Total chaos broke out below. The men in the machine-gun nests fired into the hills. Only one of the guns fired even near our direction. Freeman shot that gunner first, and then he took out the gunners in the other nests.
“You here to watch or help?” Freeman asked.
“You have things under control,” I said as I picked up the rocket launcher and aimed at the tank. Thinking this rocket would destroy that tank was the only miscalculation Freeman made. A shoulder-mounted rocket like this might damage that LG, but it sure as hell would not stop it.
“Do you know what to shoot?” Freeman asked.
“The tank?”
“Not the tank, the fuel depot.”
Located at the edge of the darkness was the fuel depot that the late Jimmy Callahan used to fill his vehicles. Somehow it had survived the Hinode Fleet’s attack. I aimed the rocket at a fuel tank and fired, triggering a grand explosion that lit up the night. The explosion was deafening.
Hidden up on that hill, I heard it and felt the percussion. The force of the blast shook the ground and the sound thundered in my ears so that the vibrations became intermingled as one in my head. A fireball shot sixty feet into the air. It towered over smaller eruptions as underground tanks, pumps, and piping blew into shrapnel. Flames shot in all directions lighting the area with a golden glow.
The rocket set off a chain reaction, igniting a network of underground fuel tanks that extended below the road. Fuel tank after fuel tank exploded leaving huge craters in the road. Made for use in a low gravity theater, that LG tank could not possibly come out after us.
Callahan’s troops were thugs, not soldiers. They would not regroup as quickly as Marines, but they would regroup. They would send scouts and assassins out to find us soon enough. We did not wait. Once he was sure that the tank and the jeeps could not follow, Freeman turned to leave.
I watched men running around near the flames. The muffled bang of underground explosions, so different from the crackle of gunfire, echoed through the night air. The late Colonel Callahan’s men would not get their LG tank out of that cul de sac anytime soon. They might fill the craters if they became desperate or ambitious enough to mix tons and tons of concrete. That might work. They certainly did not have enough technical know-how to build a bridge over those pits.
Looking back behind me as I left the rise, I saw the tree under which I had hid. I saw the bodies dangling from its lowest boughs like strange black fruit against the orange hue of the fire.
“You didn’t have to kill Callahan,” I said as we crossed the fence and left the base.
“I wanted to,” Freeman said. He led me to a house on the same street as the house I had used.
“My Starliner is self-broadcasting,” I said, sounding even more annoyed than I felt. “We can leave anytime that we want.”
Freeman stiffened and looked back at me. “Self-broadcasting? We’re getting off this rock.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if Callahan was president of the friggin’ Orion Arm,” I said. “He wouldn’t have been able to touch us.”
Freeman thought about this for a moment then grinned. “So killing him was a bonus.”
Ray Freeman did not talk much. When he did speak, he seldom talked about himself. I gleaned some of what had happened from things he said over the next few days and constructed the rest of it in my mind. This is what I think happened when Freeman landed in Safe Harbor.
Freeman came in a few days before me. He arrived before the Hinode Fleet defeated the Earth Fleet and destroyed the
Freeman stole a van at the spaceport and drove until he reached that stretch of road that was too destroyed to pass. He left his van and hiked into town and found his way to the Marine base. Like me, Freeman did not believe that the Hinode Fleet could survive a battle with the
When he got to Fort Washington, he found men wearing fatigues and armed with M27s gathering bodies. Here Freeman made a rare mistake. He assumed the men with the M27s were Marines. When he asked about their commanding officer, they took him to go see “the colonel.” Freeman did tell me that Callahan referred to himself as “the colonel.”
Alert as he was, Freeman would have noticed that Callahan’s thugs did not carry themselves like real Marines. He would have noticed the casual way they handled their firearms, the way they spoke to each other, and the slow pace at which they worked. Real enlisted men were clones. Unless all of Callahan’s men wore officers’ insignia, Freeman would have noticed that the men around him were not government-issue.
They took Freeman to the building Callahan used as his headquarters. That was a mistake. Freeman quietly surveyed the field, looking for strategic locations and tactical advantages. He had an eye for this. He would have spotted the tree at the top of the rise and known it was the perfect spot for an attack.
By the time Callahan came out to speak, Ray Freeman knew how many snipers Callahan had on the roof and where they were positioned. He knew how many machine-gun nests were along the veranda. He would have seen the LG tank rumbling around the parade grounds, and he would have taken note of the fuel depot as well.
Callahan decided to have Freeman killed. He must have decided that since he and his thugs had the guns, they would have no trouble executing the gigantic black man. They probably took him to the same field where they did their officer executions. The moment Freeman decided the odds were right, he killed his would-be executioners.
Freeman never left an attack unavenged. He hiked to Fort Clinton the following day. Knowing that the Army base would be under gang control as well, he presented himself with a winning offer. In exchange for a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, and a ride back to Callahan territory, Freeman offered to cripple the gang holding Fort Washington. How could the gangsters at Fort Clinton refuse? They gave him a stealth jeep and the best sniper rifle they could find.
That night, as he returned to even the score with Callahan, he found me.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Freeman had a stealth jeep, but he did not want to use it. The gangs whose territories bordered the Marine base would have heard the shooting. Anybody within thirty miles would have heard the fuel depot explode. Our attack would have touched off a feeding frenzy in Safe Harbor.
“How long did it take you to get in from the spaceport?” Freeman asked.
“Two days,” I said. “One day to reach town and one day to cross town.”
“Two days,” Freeman repeated.
“We could cross town in less than an hour in that jeep,” I said. “We’d be at the spaceport by sunup.”
Freeman shook his head. The house was dark inside. We were in a basement with only subterranean windows. We could see up and down the street from our ankle-high perspective. The street was dark and still, but we expected marauders to follow soon. Callahan’s troops would come looking for us. So would his enemies.
“How did you come through town?” Freeman asked.
“On foot,” I said.
“Did you cross main roads?”
“Alleys, mostly,” I said. “I hiked through a couple of department stores to avoid being seen.”
“The main roads are broken up,” Freeman said. “We’d end up driving through the neighborhoods.”
“We would be sitting ducks,” I said. “There are gangs everywhere. All it would take is some hotshot with a roadblock and a bazooka.”
Freeman watched me figure this out. Too silent by nature to help me catch up, he was often one step ahead of me. There was a flicker of movement on the street. He rose to his feet and moved toward the window, his massive body forming a black silhouette in the thin light.
Up the street, five men moved slowly toward us. Four of them formed an uneven picket line, with the fifth covering their back. These were, as I said before, thugs, not soldiers.
They walked right up the middle of the street apparently giving no thought to cover. They had torches attached to the barrels of their rifles, and they swept the ground before them with the beams of those torches.
