Half Past Midnight (44 page)

“I promise.”

***

Over the next few nights, we slipped easily back into our guerilla warfare mode. Each morning, we set traps in the road in front of them to slow them down. Each night, we sabotaged their camp or killed one or two of their guards. Finally, we had them down to a single Humvee and the truck.

Those last vehicles had all of the fifty-caliber ammo, but at least we had them pinned down. Or, at least that was what we thought until daybreak three days later.

“Sensei, wake up!”

If I had gained nothing else from the months of fighting, at least I had finally learned to bring my mind into focus the second I awakened. I opened my eyes to see Sarah hissing at me from a short distance away. “Problems.”

I sat up and started belting on my gear. “What’s wrong?”

“Larry’s gone.”

“What! How the hell did that happen?”

“They turned the tables on us. Sent scouts out and got our guards. I figure they pushed the vehicles down the road far enough that we couldn’t hear when they started up.”

“Even with the truck, they couldn’t all fit into two vehicles.”

“No. Tracks show most of them walking.”

“Damn it! Any idea how long ago?”

“Shift change was less than three hours ago. It has to have been since then.”

“Wake everyone up!”

We broke camp in record time and, within ten minutes, we were on the road. About half an hour later, we came across a small group of the enemy standing on the side of the road with their hands in the air. Another man lay on the ground at their feet. They must have heard our engines long before we saw them, but they made no attempt to hide.

Sarah and Billy led a small squad to surround the seven men and get their story. The rest of us kept a nervous eye on the surrounding forest, painfully aware that this could be a setup for another ambush.

After only a few minutes of questioning, Sarah trotted over to me. “They say Larry squeezed as many of them as he could in the Humvee and the truck and left the rest to fend for themselves. Most of them took to the woods, but this group wanted to try their hand at trading with us.”

“Trade?” I snorted. “What the hell makes them think we’d be interested in trading anything but bullets with them?” As soon as I said it, though, I realized I had missed the obvious question. “What do they have?”

Sarah cocked her head back to the man lying on the ground. “Eric.”

Megan and I both scrambled out of the Humvee. She beat me there by half a second. “Pops?” She lifted his head and cradled it in her lap. “Pops? What happened?”

He was in bad shape. Both eyes were swollen shut, and his body was a mass of blood and bruises. His right arm looked like it was broken in at least two places, and his left knee bent at an unnatural angle. Worst of all was the rib protruding through his side.

“-egan?” His speech slurred, and I realized that his jaw was broken, on top of the other punishments he had sustained. Tears began to leak from the corners of his eyes. “-egan? Ith your fadder he’e?”

“Right here, Eric.” Up until that moment, I hadn’t known how I would react when I finally found him again. Seeing my old friend like that, though, I couldn’t maintain my fury. For the moment, at least, all I could feel was pity. “I’m here.”

He turned his face to me and tried to open his eyes, but the swelling was too severe. “Thorry, Lee.” He swallowed, wincing as if he had swallowed broken glass. “Had ta do thomething ta ge’ clothe ta Lawry.”

“Yeah. Well, let’s not worry about that just now. We’ll work it out when we get back.”

He shook his head. “Ah not gonna make it back. Fucker meth-h-ed me up too bad. Th’ thombitch ith good, Lee. Be cayhful.” Megan looked up at me with tears in her eyes as she realized what Eric was saying.

“Who?” I asked. “Who’s good? Was it Han?”

Eric swallowed slightly. “Yeah. Methhed me up inthide.”

“Why now? What made them do this now?”

“Ah tried ta get Zach out this mornin’. Kicked Larry’th ath, too.” Eric grinned for a second, then grimaced as the movement sent pain through his jaw. “Almoth’ made it out, bu’ Han caugh’d me. Be cayhful, Lee. He don’ feel nuttin’. No pain… nuttin’.”

“It’s all right, Eric. We’ll get him.”

Eric nodded. “Yeah, jutht don’ fight ’im.” He reached out his left hand blindly, and I took it in my own. “You get th’ chanthe, you thoot th’ bathtard.”

“You can count on it,” I told him.

