The Rabid Brigadier (17 page)

“Nonetheless, I’m going. Going now,” Stone said firmly. “We shouldn’t send a force this large into that kind of terrain—open
to ambush from every quarter—unless we know
exactly what’s in store. I take the lives of the men in this unit seriously. That’s why I’m going to be careful—very careful.”

“You are in command, of course,” Garwood said, again flashing that shining smile that made Stone want to check his back to
make sure it hadn’t been stabbed. “But we will have to insist that several men accompany you—if only for your protection.”
Stone knew they just wanted to keep an eye on him. He had nothing to hide.

“If they don’t get in my way, they can come.” He looked down at his NAA-issue watch. “Five minutes, then I leave.” He rose
from the table and went to pick up a few things he needed for the reconnaissance. The officers stared after him with contempt.
The man wasn’t an officer. Officers did things a certain way. There were many things to consider. There had to be a minimum
number of strategy meetings, discussions about the best way to proceed. Only Stone was the get-up-and-do-it type. And it drove
the rule and regulated brass half crazy as if he were challenging the very foundations on which their lives were based.

Two huge fellows decked out light with just submachine guns and binocs came up to Stone and saluted with their fists in front
of their eyes.

Stone returned the salute in a perfunctory manner.

“Sir, we’re the forward scouts you requested. I’m Corporal Jenkins, this is Corporal Powers. We’re both from these parts;
that’s why they use us.” Stone looked them over quickly. They looked all right, a little more unkempt than the average NAA
soldier, with stubble on chins, guns used and faded, with the look a weapon gets when it’s killed a number of men.

“I move fast,” Stone said, looking at both of them, staring into their eyes, to make sure they weren’t assassins out to
liquidate him. “No stopping for breath, no taking out maps to figure out where we are. No bullshit. Okay?”

“Okay sir.” Both positively smiled back. It was the way they went too. And in the youthful and even enthusiastic faces, Stone
felt suddenly confident that he could find no traces of murder directed at him.

“Then let’s go. Just stay behind me.” He slid over the side of the plateau and moved like a skidding stone down the steep
slope. The two scouts jumped as well, and followed one after another. Within seconds they could see that they were going to
have to put out all their energy just to keep up with the man. Stone moved down the slope at full speed. He wanted to be down
lower when the sun lit up the pebble-and rock-strewn mountainside. For all he knew there were scouts sent out by the enemy
too. They could be making binocular sweeps just as he had. If Stone had learned one thing so far, it was to never underestimate
even the most apparently barbaric and filth-coated of the killer bands out there. They were like rats—smart, tough as blood-stained
steel.

He hit the bottom of the mountain upon which the rest of the force was bivouaced and started instantly across the lunar landscape
ahead. The ground was hard as coal and sharp, with what appeared to be earthquake-created fissures every thirty or forty yards,
and chasms in the granite that appeared to have no bottom. But after about an hour of it he at last reached the far side,
where a series of pine-covered rocky canyons began. Stone glanced around behind him and saw the scouts clambering along the
edges of the chasms, but he didn’t wait.

He headed through the twisted rock valleys toward the fires he had spotted earlier with the glasses. And his sense of direction
was unerring, for soon he smelled traces of smoke on the wind. He slowed down, edging up through a grove of
pines that stood on the top of a rise and froze in mid-motion. He was right over them, looking down onto the camp of the bandits.
There were about a dozen ramshackle buildings built of wood with tin roofing, none of them very straight or nailed into place
quite right. And around the camp men strolled, performing various tasks. They were a wretched-looking lot. As bad as Stone
had seen—with faces out of a nightmare, filled with scars and boils and pus-dripping sores that the bandits didn’t even bother
to clean. He lowered the binocs and saw that they were stepping in their own excrement, piles of shit that lay everywhere.
You couldn’t get much lower, Stone thought to himself as he lay flat just inside the cover of the trees. They were about fifty
feet below him in the center of a canyon, the floor of which was about a hundred feet wide and five hundred long.

