Eventually, the wag slowed, almost to a halt, and Ryan yelled, “I’m coming around!” before swinging himself around, wincing at the pain forced down his arm from his shoulder, to face the baron through the window.
“What the hell is it?” Baron Silas asked, keeping the engine ticking over and the wag moving at a walking pace.
“Your sec force—they’d move to sort out trouble at the camp, yeah?”
The baron assented. “That’s their job. What else would—?”
Ryan cut him off. “Then if they’re as thinly stretched as you say, it could be that they’ve left the well and refinery open to attack.”
“The workers on there have blasters, they could hold off until—”
“Until what? If you’re right, then they might be the ones out to wreck the well. They could be fighting among themselves even now.”
Baron Silas’s jaw dropped. It was an obvious assumption, but one that had momentarily escaped him in his determination to reach the camp. “Shit,” he muttered quietly, “then we’d better—”
“Yeah, take the long way around and check out the well first. Now go!” Ryan swung himself back into the main body of the truck.
Needing no second bidding, Baron Silas Hunter gunned the engine into life once more, slamming his foot down and putting the gears through torturous changes in his eagerness to get the vehicle up to its maximum speed. He slewed off the road and took the short route across the dusty but hard-packed earth of the Texas desert, driving the wag over terrain that wasn’t meant to take an ancient vehicle with poor suspension.
“Assuming that we arrive in one piece, will we be able to see straight enough to aim and fire at any particular enemies?” Doc asked grimly as he was thrown across the width of the wag.
“That’ll be nothing if we can do this without breaking any bones,” Dean retorted as he, too, was flung to the floor of the wag.
J.B. joined Ryan at the front of the wag, both men standing firm against the back of the cab, using the metal stanchions to support themselves as they fixed their gaze on the well and refinery buildings, which were approaching at rapid speed.
“Seems quiet enough,” the Armorer remarked.
“Too quiet. I can’t see anyone moving…or is that just these damn spectacles?”
Ryan allowed himself a smile. “You need glasses, and I’ve got just the one eye, but between us we should be able to see if there’s some fireblasted activity, and I sure as hell can’t see anything, either.” As they came even closer to the derrick and outbuildings, it became obvious that there was little sign of any work taking place, or of any workmen on-site. The wag came up close to the derrick, and from their position on the back both Ryan and J.B. could see that the workers had left the site in a hurry. There were tools and partially completed works everywhere, discarded and left where they had been dropped.
“What do you reckon?” Ryan asked his oldest friend.
“Figure they saw the smoke, ran for the camp,” J.B. mused. “It’d work as a diversion.”
“You mean they all run for the camp except those who know that trouble’s coming, and then they get a clear run to do whatever they want.”
J.B. nodded. “Yep, that’s just about the size of it.”
The wag came to a halt, and Baron Silas and his sec guard scrambled out. Ryan and his group stayed in the rear of the wag. Silas looked back toward them.
“Y’all not doing anything?” he asked, his voice half anger and half bemusement.
“Not just yet,” Ryan replied calmly. “First of all, I want to know a few things. How many work on the site?”
Baron Silas furrowed his brow and gave Ryan a searching glance before framing an answer. He couldn’t see why the one-eyed man wanted to know, and to him it just seemed that they were wasting time. Finally he said, “Guess there’s about two hundred all told, most of them on the refinery works. On the derrick, I’d say about fifty, mebbe sixty when there’s some heavy construction.”
Ryan nodded absently as he took the figure in, then asked, “So how many people all told in the camps?”