Rolltown

XVI

“So,” Bat said. “A massacre.” He turned to the assembled men. “Return to your positions. So long as they’re still at this distance, restrain your fire. Only veterans and highly experienced marksmen with long-range rifles are to fire at all. Hold your small arms and shotguns until they’re at point-blank range, which possibly won’t come until nightfall.”

Dean Armanruder shrilled, “No. No, don’t listen to him! Don’t shoot back at them! We’ll all surrender. We’ll go out with our hands up, in a body. They’ll accept our surrender!”

“Like hell they will,” Bat said in disgust. “Get back to your positions, men.”

“Shut up, Hardin!” the former magnate yelled at him. “You’re removed from your position as town police officer. I’m in command here!” He began going from group to group, yelling at the men, some of whom looked sheepish now.

Somebody grumbled, “Maybe he’s right. If we all went out with our hands up…”

Jeff Smith looked at Bat Hardin.

Bat said, “Sergeant, put him under arrest and take him into the inner circle. Post a guard over him, one of the older men we can spare from the firing line. If he attempts further to destroy morale, shoot him.”

Smith said, “Yes, sir.” He turned and grabbed Armanruder by the arm and hustled him away, jerking at the restraint and protesting hysterically.

The vigilantes were firing again, beginning to edge in again, dashing from one clump of cactus, or other cover, to the next. The circle about the mobile town was slowly narrowing.

Bat began making the rounds again, encouraging the marksmen, continually urging the conservation of ammunition. “You’ll get your chance soon enough,” he snapped to those with short-range weapons.

He came to Ferd Zogbaum who was seated nonchalantly in a foxhole, looking out over the field. He held a double-barreled shotgun in his hands but wasn’t firing it.

Bat said, “See you got yourself a gun.” He began to go on, to resume his constant patrol.

But Ferd looked at him strangely and said, “Bat, I’ve got a funny feeling.”

Bat Hardin stopped and squinted at him.

“How do you mean?”

Ferd looked out over the field again and said, choosing his words carefully, “I have a premonition that that scrambler, or whatever you called it, is awfully nearby. Well, say within a couple of hundred yards or so.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. I just have that feeling.”

Bat went on again, crouching, going from one foxhole to the next.

He came to Sam Prager who was crouched in a comfortably deep one-man entrenchment. Bat hunkered down on his heels and said, “Sam, tell me something about scramblers.”

“Not much to tell,” Sam said. “You wouldn’t understand the workings unless you had some background in electronics.”

“I haven’t. How wide a range does one have?”

Sam scowled. “According to what kind you have. The military have some real doozies, blanket a wide, wide area.”

“But would our pals out there be apt to have anything like that?”

Sam looked up into the sky, scowling still. “Well, no, now that you mention it. And they don’t even have a helicopter.”

“Why would they need a helicopter?”

“It’d give them more range. As it is, they’ve probably got it mounted on some high spot out there.”

Bat took a deep breath. “Aren’t they portable? Can’t they be moving it around?”

“I wouldn’t think so. They’re pretty delicate mechanisms, Bat. They’d have to get it all set up. If they had to move it, it would be off for the time of moving and until they got it rigged up again.”

Bat Hardin hissed between his teeth. Then, “Do I understand you that’s it’s got to be within sight of the area that it is blanketing?”

“Well, more or less. Part of it has to be. The antenna.”

“So out there, somewhere, within sight, is our scrambler?”

“It’s got to be.”

Bat got up. The firing was growing slowly more intense from the other side, falling off on the part of the defenders who were becoming increasingly conscious of their depleted store of ammunition. New Woodstock had not been proceeding with any idea at all of a need for large stocks of cartridges and shells. Some weapons had only a score or so rounds available which was the reason that Bat had pooled their supply. It was now being doled out grudgingly to the best shots.

Bat Hardin, again bent almost double as he scurried across the open space between the outer ring of vehicles and the inner, sought out Jeff Smith, who was busy supervising the digging of the trench that was to be their last stand, if it came to that.

