“I don’t think so, Jay.”
“I know. Hell, on my past performance if I were you I’d think, ‘Bug off,’ but you’ve always been fair, babe. But we can’t talk here.” He looked around. “In this dump — I mean-no offense but — it’s a zoo, right? Look, forget Anchorage. We’ll settle it here. There a hotel in this burg?”
“I’m not spending a night with you, Jay. If you think you can con me into a good-bye— Well, you know what I mean. No way.”
“That’s not what I meant. Hell, bring a chaperon if you like. I just want it settled.” He smiled. “I’ll buy you a hamburger.”
She sighed. “Why don’t you just send the papers through the mail, Jay?”
“You think I haven’t thought of that? But my damn lawyers freaked out. I told them you’d settle easy enough. There’d be no hassle. But they want it watertight. Which means they want to charge me twenty thousand bucks. It has to do with the board, too, Lana. La Roche Chemicals. The agreement you sign has got to be — well — final. They need to see it — tell us what we can and can’t change. Hell,” he said.
She recognized the relentless legality of it.
“There’s a small hotel cum cafe—Davy Jones,” she said. ‘It’s not very fancy, but we could meet there I suppose.”
He shrugged. “Fine. Eight o’clock?”
“All right.” She turned to go.
“Lana?”
When she looked at him, both arms were dangling by his side in a way she’d never seen him before. He looked defeated. “I’ll send a driver if you want.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ll get a base cab.”
“I still love you, babe. I only wanted to see you. Is that so terrible?”
When La Roche’s entourage moved out of the PX, Francine could tell something had happened to him. A young reporter, his ID press badge reading
“Fuck off!” La Roche told him.
“What are we doing, Mr. La Roche?” one of the flunkies asked.
“There’s some rat-hole in this place called the Davy Jones. Make reservations for dinner, if they know what that is. Eight o’clock. For two. And a room for me.”
“We’re booked into the Excelsior, Mr. La Roche. Nice little hotel overlooking the—”
“Well go there and draw up divorce papers.”
“Divorce papers?” the lawyer said. “But we didn’t bring any — I mean — we didn’t know you wanted anything like that on this trip, Mr. La Roche. I don’t think—”
“Then give me one of the company contracts. Something that looks legal. Can you do that much?” Jay sneered.
“Yes. Right away, Mr. La Roche.”
“Have them ready for me by eight o’clock so I can take ‘em with me to that Davy joint. And Marvin?”
“Yes, Mr. LaRoche?”
“Tell Francine to get her ass over to that hotel room. Now!”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Aussie’s FAV was halfway down a dune when they heard the bang and felt the vehicle shuddering, Aussie steering hard into the skid. Beneath the vehicle an avalanche of slow-moving sand and stones followed, the stones as big as a man’s fist.
Within seconds Aussie and David Brentwood were out, their new TOW man swiveling in his seat to make sure he could cover them for the full 360 degrees while Aussie grabbed the jack and David hit the wing nut that held down the spare.
Brentwood hoped that outflanking the ChiCom tanks would be easy, given the speed of the FAV, but he knew he couldn’t be sure until the ChiCom MBTs got their first glimpse of a FAV — would they break and go after the FAVs or stay in echelon, whatever its configuration might be?
“I can hear them,” the TOW operator said.
“Can you
“No.”
“Well that’s no bloody use, is it? I can hear them, too. Every fucker within a mile can hear—” They intuitively ducked, the sound of ordnance passing overhead with that peculiar
“Right! We’re off,” Aussie said. “I’m the first one to spot a chow. Five to one on — any takers?”
David Brentwood said nothing, peering hard through goggles, the sound of sand striking them like fine hail. The TOW operator took Aussie’s bet, for he could already see two blurs — too big to be motorcycle and sidecar units. “You’re on,” the TOW operator said. “Ten bucks.”
“Done!” Aussie said.
“I see two of ‘em — eleven o’clock.”
“What?” Aussie said, but now Brentwood could see them, too, and flecks of tracers told him the blur, whether it was an MBT or not, was firing at them.
Aussie swung hard left into a dip between two small dunes and stopped, the engine in high rev.
“You ready, TOW?”
“Ready — go!”
“Never mind,” Brentwood interjected. “Go out to the flank. It’s the radar we want.”
Swearing, Aussie dropped it into low gear and followed the line of the gully away from the tanks — or perhaps they had been APCs. “TOW,” Aussie said. “You saw those tanks or whatever they are before you made the bet?”
“No.”
“Lying bastard. Hope your prick falls off.”
“Thanks, Aussie, but you owe me fifty bucks.”
They followed the line of the gully for two hundred yards or so, then came up again. There was a sudden break in the dust storm — or was it the end of the storm? Then they came across a terrifying sight. From the left to right, as far as they could see, a brigade of MBTs — between 150 and 200 tanks, T-52s and T-72s — was making its way down an enormous dune in the strange half light, the tanks looking like a plague of huge, dark moles crawling down some enormous flesh-colored back. There was a streak of light and a more diffuse backblast from a TOW missile, fired from a FAV somewhere to Aussie’s left, and a flash of red and yellow dame as the TOW round hit a T-59.
Brentwood was furious and on the phone network within seconds, telling the FAVs to get out to the flanks. To forget the tanks. “I say again, forget the tanks—”
His voice was all but drowned out by fire from the forward five tanks in the column, which were breaking up, going into
Almost at the same time another one of the columns-there were fifteen tanks in it — all began moving to echelon right. It was the ChiComs’ weakest point, a legacy of having been trained, like the ChiCom fighter pilots, by