The Nightmare begins

Chapter Nine

Rubenstein jerked back the bolt on the Schmeisser 9mm submachine gun, checked the safety and gunned his motorcycle ahead, John Rourke's tall lean frame bent over the big Harley Davidson already several yards ahead of him. With the back of his hand, Rubenstein pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up off the bridge of his nose, bending low over his handlebars, his sparse black hair whipping across his smooth sunburnt forehead. He repeated to himself what Rourke had told him—"Don't fire that thing like it's a garden hose, practice trigger control." Rubenstein had asked what the spare magazines were for. Rourke had simply told him to sit on his motorcycle, hold the handlebars with one hand and the MP-40 subgun with the other. Then Rourke had reached over and pulled out the magazine. He'd stuck it in the saddlebag on the right side of the bike and said, "Okay—without taking that hand off the handlebar and without dropping the gun, reload."

Rubenstein had tried for a few moments, then looked at Rourke in exasperation.

"That's why," Rourke had said, "you need more than one gun, and that's why with all your guns you only fire at something, not just to make noise. And with a full-auto weapon like that you confine yourself to three-shot bursts."

Rubenstein had mimicked Rourke then: "I know—practice trigger control—right?"

And now, as Rubenstein rounded a curve in the street, watching the armed men huddled along the supports for the bridge leading into Mexico and the other armed men across the wide square in building doorways and smashed-out windows, he repeated to himself, "Trigger control… trigger control."

The speedometer on his bike was only hovering around thirty or thirty-five, he noticed, but as he caught sight of the street beneath him, the pavement seeming to race past, it seemed as though he were doing a hundred or better. Rourke was already firing his CAR-15. It looked to Rubenstein like a long-barreled space gun with the scope mounted on the carrying handle and the stock retracted—like a ray gun in a movie about outer space.

As Rubenstein reached the middle of the square, gunfire started raining down toward him and he leveled the Schmeisser at the closest group of shooters and fired back, repeating aloud at the top of his voice so he could hear himself over the noise of the shots, "Trigger control… trigger control… trigger—"