Half Past Midnight

She indicated one of the wounded men lying back in the shadows. “Frankie there, he say he know how to stop the tanks. He say el cannon must be clean. Very clean. He pour a bucket of concrete inside, and they shoot him with the little machine guns on the top, but the next thing we know, the whole thing explode! She don’ move since then. We figure the explosion also get the people in the tank.”

I thought back to the flash that Sarah and I had seen just before we spotted Rene’s group. That must have been the explosion of the cannon, which meant that all this happened just a few minutes ago.

“Rene! This just happened?”

“Si. A couple minutes ago. Why?”

I looked across the street to the tank peeking out from between the buildings, then to the office building where Rene had said our people were hidden. Inspiration struck. “I think I might have a way to pull our butts out of the fire if we move fast enough.”

I looked down through my goggles as I descended from the top of the office building. Hanging from a makeshift rope of cut and tied extension cords, I shook my head. “Leeland, what the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

The little voice in my head ignored the question, instead concentrating on trying to make me see just how foolish I was being. “Get someone else to play hero!” the voice screamed. “Go back home to your wife and kids while you still can!”

“If I don’t do this,” I answered, “there won’t be any home to go to, and I might not get the chance to ever see them again.”

I looked down once more. Almost there. In my head, a jumble of prayers and curses swirled-mostly prayers. For an avowed agnostic, I seemed to be praying an awful lot lately. Dropping closer to the tank, I prayed it would stay in place for just a few minutes more, that none of the extension cords would come untied, that none of the enemy noticed a man dropping down the side of the building like a spider clinging to a strand of silk, that none of the millions of things that could go wrong, would go wrong. The more I thought about what I was doing, the more foolish it seemed.

Tightening my grip, I yanked hard on the cord twice to signal a stop. Three feet below, the top hatch of the tank waited. Larry’s men evidently hadn’t seen the show Ivory had mentioned earlier that evening. Or perhaps they simply never expected anyone to get close enough to try the hatch, and so hadn’t bothered to put a padlock on it. Why should they worry? They had one-hundred-eighty-degree coverage from the two small M-240 machine guns on front and three-hundred-sixty-degree coverage from the more powerful top mounted fifty caliber. Combine that with the sensor package on the tanks, and a person would have to be crazy to try getting to that hatch.

So there I was. By coming in from above, I hoped to bypass all of that.

I switched the goggles from infrared to night vision and studied the dogging lever on the far left hatch. It seemed straightforward enough. Slide the lever up and pull. Satisfied that I knew how to open it, I took the goggles off and once more hung them on my belt before readying my rifle. I eased my foot out until only the toe was left in the loop.

Taking a deep breath, I pushed off from the side of the building and swung out over to the far side of the tank. And jumped.

The sound of my feet hitting the armored top of the tank sounded incredibly loud to my ears, but I wasted no time worrying about it. I yanked up the hatch, finding it lighter than I had expected, or perhaps it was just well balanced, and stared into the surprised eyes of a man sitting a few feet below. I fired point blank and tried not to gag at the mess I made of his face as I kicked him out of his seat onto the floor. Dropping inside, I slipped in the blood and landed clumsily on my butt. I turned to see another man sitting slightly above and to the right, struggling for his pistol. Panicked, I fired wildly as I struggled to my feet. My shot missed, and the man ducked. I got back to my feet as he unsnapped his holster and slid down toward me. I realized my rifle was a disadvantage in the tight quarters; I was forced to shift back to get another shot off. I hit him in the neck, and he fell forward, trapping my M-16 between us. A third man to my left swung his pistol in my direction. He was only three feet away. It should have been an easy shot, and would have been, if I could have gotten my rifle free.

Instead, heart pounding with fear and adrenaline, I dropped my rifle, clapped my left hand over his and twisted the pistol backward, causing his finger to pull the trigger about the time that he saw the barrel pointing at his own chest. His eyes widened in fear, and then glazed over.

I yanked my rifle out from under the second man and looked around frantically, searching for another opponent.

Over that quickly? My heart pounded with unspent adrenaline, and the little voice was back. Ken had said to expect four men.

As if my thoughts were the trigger, the tank lurched into motion, first forward, then left. The sudden movement threw me off balance, and I fell back into the seat, feeling the warm, sticky blood that coated it soaking into my pants. What the hell? I checked the bodies, thinking perhaps one of the men had fallen on the accelerator. I searched closely for anything that might be a means of driving this tin can, but there was nothing I recognized as such. In a panic, I started flipping levers and pushing buttons, hoping to find something by chance.

I did, though it wasn’t at all what I expected. There was a stick-on label that read “TURRET” over a console. Next to it was what looked like a kid’s video game joystick. I pulled tentatively on the joystick and saw the turret begin to turn, and an opening appeared in front, growing larger by the second. A separate compartment for the driver, I realized, just as a hand with a pistol appeared through that opening.

I flipped the lever on my rifle to Auto and fired a half a dozen rounds into the tiny compartment. The driver twitched once and fell forward in his seat with the Abrams still accelerating.

Before dropping into the tank, my hearing had been slowly returning, but the firefight in the enclosed cabin brought back the familiar ringing that had been my constant companion since the blast that had thrown Billy. Touch, sight, and smell kicked into overdrive to compensate for my lost hearing. Suddenly, the scent of gunpowder and blood was overwhelming, the feel of blood seeping through my clothing from the seat nauseating.

Standing in the seat, I prepared to climb out of the tank. It looked like I was going to have to jump, and I wanted to do it before the Abrams built up too much speed. Then I saw where we were headed. Larry’s men were dead ahead, cheering and waving at the tank, unaware that it was driving itself and would run over their barricade in less than a minute.

They thought I was one of the crew. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. I looked at the fifty caliber machine gun in front of me and took the grips in hand. It only took a few seconds to find the manual controls, and only a few more to give Larry’s thugs the surprise of their lives. The last man went down just seconds before the tank crashed into the barrier of cars; the lurch as the Abrams flattened the automobiles dropped me back into the seat. There were only seconds left before I slammed full speed into the side of the Sears building.

In retrospect, it probably would have been smarter for me to have just closed the hatch and stayed inside the tank than to have jumped, but by the time I realized just how fast I was really going, my choices were rather limited. I was already outside, on top of the tank with the department store rushing at me at about forty miles an hour. It was either jump or take my chances sitting on the outside of the tank as it slammed into the building. Visualizing a wall of bricks falling on top of me, I decided to jump.

The ground rushed up at me, and then there was darkness.

Chapter 16

August 19 / Morning

Triremes pleines tout aage captif,

Temps bon a mal, le doux pour amertume:

Proye a Barbares trop tost seront hatifs,