Then he saw that you could get lower as he focused the binoculars again. Half butchered bodies came into view, strung out
on a long high pole. Over a dozen of them. Men, women, it was hard to even tell anymore as these had no heads, some of them
no arms or legs. The gourmet etiquette of the meat eaters obviously allowed them to just go up and hack off a piece and hold
it over the fire for a minute or two, just enough to get that golden brown sizzle. And as he watched, one of them hungry for
lunch came over and did just that, sawing off a foot of one of the blood drained corpses and sticking it on the end of a branch.
It splattered grease onto the flames and they popped up in little exploding bubbles. Then after a minute he pulled it off
and began chewing away at it—toes first—spitting out the bones.

Stone was afraid he might puke, especially as the smell of the burning rotted flesh came up on a draft and hit him full in
the nostrils. It was a smell he would not soon forget. He made a complete scan of the encampment and then went
back over it again, searching out weapons stacks, where the main barracks were, everything he would need to know to formulate
his battle plan. More hungry bandits emerged from a long wooden building and headed for the gutted corpses dangling in the
wind. But Stone let the glasses fall around his chest. He’d seen enough.

He had started back down the outer slope of the valley wall when he saw just at the periphery of his vision a shape suddenly
launch itself from the branches of a tree above him. But the added quarter second of warning gave him enough time to take
a blow from a boot on the side of his shoulder rather than his head. He fell down, letting his body go limp, and as he hit
the ground, rolled away from the attacker. He rose and shook his shoulder, which felt like it had rivulets of fire streaming
through it. His attacker was rising too from the shadows at the base of the thick trees. A bandit—wild eyes, long black beard
filled with garbage that had accumulated in it, the whole side of his face eaten away, probably from radiation, Stone thought,
wincing as he saw it. For the flesh was missing down to the bone and on one side of its face it almost appeared that the mountain
killer was just a fleshless skull.

Stone pulled a blade from his boot and rushed the man, trying to reach him before he regained his balance. But the bastard
was quick, like a mountain cat, twisting and snarling. The grease-covered lips moved wildly, screaming in hate and fear as
Stone charged, but no sounds came out. Stone’s luck—the attacker was mute, probably from the radiation. If he could just kill
the pretty boy without making a sound, he might be able to avoid the camp being alerted. The attacker pulled out a dulled
butcher knife from within his blood-streaked robe, tailored from what looked like a woman’s winter coat, and pulled it back
to stab him.

Why everyone pulled back their knives was beyond Stone. He stepped inside, blocked with the left hand and plunged his blade
into the bandit’s throat. It went in on the right side just below the jawline and Stone pulled it hard across the front, cutting
the Adam’s apple, cutting everything in its path. He ripped the blade free when he reached the other side and stepped back.
A torrent of blood exploded out of the slit throat, as if everything inside the man were trying to bubble out at once. Gurgling
a horrible fishlike sound, the thing sank to the ground and grew quickly still, though his blood continued to pump for ten
minutes before the heart sputtered to a halt.

Stone heard a branch crack and turned with the red blade held out in front of him. But it was just the two NAA scouts, finally
having caught up with him. They stared down at the twitching body and the blade in Stone’s hand. The man was tough. The rumors
they had heard through the grapevine were true. They looked at him with a new respect, which Stone saw and ignored with a
snort of disgust. He never wanted to be admired for killing. It came too easy to him.

“Help me hide him,” Stone said curtly and the three of them dragged the nearly dead slab of flesh to a gulley, where they
covered it with leaves. Stone sprinkled more of the brown leaves and some dirt over the trail of blood until it seemed hidden.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said to the scouts, who looked a little disappointed. Somehow they had missed all the
action.

CHAPTER
Sixteen

B
ACK AT the waiting NAA strike force, Stone huddled with the officer corps inside a tent as the afternoon fell to evening and
the purple sky brought in a frigid wind, reminding them that it was, after all, winter, and that nature would do whatever
the fuck she felt like, whenever she felt like it. Stone was content to basically let them plan the format of the attack.
Patton’s tank strategy would, as always, be used. They would surround the canyon hideout with the four Bradleys and the wheel-mounted
155mm howitzer. Stone had seen relatively slow angled slopes at different sides of the mountains that surrounded the bandits,
so the battlewagons should be able to get into position.

