Читать книгу Hell Road Warriors - James Axler - Страница 9

Chapter Two

“Clear!” Krysty called. She tracked the security periscope. All the computers were locked down, including those controlling the sec cameras. The Diefenbunker did have several periscopes strategically placed around the facility. “Got some daylight left!” She let go of the periscope’s handles.

Ryan stood in the commander’s hatch of the LAV behind the pintle-mounted Minimi Squad Automatic Weapon. “Mildred!”

The physician hit a big red button and the blast doors began grinding open. The two women ran and jumped in the back hatch.

“Jak! Button her up and take us out!” The LAV’s rear ramp whined up while red light spilled into the vault of the Diefenbunker’s entry bay from the outside. Gears ground as Jak sent the LAV rumbling out into Ontario. The sun wasn’t quite setting yet, but it was a low red ball in the sky. The sky pulsed with sheets of red and green light as if it were on fire. Ryan had seen the Northern Lights before, but not often while the sun was still shining. In the lurid light Ryan saw a plain of low rolling hills broken up by stands of pines. Ryan also saw a war going on about a mile away.

“Jak! Hold up! J.B., up top!”

The gunner hatch clanged open and J.B. stood from behind the cannon. Ryan pointed. The Armorer took up his binoculars. Almost a mile ahead the land dropped into a shallow depression. Within it a sizable convoy was pulled up into a defensive circle. Outriders besieged it on every side. Ryan ran his Navy longeye over the encircled wags. He counted about a dozen vehicles of all different descriptions with men firing out of, from underneath and between them. Diefenbunker gear and supplies were strapped to the outsides of the vehicles. Most interesting were the convoy’s two LAVs. It explained the empty bays in the bunker. One was like the one Ryan and his companions were in, and it was burning out of control.

“Attackers.” J.B. grimaced. “They got some kind of tank buster.”

Ryan scanned the other LAV. “That one doesn’t have a turret.”

The Armorer’s eyes went wide. “That, is an engineering-recovery vehicle. Check the crane folded down on the back, the dozer blade and the winch.” J.B. sighed. “How many times could we have used one of those when we were with Trader?”

More times than Ryan could count. In the Deathlands a vehicle like that was worth its weight in anything, including human life. Ryan noticed it wasn’t attracting much in the way of fire despite the fact a man in the top hatch was firing a machine blaster like the one Ryan stood behind. The one-eyed man scanned the enemy ringing the convoy. Most of them had off-road bikes, but they had laid their bikes down and were firing prone from behind rocks and folds in the earth. Some of the pits were clearly man-made. They had chosen their ambush site well. They had probably blown the LAV before the convoy knew what was happening. The convoy had been surrounded in plain sight of the sanctuary of the Diefenbunker and cut off. Ryan picked out some 4x4 pickup wags pulled far back from the fight. The attackers were numerous, heavily armed and equipped for cross-country speed. Most had painted their faces with skulls, abstract designs or swathes of color. It wasn’t camouflage. It was war paint and designed to terrorize.

They were coldhearts.

J.B. pointed. “Watch there.”

A coldheart rose up with broad length of pipe over his shoulder. A man behind him touched a flame to the fuse in the back and ducked. A rocket hissed out of the pipe and shot out of the tube. The object arced and twisted in flight and exploded into the ground in a blast of orange fire and gray smoke a dozen yards from one of the caravan’s flatbeds.

J.B. snorted derisively. “Home made. Black powder. Not even spin stabilized. Real close you could take out a wag, even a big one, but nothing like what we’re sitting in. They still got a tank-killer we haven’t seen.”

The driver’s hatch clanged open. Jak’s head popped up. His eyes were the same color as the sinking sun as he surveyed the scene. “Pickin’ sides?”

Ryan was about the closest thing to a decent human being that could survive in the Deathlands. He could see there were women in the convoy, and the attackers looked like they were doing what they liked to do best. Nightcreeping and ambushing.

“Not our fight, and they got something down there that can kill us all.” Ryan shook his head wearily. It was a scene he had seen far too many times in his life. He was reluctant to walk away, but his friends came first. “We’re out of here and— Fireblast!”

