Ahead of him, from the glare of the truck headlights and the few lanterns, Rourke could see a knot of several dozen men by the head of the single road leading up to the top of the plateau, and he could see the flashes of gunfire and hear more small calibre automatic weapons fire.
Rourke spotted Mike, the brigand leader, without a shirt, his body visibly trembling in the cold, the riot shotgun in his hands. As Rourke ran up to the men around Mike, the brigand leader stopped talking and glared at him a moment, then nodded slightly, and went on. The words were hard to make out with the missing teeth and the stitched, swollen lip. “… ey can’t get up here after us. I figure maybe we got fifty or a hundred of ’em trapped halfway up the road down there in the dark—we keep shootin’ into ’em, we’re, ahh—we’re gonna pin ’em down all night— first light we get we can finish ’em.”
“What about the mortar rounds—all you need is one hittin’ a fuel tanker and this whole spot is a huge fireball. I don’t think that can wait till morning.” Rourke heard some of the brigands grunting agreement, one from the rear of the knot of men around Mike shouting out, “One of them mortar rounds almost hit my truck—I was parked right next door to one of the diesel tankers. The new guy’s right!”
“All right, smart ass,” Mike said, turning to Rourke, “what do we do—huh?”
“You’re the leader,” Rourke said, hunching his shoulders against the rain. “But if I were you, I’d take about fifty or seventy-five men, maybe in two groups, and work my way down both sides of the road—right now. No shooting at all until you reached those fifty or so guys in the middle of the road. Try and get ’em by surprise, maybe, then from their position, you can just dig in and start pouring out a heavy enough volume of fire to push that mortar crew back out of range of the top of the plateau. If you dig yourselves in well, by the sides of the road rather than by the middle, you can keep your casualties down, then just before dawn, pull back. Hold your fire then until the mortar crew gives the middle of the road a good enough workout to figure you’ve pulled back, then start firing from the rims of the plateau here—you might even catch ’em out in the open trying to retake the position in the middle of the road. Simple.”
Mike didn’t say anything for a long minute, then, “You volunteering to lead one of the two groups?”
Rourke sighed heavily, then said, “Yeah—wait ’til I tell my lady what’s up. You line up the guys—I’ll meet you back here in five minutes.” Without waiting for a comment, Rourke started in a slow run back across the camp and toward the pickup truck. He had no intention of sitting out the rest of the darkness in a foxhole in the middle of the road.
Another mortar hit off to Rourke’s right as he took shelter beside one of the truck trailers, then he started running again—back toward the pickup truck. Natalie and Rubenstein—their differences, Rourke judged, put aside—were drenched, the girl’s hair alternately plastered to her forehead or catching in a gust of wind, Rubenstein’s glasses off and his thinning hair pushed back in dark streaks. The lean-to was down and Rubenstein was just closing up the gate of the truck bed.
“We gotta get out of here—fast,” Rourke said, standing between them both. “I don’t have any kind of good plan, but it’s the best I can think of—now listen,” and Rourke leaned forward, saying, “I’m leading a group of the brigands down along one side of the road, there’ll be another group on the other side—kind of pincer-type thing. When we reach the paramils—there are maybe fifty of ’em in the middle of the road about halfway up to the summit—we’re going to knock them out, then lay down some fire on that mortar crew to push ’em back out of range of the plateau. Before they hit one of the fuel tankers. Now,” Rourke continued, “once I get down there and you hear the mortars stopping or pulling back, you and Paul take the bikes—”
“Wait a minute—shh, I hear something,” the girl said.
Rubenstein looked skyward, saying, “Yeah—so do I, John. Listen.”
Rourke looked skyward. He could see nothing but blackness, the rain still falling in sheets across his face and body and the ground on which he stood. “I hear it, too,” Rourke almost whispered. “Helicopters—big ones and a lot of them—the paramils don’t have that kind of equipment—”
Suddenly, the entire campsite, the whole upper surface of the plateau was bathed in powerful white light, and there was a voice, in labored English, coming over some kind of loudspeaker from the air above them. Rourke turned his eyes away from the sudden brightness. The voice was saying, “In the name of the Soviet People and the Soviet Army of Occupation you are ordered to cease all hostilities on the ground. You are outnumbered by an armed force vastly superior to you—lay down your arms and stay where you are.”
Behind him, Rourke heard Paul Rubenstein, muttering, saying, “You can all go to hell!” And as Rourke started to turn, Rubenstein had the “Schmeisser” up and had started firing.
Rourke shouted, “Down!” and grabbed at Natalie, forcing her down into the mud, the roar of heavy machine gun fire belching out of the darkness above him, Rubenstein crumpling to the mud, doubled over, the SMG in his hands still firing as he went down. Rourke crawled across the mud toward the younger man, then the voice from the helicopters shouted over the speaker system again, “No one will move! Lay down your arms and surrender or you will be killed!”
Rubenstein’s eyes were closed and Rourke could barely detect a pulse in the neck. Natalie was beside Rourke in the mud. As Rourke raised Rubenstein’s head into his lap, he glared skyward. Still, he could see nothing but the light.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Once Samuel Chambers’ advisors had stopped arguing, one of the naval officers—second in command to the air force officer, the ranking military man—had suggested using a Harrier aircraft to travel to Galveston. It could fly low, below radar, was fast, armed, and could land or take off vertically, with the capability to hover, if necessary. Chambers had agreed. The flight from the Texas-Louisiana border area had been short and, Chambers admitted to himself, exciting. The Harrier accommodated only two men, himself and the pilot, and he felt happy that he wasn’t too old yet to have been able to stare into the darkness and the rain they had encountered halfway through the trip and fantasize that he had been at the controls himself. He had flown twin engine conventional aircraft for many years, but never a jet. As the Harrier aircraft began to touch down in the Cemetery parking lot just outside Galveston, Chambers felt almost as if now he had flown a jet, and the feeling was good to him, uplifting, rejuvenating—better than the air of depression that he could feel settling over him when he thought of the sad state of affairs on the ground.
Because the plane had been for two men only, he was without his aide, without security. He had armed himself, borrowed a .45 automatic from one of the National Guardsmen, and the pilot was also armed, with a small submachine gun. As the plane touched down, any fears Chambers had held of security problems on the ground vanished. He could see more than a dozen men in U.S. military fatigues, holding M-16s and coming out of the shadows and toward the landing zone, itself illuminated with high-visibility strobe lights that had been placed there, Chambers understood, just for his arrival.
The aircraft slowed its engines and there was a loud whining noise as it stopped, the landing completed. The pilot scanned the ground, then made a thumbs-up gesture to Chambers behind him and the canopy over their heads started to open with a hydraulic-sounding hiss. The apparent commander of the soldiers on the ground stepped toward the plane, saluting, saying, “Mr. President—we’ve been waiting for you, sir.”
The pilot stepped out and reached up from the wing surface and helped Chambers out of the copilot’s seat in the camouflage-painted jet. Chambers climbed out over the side of the fuselage, awkwardly and conspicuously, he thought, then down onto the wing where the pilot helped him to the ground.
Chambers smiled at the army officer—a captain— and then turned to the pilot, extending his hand, saying, “Well, lieutenant—I enjoyed that flight. Got my mind off the troubles we all have for a few moments—it was like twelve hours’ sleep and then a date with a pretty girl and a steak dinner all rolled into one!”