No Man's Land (12 page)

But when she looked at the occasional table the dainty china plate with daintier flowers painted on it was bare except for a few crumbs.

Dammit
.

Chapter Fourteen

“Stay frosty, people,” Lieutenant Card said. “Word come down from the top that those mercie coldhearts the sheepfuckers hired are gonna be mounting a play at this depot tonight. Baron Jed would take it as a personal favor if we all gave them a triple-warm welcome.”

Asshole,
Private Reiser thought.

Unseen overhead a killdeer flicked past, trailing its distinctive
whit-whit-whit
call as it wove between the powder warehouses. From behind the small waterfront sec detail came the sound and smell of the Des Moines River slogging against the wood pilings of the dock.

The lieutenant strutted importantly in front of the four-man crew on duty. “Us here in the organic security detail aren’t expected to have to do much. Baron’s sent down a full troop of his best cavalry to get ready the surprise party.”

“Why, gee, Lieutenant,” said Haldeman from behind Reiser. “We were plumb unaware of the fact that sixty-some horsemen crowded into this happy little base of ours just before the sun went down. Not like we
keep tabs
on what goes down around here or anything.”

As usual, Reiser didn’t know whether to laugh at his squad-mate’s wisecrack or kick his ass for pissing off their superior officer. Not that trying either right now, when they were all just trying to remember how to stand at attention, was anywhere near a smart idea.

Anyway, kicking Haldeman’s ass would be too much trouble.
Especially
if this puffed-up little bastard Card socked them with extra punishment detail for his smart mouth. It wasn’t as if pulling riverside security at the main Protectors Association supply depot was the sort of work that kept the sec detail a lean, mean, fighting machine.

Mostly what Reiser and his little bunch did was try to stop pilferage. Except, of course, by duly authorized pilferers. By which he meant quartermaster corps.

Sometimes it seemed like
that
bunch’s assignment was doing its utmost to prevent potentially valuable supplies from being wasted on the troops. Not that Reiser and his buddies failed to snag their share of the loot. But they thought of it as getting back for the little guy.

Fort Thor was the grandiose name for a facility that was double-large, in the geographic sense, what with having to accommodate goods transhipments and storage, meaning flatboats and wags. Most of the personnel complement was just cargo handlers, which meant troops from the Protectors Army told to do pretty much the same sort of backbreaking grunt work for the barons they did in their civilian life.

As such, it wasn’t a bad billet. Some of them got fed more regularly at the mess than back at the manor. And at least in Reiser’s experience the chow was better. Or at least consistently moderately shitty, which was an improvement over what you got if the baron was cheap or had dropped an unusually large wad gambling with his or her bids, or the supervisors woke up on the wrong side of the cot that morning.

As the main shore-head and resupply point for the whole grand and glorious Protectors Army it would be a prime target for a sheepherders’ attack. Except of course it was miles behind the front lines, with pretty much the whole of said army between the Uplanders and it.

Except this night. This new mercie squad the sheepherders had hired was supposed to visit them. Reiser had already heard that, too. Of course, scuttlebutt was faster than official military intelligence, and consistently more reliable.

“So is it true, Lieutenant Card?” Private Coonts asked. “The general’s got a spy in the Sheepfucker HQ?”

Of course, dumb-ass, Reiser wanted to snarl. Just like Al’s got spies in Jed’s tent. It’s not like we look any different from each other, or talk a different lingo or something.

Card smiled and laid a finger alongside his long nose. He had a long skinny face for a guy who appeared to be carrying that big a cannonball in the gut area of his blue uniform blouse, which was of course immaculate and fresh. Nothing but the best for the men in the rear with the gear. Reiser had no idea what that gesture meant and knew damn well Card didn’t, either. Reiser had read about it in old books. For Card to have done likewise would imply he knew how to read, which Reiser wasn’t ready to concede.

“I only know what little I pass on to you men,” the lieutenant said importantly. “But I can tell you that the mercies are planning to sneak into the fort by hijacking a wag deadheading empty barrels back to the boats for hauling back downstream.”

Which, of course, happened all the time, at pretty much every hour of the day or night. Making it, Private Reiser had to privately concede, at least a double-shrewd scam. Except for them blurting it out under the ears of Bismuth Toth’s paid traitor in Baron Al’s court, of course.