Ryan’s hand crushed the top of J.B.’s fedora as he shoved him back into the turret. Three men had crept up out of a fold in the terrain and a rocket hissed straight at the LAV. Jak slammed the driver’s hatch shut. Ryan dropped down the commander’s hatch as a thunderclap backhanded the LAV. Mildred yipped as the armored war wag rocked violently on its chassis. The brimstone stench of black powder filled the air from the open hatches. The coldhearts howled with bloodlust outside. “Die! Die! Die!”

“Jak,” Ryan snarled, “we just picked sides!”

Jak answered by stomping on the gas. The LAV lurched forward. Bullets whanged and spalled off the hull. Ryan rose out of the hatch and leaned into the light machine gun’s stock. He rattled off a 5-round burst into a shrieking, painted face. Dust flew from the chest of a second coldheart as Ryan hammered him down. The last man dropped his rocket tube and turned to run screaming. He was still screaming as he went down beneath the LAV’s wheels.

Ryan knew he was a bullet magnet standing in the turret, but buttoned up it was very hard to see the enemy coming. “Jak, take us about a thousand yards out! Western side. Get us in range of those pickups!” Jak put a low hill between the LAV and the battle and began sneaking west.

“J.B.?”

The Armorer sat in the gunner’s chair. He’d pushed his fedora firmly on his head and tapped his finger against a small comp screen. “Fire control comp is locked, like inside. Going to have to shoot manual. Jak, get me within three hundred yards!”

The LAV rolled across the terrain at speed. Jak suddenly drove up a low gradient and parked on the crest of a low hill looking down on the battle. It would be a matter of seconds before they were spotted.

Ryan called down into the cabin. “Krysty, Mildred, Doc! Out, and keep an eye on our six!”

The back door lowered and they spilled out, blasters at the ready.

The turret whined and the seven-foot, fluted cannon barrel dipped as J.B. picked a target. Sitting in the gunner’s seat and looking through the manual aiming optical gradients, he was calculating more than aiming.

The muzzle of the cannon thudded and spit smoke.

Five coldhearts surrounding a pickup three hundred yards distant just about crapped their homespun coveralls as the high-explosive round detonated uncomfortably close. “Ten wide! Thirty short!” Ryan called. The turret turned a hairbreadth. The barrel tilted up an even tinier increment. The cannon spit. The coldheart pickup’s hood flew up into the air and the windshield shattered. The man behind the wheel disappeared in a haze of blood and smoke.

Coldhearts scattered.

Ryan kept his eye on the big picture as J.B. traversed for targets of opportunity. A coldheart had leaped up from his firing position and was jumping onto his bike. The 25 mm blaster thumped and man and motorcycle burst apart in a cloud of flesh and metal. Ryan nodded as he continued to scan the surroundings. “Nice shot, J.B.”

A pleased noise drifted up from inside the turret.

“J.B.!” Jak pointed excitedly at another pickup. Ryan whipped up his Navy longeye for a moment and smiled. The back of the wag contained a pallet of the homemade rockets.

“Oh yeah!” J.B. enthused.

Ryan thought he might be enjoying this a little too much. “I make it four hundred yards, J.B.!”

“Right!” The turret turned. The muzzle of the cannon elevated a few inches then. The blaster thudded and earth flew up in a geyser.

“Dead on but thirty short!” Ryan called.

The men around the wag didn’t need a second shot. They knew what they were carrying and they ran for their lives. The cannon hammered again and more earth flew.

“Dead on! Ten short!”

The smoking muzzle of the cannon rose almost imperceptibly and thudded.

The wag and its load blew sky-high. Jak whooped. The grass around it rippled and flattened out in a thirty-yard wave. A column of black smoke rose into the bloody sunset. The remaining pickups tore up turf in their haste to escape. Motorcycles fled the scene of the ambush and coalesced into a herd stampeding northward into the low hills. Ryan was interested to notice they took the time to take their dead with them. The pickups streaked after them.

“Moving targets!” J.B. called up. “Hard to hit on manual!”

“Hold fire,” Ryan ordered.

Krysty looked up at Ryan in his perch. “We going down?”

“No. Let them come to us. J.B., stay on station, keep the cannon pointed at anything that comes.”

Ryan watched the convoy. They stayed in defensive formation. A lot of heads stayed turned their way, but the people took care of their dead and wounded and transferred loads from ruined vehicles. A Volkswagen Iltis broke away from the defensive circle and drove slowly toward Ryan’s band. A man stood in the back holding a white flag. Ryan filled his hand with his new Scout longblaster and clambered down from the turret. Jak hopped down after him. The muzzle of J.B.’s cannon watched them like the cold eye of death, making slight adjustments as the wag closed. The 4x4 stopped about twenty yards away. The driver was a gray-hair wrinklie in homespun, and he stayed behind the wheel. The man sitting shotgun and the man in back jumped out. The man in front was clearly in command, but Ryan kept his eye on the other one.