I held his hand like that for a time while Megan cradled his head, until his hand finally lost its strength. As I lay his hand on his too-still chest, my emotions were so mixed up that I could hardly sort one from the other. In those last few minutes, I was almost surprised to find that I genuinely and completely forgave him. Once more, I found myself weeping over the loss of a friend and, as my daughter’s eyes met mine, I think she finally forgave me as well.

No one bothered us for the few minutes that we grieved, though we all knew that time was pressing. Finally though, I felt it was time to go. As hard as it was to leave Eric, there was a more impending matter. “Come on, Megan. Time to go get your brother.”

She nodded. “Just give me a minute alone with him?”

“Sure. I’ll be in the truck.” I walked away with a lump in my throat.

I didn’t make it far before a soft voice from behind stopped me. “Sensei?”

I sighed. “What, Sarah?”

“Ahmm, the others?”

“What?” I turned, confused.

She jerked her chin back at the men Larry had abandoned. “They want to know about their trade.” The men who had brought Eric to us in this condition.

“Trade?” I spun and growled, “What the hell do you want?” Running up to the nearest one, I grabbed him by the shirt and drew Brad’s dagger from my belt. “You march into our town! You kill our friends!” I jabbed the dagger at his throat, letting the tip break the skin. “Our families! Our neighbors! You destroy half the damned town!” I twisted the knife, and a bead of blood welled at the tip. “You steal my son!” His terror showed in the wide eyes that stared in shock at my reaction. “And now you have the balls to ask me for a trade?”

“Sensei!”

Sarah touched my hand, and I flinched away, withdrawing the dagger. I had nearly killed a helpless man. Worse yet, at that particular moment, I didn’t really care. I walked a few paces away to try to cool off and heard Sarah come up behind me again.

I closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. When I felt calm enough to be halfway civil, I turned to her. “What do they want?”

“Tattoos.”

“What?”

“They heard about the slave tattoos from when Larry captured that foraging group a couple of months back. Seems they’ve decided they’d be better off as our slaves than fighting in Larry’s army.”

I thought about it for a while, then walked back to the bedraggled men standing around Eric and Megan. “You’re asking for tattoos? You know what that means?”

“Yes, sir,” a particularly rough-looking man at the far end of the line spoke up. “Some of the men who were part of the group that…” He hesitated. “That captured and tortured some of your slaves before… before the big fight, they told us about it.”

I walked over to stand in front of him. “So what does it mean?”

“It means we’re slaves for the town. Means we serve our time and, eventually, we get the chance to work our way out of it.”

“It means you would get a chance to live!” I hissed. “So what makes you think I should let you live?”

They looked at one another wildly. It had apparently never occurred to them that we might not allow them to become slaves. “But we brought you—” He stopped as he realized what he had brought us.

“You brought me another friend I had to watch die.”

I remembered an argument with Ken. He had wanted to kill a man, the last surviving member of the group who had killed his neighbors. I’d won that argument, and Billy had lived. And he’d gone on to become a fine person, even a friend. But now I knew firsthand what Ken had felt that day, the deep desire to punish someone, and the frustration of knowing it was not to be.

“All right,” I told them. “Assuming you don’t give us any trouble, and that you survive this trip, you’ll get your damned tattoos.”

I turned back to Sarah. “Tie them and put them in the back of a truck. If they so much as blink wrong, kill them where they stand.”

“Yes, Sensei.”

***

“There. In the brush to the right, just before the road curves. About twenty feet from the edge of the road.”

I searched closely where René indicated and saw nothing. “You sure you saw something?”

“Sí. Keep watching.”

I had just about decided that the tension had finally gotten to her when the branches of the juniper swayed, and I finally discerned the camouflaged figure behind it. Once I saw what to watch for, I found several others in the area. “I see them. Looks like about a half dozen or so.”

“More on the other side,” Billy whispered from his perch on the limb above us.

I shifted the binoculars across the road. Sure enough, another group waited there. “Damn.” I sat down with my back against the pine I hid behind and rubbed my eyes. I was so tired I couldn’t see straight. I was tired of driving, tired of sneaking through the woods, but mostly I was tired of the fighting. And just down the road, it looked like Larry’s boys were settling in for one hell of a fight.

Time to review options. “Any ideas?”

