Freedom Express (29 page)

Also retrieved from the scattered remains was a pouch

containing the unit's up-to-date orders from the Burning Cross.

The orders, which ran more than twenty pages long,

contained the latest updates on the train's extremely slow progress, as well as various charts and graphs with which the Tongue commander could determine the train's ETA in their area.

As always, the missive ended with a warning from Devillian himself: "Do this job right or I'll make sure you never burn a damn thing again."

This was one threat that the Tongue commander took

seriously. He had heard of Devillian even before he'd gotten the call from the Burning Cross to transit over from Pretoria not a month before. But the Afrikaner was also confident that there'd be no screw-ups. The gasoline jelly dispensed by their weapons was perfect for stinging the train. His plan was to concentrate on lighting up the last third of the train cars as they passed by. Then the men on the train would have no choice but to cut those cars loose.

This way, the train would be severely crippled from the loss of thirty percent of its defensive weaponry, yet still able to continue on to its deadly rendezvous with Devillian's main force.

"Then maybe we can get the hell out of here," the fastidious Tongue commander told his second-in-command after reviewing the new orders. "I haven't gone this long without a bath since college."

The Burning Cross communications officer didn't know what to do.

He had just received a bit of good news - something that was running in critically short supply on top of the mesa lately, along with everything else. The Transsail crew had completed their mission and the Tongue of Fire unit was now resupplied for at least the next forty-eight hours.

The communication officer's dilemma was whether to wake Devillian with the news or not. It was just six AM, and he had to figure the Burning Cross leader was still sleeping-or, more accurately, still unconscious. Waking the cross-eyed terrorist was a dangerous proposition. The officer knew that on one hand, the boss shot people for rousing him too early. On the other, he'd also shot a number of people for delivering news too late.

Such were the pitfalls of serving close to the top of the Burning Cross power structure.

The communications officer remained undecided during most of the long walk toward Devillian's Play Pen. He was about two thirds of the way there when he hit upon a compromise strategy.

He would simply put his ear to the lust nest's door and knock only at the first sign of life inside.

So it was with great surprise that the officer found the doors to the Play Pen open and a groggy, yet noisy party still inside.

The man gulped when he first saw Devillian. The white

supremacist leader was lying on his huge bed, drunkenly orchestrating a bevy of confused, naked beauties as they halfheartedly flagellated him.

On the floor next to the bed was the massive frame of the bandit Jorge Juarez, naked from the waist down and laying in a multi-colored pool of unidentifiable liquid. The recently returned Major Heck, he being bandaged on the head and shoulder, was sitting in one corner of the huge room, babbling incoherently as he tried to stick the needle of a morphine-filled syringe into his arm, two unconscious naked girls at his feet.

All the while, an extremely sickening video of newsreel footage depicting the horrors of the World War II Nazi war camp Treblinka was playing unwatched on the enormous TV screen in the far corner. The room itself smelt of vomit.

The officer had no choice but to give Devillian the message now. Holding his breath, he saluted and handed the communiqué to the cross-eyed man. Devillian started gurgling as he tried to focus on the neatly typed-out words, all the while enduring the less-than-satisfactory flogging.

It took a full two minutes before he caught the gist of the news.

"This is great!" he proclaimed, so loudly even the gross mass that was Jorge Juarez stirred slightly. "Leave it to those South Afrikaners to prove to me that you shouldn't give a critical job to a bunch of darkies."

Heartened that Devillian seemed pleased at the news, the communications officer was still trembling with anxiety.

Devillian had been known to kill people on an early morning, get-the-day-off-to-the-right-start whim before, and the man knew that if he saw the terrorist reach for his trusted Polaroid instant camera, his life was soon to come to an end.

So the communications officer was amazed when Devillian promptly jumped up from the bed and swallowed a handful of speed tablets instead.

Then he turned to him and said, "You've just been promoted.

Be in the War Room in one hour."

It was actually an hour and ten minutes later when Devillian finally entered the crowded War Room.

The communications officer was sitting in the front row when the terrorist leader swaggered in, resplendent in his jet black Nazi-style uniform. He was followed by a phalanx of guards who had been pressed into service as an unlikely squad of cooks.

Two of them were wheeling a cart that contained a large, six-tiered cake. Except for the lack of a wax bride and groom figure on top, the cake would have been appropriate for an enormous wedding reception.

"Today is a new beginning for the Burning Cross," Devillian said. "Today, we commence feeding from the fruits of our new power. Today, we begin pulling the strings that will make the people in this country stand up and take notice of us."

The last thing that the twenty other people in attendance representatives from the various bandit gangs, air pirate groups and other mercenary units in the employ of the Burning

Cross-thought they'd hear at the early morning meeting was a sugar-coated pep talk. Instead, most had been under the impression that the terrorist leader was going to address the alarmingly critical supply shortage. The last they had heard, an overland convoy was to reach the mesa by that afternoon. Yet essential items such as diesel fuel, food and water were in such low supply that the replenishment would be sucked up

immediately, thus doing nothing to relieve the base of the shortage problem.

Making a bad situation worse was the fact that Devillian had ordered most of what precious supplies they had left to a secret location somewhere in northern Arizona, the purpose of which the terrorist leader had yet to reveal to them.

Until now. . . .

"The final die has been cast," Devillian said, strangely sounding as if he were reading from a movie script. "Here is the layout for the triumph of our will."

Turning on the War Room's huge electronic map, Devillian indicated the Tongue of Fire's current position on the west side of the San Juan Mountains.

