The Company of the Dead (72 page)

The Jacksons spat sabot rounds and machine-gun fire. The dancers saturated the Imperial line with mortar fire, yet the Japanese held their ground.

The column of enemy reinforcements would soon be out of range, bound for Red Rock. He couldn’t raise Iron Horse on the radio. He couldn’t raise Hayes.

A Jackson stewed in the blast of a rocket’s detonation before breaking up in an expanding ball of white flame. Scathing heavy-weapons fire nailed his men down. Incoming rounds sprayed dirt across his goggles and mouthpiece.

There was a length of metal piping thrown wide of the shattered tank. Kennedy reached for it and felt the iron burn his fingertips. A bullet skimmed its curvature with a clang, sending a tremor up his arm. He ran the tattered remnant of the flag along its searing length and rose to his feet. He sent the tanks forwards.

The air sang with bullets. He managed to brandish the banner in one mighty arc, two, before a blistering explosion in his right shoulder sent him back down to his knees.

His vision blotched. His fingers fumbled in the dirt for the pipe.

He was about to rise again when a one-twenty whipped the air overhead with a deafening wail. Then a salvo of blasts rent the air.

Ahead, the Union guns, now lowered, were hammering the rear of the Japanese line. Stray shells slammed into the ground behind the pinned dancers.

He rose to his feet again, slipping on slick earth. Dancers gripped him under each arm as they surged into the swirl of sand. He still had the flag. Figures lurched ahead and fell away. A samurai whirled out of the storm, katana raised. A tomahawk, its ribboned haft still quivering, cleft his face into crimsoned halves. Another’s swinging blade encountered the crossed staves of two dancer axes. Okinawa steel met Sioux iron in a shower of sparks. The dancer thrust the samurai to the ground and dropped the point of his knee on the Hachiman’s throat. Kennedy heard the cartilage crack, distinctly and clean.

He’d somehow exchanged his flag for a watchman’s machine-gun.

He squeezed the trigger. His body vibrated, synched to the weapon. He sprayed the enemy line. The barrel glowed red, then white. He held the trigger taut. His vision swam. The barrel melted. He cast aside the gun and reached for his Mauser.

Blasted from behind and ravaged from the fore, the line of Imperials fell apart.

A Jackson swayed past. Then Kennedy’s hand was on the side grip and he was riding the skirt. The tank was plastered with ghost dancers. An adjacent rider cast him a wild grin. The tank rose and fell on the crushed Japanese defences to enter the Union perimeter.

Dead samurai lay twisted among the Union slain, but too many had been undone. The guns were undermanned. Turned outwards and low, the one-twenties and eighty-eights were arranged in a ring.

Seeing the arrangement of the Union redoubt, Kennedy laughed, but the sound that emerged from his shielded mouth was a dry cackle. Circled wagons awaiting indian saviours redefined irony.

His radio man planted the flag on a mound of cracked earth.

Kennedy approached the nearest gun.

Malcolm had kept silent about Joseph’s letter. She hadn’t warned the others of his chosen doom. Lightholler, Morgan and Shine might be headstrong—or at the very worst naïve—but she’d never pegged them for lunatics.

So much for that.

She couldn’t use the radio for fear of alerting the enemy. Standing before Doc Gershon, afraid to disrupt his efforts, she pondered her choices.

He misread her silence and said, “You couldn’t have known they’d go out there. You couldn’t have known they’d try to find him.”

She shot him a quizzical look.

“I know about the major’s arrangement, Miss Malcolm.”

Confusion gave way to astonishment.

“I’ve been down here the whole time,” he explained. “I saw everything.”

“Why didn’t you
say
something?” Her voice rose in abject fury. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“It was his choice to make.” Doc returned his attention to the terminal.

But that wasn’t enough. She leaned on the desk looming above him. “And here we are, with everyone off on some futile attempt to rescue someone who won’t
allow
himself to be rescued, and the Japanese are hammering at the door. Meanwhile, you’re still struggling with the jump points and Joseph’s sacrifice was for
nothing
.”

“The major’s diversion bought us some time. His bargain will take care of the rest.”

“What about Lightholler and the others?”

“They’re with Tecumseh. He’ll get them back in time.”

“How can you be so
calm
about it all?” she demanded, exasperated beyond belief. “Where is your heart, Doctor?”