He was black, half a head taller than Ryan and looked to be about half again as heavy, all of it muscle. His head was shaved, and he wore a sheepskin coat someone had tailored to his massive frame. The stainless-steel lever action blaster he carried looked like a toy in his hand. He was obviously a sec man and a damned impressive one.

The leader was a plain-looking man and he stepped straight up to Ryan. He was neither tall nor short. His brown hair was clipped short as was his mustache and beard. The most notable thing about him was his green eyes. They literally twinkled as he smiled at Ryan, and the man radiated a busy, competent sort of energy. His predark parka, cargo pants and boots looked as though they had only recently been put into use. A shiny knew Diefenbunker SIG-Sauer blaster was tucked under his belt. He raised an open right hand in friendship and spent long moments saying something to Ryan that sounded mostly like vowels. It kind of sounded like language Ryan had heard in Cajun country. He looked at Jak. The young man’s snowy brows were bunching mightily. His head cocked slightly as he tried to digest what he had just heard.

Doc took a step forward and made a graceful bow. “Parlez-vous anglais?”

The convoy leader grinned. “But of course.” He nodded at Ryan again. “Hello!”

Ryan nodded noncommittally. “Hi.”

“I am Yoann Toulalan, son of Baron Luc Toulalan, baron of the ville of Val-d’Or.”

Krysty shot Ryan a look, who had caught it, too. Val-d’Or was one of the Diefenbunker locations in Quebec. He nodded at the baron’s son again. “Ryan.”

“Uh…” Toulalan seemed nonplussed at Ryan’s taciturn part in the exchange. He threw up his hands and grinned again. “Well! You are our savior!”

“Glad to help.”

The big man’s face split into a smile as he loomed over Jak. His voice was incredibly deep. “This one is mutant.”

Krysty’s lips tightened but she kept her mouth shut. For the moment.

Ryan’s voice went quiet and cold. “Albino, it’s a condition.”

“Ah.” Toulalan nodded. “We know of such things.”

The big man turned to Ryan and tilted his chin at the LAV and the supplies strapped to the sides. “You stole from us.”

Toulalan made a tsking noise.

Ryan spoke quietly. “You left it. Headed west. With no one to look after it.” The one-eyed man lifted his chin toward the smoking ruins of the coldheart wags. “Except mebbe them.”

The big man slowly straightened in outrage. For a heartbeat Ryan thought it was going to be a fight. Mildred had been in the LAV with J.B. She stepped out angrily. “Why don’t you back off, brother-man!”

The man’s rage fell away. He was clearly startled at the sight of Mildred. His mouth opened and closed again.

Toulalan took the opportunity to step in. “Monsieur Ryan, may I introduce my head security man, Vincent Six. Forgive him. We have taken losses, lost friends. We’re all upset.”

Six tore his eyes off Mildred for a moment. He looked like he didn’t give a spent shell whether Ryan forgave him, but the big man grunted and nodded. Ryan nodded back. Six went back to openly eyeballing Mildred, who put her fists on her hips and glared back.

Toulalan gestured back at his wag. “And allow me to introduce my dear friend Florian Medard, he’s our, how would you say…scholar?”

Florian nodded and touched a pair of fingers to his head in greeting. His eyes ran over each member of the companions and seemed to be cataloging them.

Ryan shrugged. “What do you want?”

Toulalan blinked in surprise. “I believe the question is, what do you want? You have driven off our enemies. For that we are deeply in your debt, but by the same token, you could easily decimate our convoy with your autocannon. I merely ask, what are your intentions?”

“I don’t know.” Ryan shrugged. “Head south mebbe.”

“Well, would you care to join us in our evening meal? Six shot a wild boar just this morning.”

“We just had pizza.”

“We had pizza for lunch!”

“We noticed.”

Toulalan gave Ryan a very shrewd look. “We have more beer.”

One corner of Ryan’s mouth quirked against his will. “Bastard.”

Toulalan threw back his head and laughed. “Florian, go tell Cyrielle we have guests for dinner tonight.”