René thought for a second, then shook her head. “Sorry, Jefe, I got nada.”

I sighed. “Go get Sarah and Megan,” I told her. “Tell them what we’ve got here, and I want all three of you to start thinking of some way around this situation. I want some ideas by the time you get them back here.” She slipped off through the woods to get the others.
Damn it, Ken, why’d you have to go and get shot?

“Billy?”

“Yes, Sensei?”

“Think you can get around those jokers and see what else is down there?”

The young man nodded. “Easier done than said.”

“All right. Be back in an hour.”

“Yes, sir.” Billy started to slip away.

“Hey!”

“Yes, sir?”

“Make sure you don’t get your ass shot off.”

He grinned nervously. “That’s my number one priority.”

It was a long hour.

Chapter 21
* * December 2 * *

A L’ennemy, l’ennemy foy promise
Ne se tiendra, les captifs retenus:
Prins preme mort, & le reste en chemise.
Damné le reste pour estre soustenus.

To the enemy, the enemy faith promised
Will not be kept, the captives retained:
One near death captured, and the remainder in their shirts,
The remainder damned for being supported.

Nostradamus –
Century 10, Quatrain 1

I jolted awake to the sound of soft scurrying from the trees behind me. “Sensei?”

I lowered my pistol. “Here,” I whispered back to René.

A few seconds later, she slipped up beside me, accompanied by Sarah and Megan. Sarah’s head swiveled around curiously. “Where’s Billy?”

“Scouting.”

I noticed her worried demeanor.
Something going on there?

She saw me looking at her and immediately lost the expression. “Just curious,” she muttered.

I smiled. “He’ll be back any minute now.”

“Whatever.”

I’ll be damned.

Before I could comment, Billy stepped out from the trees behind us. “Any minute is right.”

I glanced at Sarah and saw definite signs of relief in her face as he sat beside us.

“What’d you find out?” I asked.

“Looks like this is it.”

My heart began to beat faster. “What do you mean?”

Billy cleared the pine needles away and grabbed a stick to draw with in the dirt. “Road curves around to the right up here and, about half a mile further up, they got a little camp set up. Looks like their last Humvee gave up the ghost. They got the hood up, and they’re goin’ apeshit tryin’ to do something to it.”

“Larry’s there?”

Billy nodded. “Down there screamin’ at ‘em to get the thing runnin’ before he shoots them all. The way they’re jumpin’, seems like they believe him, too.”

I was afraid to ask, but I had to know for sure. “What about Zachary?”

“He’s there. The big Chinese dude has him.”

Megan asked what I should have. “How many of them did you see?”

“Just up ahead, there’s about twenty of ‘em waiting to ambush us when we hit the turn in the road. They have one of the Humvees just ahead of that. It’s blocking the road, with two flat tires and a fifty-caliber aimed right where we would come around the bend.

“About half a mile past there, there’s an old highway rest area. That’s where Larry’s having his screamin’ fit. He’s got another dozen or so with him. Including Zach. All together, I’d say they have about thirty to thirty-five people.”

I clapped Billy on the shoulder. “I’d say you’re right then. Looks like this is it.”

Sarah grinned. “Half a mile away. We can finish it.”

Megan tempered Sarah’s enthusiasm with a bitter comment. “About damned time.”

“Yeah.” I turned back to René. “How many people you think you’ll need to ambush the ambush?”

“Why fight them at all? We can just go around them and hit Larry.”

I shook my head. “If we do that, we’re likely to end up with Larry in front of us, and the ambush jumping in behind us. Our best bet is to use our numbers to hit them on both fronts at the same time. Keep both groups busy and overwhelm them.”

She thought it over. “All right. Gimme fifty people, and Sarah to take half of them.”

Sarah nodded her confirmation. “No problem, we’ll hit ‘em from everywhere but where they expect us. Should be over before it starts.”

“All right,” I agreed. “We head back to camp. You ladies pick your squads. Take anybody you need. Billy, you’ll lead the rest of us to where you found Larry. We leave in an hour.”

“Uh, Sensei?”

I realized then that Billy had been conspicuously quiet while the rest of us practically gushed. I could see from his bearing that it wasn’t going to be good news. I sighed. “What is it, Billy?”