"Going along with our plan of harassing the guys on the train, I've got a unit of South Africans sitting here on a bend in the track near a shit hole named Petaca," Devillian explained.

"They've just been resupplied, and when the train passes by them, they're gonna burn them."

There was a spontaneous cheer from those assembled.

Devillian then indicated an area in the northwest corner of New Mexico. "When they reach this point, we'll send up a bunch of Hinds to pop them. This will keep them thinking while they pass into Arizona territory."

There was another cheer.

"Then," Devillian continued, pointing to the area around the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, "they'll reach this area, where most of our forces are deployed. At this point, gentlemen, we stop toying with them and let them have it with both barrels."

Now the room erupted in an explosion of cheering and

whistles. Finally, they were actually going to destroy the accursed train.

Only the newly promoted communications officer raised his hand.

"Why there, sir?" he asked, somewhat naively. "If we are going to destroy them, why don't we do it sooner? Closer?"

Devillian turned from pale to red back to pale in a matter of seconds. Possibly the only thing that saved the

communications officer's life was that the Burning Cross leader had recognized that he'd just promoted the man minutes before and that he was entitled to just one stupid question.

"Because," Devillian began, "when we finally annihilate these assholes on the train, I intend to make it a historic battle. I want to see the bodies fly, burn, be crushed, the very life sucked out of them. But, more importantly, I want every person in this whole damn country to see all that as well.

Consider it a live news event -history instantly in the making."

"But why there?" the man persisted. Devillian routinely reached for his pistol. "Because, that's the farthest point that we can still beam TV transmissions back to LA, of course," he answered somewhat enigmatically.

With that he fatally shot the man in the neck.

There was another, less than spontaneous round of applause, and then Devillian called the meeting to a close by asking, "Does anyone have a camera with them?"

Mike Fitzgerald was getting nervous.

He was standing under the stairway of the dilapidated gray house that sat in the alley off the main drag in West Santa Fe.

His trusty Uzi was in one hand, its safety off. A flash grenade was in his other, the pin just a hairbreadth away from being disengaged. He was also carrying a .440 Magnum under his coat, and a back-up 9mm machine pistol in his boot.

Still he wondered if he could really hold off the number of people he envisioned being roused by the racket going on up in the second-floor apartment.

It wasn't screaming, per se. Quite the opposite in fact.

Instead it was the very loud, passionate sound of a woman moaning-and doing it so loudly that Fitz could actually feel its strident tone vibrating the hair on the back of his head. And as the chorus of delight was growing progressively in volume over the past twenty minutes, Fitz could only conclude that it soon would be loud enough to start attracting attention.

And that's when he'd be forced to break out his weapons.

"Jessuz, Hawker," he whispered, bringing the Uzi up a little closer to his chest as another even louder wail of undeniable pleasure echoed through the dingy alley. "What are ye doing to the poor girl up there?"

"I can't take any more of this," Juanita was saying, her erotic pleasure zones becoming overloaded. "I just can't. . ."

Hunter felt the same way-but for different reasons. His fingers were almost numb from carefully squeezing Juanita's lovely nipples.

He'd been at it for what seemed to be hours now. It hadn't taken very long for Juanita to remove her clothes for him after he'd first appeared. On first sight of him the amnestic hypnotic suggestion he'd given her during their first meeting had quickly evaporated. However he had thought the real convincer would have been when he told her that Studs Mallox was now a prisoner and that she too would be kidnapped if she didn't cooperate; after all, that was the whole idea of leaving her the picture of Studs in his mumu. But at that point she didn't even care. Even when he revealed to her who he was, her only concern was for him to put her back into the orgasmic trance. Clearly she needed this kind of fulfillment as much as he wanted the intelligence on Devillian.

And so slowly he had drawn the information out of her how Devillian intended to finally attack the train and where.

But as the interrogation went on, the problem was that he was apparently doing his job too well; Juanita's moans of delight were getting louder by the minute.

Five more minutes went by until Fitz-his anxiety getting the best of him -finally bounded up the stairs and banged on the door.

"You got crowds at both ends of the alley," he yelled in to Hunter. "Time to wrap it up."

Hunter was out of the door a few seconds later, Fitz just catching a glimpse of the topless, happily unconscious Juanita as she lay on the apartment's couch.

"Did you get what we want?" Fitz asked him.

"I did," Hunter replied, feeling only a mild pang of concern that he didn't have time to reinstitute the hypnotic suggestion that Juanita forget everything that had just happened to her.

"And you probably won't believe it when I tell you-"

"Save it for the long walk back to the chopper," the Irishman said. "First we've got to figure a way out of here."

One glance down the stairway told them that a crowd of

twenty-five or so armed men was now moving down the alley, the strange wailing coming from the gray house indicating that something was amiss. A look out the window of the second-story porch gave Hunter and Fitz a good view of the smaller, but no less meaner crowd that was coming down the opposite end of the court.

"She must be quite popular," Fitz said dryly.

"All these guys are either her boyfriends or her brothers,"

Hunter observed.

They broke through a skylight and climbed up to the roof only to find that no other adjoining rooftops were within jumping distance.

Back down into the hallway, they briefly discussed their options.

"Flash or crash?" Hunter asked.

"Flash," Fitz confirmed.

By this time, the two approaching gangs were only about twenty feet apart and getting very close to the stairway that led up to Juanita's place. Suddenly they were startled to see two men leap from the stairway to the ground right between them.