” ‘Bout as long as it takes to get over there,” Baron Silas replied, casting his arm out and pointing to the horizon.
There, shimmering in the heat haze, an oil derrick and a cluster of buildings were visible. To one side was a motley collection of shacks and shelters.
And in the middle of it all was an oily cloud of smoke bespeaking a fire.
“Looks like we’re riding right into trouble without being able to draw breath,” the one-eyed man remarked.
“They not know what hit them,” Jak replied, shielding his eyes to stare into the distance.
“That’s what I’m relying on,” Baron Silas countered.
“What we’re all relying on,” Doc added.
They remounted the wag and the baron fired it up, turning and heading toward the oil well…and toward a firefight in more ways than one.
Chapter Eleven
As they approached the well and refinery, they could see more clearly that the thick, oily black cloud was coming not from the area of the well or the refinery buildings, but from the encampment where the workers had their shacks and settlements.
“Looks like they’re trying to chill each other this time, not fire the well,” Krysty remarked, the wind from the speeding wag making her hair whip in its wake.
“Yeah, and if we’re headed for action we’d better be ready for it,” Ryan replied, wincing as he flexed his battered shoulder. As he rotated the ball in its socket, it grated and sent a wave of pain down his arm as far as the elbow. He could think of better times for this injury than when he had a firefight in view, but what choice did he have now?
As the wag jerked and bumped at high speed over the derelict concrete road, the companions checked their weapons, making sure that they were in working order after their brief sojourn with Baron Silas’s sec men. All weapons were loaded with cartridge, shot or shell, and rounds were chambered ready for action, which was getting closer with every twist and turn of the road.
There was no indication of where the well and refinery area actually began or ended. Ryan remembered the baron saying that the sec force he had on-site was stretched thin, but how thin was nonexistent? For, as far as his eye could see, there was little sign of any sec force actually standing guard over whatever passed for the perimeters of the area. Maybe they’d all had to hightail it over to the area where the smoke originated from. That would leave the area wide open if that was a decoy. Right at that moment he wished he could ask Baron Silas about the sec setup, but at this speed and with the baron in the driving seat, that was an impossibility.
The one-eyed warrior turned to his people, all of whom had completed their weapons check and were now perched on the bench seats, riding the twists, turns and bucking motion of the old wag.
“Okay, we don’t really know what we’re riding into here, but it’s going to be a tough one. We don’t know how many sec men Silas has in there, or whether they’ll recognize us. And if there’s some kind of firefight going on between the different workers, then it’ll be a free-for-all.”
“Won’t be the first time, won’t be the last,” J.B. remarked. “Anyway, where are these sec men of Silas’s anyway? I haven’t seen jackshit as we’ve got near. Anyone could move about and screw up the well.”
“Anyone could if they could get across this desert,” Mildred said thoughtfully. “But what if the trouble in the camp is a diversion, because maybe there’s some sabotage at the well or refinery.”
Ryan nodded. “If the sec force is that thinly stretched, that’d be the way to do it during daylight. Mebbe we should take a little diversion and have a recce, just because…”
The one-eyed man strode to the front of the wag and rapped hard several times on the roof of the cab with the butt of his Steyr. The finely shaped and molded stock made a sharp cracking sound on the battered metal of the wag that cut through the full-throated roar of the wag’s engine. At first, Baron Silas ignored the constant rapping, but Ryan kept hitting the roof, cursing to himself at the stubbornness of the baron in ignoring him.