A state of disobedience

curious device with four playing cards, blue pattern printed, attached to it.

'I can do this. Go,' he half whispered.

Williams saw where James' eyes had come to rest. He drew his pistol from its holster with his right hand, grabbed the company guidon with his left, then ordered, quietly, 'Do it then. Take over. The rest of you'—a hand swept in the other eighteen or so men in the room—'fix bayonets and follow me.'

* * *

Smoke filled the air in the upper half of the unblocked corridor, causing the necessarily tight little knot of troopers following Williams to have to crouch half bent over. Somewhere, some portion of the building must have caught fire, mused the major. Might help; might hurt. No telling.

From nowhere, seemingly, a rifle-bearing man in the black battle dress and helmet of the PGSS appeared. The agent appeared confused as much as anything. Possibly he was in shock, as sometimes happens with soldiers in sustained, close and vicious combat.

Williams raised his pistol, took two steps towards the disoriented agent, aimed and fired. The bullet entered the victim's head having passed squarely through the bridge of his nose. Both eyes were forced out of the man's head even as his brains scattered across the light green painted wall behind him.

Waving his pistol forward, Williams repeated the refrain, 'Come on; follow me.'

The smoke grew worse, chokingly worse, as the group ascended a broad flight of stairs. 'Don masks,' Williams ordered, though he knew this would not help if the fire—wherever it was—had sucked all the oxygen from the air. 'Forward.'

From chokingly thick with smoke the air soon became a gaseous morass of blinding fumes and sooty embers. Williams could see precisely nothing. He felt the tension and fear of uncertainty emanating from the men following him.

'Nothing is good,' he whispered to himself.

'Sir?'

'We can't see, right?'

'No, sir . . . not a goddamned thing.'

'That means they can't see either, right?'

'Yes, sir . . . ohhh.'

'Right. We've been here before. They haven't. Let's go . . . quietly. And remember; we have this corridor booby trapped about fifty yards ahead.'

Onward they crept, silently. Ahead were shouts and orders. None sounded quite like Army standard. Nor were the accents, in general, quite right.

'Bayonets only,' ordered Williams, wishing he had one himself; that or a good sword. Oh, well, the guidon will do for a spear. 'Come on . . . and once we hit 'em? 'Keep up the skeer.' '

Williams holstered his pistol and reversed the guidon, gripping it firmly in both hands. Then, with a fierce toothy grin, sharklike, he advanced.

The first PGSS man was taken from the rear. Concentrating on some problem up ahead, that man never heard the stealthy approach of the Texans.

Williams' eyes registered neck-to-buttocks Kevlar and decided that the only way in was right through the aramid fibers. He drew the guidon back a bit, then with an open mouthed, predatory glare he drove it forward, all of his bodily weight and strength behind it. The sharp point of the ferule touched the tightly woven fibers and slid slightly until reaching a small space where two of them met. The point parted these, parting likewise the next several layers. A small flange on the ferule hung up on the fibers. No matter, the point only penetrated three inches into the PGSS man's back—missing his spine by several inches—but the force of the thrust, along with the surprise, knocked the wind from his body. He went down, gasping for air.

Williams, on the point, pressed onward. Behind, another of his men tore the helmet from the fallen PGSS man, half strangling him in the process. That guardsman then proceeded to beat his victim's skull in with his own helmet.

Bayonets slashed; rifle butts crashed. In moments the corridor had turned into a swirling orgy of struggling, screaming, cursing and fighting men.

And then it was over. Williams saw the last actively resisting enemy physically picked up by a bayonet point thrust under his armor and into his groin and then tossed, screaming, upon the tangled and matted up wad of barbed wire that had been blocking the corridor. He released the corpse of the man he had strangled and looked around. The guidon was broken in two, though the smoke was too thick to see more than the kindled upper half of it. To his right another guardsman was rhythmically cursing as he raised his rifle over and over to smash it downward into the red paste face of what might have been a PGSS woman. All the others were gasping for breath except for two who had had their own masks torn off in the fight and were choking and vomiting as they frantically attempted to reseat their masks.

A headcount revealed there were four Texans dead or so badly wounded that they could not go on. No one bothered with a headcount for the PGSS as they were very dead indeed.

Williams grasped the remnant of the guidon in his left hand, redrew his pistol with his right, and ordered, 'Forward,' while pointing the pistol up a broad stairwell.

They met the enemy—the next wave of the enemy—as they were coming down the very stairs the Texans were going up. This time, with fresh men facing worn ones, with momentum on the side of the PGSS, and worst of all without the surprise that had made the previous encounter such a relatively easy victory, the Texans could not win.

Yet they died hard. Williams met the first of the PGSS' thrusting bayonets with a sweeping block from the guidon. Then he plunged his pistol forcefully into the soft spot under the jaw of the bayonet wielder and pulled the trigger to create a shower of brains, blood and red-speckled bone.