“It was buried in the sand a century ago, by Wells,” he replied evenly.

He returned to his calculations.

Lightholler’s band swept through the relic of Red Rock, covering the devastation on swift hooves. The ghost-dancer horses had received a training no less rigorous than the men themselves. Sure-footed, the mounts found purchase among the smoking pits as easily as on the infrequent stretch of untrammelled desert sand.

The marks of the incursion were written on the scorched ruins of the prefabs. The armoury was a Stonehenge of skewed pylons, the grounds were littered with the Japanese dead. Deep tank tracks in the scored earth plotted the path of Iron Horse’s havoc.

The kills grew fresher, until the occasional wounded soldier glanced up from a broken body with uncomprehending eyes. Morgan watched as an infantryman, piled among corpses, struggled to bring his rifle to bear on them. The soldier dragged his gun’s stock in the earth like a crutch. Shine caught the clumsy movement. The rifle barrel wavered in their direction. Shine, seeking the soldier’s eye, shook his head slowly. The soldier dropped his rifle and slumped back into his comrades.

Under an orange sun their path was criss-crossed by wayward black smoke.

Tecumseh trotted his mount to Shine’s side and tapped out a question on the transmitter. The reply took long moments. Tecumseh grunted the translation. “There’s no road west to the major. The bulk of a mechanised division lies between us. It’s one thing holding them off, another thing entirely traversing their ranks.”

“So what now?” Morgan asked.

“You return to the cavern and await your departure. You ensure some meaning to the destruction by fulfilling your part in all this.”

“By sitting underground and listening to you all die? By leaving the major out there?” Lightholler’s sorrel, in tune with his rider, snorted hot gusts of defiance.

“At what point in your instructions did the major ask you to hold out hope for him?”

“When he stood outside my hotel suite in New York and asked me for a few moments of my time,” Lightholler replied. “I plan on giving them to him now.”

“Your loyalty is only exceeded by your stupidity,” Tecumseh muttered. “We’ll take the southern path, skirt Echo, and try to come up behind the old Groom ore seam. There are mines and other snares out there, so follow my trail well.”

Tecumseh picked a path through the rocks that guarded the southern entry to the base. Low hills rose into sharp banks of bare stone that cut the sky. Red Rock dropped behind them. From their vantage point, the installation—once so well concealed—was a blackened stain on the desert floor.

Fifteen minutes of riding gained them little ground across the harsh terrain. Morgan glanced at his watch often. His heart had soared at the thought of finding the major, but the possibility that they would run out of time was becoming all too real. What would Doc and Agent Malcolm hope to achieve alone in Wells’ world?

Tecumseh had his binoculars out. He surveyed the western skyline. There was nothing to see in the distant haze but a shimmer of broken horizon.

“
Ceta’n
,” he muttered.

“I beg your pardon?” Lightholler said.

“Hawk,” Tecumseh replied. He handed the binoculars to Lightholler.

Morgan looked up. A solitary bird, its crown a dappled black, its tail white-banded and broad, soared among the thermals. Wings beat rapidly, then fixed to a languid glide.

Tecumseh’s ravaged face was a portrait of bereavement. Did he suddenly mourn the passing of this damaged world? “
Ceta’n ote
,” he added, qualifying his assessment. He directed Lightholler to a point beyond Morgan’s vision. “Many hawks.”

Lightholler shifted his point of view and handed the binoculars distractedly to Morgan. Morgan adjusted the focus. The bird was long gone. There was a stipple of black smudges in the far distance. He played with the focus and they resolved. He handed the binoculars on to Shine.

“They have Mitsubishi FS-Zs among those bombers,” Lightholler said. “Where the hell are they coming from?”

“They might have repaired some of the captured airfields on the border,” Tecumseh suggested.

“Even so, those interceptors will be running on fumes.”

“It hardly matters. We have no anti-air defences.”

Morgan could see them without the binoculars now. Wing upon wing of heavy bombers, low and to the west.

Many hawks.

It was a place Kennedy had frequented only in his dreams these last ten years. This was where Cambyses’ Persian army, fifty-thousand strong, had vanished without a trace. Where Carthage was lost and the Crusaders fought and died. Here was where Napoleon had sought to destroy an empire, and Prussia carved a new one. This might have been the Sahara or the Gobi, the Simpson or the Mojave, but one simple act could turn them all into the same dark place.

