Red Holocaust

Chapter Eighteen

Okie was on guard, walking cautiously around the ruined houses at the neck of the valley. From below she heard the river tumbling over the rounded stones at the foot of the dam's spillway. To her right, she could make out the great dam, with its towers and pumping stations. The moon gave only a pale, spectral light, not enough to illuminate the trail that clung to the mountainside, dappled with patches of ice and snow. It hadn't been easy to negotiate that trail, even with the tracked buggies, but there was no other way up or down.

Her low-heeled tan riding boots clicked on the loose stones. The Mini-Uzi was safely in its holster on her belt; the M-16 carbine cradled in her arms. Looking behind her, she saw the tiny ruby glow of the fire that smoldered at the center of their camp between the two parked buggies. Straining her eyes, the blaster could see the gravelike mounds that were her sleeping comrades. The larger one was Ryan Cawdor, and the mutie girl tangled together.

Okie spat, her sullen face showing her dislike for Krysty Wroth. Ryan had shown interest in her before the redhead had appeared. If anything happened to the mutie?..

There was always the strong possibility of a nasty accident.

She turned slowly, feeling the wind tugging at her long dark ponytail. Behind her she caught the sound of stones shifting, as if a piece of frozen earth had slithered down the hill. Okie whirled, finger on the trigger of her carbine.

For a few moments, she stood there, still as a statue, ears straining for any odd sound.

It was repeated.

It came from her right, where an old concrete sluice hung perilously over the side of the valley, stretching up into the darkness. If anything were to happen to it, then the whole tangle of stone and metal would come grinding down on the sleeping camp.

Okie moved slowly, keeping to the shadows, gun questing ahead of her. She placed each step with utmost care, as silent as a lover's touch on velvet skin.

Her ears caught the frail scraping of metal on metal. She stopped, letting her eyes rake around the ghost town — drawing a slow breath as she saw them. Three. No, four. One stooped over by the foot of the sluice's main support girders. The others ringed him, facing her.

Okie raised her gun to shoulder level, bracing it, squinting down the barrel. She tightened her finger on the trigger.

The explosion woke the night. The M-16 spat out death, empty cartridge cases tinkling on the stones. She saw the bursting sparks as the 5.56 mm bullets bounced off the rocks and the iron, screeching into the dark valley. Two of the four strangers went down under the first hail of lead. The third dived sideways, snapping off shots from a Kalashnikov AKM, the heavy 7.62 mm bullets whining high over Okie's head, dashing splinters of rock around her.

The fourth figure vanished into the maze of twisted metal. Okie's guess was that the fourth man who had been, crouched over the girders, was an explosives expert. If she was right, then he was the prime target. She waited, knowing that the third blaster was likely to try for better cover.

He did.

She bowled him over in a jumble of kicking legs and scrabbling hands.

There was no need for her to warn Ryan and the others. At the first echo of the hammering carbine, they were awake. Within seconds they were beside her, holding their weapons. Lori and Doc were the last to show.

"Cover me!" yelled Okie, making her move — a dodging, crouched run toward the spot where the fourth man had disappeared.

Ryan and J.B. both gave scattering fire, raking the hillside to right and left of the darting girl. Hennings and Finnegan were behind them, taking shelter behind an overturned water tank. The four men hadn't come raiding alone. Already there was spasmodic fire from farther down the trail, but it was poorly aimed.

The big man who'd gone into hiding was Grom; nicknamed Thunder, he was the expert in the gang on all manner of bombs, mines and explosives. Uchitel had sent him in with a small support party to try to bring the sluice down on the sleeping Americans. Nobody had seen Okie, patrolling like a panther in the shadows.

Grom was deaf and hadn't heard the opening burst of fire, but he'd seen his friends falling. Now he was on his own, with the long-haired woman after him. He held a parcel of plastic explosives, primed and attached to a timer. But there was a manual override on the bomb. He saw that he was trapped, but he grinned; he could still set off his bomb and take these Americans with him in death. With Uchitel as his leader, he feared failure much more than mere death.

Someone farther down the trail fired a phos gren, flooding the whole area with a stark white light. It flushed the lurking Russian from his hiding place, sending him scampering toward the blind corner of the trail. He clutched the bomb to his chest like an undelivered birthday present. Okie spotted him and fired from the hip, the bullets lancing through the dirt all round the Russian. Miraculously Grom wasn't hit, though he stumbled and fell, nearly dropping the bomb.

Okie, lusting to kill, dropped the empty M-16. Not bothering to draw her machine pistol from its holster, she went for the cowering man with only her long-bladed Italian stiletto.

Ryan was about to shoot at the Russian, when he saw the danger of hitting the girl. Also, as clear as day in the light of the phos gren, he saw the man fumbling with the parcel.

"Fireblast!" he spat. "He's primin' a fuckin' bomb." He raised his voice to warn Okie. "Watch it! He's got a bastard bomb!"

If the blaster heard him, she gave no sign of it. Never deviating from her attack, she launched herself at the Russian like an arrow. Grom saw her coming and held up the package of explosives as though it were some holy relic that warded off evil. "So long," said J.B. Dix quietly, so that only Ryan heard him.

As usual, the little man was right. Grom's intention had been to throw the bomb toward Ryan and the others, but Okie's unexpected attack thwarted that. He was taken so much by surprise that he was still holding the ticking bomb as she landed on him.

The knife struck with practiced, lethal accuracy high at the side of the deaf man's neck, just below his right ear, opening the carotid artery in a spouting gush of crimson. Grom was dying as he fell. His last act was to grab the girl's green sweater, clutching her to him in his death spasm.

