That was it. If they got above him, the guy was screwed. They could bring fire on him and if they didn't kill him, he'd have to move. Herman would bring him down if he moved.
Herman snapped in a new magazine, waiting for the guy to move. He stood in a semicrouch and was so strong that the fourteen-pound automatic rifle felt light and feathery to the touch. He looked over its sights, through a screen of grass, searching for signs of movement.
He saw nothing, but given the source of the fire, given the speedy response on his part and the volume of fire he had poured in, the man could not have gotten away, unless there were secret tunnels or something, but there were only secret tunnels in movies.
Be patient, he told himself.
Johnny worked his way around in a wide arc to the base of the hill. He was possibly a hundred yards behind the cowboy's position. He squatted in the grass. He hadn't fired yet. He had a full drum, one of the big ones, with a hundred rounds. He could fire single shots, doubles, triples, even quadruples and quintuples if he had to, so exquisite was his trigger control. He could hold one hundred rounds in a four-inch circle in a fifty-yard silhouette if he had to. He could shoot skeet or trap with a Thompson if he had to. He was the best tommy-gunner in the world.
He was a little anxious.
This fellow was very good. He'd obviously used a Thompson well in the war and could make it do tricks. But Johnny knew if it came to shooting man-on-man, he'd take it. Nobody was faster, nobody was surer, nobody could make the gun do what he could make it do.
He squirmed ahead, then heard the gunfire from Red and Ding-Dong. Red yelled something?he could not quite make it out?but knew what it signified. Red and Ding-Dong had reached the hill and were heading up it. When they got elevation, it was all over. It would be all over very shortly. It was just a question of waiting.
Owney heard the firing. There was so much firing from the right-hand side of the field, and then there was nothing. But all the guns that fired had to be Johnny and his boys. He'd only heard one burst that seemed to come from elsewhere.
He could see nothing. Though the floor of Hard Bargain Valley was relatively flat and hard, for some reason the grass grew at different heights upon its surface, and from where he was, it looked like a yellow ocean, a ripple with waves. Toward the edges of the valley, small stunted trees appeared in strange places, randomly.
He thought the fighting was going on over there, maybe a half mile down, on the right side. He thought he could see dust rising from all the gunfire.
Suddenly a long burst broke out, and his eye was drawn to what he took to be the position of the shooter. Another came in on top of the first. Each burst chattered for about two seconds, though from this distance the sound was dry, like a series of pops, like balloons exploding, something childlike and innocent.
Then he saw movement. It was hard to make out, but he saw soon enough that two of Johnny's men, visible in their dark suits, were scrambling up the ridge. They seemed well under cover.
Owney grasped the significance instantly. If they got above him, the cowboy was finished. They could hold him down while the others moved in on him.
Johnny, you smart bastard, he thought. You are the goddamned best.
Herman waited and waited. Nothing seemed to be happening. He decided to move on the oblique and come on the cowboy's position from another angle.
Ever so slowly he moved out, angling wide, edging ever so gently through the high grass, keeping his eyes on the area where the man had to be. Once in a while he'd shoot a glance up the ridge that ran up the hill for signs of Red and Ding-Dong. But he saw nothing.
The sxm was high now. A bit of wind sang in his ears, and the grass around him weaved as it pressed through, rubbing against itself with a soft hiss.
The grass seemed to be thinning somewhat as he drew near to the beginning of the incline. He slowed, dropped to his knees, and looked intently ahead. He could see nothing.
Where was the bastard?
He wiggled a little farther out, staying low, ready to squeeze off a burst at any moment. The silence that greeted his ears was profound.
He planted the gun's butt under his right arm, locking it in the pit, and stepped boldly out, its muzzle covering the beaten zone where haze still drifted. He expected to see a body or a blood trail or something. But he saw nothing. He saw a log ahead on the left and in the deeper grass some kind of bush and he directed his vision back, looking for?
Something to the left flashed. In die instant that his peripheral vision caught the motion, Herman cranked hard to bring his muzzle to bear on the apparition; it was a living bush and as it rose, fluffs of grass fell off it, the bush itself fell away and then Herman saw it was a man.
Earl fired five tracers into the big man in one second. They flew on a line and he absorbed them almost stoically in the center body, then sank to the earth, toppling forward, then trying to prevent his fall with the muzzle of the Browning Automatic Rifle, which he jammed into the ground. So sustained he paused, as if on the edge of a topple, his face gray and his eyes bulging, the blood running everywhere.
Earl didn't have time for this shit. He put seven more into him, knocking him down. The tracers set his clothes aflame.
Earl turned as fire broke out behind him. Two men with tommy guns lay at the crest of the ridge, and fired at him. But of course they had forgotten to adjust their Lyman peep sights for the proper distance, so while they aimed at him, the extreme trajectory of the.45s over two hundred downhill yards pulled their rounds into the ground fifty feet ahead of him.
Earl slid back to the earth, making a range estimation as he went. Bracing the gun tight against himself, he hosed a short burst high in the air, watched as it arched out, trailing incandescence visible even in the bright air. At apogee the consecutive quality of the burst broke up and each bullet spiraled on a slightly different vector toward the earth. Earl watched them, and saw that they hit just fine for windage but too far back. He needed more elevation. He corrected in a second, fired two shots and watched them rise and fall like mortar shells. They fell where he wanted. He pressed the trigger and finished the magazine, dumped it, quickly slammed another one home, found the same position in his muscle memory and this time squeezed off the entire thirty rounds in about four seconds. The gun shuddered, spewing empties like a brass liquid pouring from its breech, and the tracers curved through the air, riding a bright rainbow. Where they struck, they started fires.
It was Red who saw what was happening first. He felt okay, ducking back behind cover as a rainbow of bright slugs lofted high above him and descended, but without precision. It was absurdly raining light. Still, there was no real chance that any of the rounds could hit a target, as they dispersed widely as they plummeted.
Then he felt a wall of heat crushing over him, and the heat's presence seemed to distend or twist the air itself. To the right a wall of flame seemed to explode from nowhere. He'd never understood how fast a brushfire can bum, particularly on a hillside where the wind blows continually and there is no shelter.
The fire was a crackling enemy, advancing behind them in a human wave attack, throwing out fiery patrols of pure flame and crackling, popping menace. It sucked the air from them and its smoke closed on them quickly. They turned to run, but the fire was all around them and suddenly a lick of it lashed out and set Ding-Dong's sleeve afire.
He screamed, dropped his weapon and went to his knees to beat it out. But more flame was on him and soon he was lit up like a Roman candle, and if the power of the fire would drive him to rim, the pain of it took his energy from him, and he fell back, his flesh burning.
Red didn't want that happening to him. He had just a second to decide, and then he scrambled up the ridge and leaped over it, escaping the hungry flames, but before he could congratulate himself, a fleet of tracers rose from nowhere and crucified him to the ground.
Earl spun, changed magazines again, and looked backward for another target. He could see nothing. If there was another man moving in on him from behind he was moving stealthily. Earl didn't have much cover here and in fact there was very little cover anywhere. He emptied another magazine, then another, hosing down the area where another man would be if he existed. That was sixty rounds in about ten seconds, and the tracers sprayed across the area before him like lightning bolts seeking the highest available target. They churned through the grass, setting small fires when they encountered dryness, but generally just ripping up earth and drawing a screen of dirt into the