This was the churning whirlpool of war in the sand.

A crew of Union gunners manned the nearest one-twenty. The vehicle, partially dug into the sand, had its gun almost resting on the dunes. Kennedy worked his way towards them. He hunkered down with them, his hands over his ears to blunt the crashing bellow of its blast.

“Who’s in charge here?”

The commander seemed unfazed by Kennedy’s squad. He eyed them cursorily before saying, “Thought you were, General.” His salute was an airy gesture as he turned back to his spotter. “Hit ’em again.”

The loaders secured the ungainly bulk of the round and the one-twenty roared flame.

“Where’s your commanding officer?”

The commander gestured to a point behind him with a toss of his head. “Captain Hobbes.”

Tracer fire illuminated the smoke and danced across the notched plating of the gun’s armour.

“Hit ’em again.”

Kennedy detailed two of his men to cover the gun and negotiated the cleft landscape of the Union enclave. He found the captain standing by the slashed remains of a tent. His staff, two lieutenants and a warrant officer, stood with him by a radio set.

Hobbes was a heavily built man. The broad features of his face were lost in the ambiguity of caked dirt. He snapped a salute and said to Kennedy, “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

“I’m working on it, Captain.” Kennedy returned the salute. He felt something catch in his shoulder, only now recalling the recent wound. Their exchange was yelled over the pandemonium of the artillery barrage.

“Clearly. When did you get promoted?”

“About five minutes ago.”

The captain’s face contorted into an ugly scowl. “And the provisional government?”

“You’re looking at it.”

“Lousy son of a...” The captain punched his meaty palm. He turned away from Kennedy, but as he took in the faces of his staff his look of disgust swiftly melted into something else. “You had the japs going for a while,” he said. “The colonel was considering a parley.”

“A colonel is in command of this army?” Kennedy asked.

“Your snipers took out a Japanese general and lieutenant general last night. They lost a lot of momentum dealing with your supply raids, and your decoy took out an entire battalion. There isn’t supposed to be any confed resistance out here, and I haven’t seen anything like your uniforms before.”

A battalion?
Kennedy’s bared teeth were thankfully concealed behind his mask. “We’re Special Forces.”

“I’ll say,” the warrant officer volunteered.

“What changed the colonel’s mind?” Kennedy asked.

“Full-strength reserves are only ten miles back, and they called in an air strike three hours ago.”

Kennedy’s men had taken up position within the Union defences. Ghost dancers helped man the understaffed guns or took defensive positions to cover the Union crews. The redoubt was a vortex of dust and burning wreckage.

“So why did you throw in with me?”

“You’re Joseph fucking Kennedy. I thought you might have had something up your sleeve.”

“I did,” Kennedy replied. “You.”

“Christ, what were you expecting
us
to do?”

“I was expecting you to butt out of this while my men took out the enemy supplies. You were a bit more enthusiastic than I expected.”

“Hell of a nice flag you had waving on that hilltop, sir. We just got carried away. Well, now that we’re stuck in this situation, what do you want us to do? Visibility is down to shit. We just been aiming low and hitting anything that moves.”

“I have spotters up on the escarpment. I want your guns to prevent that brigade of tanks from deploying, and take out the column of reinforcements that are making for my base.”

“Piece o’ cake. Anything else?”

“You can tell me more about that air strike, Captain.”

“All I’m saying is that we can’t stay on open ground.” Morgan’s comment was directed more to himself than his companions.

Shine, intent on Tecumseh’s radio transmissions, nodded his accord. Even the horses seemed edgy. They scraped at the plateau’s pebbled surface. Reined in on the narrow shelf of bare rock, the three horsemen drew their mounts closer to Tecumseh, as if that might afford protection from the incoming fighters.

“This fast becomes a fool’s errand,” Tecumseh murmured.

The battlefields were spread out below them. Dispersing vapours roofed the gorge that had housed Echo. A thicker black cloud extended over Red Rock’s west reach and a pall of filthy, flame-edged smoke burgeoned in the far distance where Major Kennedy had struck. Elsewhere, seared patches of earth documented slaughter and devastation. The extent of the Japanese camp, beyond Kennedy’s attack, stretched towards the western horizon.