Don Pendleton - Civil War II (29 page)

"Or a nuclear reaction," Winston muttered. He took Colonel Stanley by the arm and marched him to a wall display of the United States. With a grease pencil he drew a circle in the southeast portion of the country. "Bracket them," he commanded simply. He jerked the map off the wall and gave it to the Colonel.

"Yes sir, I understand."

"You know what I want. Put some birds up there. The total number I leave entirely to your superior knowledge. But I want every person in that area to know without any doubt whatever that nuclear devices are exploding above their heads."

"Yes sir."

"All right. How long, Colonel?"

"How long, sir?"

"Before your birds are aloft."

The Colonel frowned. "These will be manual mode launchings. I'll have to program the coordinates and select the appropriate sites. Say ten minutes."

"All right, let's say
twenty,
and the timing is all-important. I want those warheads felt in
exactly
twenty minutes."

"Can you give me a written order to cover this, sir?"

"Who the hell gave me any written orders?" Winston j snapped. "Twenty minutes, Stanley, or I'll have it written all over your ass!"

"Yes sir. Exactly twenty minutes, sir." The Colonel
back-stepped, threw
Mr. Director
a smart salute, and went to talk to his birds.

Winston, Bogan, Silverman, and Ritter had retired to the conference alcove adjoining the War Room. Now a dead calm prevailed there. Winston had gone to a wall map and was silently staring at it, hands on his hips, lips pursed thoughtfully.

The rattle of diaphragms in telephone receivers scattered along the conference table could be plainly heard. Silverman was slumped in a chair, staring at the telephone, a perplexity working at his craggy features, hands crossed on one knee.

Norman Ritter was staring at the back of Michael Winston, and he was quieter than perhaps at any other time during his adult life.

General Bogan watched the play of emotion across the redhead's face, then he moved alongside him and asked, "Something bothering you, Norm?"

Ritter's eyes swiveled about to rest lightly on the old soldier, then they returned abruptly to the object of his intent interest. "That man there bothers me," he said softly. "I just realized what he's doing. He's atom bombing us. He's attacking my country with nuclear weapons."

"Would you care to depose him and take his place for awhile?" Bogan asked calmly.

"He scares the shit out of me," Ritter said, ignoring the sarcastic query. "I've been watching him all day." He tossed a quick look at the General and added, "But I'm not scared of the damn
bombs.
I'm scared of
him?

"I don't believe it," Bogan said, with faint amusement. "The tiger of the towns, afraid of a mere white man?"

"That's just it," Ritter muttered. "There's nothing
mere
about this white man. Nothing even nearly
mere.
And he scares the shit out of me, Jackson."

Bogan heaved a long sigh and said, "It's a phenomenon

I've seen many times. Norm. In Korea. In Southeast Asia. Many places. It's called
growing into your hat.
I'd say that Mr. Winston has
mushroomed
into his."

Winston turned from the wall and caught the two men staring at him. "What am I now?" he growled. "The new ogre of Pennsylvania Avenue?"

General Bogan smiled and told him, "I guess so, Mr. Director. Yes, I guess that must be it. Welcome to the club."

CHAPTER 8

Henry Chambers was thankful that he had dug that drainage ditch, after all. When Dixie Agro began the condemnation proceedings that Spring, wanting to swallow up Chambers and the other handful of independent farmers in the area—he'd thought, what the heck, why dig ditches or anything else now? No one could fight Dixie Agro, certainly not a poor independent like Henry Chambers.

But now Chambers was glad he'd gone ahead and dug the ditch. It seemed highly unlikely now that Dixie's claims would ever come before a court—unless it was a
black
court. And that ditch now provided a near-perfect front line defense entrenchment for himself and his two boys, Wayne and Pete, and they'd by God fight the blacks for their land... in a way they could have never hoped to fight the agricultural conglomerate.

