Of course, it was doomed. He’d been right about that.
For one thing, MAGOG carried more dedicated fighters than Chato had, not to mention another hundred or so support types, cooks and clerks, who could fire a CAR-15 or submachine gun out windows and firing ports about as well as anybody. And neither Chato nor any of his followers had the remotest conception of how much sheer firepower MAGOG mounted.
Two could play the sharpshooting game, for instance. There were four dedicated antisniper turrets, each containing a shooter behind a Barrett Light Fifty sniper rifle and a separate spotter, each using mounted optics far superior to what Ironhead Johnson and his boys had. As Johnson realized, peering at the train through ancient but excellent Zeiss binocs for the few short heartbeats before his head turned into pink mist. Not even iron was proof against a 709-grain jacketed slug traveling about four times the speed of sound, it turned out.
Nor had the coldhearts grasped the fact the General had dozens of machine guns of various calibers at his command. And here came the first serious hitch in the plan: however reluctant the rail wag soldiers may have been about firing up their own buddies, much less the laborers, many of their machine guns were mounted on top of the train, where they could fire right over the heads of guards and prisoners alike.
Then there were the automatic grenade launchers, and the 82 mm mortars that quickly began to chug and cause big gouts of earth and assorted body parts to spout up out of the desert.
And Wild Wess Wilhelm received the surprise of his life—and death, as it happened—when a rack popped out the top of the train’s engine. He didn’t see it, because it was infrared and invisible to the unaided eye, the laser-designation spot painted right on the pearly third snap-button of his shirt as he rode standing up behind the roll bar of his Baja buggy. He did see the puff of white smoke as the Hellfire antitank guided missile came off the rack, however.
He had time to shout a hysterical command to his driver, who was already yanking the wheel hard right in a turn, which would have rolled the buggy and spilled them all out to their deaths or at least painful and crippling injury. The huge missile, however, struck the lower edge of the roll bar before the tires had even broken loose in a skid. A jet of copper from the shaped-charge warhead, so incandescent hot it was almost plasma, simply vaporized young Wilhelm’s midsection and right shoulder and about half the head of the driver. Then the speeding wag began to roll broadside, but now as a ball of fire, trailing blazing fuel and a giant caterpillar of black smoke. Another buggy lost it, veered from the road and took off end for end trying to avoid the blazing wreck, scattering its occupants in every direction. And then the machine guns began raking the wags that were attacking along the road.
The second serious problem with Chato’s plan now appeared: the expectation that the slaves would either flee in panic, disrupting the defenders, or better still actually begin to fight with their guards. But few of the captives had grown up in what anybody would call sheltered circumstances; life really was tough all over. As for regarding the attackers as liberators, trust of scruffy wild-acting guys with blasters wasn’t deeply engrained in the contemporary psyche. After all, however badly the soldiers had treated and were treating their slaves, it was the coldhearts who were shooting at them.
Of course, there are always a few who don’t get the message. Ten or fifteen captives did try bolting and got ripped to wet red rags, some with fingertips scraped bloody from trying to claw their way up the steep railway embankment. Most of the slaves had too much sense to try to outrun the bullets cracking past their ears, and instead just dropped flat against the ground.
Doomed, but not entirely futile. The attackers boiling out of the arroyo had appeared suddenly and were fairly close at hand. A lot of the slower ones got minced and mulched by the horizontal lead storm. Others went to their bellies and opened vigorous, if not particularly accurate, fire.
The rest quickly got under the heavy weapons’ arcs of fire, so close the blasters mounted atop the train couldn’t depress any farther to track them. It was one of the few true cracks in mighty MAGOG’s defenses. And eighty or ninety armed and angry coldhearts were pouring through it.
Crawling with less alacrity than J.B., Mildred had reached the body of a soldier downed in the first ragged volley of sniper fire. With MAGOG’s blasters thundering overhead and shutting out the screams of the injured, she pulled free his M-16. She assumed a classic prone firing position, her body at forty-five degrees to the target, behind the stiff, using him as cover and a rest. She was a devoted pistol shooter—an Olympic competitor, in fact—but she could shoot a longblaster with a high degree of accuracy.
Clicking the selector to single shot, she began to take out targets. She aimed at the coldhearts she deemed most threatening—the ones who seemed to be shooting most effectively themselves. At almost every shot, a bandit dropped.
J.B. had taken cover behind the late Corporal Moredock and was firing aimed singles from the Beretta with a two-handed grip. Thirty yards away from his friends, Jak had scooped up two M-16s from downed guards, one gazing sightlessly at the sky, the other rolling around shrieking and clutching a shattered shin, out of the fight. Not a great marksman, he was firing both at once.
From the hip.
Normally there was no craftier fighter than the albino youth from the bayou. Not now. All the fury that had been building within him since he had watched his friend and revered leader fall into the Grand Canyon the day before boiled up within him and out his mouth in an unending scream of fury, and out the muzzles of the M-16s in uninterrupted streams of lead.
One of Red Wolf’s hawk-faced Plains chillers, riding a buckskin, charged Jak with a feathered lance. Jak stood his ground and blasted the mount with both rifles. The horse screamed in mortal agony as it reared, fountaining blood from a dozen holes, and fell over backward, trapping its rider’s leg and crushing his pelvis and the lowest three vertebrae of his spine. As he howled in his own death agony, a second Plains rider charged, raising a war club with a cast-iron ball for a head. He was already too close to take down with the M-16s’ lightweight bullets.
Having spent some time on his own ranch in New Mexico, Jak knew a thing or two about horses. Specifically, that a horse wouldn’t run over anything it thought could trip it. He knelt and ducked his head, making an X of the two longblasters before his face. The horse, disregarding its rider’s intentions, launched himself and jumped clean over the white-haired boy, who was dropping and rolling to his right even as the great shadow passed over him. From his back he emptied both magazines into the bare back of the rider. Uninjured, the horse ran on, eyes rolling, foam flecks flying from its nostrils.
A biker roared toward J.B., firing an Uzi over his T-bar handlebars. He didn’t hit anything, the way his ride was jouncing all over the place. More concerned with the imprint the front tire would make on his forehead, J.B. recoiled by reflex to a sitting position, firing the Beretta as fast as it would cycle. He wasn’t just spraying and praying. The biker went over the back of his postage-stamp-sized seat with the Uzi still blazing.
For another heart-stopping instant the heavy bike charged on. J.B.’s eyes got wide behind his glasses and he cocked himself for a wild spring to the side. The outlaw sled wobbled, toppled and slid toward him broadside, raising a big bow-wave of khaki earth and dried weeds. J.B. held his hands up before his face.
The bike stopped with its tires spinning inches short of Moredock’s corpse.
J.B. heard a familiar voice cry out. Reflexively he looked toward it—to see Mildred, in a perfect kneeling position, aiming her M-16 right between his eyes.
Chapter Six
Leading four of his bros, Hogan rode his bike back along the road toward the rear of the train. He realized the machine guns couldn’t reach them here. Laughing and shouting in triumph, he was firing away into the passenger cars, their metal skins too thin to stop the bullets from his Ruger Mini-14. He couldn’t tell if he was actually hitting anybody, but it didn’t matter. He was laying some hurt on the monster. It wasn’t invincible after all.
But neither was MAGOG