“Word is, they’re gonna be hiding inside. Then in the middle of the night they’ll creep out and blow the powder stocks. Just like the Trojan Horse.”

He grinned. “Except they’re never gonna get through the gate! A troop of First Battalion’s gonna make sure of that!”

“So what do you want us to do, Lieutenant?” Coonts asked.

Card smiled wider. “Nothing at all, gentlemen,” he said. “The higher-ups just didn’t want you panicking when the balloon went up. For tonight, you can all stand easy and let the glory boys from the pony troop earn their jack!”

Reiser felt his eyebrows rise. “Well, that’s a first, Lieutenant,” he blurted. “You’ve given us some good news for once.”

* * *

“R
EADY
,”
S
ERGEANT
Clancy whispered as the wag approached the outer perimeter. The sprawling camp was ringed about on the landward side with double rows of razor tape and barbed wire, depending obviously on how much of what variety scabbie had been available when a specific section went up.

The idea, or so Trooper Brown and his eager comrades thought, was to crouch hidden in the dark behind barrels and stacked crates just inside the inner wire, while every fourth man from A Troop held his and his mates’ horses in a space behind the blacksmith shop and a warehouse where they couldn’t be seen from the gate. But where they were ready for the troop hiding in ambush to mount up and ride down survivors of their little turnabout surprise.

The covered wag rumbled forward into the lights of big lanterns that flanked the gates. The first set of guards pulled up the barrier, per routine. The wag proceeded into the ten-yard space between it and the next gate, which stayed shut.

The team of four horses bobbed their heads in agitation. Long-time veterans of the run, they knew this wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

As barriers, neither was much, though wags loaded with sandbags could be rolled out to block the inner entrance in case of serious threat. For regular operations the barriers were pretty nominal: a couple of ancient metal light standards, too brittle to be worth chopping up for scrap. They wouldn’t actually hold back much, certainly not the mass of a full-size cargo wag, even one carrying nothing but empty barrels. But horses wouldn’t push against a visible barrier unless they knew it would open, the way they learned the gates of their stalls would. So the relatively flimsy barriers blocked horse-drawn progress as effectively as a reinforced-concrete wall.

At once the driver, a crusty old man with a hat battered to shapelessness with a ratty old cock-pheasant tail feather stick in it, started looking around, his eyes as wild as his bushy gray beard.

“That’s suspicious behavior if I ever saw it,” muttered Corporal Rollins, crouched to Trooper Brown’s right.

“Stand your ground and prepare to be searched!” cried the troop commander, Captain Morris.

“Wait! No! Please!” The wag driver began to wave his hands desperately, causing his ragged sleeves to flap like cavalry pennons in a stiff breeze. “Please, don’t hurt me! I’m not in this! They made me! I’m only doin’ it ’cause they got blasters on me—”

In response to his words a muzzle-flash bloomed in unmistakable orange fire out in the black of the bottomlands. By the way the shot’s sound hit Brown’s ears a beat later, it wouldn’t be more than one or two hundred yards out.

“We’re under attack!” the captain roared. “Open fire!”

With enthusiastic obedience, Trooper Brown pulled the trigger of his longblaster. The brass butt-plate of his replica Spencer repeating carbine slammed his shoulder as a giant yellow flame and a big cloud of smoke erupted out the muzzle. He jacked the lever action, feeding in a fresh .56-caliber rimfire cartridge, specially loaded back in Hugoville, into the chamber from the 7-round tubular magazine.

The old wagoneer was still waving hysterically. “No!” he shrieked, his voice soaring even over the slamming blasts of the weps to either side of Trooper Brown. “Them barrels ain’t empt—”

A white flash swallowed the old man, the wag, the team.

Before Trooper Brown could do more than blink at the glare and feel a kiss of warmth on his downy-bearded young face, the white light swallowed him, too.

* * *

A
T
THE
ENORMOUS
FLASH
, followed rapidly by a head-splitting crack of explosion, J.B. turned a wicked grin to Jak, who was crouched beside him in the darkness at the water’s edge.

