The Gates of Babylon (29 page)

A crack sounded in the night air, like the flail of a whip. It was a shot from Krantz’s sniper rife. A man groaned outside and a body fell and knocked into the main pole. The tent listed.

The man in the mummy bag stirred. “What was that?” he said. “Evan?”

He was unzipping the mummy bag from the inside as Miriam turned. He hadn’t noticed her yet, standing motionless in the darkness, but he was groping for a flashlight, which she could see
through the night vision was sitting next to his boots. His hands closed around the handle. Miriam fell on him.

It would have been a simple enough thing moments earlier, but the man was now awake and alert. He bucked and flailed.

“Evan!” he shouted. “Help!”

Evan was most likely outside the tent, dead with a 7.62 mm bullet through the chest, but she couldn’t let this kid keep screaming or he’d have the whole camp on her. She shoved her forearm in his face, ignored his bite, muffled by her jacket, and slashed with the knife.

He had the bad luck to be craning back, trying to bring around the flashlight, and he lifted his chin and exposed his neck as the blade came down. It bit deep and she pressed down as she drew it across his throat. He let out a horrible, gasping, burbling noise.

When it was done, Miriam backed out of the tent, horrified and shaking. She managed not to drop the knife. The sniper rifle thumped a second time.

Flashlights illuminated the top of the ravine. Three men came down the hillside, half running, half sliding. Krantz’s rifle fired a third time, and one fell. The other two spotted her silhouette rising from the tent in the darkness and gave a shout. They came at her. Another man crawled out of the tent to her right. Miriam shoved the bloody knife into its sheath and drew her pistol.

“Over there!” a man shouted.

A fresh set of lights swept her position. She threw herself forward, even as two men snapped off shots with their pistols. She fired back and they threw themselves flat on the ground. Another shot from Krantz’s sniper rifle.

A cry of pain to her right. A machine gun fired wildly into the night from the same direction.

They were all around her now, moving, trying to pin her down with flashlights. Krantz fired again. Another man fell. Thank heavens for Krantz’s steady hand. She’d be dead already without him on the other end. Except now she was running away from his protective fire as she tried to gain the ridge.

She surprised two more men when she got to the top. They’d tossed down flares and were feeding a belt of ammunition into a .50-caliber machine gun set up behind a pile of volcanic tuff. But someone had rather foolishly parked a pickup truck next to the emplacement. Miriam ran by them as they shouted in alarm. She plucked a grenade from her pocket as she passed, pulled the pin, and rolled it beneath the truck.

The gunner pulled the trigger as he swung the machine gun in her direction. The grenade detonated. Light blinded her night vision, and she pulled the goggles from her eyes. Men screamed in pain. One staggered out, burning.

The van sat next to the bridge to her left and she thought briefly about attacking it straight on, but by now gunfire lit up the night, flashing all around her. And so she sprinted straight through and continued running until she was a good two hundred yards beyond the van by the bridge. She scrambled over a hillock of sagebrush and volcanic rock then threw herself to the ground.

Her heart was pounding, but only from exertion. The fear was gone. It had disappeared the moment she backed out of the tent to see the flashlights and realized people were searching for her. Reflex and training swept everything aside, and those next few minutes had felt as though someone else had taken control of her limbs. A corner of her mind wondered what had terrified her. You
couldn’t control a situation like this, you could only act and react and hope you were better prepared, luckier than your enemy. If not, and you fell, it could only be the Lord’s plan at work.

Her hands were numb from cold, and she stuck them under her jacket to her armpits to keep them warm and flexible. Flashlights and headlamps cut across the desert, and the gunfire chattered in all directions. Jeez, how many were there?

Alfred Christianson had been no coward. There must be a small army of bandits out there, at least forty or fifty well-armed men. For reasons she couldn’t fathom they had picked Colorado City to test their abilities.

But they were bandits, that much was clear, not professionals. Trained soldiers wouldn’t make those kinds of mistakes—setting up guns near fuel tanks, spreading forces along an exposed ridge and unguarded to the rear. No night vision in a situation when the ability to see ruled. Two professionals had infiltrated their ranks and they’d turned into a disorganized mob. If only she had an FBI SWAT team.