They had filled some old fifty-gallon steel drums with dirt and lined them along the road side of the ditch, just for extra added protection, and Chambers figured they were pretty well dug in ... if only them coons didn't start pitching heavy stuff at them. He carefully positioned his old 30.06 between two of the drums, then smiled grimly at his boys and double-checked their positions.

Think
they'll be coming soon, Dad?" asked thirteen-

year-old Pete, Ms voice quivering with the excitement of the moment.

"Soon enough," his father grunted. "And don't sound so anxious. We got about one chance in a million if they come up here with tanks or with heavy artillery."

"You're not scared of them, are you Dad?" Wayne asked, the seventeen-year-old's eyes probing into his father for the truth of the matter.

Chambers glared at his eldest son for a moment. Then he smiled reassuringly and told him, "Course I'm scared, Wayne. Think I'm an idiot? Man has to be an idiot not to be scared at a time like this." He pulled a coarse blue handkerchief from his hip pocket and mopped his face with it, then sat on the side of the trench with a loud sigh.

"Now look here, you boys," he said softly. "Let's not play games with ourselves. We got a hell of a chore coming up here. But it
is
a chore, just like milking a cow or slopping the hogs. We got a chore. And that chore is to keep those coons away from your mother and your sisters. Now that's the whole thing, pure and simple. You know what those coons will do to our women. So we can't let them past us. Understand? That's all there is to it. We don't let 'em past us."

"We won't," Wayne replied staunchly.

"We'll probably die, boys. Face that. We'll die. But if we hurt the coons enough first.. . well.. . maybe they won't be in no mood for anything else. I know this is a bitter pill for boys your age to swallow. But the worst can happen to
us
is that we'll die. Your mother and sisters . . . well, you know what I mean. Some things are
worse
than death."

"I ain't afraid t'die!" young Pete declared fiercely.

"Just don't be in no hurry to do it. We gotta hurt 'em all we can first. Remember that. We got to keep our heads."

Wayne cried out a warning and pointed down the dirt road. A faint cloud of dust was lifting above the treetops, far down the hillside.

Henry Chambers huskily cleared his throat and told his troops, "All right, that might be them coming now. Petey, you run back and make sure the women are in the storm cellar. And you make 'em lock it from the inside, now. And

then you get right back here. Wayne, you come with me, We'll set the gas trap now."

Young Pete dashed off toward the house, some thirty yards up the hill. Chambers and the older boy ran down the rutted farm road to a point about fifty yards below the entrenchment. Four large gasoline cans occupied the center of the narrow road. The two men feverishly dumped three of the cans, saturating a fifteen-foot stretch of freshly plowed roadbed, then used the fourth can to spew a careful trail back to the entrenchment. Pete had returned from his task when they reached the trench, and he was grunting with exertion and restrained anxiety.

"Now listen to me," Chambers panted. "Don't do any shooting until I light off that gas. And then make every damn shot count. I mean every one. Don't lose your heads. Putting a bullet through a coon's head is no different than putting one through a squirrel's head. Remember that. And maybe we'll even come through this. They're going to be coming upgrade and that fresh earth will slow them even more. If we're lucky, and I mean damn lucky, we'll blow them to kingdom come, or at least roast their tails good. Okay now. Get your heads down. Here they come."

Henry Chambers took a last long look at his two sons, his throat constricting with a swelling pride as he noted the unflinching determination upon their too-young faces. His eyes roved slowly and wetly across the fields he'd spent his sweat on for so many years, finally coming to rest upon the big house he'd built with his own two hands.

He tried to visualize his Judith and the two girls, huddled together in the storm cellar, awaiting God only knew what—but he simply could not call up a vision of such an impossible thing.
What a funny thing,
he thought. What a funny thing to be happening to him and his on their own land and in their own country. It simply could not be happening. But it was.