Before she could free herself, the bomb exploded.

The heavy sound was muffled by the two bodies. Ryan ducked, feeling the shock wave tug his dark hair. The booming noise echoed across the valley, bouncing flatly off the dam. When he stood up, his face was wet with gore, and he felt sickened at the sound of human flesh landing all around him. A thin pall of smoke blew across the plateau by the ghost town, then was gone. The rising wind carried with it all trace of the woman whose name had been Okie.

Uchitel signaled the rest of the attacking party to retreat. With the element of surprise gone and his party whittled down to only nineteen men and four women, he couldn't risk a frontal assault and an all-out firefight farther up the hillside where the massive dam loomed over them, dominating the valley. They assembled at a spot where the river ran fast and narrow, barely fifteen feet wide, with a thin veil of gray ice growing at its edges.

"What now?" asked Urach.

"They can go nowhere. There is the one road, and we control that here by the river. We have them trapped, my brother. Let us wait and they will come to us and beg us for mercy." His comrades bellowed with laughter.

"Short an' curlies, Ryan," said J.B.

"What?" said Finnegan.

"Those bastards got us by the short and curlies. No other road out or in. We go down, and they pick us off like flies in molasses."

"Mebbe not," said Ryan.

"I have never ceased to wonder at the enigmatic nature of your discourse in moments of dire stress," Doc said, sitting against a stone wall that still carried a faded advertisement for a canned beer.

"What's the idea, Ryan?" asked J.B.

Lori moved beside Ryan, staring wonderingly into his face. "We live?" she asked.

"Sure. We live right up to the moment that we start dyin'," he replied. Turning to the Armorer, he said, "This missile you found..."

The launcher was like a sledge. The red-and-white missile rested on the sledge, with torn strips of tarpaulin swaddling it like a baby. J.B. and Finn peeled away the covering, revealing the sleek, elegant shape. It was about the length of a tall man and had four triangular fins at the rear.

There were letters and numbers stenciled on the casing, black on white, and white on red: USAF A/T/M SD4 TRD/C 24942 1/1/00. And in a circle, with arrows pointing to it, there was the single word Active.

"There's another one without activeon it," J.B. pointed out. "This could take out a dozen war wags in one go. Never seen a baby this size still juiced an' ready to go."

"But it's not a lot of good against the scattering of Russians down by the river. It's not antipersonnel, is it?"

They all stood around the launching cradle. Ryan noticed that someone — now long dead and turned to dust — had scrawled the girl's name, Cathy, on the live missile in green paint. For a moment he wondered who she'd been.

It was tempting to do it in the dark. The effect would be more terrifying, the shock more total. But in the end J.B. agreed with Ryan that it would be best to wait until first light.

The party split up. J.B. stayed in the narrow valley with Doc and Lori. Ryan, Henn, Finn and Krysty moved carefully down the track, stopping about one hundred and fifty feet above where Uchitel and the Narodniki commanded the river crossing.

"Could hit their horses there," whispered Finnegan, pointing to the shifting blur of the Russians' animals.

"Tell 'em we're here? No. No fuckin' way. We just stop here and wait and watch. We move when the time comes."

Major Zimyanin was also watching the river crossing. His cavalry unit was a scant couple of miles off on the far side of the valley. He lay on a promontory of cold rock. The sniper, Corporal Solomentsov, was beside him. The party didn't allow muties in the fighting patrols — indeed, they were unofficially being purged — and Solomentsov's eyesight was so good that the major suspected that he must have a mutie strain in him. However, the sniper was valuable to the militia, and Zimyanin had never mentioned his suspicions to anyone.

"How many?"

"More than four hands and less than five, Major. They crossed the bottom of the trail."

"And higher?"

The sniper hesitated, pressing the Zeiss binoculars to his eyes. "Not easy against the dark rock in this light, Major."

"But?"

"But I think less than two hands. I am sorry I cannot see more."

It was enough for the major, and he took back the glasses, smiling. It had been a long stern chase, longer than he guessed when he first received his orders. Now he was in America. It lay open before him, begging to be possessed like a complaisant whore with her legs spread wide. Tomorrow could be the best day of his life.

The first pink fingers of light were creeping over the eastern side of the valley, touching the concrete of the dam. The wind had veered more to the south, bringing the promise of heavy snowfall. The air tasted foul from the volcanic sulfur carried from a volcano a few miles toward the sea.

Uchitel had wandered to the river, keeping in the lee of the huge boulders that dotted the valley. Soon it would be done, he thought. He could take the buggies of the Americans, and their new weapons. And perhaps learn from them the location of the secret city of power where such things resided.

And then there would be no stopping the Narodniki, the rulers of the land.

Ryan glanced at Krysty who lay at his side, then turned to look up the valley toward the dam. "Soon," said the man.

Uchitel moved away from his band and stood where the slope began to steepen. Four members of his band slept there, including Barkhat, Krisa and Zmeya, whose skinny frame was almost smothered by the porcine bulk of Bizabraznia. It was time to begin rousing them for the coming day.

Major Zimyanin wiped smears of mud from the hem of his long gray coat, then peered across the valley, squinting at the unusually bright rising sun. It was rare to see it so naked and unveiled, free from chem clouds.

He clapped his hands together, trying to keep warm; it was much colder than the day before. As the officer glanced farther up the valley, he saw a pinprick of silver that trailed orange and red fringed with ragged smoke. Some moments passed before he realized what it heralded. By then the boom of the massive explosion had confirmed his guess.