Chapter 20
De batailler ne sera donne signe,
Du parc seront contraints de sortir hors:
De Gand l’entour sera cogneu l’ensigne,
Qui fera mettre de tous les siens a morts.
The signal to give battle will not be given,
They will be obliged to go out of the park:
The banner around Ghent will be recognized,
Of him who will cause all his followers to be put to death.
So began our last great confrontation with Larry’s army. It wasn’t the short two- or three-day trip I expected. I was off my game-no planning, no strategy, nothing but simple reaction.
We had to stop for the night about halfway to Bixby. As much as I hated to do so, it would have been foolish to try heading into a town where Larry’s troops might be camped with our headlights announcing us from miles away.
“I’m gonna see what all we’ve got in this sorry excuse for an army.” Ken climbed out of the Humvee. “Why don’t you guys just kick back and take it easy. You’ve all had a rough day.”
“Thanks, Ken,” Debra said. “I could use some sleep.” She grabbed my hand. “Coming?”
“Sure.” I knew I’d never get to sleep. There was just too much going on in my head, but Debra seemed to want the company.
We lay wrapped up in a blanket, my wife tucked in close beside me. Before long, her soft and steady breathing told me she was asleep. I waited a few more minutes, then slipped away to a campfire someone had started nearby.
Ken found me there a bit later and sat beside me as I stared at the fire. “Ninety-three people with twenty- two handguns, nineteen rifles, forty bows, and an assortment of blades. Every one of them here to help you get Zachary back, Leeland.” I nodded absently. “So what’s the plan?” I shrugged.
Ken slapped me on the shoulder. “Come on. You can tell me. What do you have in mind?”
“What do you mean?” Wasn’t it obvious? I was going to get my son. If anyone got in my way, I would do whatever was necessary to get him
“I mean, how do you plan to get Zachary back? You know you can’t just walk in and grab him. So what’s the game plan?” He grunted when I hesitated. “That’s what I thought. You haven’t got a clue, do you?”
“Not really.” I admitted. “Before everyone else joined the party, I figured on some kind of sneak attack.”
“You mean something like Megan had in mind with Eric?”
I shrugged. “It was all I could come up with on short notice.”
“And now?”
“Well, I don’t think we’re likely to sneak a hundred people to anywhere within a mile of Larry. There’s just too many of us.”
“Yep.” He looked at me. “Want some advice?”
“Oh, yeah.”
The relief must have been evident in my voice, because Ken smiled before he began. “Their greatest advantage is their firepower, the fifties and the seven-sixty-twos mounted on their vehicles. So we find a way to take out their vehicles. Larry’s gonna expect you to come after him in Bixby.” Ken drew an X in the dirt with a stick. “So in the morning, we go to Jennings.”
I tried to remember where Jennings was. If I remembered correctly, it was about twenty miles northeast of Bixby. “Why Jennings?”
“So we can get around them and set up our ambush.”
“Sounds good. How do you propose we do it?”
“We head north in the morning. Jump up to Highway two seventy-nine and take it east to Jennings. At Jennings, we drop back down to one eighty, on the other side of Bixby. Then we wait for Larry and take out his Humvees.”
“All right. And just how do we do that?”
Something thudded into the ground in front of me. A miniature cluster of nails fused together in such a way that no matter how it sat, it always had one point sticking up.
“Caltrops. Mark and I made several dozen this morning.” He stared at me like I was crazy when I started to laugh. “Did I miss something?”
“No.” I laughed so hard tears flowed. Several seconds later, I got myself under control. “It’s just… hell, Ken, I take back every bad thing I ever said about making nails!”
For as long as man has fought, the idea behind the ambush has been simple. One side attempts to catch the other by surprise and strikes hard and fast enough to compensate for whatever their opponent’s advantage might be.
As Ken had pointed out, Larry’s advantage was superior firepower. Ours was superior numbers. If everything went as planned, we would turn off the main highway before getting anywhere near Bixby, cut to a parallel road some ten miles north, and drop back south when we got past him.
Everything went as planned.
We weren’t foolish enough to think we could take Larry’s group head-to-head, not even with the ambush, but the caltrops blew all four tires in the lead vehicle, two in the second, and one in the third. Our snipers took random shots at some of the others before fading into the trees to observe. Larry’s boys ripped the surrounding trees and brush to shreds in response, wasting much of their ammunition and hitting nothing but foliage.
After considerable screaming and shouting, Larry finally got them to cease firing. “Leeland!” he screamed to the trees. “Leeland! I know you’re out there! I have your son!”
I watched through my binoculars, and my heart leapt into my throat as I saw him reach down and drag Zachary up and lay a pistol to his head. So Eric had already reached him.
Larry yelled into the trees again. “I don’t want to hurt him, Leeland. That would complicate things unnecessarily. But I’ll do it if I have to! Don’t make me kill him!”
Zachary kicked Larry in the shins. “Let go of me you… you, asshole!” I remembered him telling me that I shouldn’t use that word-that it was a bad word.
Then Larry cuffed him and lifted him by the collar of his shirt.
As hard as it was, I held my tongue, and Larry eventually must have decided that he’d scared us off. He started yelling orders at his men to get the blown tires off the damaged vehicles and get the convoy moving. Men scrambled to pull spares off of other vehicles and rush them to the front of the line, while others hustled to remove the flat tires.
The binoculars brought the terror on my son’s face right up to me. I could see the tears in his eyes, and his ten-year-old determination to keep them in check.
But I thought I also saw something else. Something in the way Han stood beside Larry-a sudden tension in the big man’s stance.
“