Bat said, “Sergeant.”

The Southerner came over and looked at him questioningly.

Bat pointed with his finger, swept it around the horizon. He said, “According to Sam Prager, the scrambler is somewhere out there in an elevated position. Probably on one of those knolls. We could make a sortie and destroy it.”

“Yeah,” the other said disgustedly. “But which knoll?”

Bat called over to Luke Robertson, “Luke, locate us a couple of pair of the strongest binoculars in town.” Then he turned back to Jeff Smith.

“It seems that it takes a bit of time to set a scrambler up. Very delicate. And if you want to keep it in action, you can’t move it. It’s got to just sit there. Now our friend, Don Caesar, is no fool. He’s figured out this raid to the last detail. He knows that our only chance is to get that scrambler and wreck it. He also knows that we have some four hundred armed and desperate men on hand for a sortie. So what does he do?”

Smith’s forehead was wrinkled. “I’m not following you, Lieutenant.”

“If one of those knolls out there was more strongly defended than any other, what would you suspect?”

“That’s where the scrambler was.”

“And if one knoll had no men around it all…”

Smith got it. “You mean the old bastard is trying to fox us by having that damn thing stuck up somewhere with nobody at all in the vicinity?”

“It’s worth thinking about.”

Luke came up with the glasses and handed them to Smith and Bat. They began to scan the vicinity slowly, carefully.

Bat murmured, “It would probably be one of the higher knolls, and one not too very far away. They planned this down to the last detail. They maneuvered us out into this field, as though we were sheep. They knew exactly where we’d have to go. And that scrambler was all set up and waiting for us when we arrived.”

Jeff Smith said, “There it is, Lieutenant.” He pointed. “I can just barely make out an antenna, or whatever it is.”

Bat Hardin directed his glasses. “You’re right. Okay, Sergeant. It’s you and me.”

Smith looked at him. “Just the two of us? Wouldn’t it make more sense if we took a hundred of the best men and headed for that knoll on the double?”

Bat shook his head. “My converted police car is the only armored vehicle in town and it’s a two-seater. We have, in short, the equivalent of a tank. Can you operate an Am-8?”

“The Chinese automatic? Sure, why not?”

“Get Art Clarke’s from him and both clips of ammo. I’ll meet you at my car.”

Jeff Smith took off and Bat Hardin called to Al Castro, “Al, let me have your Gyro-jet pistol.”

Al handed it over. Bat Hardin checked the magazine, jacked a 9mm rocket cartridge into the barrel. He stuck the gun in his belt, then brought forth his own identical weapon and checked and loaded it. Then he went over to his car, located spare 9mm rocket shells and dropped them into his side pocket. He took up his carbine and filled the magazine to capacity.

“Jesus,” Al said. “You look like Billy the Kid with all that artillery.”

Bat said, “Al, get together our best half dozen marksmen. That knoll out there looks as though nobody at all is around. There’s nobody firing from the top or anything. However, I’ll bet my left arm that they’ve got a sizable defending force behind it, keeping hidden. Jeff and I are going to need all the covering fire we can get.”

“Got you,” Al said, moving off.

A dozen of the men who had been digging now stood around, popeyed at what Bat was planning.

Manuel Chauvez, shovel in hand, said, “Mr. Hardin, for sure, you are not going out there into all that fire?”

“Somebody’s got to go, or we’ll unlikely see tomorrow,” Bat growled to the Armanruder’s servant. “Come on, Sergeant. The delta was never like this.”

“Thank the good Lord,” Jeff Smith muttered. “It was bad enough.” He had Art Clarke’s automatic rifle under his arm and was stuffing the spare magazine into a side pocket. He climbed into the seat next to Bat’s driver position.

Smith looked out over the terrain unhappily and said, “You think you can make it over that? You’d need at least a four-wheel drive.”

Bat grinned. “I’ve got secrets in this buggy.” He dropped the conversion lever, activated the air cushion and the vehicle rose a foot off the ground. He recessed the wheels and yelled out the window, “Luke, get that crate of yours out of the way.”

