muttered.
“What, lover?” He could smell Krysty, close by him, the familiar scent of her body rising over the permeating miasma of oil, rubber and gasoline. And scorched flesh.
“It was an implode gren.”
“Yeah, we know. We all heard it. Are you feeling all right, lover?”
“Bruised and scratched but nothing bad.”
“You shut the door on our brother.” The accusation came from a dark figure to Ryan’s right, one of a group of eight men, the surviving Navaho.
“There was another of the General’s killers left inside. When Man Sees Behind Sun went on the recce and counted them” He coughed and cleared his throat. “He counted wrong. The man was hiding, and he pulled the kid down and was chilling him in the command center of the wag.”
“Who released the gren?” Now he knew the voice was that of Sleeps In Day.
“Don’t know. Could easily have been the enemy. Think it was. Kid shouted to warn me.”
“Why did you not help him?”
This time the words came from Thomas Firemaker. Ryan could hear the pain and the anger in his voice.
“How?”
“Pull him free.”
Ryan sat up, wiping grit from his face, feeling his own anger swelling, the scar on his cheek throbbing. “He told me the pin was pulled. I’m sitting right on top of the oven. The gren went off about seven seconds after that. I nearly got my fucking head blown off as it was, you triple stupe! What the fuck could I have done?”
“Simmer down, lover.” Krysty patted him on the arm. “It’s over.”
“Our brother died,” Thomas Firemaker insisted. “And you closed the door where he might have escaped.”
“Sure I did. If I hadn’t, then the noise would have been heard by everyone from the Lakes to the Grandee and all the fucking way back again!”
“But our brother died,” Thomas repeated, as though Ryan hadn’t bothered with an explanation.
“Sure. So did all the men and women we set out after. Not a bad deal. One life for their lives.”
“Bastard!”
Ryan was on his feet, shrugging off Krysty’s restraining hand. “Nobody, but nobody”
The leader of the Native Americans, Sleeps In Day, stepped between Ryan and Thomas. “This is not the time and not the place.”
“I’ll fight him now.” The skirmish hadn’t gone well. The violence from the woman, then the unexpected death of the teenage Navaho and the destruction of the wag had all taken a toll on Ryan’s nerves. He was more than ready to take on Thomas right there and then.
“Let it lie, Ryan,” J.B. cautioned. “We got a job to do.”
“Fuck the job.”
He was aware that the Navaho had all gone into a huddle and Sleeps In Day was holding Thomas by the arm, whispering urgently to him.