Stone let them feel as if
they
were planning the operation; he wasn’t an idiot. He knew they had to feel they were running the show, or they would be resistant,
play games with him. Stone was content to watch it all. They, after all,
were the “experts” at large-scale armored warfare. He added only one plan to the entire operation, the sending of the infantry
first to seal the bandits in—in case the tanks were heard before they had a chance to open up with cannon. And thus Operation
Bandit Sweep IV—the fourth time they’d tried to take on this particular group of flesh-eating slime—was set in motion.

They waited until the sun slid into the coalpit of the evening and the magnetic curtains of the aurora borealis began to wave
and whip high above the earth to the far north. The strike force broke up into four units, each with a tank in the lead and
infantry surrounding them, and headed off the plateau in different directions. They had to take a far more circuitous route
than Stone had, onto slopes slow enough for the tanks’ treads to be able to grip. But if the maps held up, they would all
be able to pick out a zigzagging trail and get there. Stone let Lieutenant Carpenter drive the Bradley. Here, in such tight
quarters—boulders, trees all around them—he didn’t want to take a chance. At lower speed, with additional muffler equipment
thrown into operation, the tanks were only about a quarter of the volume of their normal noise level. The bandits would hear
them at a half mile or less. But by then—or so the plan went—it would be too late.

It took Stone’s tank half the night to complete the wide route to their slope, the southern approach, but at last the lieutenant
pulled the Bradley to a stop about a mile from the almost circular wall of tree-dotted slopes that surrounded the bandit camp.
Stone looked at his watch in the luminous green lights that filled the inside of the tank. Four-thirty exactly. They were
right on schedule.

“Now, you know the plan, right?” Stone asked as he rose
and started up the metal-runged ladder that led to the exit hatch.

“Infantry gets in place. Five hundred we start moving; will proceed to coordinates A-14, K-27 and commence firing on enemy.”

“Sounds right,” Stone said. “Good luck,” he added a little too stiffly, and then was gone up the ladder. He still had no idea
quite how this commander stuff really worked and wondered for the fiftieth time if he really had a career cut out for him
in the NAA. Stone took command of the twenty-five troops who were milling around in the front of the tank, waiting. It was
still dark, the sky devoid of moon or magnetic stripes or anything. It was that dead time of the morning when night had vanished
without a trace but morning hadn’t really arrived on the scene yet. It is death’s favorite time, the hour when most men die.

Stone led the force across the rocky terrain and then up the brush-covered slope. It was only a few minutes to the top and
then they set themselves around the edge of the rise, staring down onto the bandit stronghold. If the slime had any idea that
something was up they were sure pretending good. Spirals of smoke drifted up from the long huts, while five men attended a
large bonfire in the center of the camp that they always seemed to keep going, throwing branches on from time to time. Stone
checked his watch again by the first weak rays of the sun that drifted through the mountain mists to the east. He was into
his second day without sleep. Already the NAA training was paying off. It was five o’clock—the tanks should be moving in.
Stone heard the distant rumblings of the Bradleys, which grew louder by the second.

Suddenly the bandits were stirring. Lanterns snapped on inside two of the wooden structures and within seconds
naked and half naked men came running out with rifles in their hands. The infantry forces had been ordered to hold their fire
until the shit actually hit the fan. But it clearly had. Stone opened up along with the rest of them, firing the M-16, which
bucked in his hands like something alive.

The rest of the infantry forces had apparently gotten into place on all four sides, for sparks of lights lit up the darkness
around the upper edge of the valley slopes as round after round descended into the encampment. The first rush of mountain
men from the doorways was cut to ribbons, suddenly dancing an insane jig of jerking arms and legs, spewing blood out in a
red whirlwind as their bodies were spun around by the sheer intensity of the fire. The bandits retreated back into their half
caved-in wood buildings and various little trenches they had dug throughout the camp. Several machine guns opened up from
camouflaged ditches in the ground and Stone saw a line of slugs dig into the slope below him, jackhammering the loose rocks
there into powder that filled the air with acrid dust for a few seconds before settling down. So it was going to be a battle
after all. These flesh-eating son-of-a-bitches weren’t going to give it up easily.