“I’ll be damned; a little old hover-car,” Smith said.

Bat nodded while Luke hurried to get his electro-steamer and mobile home out of the way so that the two volunteers could leave the perimeter.

Bat was saying, “They’ve got a lot of shortcomings but for certain specialized uses you can’t beat the air cushion. Ordinarily they aren’t practical for a vehicle of this size. Too small. Consume power like crazy. Can’t propel them very fast, either, or your vehicle will over-run your air cushion. It’s got to have time to get out in front of the skirt, or the whole shebang starts nosing in.”

Luke yelled, “Okay, Bat!”

The police car, now air-cushion borne, flowed ahead. Immediately, slugs began to bounce off in screaming ricochet.

“Holy smokes,” Bat bit out. “You’d think they were waiting for us. Keep your window up until we get on the scene. Bulletproof glass. They’d have to have anti-tank shells to knock us off.”

Smith said, “They don’t need anti-tank shells, they’ve got that goddamned bazooka.”

“Ummm,” Bat said distastefully, beginning to zig and zag in evasive action. “But I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that the boys operating it aren’t exactly crackshots. Who in the hell knows how to fire a bazooka in this day and age? It’s one thing sitting pat and directing it at something as big as New Woodstock. But a target this small and on the move?”

“I hope you’re right, Lieutenant,” the other said dryly.

The knoll was perhaps three hundred meters away. Al’s marksmen were going to have to be on their merit to do much in the way of covering. However, any fire at all was better than none, just so it didn’t hit Bat or Jeff Smith.

Bat kept the car at as high a speed as was consistent with the terrain and their air cushions, but they were doing fifty kilometers an hour at best. Occasional bullets continued to rain off their armor but thus far there had been no stirring of opponents on the knoll which was their destination. Bat began to wonder if they had guessed wrong. But no, it was more than a guess, the closer they got the more obvious was the antenna, stretching its evil feelers up into the sky, robbing them of contact with the outside world.

As they got nearer it became obvious that the car would never make it up to the summit.

Bat groaned, “These things are impossible on non-horizontal surfaces. They slip off in every direction except the one you want to go.”

Jeff Smith bit out, “Get as far up as you can and then cover me. I’ll make a run for it.”

“Why not me?”

Smith said, “Because you know how to drive this contraption and I don’t.”

“All right.”

Just as they hit the bottom of the slope, a half dozen Mexicans materialized at the summit and began firing down at them in great excitement.

Smith muttered, “Amateurs!” and activated the window. He steadied the Chinese automatic rifle on the sill and let loose a sweeping burst. Several went down, screaming pain, the others ducked for cover.

Jeff Smith was out of the car, gun in hand and. zigzagging up to the crest.

“Go it!” Bat yelled. He popped from the side of the car, both Gyro-jet pistols in his hands.

Jeff Smith scrambled, slid, fell, was on his feet again. Up he went.

At the top, one of the Mexicans who had fallen got to his knees. He was holding some sort of automatic weapon with which Bat Hardin was unfamiliar. It stuttered and Jeff Smith fell off to the side and to the ground.

Bat fired twice and brought the gunner down. He started up the hill after his companion. From the perimeter of the mobile homes came a hail of supporting fire, sweeping the top of the small mesa.

Bat Hardin went to the smaller man. He jammed his pistols into his belt, swearing uncontrollably. “Bad?” he snapped, reaching down.

Jeff Smith groaned, “Yeah. Nailed me at least twice. Belly.”

“Oh, Christ,” Bat groaned. He hiked the other up over his shoulder, reached down and swept up the automatic and started staggering and stumbling down the hill.

A blow struck him in the right hip and he all but fell.

“Hit?” Jeff Smith groaned.

“Yeah.”

He continued on, stumbling. He could feel the blood running down his leg.