How long since the initial gunfire? Five minutes? Jacob would be rolling toward the bridge by now. He’d hit it with everything he had, but there were still too many bandits to make it across. And machine guns. Miriam had to spread more chaos. She rose to her feet.

This time she swept south, continuing a hundred yards through the darkness. Lights and flares and gunfire lit up the sky to her left. When she was well beyond the camp, she pulled east until she reached the ravine and followed it at a trot back toward the enemy camp, but this time coming from the opposite direction.

The gunfire continued, mostly across the ravine, but also to the north in the direction she’d attacked on her first approach. The van and two pickup trucks were backing up on the road, and for a moment Miriam thought the enemy meant to abandon the battlefield, but they were lining up to cross the road in the other direction. They must be going after Krantz.

Every twenty or thirty seconds another thump sounded from the sniper rifle. Many of those shots would be killing bandits. They meant to drive over and flush him out.

Miriam squatted to study a machine gun on the near side of the bridge that was firing across to support the bandits. It fired short bursts, followed by longer squirts. Seen through the green glow of her night vision, tracer bullets cut a gleaming white knife from the muzzle and it moved back and forth across the road under a steady hand. No pauses to reload, so there must be a second man there, feeding fresh belts into the gun.

Unlike the rabble she’d faced earlier, these two knew what they were doing. Deserters from the National Guard maybe, or army vets.

A light flashed to the east, from the direction of Colorado City. That would be Jacob, David, Trost, and the refugees. Miriam’s sense of time was skewed by the flush of battle, and she could hardly believe it had been more than a few minutes since the first gunfire. So many men dead, so many thousands of rounds spewed into the night.

The gunner spotted the caravan and swiveled back to the center of the road to fire down the highway. They were too far away to hit yet, but if Jacob kept rolling forward, he’d soon enter that murderous fire.

Miriam rose to her feet, pistol in hand. Her thumb moved automatically to the safety as she broke into a run. Her other hand removed the second grenade from her jacket.

They’d set up the gun behind another makeshift bunker of volcanic tuff, which formed a wall of hard, jagged black stone. It looked like a mini-caldera, with an opening in the back for entry. Two men squatted at the bottom, one working at the gun, the other peeling out another belt of ammo from a half-empty crate. Hundreds of spent shell casings littered the ground.

Miriam pulled the grenade pin with her teeth and threw on the run with an underhand scoop. Drop it right in the middle of that bunker and blow her enemies to hell. The walls would protect her from shrapnel. The throw felt good when it left her hand, looked good, but it sailed long, bounced off the far side of the bunker, and dropped into the darkness on the other side. The men shouted in alarm. The machine gun swung in her direction.

The grenade detonated. Light flashed, and a fist of air hit her chest. Something burned on her leg, and she dimly realized she’d been hit by a piece of shrapnel. The machine gun muzzle jerked skyward. Miriam kept running and hurdled the wall. She landed in the middle of the bunker, where the two stunned men were regaining their senses.

She shot the gunner twice. He fell away, arms flying skyward, and bent backward nearly double over the bunker wall. The other man grabbed for her arm, but she kicked his chest and knocked him back. Her gun barked two more times. He fell at her feet.

Miriam holstered the pistol and knelt in the mud and slush and empty casings behind the machine gun. Her leg throbbed, but she
could still feel her muscles. Not a serious wound. Not like the poor fools lying dead next to her.

Half a belt of ammo left before she had to reload. She aimed down the road. No more need for night vision. The pickup truck was still burning to her left, and there were so many vehicle lights, flares on the road, and muzzle flashes that it wasn’t difficult to pick targets. She aimed the gun across the bridge at the back of the van, adjusted her aim with the first few tracer bullets, and then attacked. Two men threw themselves from the front passenger side door, but she ignored them and emptied the belt into the van. It spun out on the road.

Miriam’s hands were numb, and it took several seconds to load more ammo and pull back the breech bolt. By the time she was ready to shoot again, she was taking fire from assault rifles and pistols to her left. She kept her head down, ignored them—hoping that Krantz had figured out where she was and was sniping her enemies from his blind—and focused her firepower at the remaining vehicles. By now the caravan from Colorado City had closed, and the two sides sat some hundred yards apart, blasting away at each other.

