south, the highway ran straight.
'Okay, Pol,' Lyons said. 'You're the Green Beret, retired. Call it.'
Blancanales pointed to the ridge on which they stood. 'You with the Mannlicher right here. You can hit anyone on the radio station's road, and if any of them make a break for town, hit them in the back.'
He turned to Gadgets. 'A quick booby trap on the gate...'
'A phosphorous grenade...'
'The gate's closed, they stop to open it, boom. The shooting starts. Lyons, let me take your Ingram. Let's go.'
In two minutes they had set the ambush, Lyons on the ridge, Blancanales lower on the hillside, only a hundred feet from the road opposite him. Gadgets closed the gate. He pulled the pin from a white phosphorous grenade and placed it carefully on one of the gate's hinges, using the gate to hold the lever closed.
Lyons heard motorcycles. He whistled a warning. Gadgets sprinted through the brush and threw himself flat a few yards from Blancanales.
Chief had reached the gate already, and he waited for the stragglers to join him, his bike drawn up parallel to the gate. He carried an M-60 machine gun slung over his back like a rifle. In his Italian wraparound shades and Mohawk haircut, the road's dust swirling around him, he looked like a demon from hell.
Lyons watched him through the Mannlicher's scope, the biker's face and chest filling the image. Chief turned from side to side, counting his men.
Panning back and forth across the bikers, Lyons suddenly noted a hideous ornament on the forks of Chief's bike. The head of a man, the eyes wide and staring, had been wired to the handlebars.
'Ready to die, freak show?' Lyons whispered, his finger on the Mannlicher's trigger.
Chief kicked the gate open, then gunned his bike. Gadgets saw the grenade drop. But Chief accelerated away. In the six seconds before the grenade exploded, Chief would ride to safety. Gadgets sighted his Uzi on Chief. He fired. The biker spilled splashily.
All the bikers, the two pulling off the highway, the several near the gate, the others gunning their motorcycles up the road, turned their heads fast toward the Uzi-fire. The distraction served only to make them less ready for what followed. An exploding ball of white flame engulfed the road.
Five human forms were directly hit. Hundreds of droplets of white phosphorous splattered their bodies, each drop a searing point of flame that burned through cloth and leather and flesh. Not requiring oxygen to burn, the metallic fire would continue through their flesh to the bone and burn there until the metal consumed itself. But they died before that agony. Their motorcycles' gasoline was exploding. Screaming, the bikers inhaled gulps of fire into their lungs, died in seconds.
Dust and flame and smoke filled the scope's image, but Lyons still squeezed off a shot at the downed Chief. Then he opened his left eye, searching the road for targets, his right eye still at the eyepiece.
Automatic fire from Gadgets and Blancanales poured into the two bikers immediately behind the fallen Chief. The hillside beyond the bikers puffed into a sheet of dust as slugs punched through the two men. Other bullets tore through the sheet metal of the gas tanks.
Seeing the annihilation of the patrol, the last two Outlaws spun their motorcycles, throwing dust and rocks as their rear wheels skittered on the dirt road. Lyons put the Mannlicher's cross hairs in the center of the 'Outlaws Forever' insignia on a biker's jacket. His shot snapped the man's spine.
Whipping back the bolt, Carl Lyons put the next slug into the second biker's head.
On the road, a biker lay under his motorcycle. Through the scope, Lyons saw blood streaming from wounds in Chief's head and chest. One arm flopped, broken a few inches below the shoulder. He struggled against the weight of the motorcycle with one arm. He was trying to reach for the belt-fed M-60. Lyons put the cross hairs on the man's forehead. But he didn't shoot.
He jerked back the bolt, caught the unfired Accelerator. Searching through the pouches of his bandolier, he found the .308 tracers. Lyons loaded up, then snapped the tracer through the struggling biker's gas tank. Immediately a churning ball of flame rose above Chief. His screams continued for thirty seconds.
Then there was silence.
'Lyons!' Blancanales shouted. 'You see anything moving?'
Motorcycle tires burned, filling the narrow canyon mouth with acrid rubber smoke. Around the gate, a brushfire spread up the slope. By the time he had gazed over the blackened scene of bone and scorched flesh, Lyons could see nothing that was living. He searched the rock and brush of the stream-bed.
He saw the barrel of an M-60. The muzzle flashed. Lyons flew backward, his body exploding with pain.
Streams of .308 slugs suddenly shrieking over them, Gadgets and Blancanales sprayed back with 9mm Parabellum. The machinegunner fell behind his rock for an instant, then popped out a few yards away, still firing his belt-fed M-60.
Slugs marched across the hillside, chopping brush, making the earth around Blancanales jump. 'Lyons!' Blancanales screamed. 'Hit him, hit him!'
There was no rifle fire, no answer from the ridge.
Burst after burst searched for Blancanales. Desperate, he screamed again, but this time without words, his voice shuddering with faked agony. He screamed until his throat ached, then let his wail die to a whimper. 'Arm... my arm... it's... off.' After a second, he wailed again. 'My arm — oh God oh God oh God...'
'Rosario!' Gadgets cried.
Another long burst searched for Gadgets. He rolled clear, crawled toward Blancanales. Hissed words stopped him: 'Lay cool! I'm all right, see? It's Lyons up there we got to worry about. Radio!'
Keying his hand-radio, Gadgets got no reply. 'Lyons! Answer. Answer! Lyons...'
No reply.
Gadgets crawled back to Blancanales. 'We got to bring this show to a close.'
'Frag him? Or phosphorous?'
'We need that M-60 of his.'
'Frags.' Blancanales took a fragmentation grenade from the battle rig under his Outlaws jacket. He straightened the cotter pin, saying: 'Wanted to save these for tonight, when we...'
'There won't be any tonight for us if we don't use them now.' Gadgets braced himself to throw. 'On three. Yours to the right, mine on the left. Pull. Now, one and two and three!'
The surviving biker, dizzy from blood loss, saw the arms heave the grenades. He snapped a burst at the hidden men as the grenades arced toward him. One grenade hit a rock and bounced over him. The other landed exactly three feet in front of him.
He snatched up the grenade and threw it back. He struggled to crawl a few feet, the exposed bones of his right leg scraping on rocks, the pain beyond imagination.
Then an explosion of thousands of steel razors shredded his legs and punched tiny holes in the back of his head. The rush of even greater pain lifted him into darkness. The grenade he had thrown had exploded in midair, and fragments of steel wire were showering even Gadgets and Blancanales.
The grenade sent tiny slivers into their backs. Blancanales felt blood on his hands. He looked at his hands and saw bits of wire in the flesh. Gadgets had tiny cuts also.
The wounds did not stop them. They fired into their target's twisted, mangled body, the bursts of 9mm slugs throwing him over. Gadgets put a burst into the guy's haircut, spraying it and everything else rosily over the creek bed.
'Think he's dead?' Blancanales joked.
'Might be. Let's go make sure.'
Breaking cover, they zigzagged down the hillside. They crouched beside the biker's almost headless body.
'Take the M-60, I'll check his bike for belts of .308.' Blancanales ran up the embankment to a big downed Suzuki. He searched through the saddlebags and found two belts of two hundred and fifty .308 cartridges. He slung them around his shoulders, then slid back down to the creek bed.
He heard motorcycles. 'Gadgets. They're coming.'
They looked up the hillside for cover. Too far. They saw the culvert. They glanced to each other, and without a word ran through the rocks and sand mounds to the shelter of the highway's overhang. Above them, motorcycles screeched to a stop.