They got to the car, on Smith’s side. Bat dumped him in, tossed the Chinese weapon in after him, then hurried around the car, limping, dragging his leg, to his own side. He lifted his right leg by grabbing hold of the cloth of his pants and swung it into the cab. He wedged himself in, pulled Smith to a position so that he could close the door on that side. He swerved the car and headed back. He would have liked to make his own try for the crest but he doubted that his leg would allow him and, besides, Jeff Smith had to be gotten back to Doc Smith soonest. The Southerner was bleeding like a stuck pig.

Bullets were again caroming off the surface of the vehicle. They retraced their route. Twice, Bat Hardin recognized the whoosh and trail of bazooka rockets but he had been right, they were far off the mark. Whoever was on the old-time rocket launcher was no marksman.

Luke Robertson’s vehicles were still drawn out of the way and Bat Hardin maneuvered through.

He yelled out the window, “Jeff’s been hit. Where’s Doc Barnes?”

Barnes came hurrying forward, physician’s bag in hand.

Jeff Smith, his face drained as death, looked over at his companion.

“Hey, man.”

“Yeah?”

“Sorry about that nigger thing… Bat.”

Bat shook his head. “Nothing to it… Jeff.”

Doc Barnes wrenched open the door of the car and bent over Smith.

He looked up at Bat. “He’s dead.”

Bat Hardin didn’t say anything for a moment. Two men were hauling Jeff Smith from the car, ridiculously gently in view of the fact that pain would never come to the small feisty Southerner again.

Bat said, “I’ve copped one too, Doc. See if you can patch me up a little.”

“We’ll get you out of the car and up to the hospital where I can do a better job.”

Bat shook his head. “Can’t. If I do, I’ll never be able to get back in, and I’m the only one who can drive this thing. It takes a certain know-how.” He looked at Luke. “Somebody in here tipped them that we were coming in this vehicle. Find Nadine Paskov. Have her check in the computer banks and find out who voted against me in that hassle I had with Jeff.” He added sourly, “She’s probably under some bed, somewhere. A change for her. I suspect that whoever cast that vote against me is our traitor. If she refuses to tell you, for whatever reason, slap her around a little.”

“Got it,” Luke said. “What’ll I do if I find the traitor?”

Bat looked at him levelly.

“Got it,” Luke said, and was off.

“Hold still, damn it,” Doc Barnes said. “Let me get this bandage on you. You need plasma; you dripped too much ink, Bat.”

“Oh, great,” Bat said. “Have you got some kind of pep pill instead?” He looked out over the crowd and called, “Ferd, you’re next.”

“Coming up,” Ferd Zogbaum sang out, pushing his way through the assembled men. He caught up the automatic rifle that had fallen to the ground when the men had taken Smith’s body out, and scrambled into the bloody seat next to Bat.

Bat called, feeling himself already weaker, “There’s an extra clip of ammo in Jeff’s pocket.”

Somebody brought it.

Bat Hardin activated the lift lever again and they started forward.

He explained as they went. “I can’t get the car to the crest. You’ll have to make it on foot. All hell is breaking loose over there. Don Caesar is sending new men over as fast as they can make it to defend the point. They know damn well, now, that we know it’s there, and they’ve got to defend it.” He felt his voice going weaker.

Next to him, Ferd Zogbaum was checking the clip in the gun. Jeff Smith had nearly emptied it. Ferd threw it and rammed home the spare full clip with the heel of his hand.

Bat said weakly, “Where did you get checked out on the Chinese Am-8?”

Ferd said, “I was in the big one too.”

They were approaching the knoll. From behind, the full barrage of all that New Woodstock could mount in the way of long-range rifles was firing over them, attempting to pin down any of the enemy forces on hand.

Bat ground to a halt. He pulled his two pistols out.

“Okay, Ferd. It’s all yours.”

Ferd was out of the car, automatic in hands and scurrying up the hill, slipping, sliding on the sandy terrain, going three feet up, sliding back at least one. A continual fire kicked up the dust around his feet but he miraculously remained erect. Bat, his eyes fogging, leaned out the window of the car and blasted away at anything that moved#longdash#save Ferd.

