moving north. If you heard any voices, you was hearin’ your own head talkin’ from all that moonshine whiskey you drunk last night.”
The men laughed roughly.
It was their last dirty bark of humor on this earth.
Ike clicked his M-16 onto full auto, nestled the butt into his shoulder, and burned a full clip into the knot of Ninth Order. The black rifle did its work, the so-called “tumbling” bullets knocking the men off their feet, slamming and jerking them around like so many mindless marionettes, the strings of which were being manipulated by an insane puppeteer. The bullets spun the men into trees and stained the virgin ground beneath them with wet, sticky crimson.
“Come on!” Ike said to Nina.
Together, they finished the job, with a single bullet to the back of the head of any left alive. Working swiftly, they stripped the men of ammo, with Nina discarding her .270 for an M-16. They hung bandoleers of ammo about them like old-time Mexican bandits, the bandoleers crisscrossing their chests. The men all wore canteens full of water, attached to web belts; those went around the waists of Ike and Nina. Ike hooked a half dozen grenades to his new harness and gave several grenades to Nina, showing her how to hook them in place. He showed
her how to work the additional walkie-talkie.
“Now you have communications, Nina-in case we get separated. I’ll go over the nomenclature of the M-16 once we get some distance between us and them.” He pointed to the cooling carnage sprawled unsightly on the forest floor. “Let’s split, babe. Now we got some firepower.”
“Can we run away now?” Lilli asked.
The three young girls were playing dolls in Tony’s motel quarters outside Savannah. Lilli had seen dolls before, lying like shattered little beings amid the rubble of man’s hate and destruction, but the child had no earthly idea what one was supposed to do with them. Now it was kind of fun, dressing them up in little doll dresses. Once you knew where to look in the old stores, you could find all sorts of pretty things to dress up all kinds of dolls.
“We’re guarded,” Ann flatly informed her. “And the windows is barred and the doors got special locks on them. We can’t get out. These three rooms,” she said, pointing left and right, to the adjoining motel rooms, “is it. You still hurtin?” she asked Lilli.
“Some. But it’s better. It really hurt when Tony done it to me. I’m gonna tell ya’ll something: I don’t like that Patsy woman none at all. She done things to me made me feel … well, kinda dirty. You know what I mean?”
“She done it to me, too,” Peg said. “It don’t hurt, but I don’t like it.”
Ann said nothing about the cruel woman called Patsy. Patsy had forced the girl to have sex with her
more than once, with Tony watching one time. And she had forced Ann to strap on a huge penis and act like a man. That’s when Ann really began scheming and plotting ways to escape. But first she wanted to somehow hurt Tony as badly as he had hurt her. She already thought she knew how she was going to get even with that Patsy woman.
“What’s wrong with you, Ann?” Lilli asked. “Your face looked funny for a minute.”
“Yeah,” Peg said. “You sure are quiet.”
“Just thinkin’ about ways for us to get out. I can’t come up with nothing yet. But I will. I betcha on that.”
A key rattled in the lock and the door swung open. A burly man stood in the open doorway, grinning lewdly at the three young girls. “Shuck outta them jeans, babies,” he said. “Patsy’s on the way up here with another chick. And I’m gonna watch the action. Hell, I might decide to join in. I ain’t had me no young gash in a while.”
Lilli began weeping, her face pressed into her hands. The man stepped to the bed and slapped the girl, knocking her to the carpet. He jerked up one of her dolls and savagely twisted the head from it. The doll made a momma-momma sound. He dropped the head to the floor, where it bounced into a corner.
“Don’t you hurt my dolly!” Lilli screamed.
The man laughed at her, then looked at the other girls. “How’d you like for me to take all your dollies away from you?”
“No!” the girls cried.
“Then git naked, babies. All of you. Show me the bare butts and pussies.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The first team of Gray’s Scouts ran into a patrol just inside the main compound. A patrol of coup members, leaving for a nighttime search of the immediate woods rounded a corner and came face to face with the Scouts.
Jimmy Paul, leader of the Eagle team, did not have time to raise his M-16.
“Traitors!” the coup member screamed at the Scouts. The leader lifted his sawed-off ten-gauge shotgun and pulled the trigger, blowing Jimmy’s belly out his back, part of the stomach lining wrapping around the backbone, ripping and tearing out the stomach along with several yards of intestines.
The patrol and the Scouts blasted away at each other at point-blank range. No one among either side survived the encounter.
The camp erupted in gunfire, the muzzle blasts pocking the night like a Fourth of July celebration planned and executed by a pyromaniac with a full arsenal at his command.
Jumping to his booted feet before the first echoes of gunfire died away, Colonel Gray shouted, “Now!” He hit the detonator, activating the C-4. The cell door lock blew apart. Other explosions rocked the
old jail as cell locks were shattered. Gray, Juan, Cecil, Mark and Peggy stepped out into the smoky runaround of the cellblock. Mark was armed with an M-M-10 machine pistol.
“I’ll take the point,” he yelled, running toward the still-locked door to the cellblock. He held a block of C-4 in one hand.
Before he reached the door, it swung open, two armed coup members stepping into the smoky hall. Firing one-handed, Mark pulled the trigger, fighting the rise of the weapon. The slugs jerked the pair backward in a macabre dance of pain and death. Mark tossed one of their M-16’s to Colonel Gray, the other to Cecil. He ripped off their ammo pouches and threw them over his shoulder toward the newly freed prisoners. Dan and Cecil caught the full pouches and slung the straps over their shoulder.
Peggy Jones leveled her pistol and shot a young coup member between the eyes just as he rounded a corner, an AK-47 at the ready. He slumped back against the wall and slid downward, blood and brains leaking from the back of his head, staining the old brick of the jail.
“Take his weapon, Juan!” she yelled, as the hallway filled with coup members.
Gunfire ripped from the coup members’ rifles and pistols. Peggy went down, a bullet in her side. Juan jerked up the Kalashnikov assault rifle and swept the hallway clean, using a clip of 7.62 ammo, the slugs slamming young coup members right and left, filling the hall with smoke and pain and the odor of blood and death.
“I’m OK!” Peggy yelled. “The slug just grazed me.
It went clear through.” She tore off her shirt tail and the belt from a dead man to fix a quick pressure bandage.
“Let’s go!” Dan shouted, pushing through the stalled crowd, jumping over the body-littered hallway.
Outside the jail, the situation was chaotic, with no one really knowing who was friend or foe. Coup members were firing wildly in the darkness, many times the bullets hitting their own people.
And Abe Lancer and his men were massing to free those men and women and children held inside the football stadium.
“Anything moving?” Ben asked the young guard.
The young Rebel, attached to Captain Rayle’s command, almost jumped out of his boots.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “No, sir.” He calmed himself, taking several deep breaths of the cool night air. “God, sir, you move like a ghost. I didn’t even hear you come up behind me. How do you do that, sir?”
Ben laughed softly and patted the young man’s shoulder. “Settle down, son,” he told him. “They’re not here yet. The attack will probably start no sooner than ten o’clock tomorrow.”
“How do you know that, sir?”
Other Rebels had gathered around the southeast sentry post. Ben smiled. “Because I changed the crystal in one of our PRC-6’S and wired the mic button closed. I strapped the walkie-talkie to a telephone pole in the town of Troy. I’ve been listening to the forces gather there. Heard some very profane chatter,