She ended the fight.

Rounds poured from the end of the .50-cal, and by the time she’d chewed through the belt, the enemy trucks were shredded and burning. Guns silent. No survivors fleeing onto the road.

Jacob’s group jerked forward. The flatbed truck rammed through the burning vehicles to shove them out of the way, and then the Ford 250 and the Winnebago rolled through the gap and toward the ravine. They paused in front of the bridge, Miriam thought with some
uncertainty, but then she saw a large figure swing onto the back of the flatbed truck, carrying a heavy bag. Krantz.

Miriam fed a new ammo belt into the gun, but there was no need. Most of the gunfire was coming from the back of the trucks or out the window of the motor home, with sporadic return flashes answering from across the desert. But before the convoy pulled up to Miriam’s position even this failed. Krantz’s sniping and Miriam’s murderous fire into the heart of their defense had decimated their ranks. Whoever was left had abandoned the fight.

Her adrenaline was gone, and she was shaking with cold and exhaustion. Fear mixed with relief. Miriam crawled over the top of the bunker. Her injured leg gave out and she nearly fell before she regained her feet and limped toward the road, waving her hands.

The pickup truck was pulling ahead of the flatbed truck as they occupied both lanes, with the Winnebago still behind on the bridge. The pickup slowed as she approached and flashed its lights. The window rolled down. A flashlight caught her face, then blinked off.

“Hurry!” It was Jacob.

“I’m trying!” she shouted back through clenched teeth.

Her leg was really hurting now and refused to cooperate. It had carried her through the battle and now had decided that enough was enough.

The motor home, the rearmost of the three vehicles, and still with its back half on the bridge, honked its horn. The driver apparently didn’t see or understand why Jacob had stopped. The pickup edged forward to let the motor home off the bridge, which added another twenty feet to the distance Miriam had to cross.

When the motor home cleared the bridge it stopped and two men climbed out, scrambled up a ladder on the back, and knelt on the roof. The action confused her at first, but then the motor home stopped beneath the bodies of the two women still dangling from the utility pole. They cut the bodies free and eased them down. The taller of the two men let out a wail that sounded more like a wounded animal than a human. Alfred Christianson, the poor devil.

Hearing Alfred’s cry distracted Miriam from her own pain. She made it to the road. The last gunfire had died off, and the stench of burning fuel and plastic came in whiffs as the wind first brought it her direction and then swept it away.

The back door of the pickup swung open and David leaned out and gestured. “Come on. You’re almost here.”

He was trying to get out, but there were too many children and women crammed in.

That didn’t matter. When she saw that door swing open and her husband gesturing for her, Miriam felt a flood of relief. It was over, she thought, she had escaped from the carnage and bloodshed. Escaped her fear. It hadn’t been premonition, simply a bad case of the nerves.

A gunshot.

Somebody hadn’t heard. Didn’t know the battle was over. Maybe a bandit, dying on the ground, with a final shot at his enemy. Or maybe some kid from Miriam’s own side, leaning out the back window of the Winnebago. He couldn’t hear over crying children and excited voices from the refugees, and so he thought the road was blocked by enemies and that’s why they weren’t moving. He saw a figure crossing the road and fired.

Maybe.

Miriam didn’t see the shot when it came, didn’t see the flash of light. But she heard a rifle crack. A fist punched her in the chest and she fell. David screamed.

She came to a rest on her back. Her body was heavy and wouldn’t move. Heavy flakes mixed with the last of the sleet to coat her lips and eyelashes.

David loomed over her. “Miriam!” It wasn’t a plea or a command, but a howl of anguish.

Jacob was there, too, and they were grabbing her arms.

No pain. In fact, she felt almost peaceful, even as her breathing whistled and she tasted something metallic on her lips. She coughed, and a fine spray came out of her mouth. Blood.

It’s okay,
she thought.
I will reach the other side and the Lord will understand why I did what I did. He will forgive my sins because He knows that I tried.