The freelance writer achieved the top, fired twice, thrice, in this direction and that, on full automatic, and finally immediately down as though toward his feet. He turned and began retracing his steps, running dangerously. He fell, rolled a score of feet, staggered erect, came on again.

“Come on boy, come on!” Bat pleaded.

Suddenly, Ferd Zogbaum stopped dead in his tracks. The automatic rifle dropped from his hands. He grabbed his head desperately and began to waver.

“The bug!”

He staggered around, completely out of control of himself, moaning in agony. A burst of automatic fire hit him.

Bat, reeling weakly himself, flicked on his phone and stuttered, “Emergency, emergency! Mexican Police. Road Dolores Hidalgo, San Miguel de Allende. Emergency emergency, emer…” And then the fog rolled in.

When Bat Hardin became conscious again, he was in the mobile clinic of Doc Barnes. He felt weak, but his mind was alert. He looked about him. Ferd Zogbaum, unconscious, was in the next bed. It was a three-bed dormitory. The other bed was empty.

Doc Barnes came in followed by Diana Sward who was wearing a nurse’s white smock. She was obviously a volunteer.

Barnes said, “You’re awake. Good.” He turned and looked down at Ferd Zogbaum.

Bat said, “How’s Ferd?”

“He’ll be all right. He took three hits, but none of them too serious. We’re taking him in for some minor surgery now.”

Bat said, “Listen, has he been unconscious all this time?”

Doc Barnes looked at him impatiently over his shoulder. “Why, yes.”

Bat said, “Look, Doc. When you were in private practice what was your specialty?”

“Why, I was a surgeon.”

“Brain surgeon?”

“No. I have done some brain surgery, but it was not my specialty.”

Bat took a deep breath. “Look, Doc. Ferd Zogbaum is going to die on your operating table.”

Di Sward blurted, “Don’t be an ass.”

He ignored her. “Doc, Ferd has an electronic device planted in his skull. Can you take it out?”

Barnes goggled at him.

Bat pursued. “He’s a paroled convict. Life sentence. He saved us all. Look, Doc. We took a lot of casualties in this fracas. All is confusion. He can die on your operating table. You can sign… whatever it is you doctors sign when a guy cashes in his chips.”

“I’m an ethical…”

“And you and everybody else in New Woodstock owe your life to Ferd Zogbaum.”

Doctor Barnes held a long silence. Finally he said, “What was he sentenced to life for? I have heard of this electronic bug before but it is the first in my experience. It should not be difficult to remove. Is he a murderer?”

It was Di Sward who said heatedly, “He’s an idealist! He has political objections to the present socio-economic system in the States.”

Doc Barnes looked at her wryly. “You seem a bit partisan, Miss Sward. However, so do I. I don’t exactly know what they are, but I too have reservations about our present socio-economic system. You are sure that Zogbaum’s, ah, crimes, are all of a political nature?”

“Yes,” Diana said firmly.

“Very well. Now the question becomes, if he, ah, dies on my operating table, and I remove the electronic device from his skull, how does he continue to collect his NIT or otherwise support himself?”

Bat and Diana looked at each other blankly. Diana Sward said finally, “I make a reasonable living with my painting. He can write under a pseudonym until he gets to the point where he is making better sales. We’ll never return to the States.”

Doc Barnes took her in. “You are his mistress?” She said, her mouth tight, “Yes, I am his mistress, and I am willing to become his wife#longdash#if he will have me. I am not a great acquisition.”

“Like hell you aren’t,” Barnes said sourly.

Doc thought about it, his face in disgust. “Damn it,” he said. “Why can’t a doctor just carve them up, or slip them the necessary shots or pills?” He glared at Di. “Miss Sward, let’s make the arrangements to get this operation rolling, before we have no patient left… to die on our operating table.” He turned and left the room.

Diana Sward looked at Bat and said, “I think we’ve swung him. See you later, Bat.”

“Yeah, see you later, Di,” he said, looking after the woman he loved as she left the room.