The cloud of dust was no more than a city block away now. They would be coming over the rise any second now.
God help me\
he cried out in the anguish of his mind.
God help me do what I got to do\

Several minutes before Wayne Chambers had spotted the dust cloud, a small armored column moved swiftly northwest along the highway out of Yazoo City, Mississippi Then suddenly the column came to a quick and unexpected halt. The point jeep, which had a good hundred-yard lead on the heavier vehicles of the column, burned rubber on the deserted asphalt pavement for thirty feet or more before halting its forward motion.

Sergeant Paul Battel, seated alongside the driver, rose to gaze back at the column. He conversed briefly with the C.O, through a two-way radio, then commanded the driver, "Okay, lets go back."

The little vehicle weaved wildly in reverse motion, coming to rest beside the scout car at the head of the column. Bartel stood up in the floor of the jeep and gazed back along the column, taking a mental inventory of the six light tanks and three troop-carriers, then he shifted puzzled eyes to the lieutenant who sat in the observation turret of the scout. "What's up, sir?" he asked.

The C.O. pointed to a rural mail box which was supported by an unpainted post just off the shoulder of the highway. A deeply rutted dirt road led off just beyond the mail box, disappearing over a small hill several hundred yards distant "Must be a farmhouse up in there, maybe a bunch," the lieutenant said. "Go on up and spot for us. If there's a decent target, call back the coordinates. Otherwise just chop up what's there with your fifties and get on back here."

Sergeant Bartel grimaced distastefully. "One lousy farmhouse, Lieutenant?"

"One lousy pigpen, Sergeant, if that's all there is up there. You know our orders and you've got yours. Now get to it"

Bartel touched his helmet in a limp salute, slid into the seat, and motioned resignedly to the driver. The jeep leaped forward, swerved onto the dusty roadway, then jounced along in second gear up the incline.

To Sergeant Bartel, this was not a war. Nothing in all his years of training had prepared him for the horrors he'd witnessed this day. The lieutenant was sure a cold one.

Hell, Bartel had seen that road when they passed. But, God, what was going to be gained by slaughtering everything they passed? What a great new start for the bright new future of the American Negro! Be happy, children. Laugh, sing, and be merry. You're dancing in a graveyard—but we can't help that. The whole damn country is a graveyard. A couple hundred million dead people are under your feet, and that squishy feeling between your toes is nothing but millions of gallons of whitey blood trying to soak into the earth. It never will, of course. It'll never soak in. You'll be walking around ankle deep in blood for the rest of your lives. But we couldn't help that. That's what war is like.

He swiveled about to glare back into the motionless line of armor on the highway and he sighed. This courageous and powerful armored light attack force was gonna slaughter the enemy—boy wasn't that something! Probably one lousy farmhouse, probably an old weatherbeaten man and woman and a bunch of raggedy kids. And this was the enemy. Hell, what an enemy. These people out here probably didn't even know the war was on. Bartel smiled grimly, smarting at the taste of dust in his mouth. The cause of liberty and equality must not falter. The sergeant grunted and tried to find a comfortable hand grip. They topped the rise and plunged down the other side, the little jeep shuddering and jouncing along the washboard roadbed, then started up another gender incline.

Bartel stood up, gripping the top of the windshield with both hands, trying to get above the dust and get a better look at the terrain ahead. The private who was manning the rear-fifty swore loudly. He was all but obscured in the backwash of finely powdered dust being kicked up by the jeep's wheels.

"Slow the sunabitch down!" the gunner cried. "You're bouncing my balls off!"

The driver grinned and shifted into first gear, slowing to a crawl. Bartel leaned forward suddenly and waved violently at the driver. The jeep jerked to a halt, swinging almost broadside across the road as the brakes grabbed and held.

The Sergeant stepped onto the road and took several paces up the incline. They had halted just a few feet short of what appeared to be a mudhole. He was thankful he'd seen it in time. Nothing he'd like worse than getting stuck in the mud in this forsaken spot. He dropped to one knee and dug his fingers into the soft earth, plumbing for depth, then withdrew his hand quickly in surprise and raised it to his nose. Gasoline? A gasoline-soaked country road?