“Oh, shoot, did Ryan say we’d steal a wagload of
empty
barrels in front of whoever the spy at Uplander HQ is? What a damn shame.”

Jak grinned back. Like the Armorer, he had averted his eyes from the direction of the front gate of the compound they’d infiltrated by canoe, floating down the broad yet shallow Des Moines River, to preserve his night vision. Now they opened to mirror the orange dance of flames from the wreck of the powder wag.

It hadn’t been even half a challenge to find a fully loaded powder wag, headed out from the supply base to the Protectors camp, given how insatiable an army’s appetite for gunpowder was. And Jed was shrewd enough to stockpile what he could between battles.

Nor had it been hard to jack the wag, especially since they were miles behind the army’s lines. And if there was any special alert it would concern the unloaded wags heading back south to send the barrels home to Hugoville to get filled up again. And it had been a breeze for J.B., cool hand that he was with explosives, to rig up percussion caps to the barrels in convenient locations to be hit by incoming bullets—from Ryan’s Scout longblaster, if the fort’s defenders inexplicably hadn’t obliged. As naturally they had. Ricky had been a help, too, even suggesting a few little twists of his own. Handy, that boy, J.B. thought.

Now he was hiding in some weeds near the water with as good a lookout on the supply base’s waterfront as J.B. had thought decent to give him. He was out of sight of both J.B. and Jak, but ready to give support while his two companions did the necessary.

The wag blowing up was the signal to commence. J.B. hoped the blast had killed enough of the troops hiding out to await the raiders—just as Ryan had predicted—and discombobulated the survivors enough Ryan could slip away safely into the night to where Krysty, Mildred and Doc waited with their horses. He had reckoned it was worth the risk to fire at least one shot from his longblaster to make sure the Protectors lying in ambush opened up first and asked questions...never, as it turned out.

But it was Ryan’s plan, all the way. And even if J.B. had been a man inclined to worry, worrying about the one-eyed man was the last way he’d waste his valuable time. The man just had a way of surviving, no matter what.

Now it was up to J.B. and Jak. The Armorer checked the load in his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun. Although to save their relatively rare and valuable smokeless ammo, they all were using scabbied black powder weapons as much as possible. Jak was toting a Schofield double-action replica revolver in place of his favored Python handblaster, which mattered little to him since he planned on blade-work alone this night. Where needed, they were still willing to burn up their more modern cartridges and shells.

“Let’s go,” J.B. said softly.

Just like that, they vanished into the darkness.

* * *

A
LTHOUGH
HE
WAS
pretty much the width of the whole sprawling supply depot away from the explosion, it stunned Private Reiser. No doubt it was the sheer sudden shock of the event, as well as the head-smashing noise that left his ears ringing and the flash that had left giant purple balloons drifting across his vision.

He was walking the usual beat around the wooden and concrete docks where the supplies were offloaded and the various empties were put back on the shallow-draft barges, pushed upstream by small steam tugs, for the much easier trip back down the Des Moines to Hugoville. They kept to the lantern-lit area between the docks and the warehouses. The perimeter extended much farther to the riverbank, for reasons nobody ever bothered to explain to Reiser. But the higher-ups didn’t deem it worth anybody’s trouble to patrol the empty grass and weeds along the bank, when all anybody would care about was the storage areas or maybe the shops where tugs in need of repair got fixed.

His partner this night was Haldeman. Smart-ass though he was, Haldeman was a pretty clever soldier. He’d seen combat in the Grand Army’s infantry before a muzzle-loader ball glancing off his hip relegated him to light duty.

But as he thought about it, there was probably no better man in the Fort Thor sec-man contingent to have at your back when the shit-hammer actually fell. And for the first time in his stint there, Private Reiser found himself thinking about it, as he tried to gather his reeling senses.

At his side Haldeman was snapping into action despite the blood that trickled from his left ear beneath his kepi-style cap, the one nearer to his partner. He had his own Spencer in his hands—a personal blaster that he’d brought with him to Fort Thor, having somehow managed to keep it from being stolen by orderlies at the field hospital after he got blasted at Third Greasy Creek—and was looking toward the flames brightening up the sky above the roofs of the buildings between them and the camp entrance, looking for attackers.