low,” he said, his voice choked with anger and frustration.
Mark felt his guts churn and his breakfast fight to lunge from his stomach as he lifted the long-range glasses to his eyes. Like the sentry, he was, for a moment, speechless. He felt the blood rush from his head, and for a moment, thought he would pass out from the sheer horror of the sight in the valley below.
“The dirty bastard!” he finally found his voice.
Al had joined him on the ridge, pulling field glasses to his eyes. “Oh, my God!” he blurted. “Oh, my God, no!”
The IPF and Hartline’s troops were on the march, moving up behind armored personnel carriers. On the front of each APC, strapped to the sloping front of the carrier, a naked woman was positioned, her legs spread wide, ankles and feet secured to the lugs near the base of the Ml13. Her arms were out-flung, wrists tied to the headlight brackets. The machine gun mounted to the front of the APC was only inches from each woman’s head, guaranteeing a savage muzzle-blast burn to the side of the woman’s head.
When the troops on the ridges saw what was coming up behind the APC’S, to a man, they openly, unashamedly wept.
A hundred or so old people were being herded in front of and mixed with the mercenaries and the troops from the IPF.
The elderly black men and women were crying from fear and humiliation as they stumbled along, prodded by the rifle barrels of the mercs and the IPF troops.
The elderly men and women had been stripped naked and were barefooted.
The IPF troops and Hartline’s men were moving ever closer, and so far no shots had been fired from the troops on the ridges. All eyes were fixed unbelievingly on the scene before them. Weapons had been forgotten, hanging loose in their hands.
“They have to be stopped.” Mark was the first to speak, his words hoarse-sounding, pushed from his tight throat. “We have to stop them; there is no one else to do the job.”
Up and down the thin and battle-weary line of defenders of liberty, the troops looked first at each other, and then to Al and Mark for orders. But for many, the decision had already been made in their minds.
From the lead APC, still much too far away to be heard by any of the resistance fighters, Peggy Jones was screaming.
“Fire!” she screamed. “Shoot your guns! For God’s sake-shoot!”
The IPF troops in the APC laughed at her words.
“I can’t fire on those people,” a man said, tears in his eyes. “I can’t shoot, I might hit some of the old people or the women. I can’t do it.”
“Fire!” Mark screamed the command. “Goddamnit, people, they have to be stopped regardless of the cost. Fire, goddamn you!”
The enemy moved closer.
Now the troops on the ridges could hear Peggy’s screaming, very faint, but audible.
“Shoot,” she screamed. “For God’s sake, shoot!”
The machine guns on the front of the APC’S began singing their lethal songs, spitting out lead. One woman’s
hair caught fire from the fierce heat of the muzzle; her screaming was hideous.
“Pick your targets,” Al yelled to a rifle squad. “Shoot around the old people.”
The snipers tried, but the troops in the APC’S were crouched low, and almost impossible to hit. Bullets struck one naked young woman in the stomach; she cried out in pain. Several old people were struck by the lead from the men on the ridges. They fell to the earth, screaming in pain and confusion. A Jeep ran over one; an APC crushed the legs of another. Yet another elderly man tried to grab the rear of a Jeep. He was dragged over the rocky ground for several hundred feet until life and strength left him.
Most of the guns on the high ground fell silent. They could not be blamed for that.
“Fall back!” Mark yelled, knowing his position was nearly hopeless. “First and second companies regroup. First company to the right flank, second company to the left, come in behind them.”
But it was too late; Hartline’s men and the IPF were too close. They had already begun executing an end- around sweep. The defenders on the ridges were cut off.
“Goddamn you!” Peggy yelled her rage at the men on the ridges. She tried to anger them into firing. “Can’t you niggers do anything right? You have to leave everything up to whitey?”
Hartline’s mercs thought that hysterically amusing.
The APC’S and Jeeps were roaring up the small inclines, the ring-mounted .50’s on the Jeeps and APC’S spitting and hammering out death.
Al Maiden lifted his M-16 and shot one machine
gunner in the face. A second later a hard burst from an M-60 spun him around and tore his chest open. He danced grotesquely and then fell to the cool earth, his blood soaking into the ground.
The mercenaries and the IPF troops crested the ridges and were over the top as the troops who had pulled the flanking maneuver sealed off much of the rear escape route. The black troops fought well and bravely, but the better-fed, better-trained and better-equipped IPF and mercs soon overwhelmed the small force on the ridges.
Mark Terry shot the driver of one APC in the head and dropped a grenade into the carrier. The grenade exploded, sending bits of human flesh and brains flying out of the APC. He slashed at Peggy’s ropes, freeing her. He jerked her toward a Jeep, bodily picking her up and throwing her into the back seat. A bullet slammed into the fleshy part of his shoulder, spinning him around and dropping him to the ground. He pulled himself into the driver’s seat with his good arm and jerked the Jeep into gear, racing back to the main encampment, to his command post. But Hartline’s flankers were well ahead of him, and he could see the battle was almost over. Hartline’s men were shooting the wounded in the head.
Cursing, Mark floorboarded the Jeep and headed for the timber. Driving deep into a forest, away from the battleground, he pulled over, off the old dirt road, and switched off the engine.
Mark removed his field jacket and gave it to Peggy. He could see that the woman had been beaten and tortured. Despite that, she was still beautiful.
Mark poured raw alcohol onto his shoulder wound
and bandaged it hurriedly. Peggy crawled into the front seat beside him.
“We’re beaten,” she said flatly.
“Not yet,” Mark said grimly. He slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel. “Goddamnit!” he cursed. “I just didn’t count on Hartline doing anything like that.”
Her bitter laugh lifted his eyes toward her. “You can count on Hartline doing almost anything,” she told him. “He is brilliantly insane and perversely twisted; and so are a great number of his men.”
“You sound like you know him well.”
The sounds of battle were coming to a close, with only an occasional shot being fired far in the distance. Mark felt like a traitor for running out on his men. But there was still a chance he could regroup some of his people. But it was a slim one and Mark knew it. And he didn’t know if he wanted to see those who refused to fire. He thought he might try to kill them.
The taste of defeat was brass-bitter on his tongue. The word coward kept coming to him.
But Mark knew he was no coward; he had faced too much adversity in his life to be a coward. He just wished he could have done more.
As if reading his thoughts, Peggy said, “That battle was lost before it began back there, and Sam Hartline knew it. Said as much. There was nothing you could have done to change any of it. What is your name?”
“Mark. Mark Terry.”
“I’m Peggy Jones. Yeah, I know Sam Hartline.” The words rolled harshly from her tongue. “I was his … house nigger for a time, reporting back to Lois Peters, and she to the resistance. But he knew what I was doing
all along and the information he gave me was deliberately false. I … got away from him-don’t ask me how- but he finally tortured Lois until she gave away where I was hiding. I can’t blame her for that. He tortured her to death. It was … terrible what he did to her. I will never get that picture of her out of my mind.
“Then,” she sighed, “he had a high old time with me. I… really don’t want to say what he did to me. It was sexual, most of the time. I will never be able to bear children. The IPF people… fixed me.” She lifted her arm and pulled back the sleeve of the field jacket, showing Mark the tattoo on her arm. “Hartline and a lot of his men and
