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  “Get the fuck up here. You hear me. We’re dropping bombs down there in ten seconds. Ten seconds.” The woman seemed to speed up, though she stumbled here and there as she carried a device about as large as a suitcase. “One,” Stone screamed down into the hole, so that his voice echoed back and forth even above the growing roar of the rocket’s ignition system. Carla speeded up even more, and Stone kept counting all the way, goosing her along. He could see that the timing on all this was going to be so close as to be ridiculous. The whole perfectly sculpted missile of mega-destruction was already beginning to vibrate and prepare its computer system for takeoff.

  Suddenly she was right at the top, and Little Bear reached out hands to help her out. “Run,” he said, pointing toward the lumber pile and, without stopping, she rushed on. The three of them looked at each other—wanting to time their throws perfectly so all three land mines went off simultaneously instead of just blowing each other out of existence. They all knew the blasts would be so quick that they would be caught in at least some of the force. But as the missile suddenly roared into flame below them, lighting up the whole missile silo like a Roman candle, they knew they’d run out of time.

  Three arms flung their explosive packets of steel forward, and three bodies pushed themselves backward. If they hadn’t already been moving in a direction completely away from the explosion that instantly occurred, they surely would have been killed. For suddenly the cylindrical hole in the earth roared out a pillar of fire that rose straight up in the air a good three hundred feet. All three land mines came down within feet of each other at the very base of the rocket. As they went off, the brunt of their explosions were reflected up from the concrete launchpad and into the engine section of the ICBM. The entire liquid fuel system ignited at once, as the fuel tanks ruptured, and the flames of the rocket exhaust sent the whole thing up like a funeral pyre.

  The explosion was so great that it could be felt for up to ten miles. Animals and peasants in their slovenly huts all stopped what they were doing and turned their heads toward the sound, feeling the vibrations in their feet and bones. Then they turned away again and went on with their respective tasks. Whoever had died, it wasn’t them.

  But for Stone, and the two Cheyenne, it was like being in the center of a tornado, and they felt themselves literally lifted up and flung backward through the air like dead leaves, flipping and spinning around. For one mad second Stone was flung back in his mind to when he had been a child at the beach in California riding the surf and he had been caught in a wave, and the spinning ocean waters had spun and twisted him around like this. He had thought for a few seconds that he was going to die. And again the same claustrophobic panic swept through him of not even knowing where he was—the sky and earth spinning around unrecognizably. But as he came down hard nearly thirty feet from where he had started, Stone’s mind was riveted back to the present by the waves of pain that slammed through his already ready-for-collection-by-the-Salvation-Army wreck of a body.

  The roar of the rising flame of pure white slammed into his ears like the scream of a jet engine next to his head. And as he lay on his side in a daze, the flame already began to lower slightly and the thundering roar of the fire subsided to about half its height. The missile had burned over half its fuel out in one titanic explosion; now it would burn slowly for days, lower and lower until like a candle it went out in its own wax. What all this would do to the radioactive core of the missile Stone couldn’t begin to imagine, nor did he try.

  The cold dirt that he suddenly became aware of in his mouth brought him back to total awareness, and Stone opened his eyes wide, coughing out the foul, chemical-tasting soil. He rolled over just in time to see a helicopter fly overhead. It seemed to hover over them about two hundred feet up, just out of the line of the rising pillar of fire and smoke, seemed to try to find them. And then suddenly it shot forward, curving around in a wide circle so that it was quickly heading north.

  Stone rose shakily to his feet, as did the others. Excaliber, who had been far back from the explosion, walked on a fast three-legged hobble over to Stone and nipped at his leg with concern.

  “It’s Patton,” Carla, the female tech who had barely escaped from the silo, said as she came forward, holding the strange, high-tech mechanical device out in front of her. “Up in that chopper. I know it—it’s his private craft.”

  “So he got away,” Stone said, turning to her and seeing that she was quite attractive, despite hair severely cut back in military fashion. She wore a white technician’s smock and low pumps and looked terrified. “At least we got the missile,” Stone said with a tired sigh. “That thing ain’t going nowhere. At least we bought just a little time.”

  “You don’t understand,” Carla said with tears forming in her eyes. “There’s another one just ten miles north of here —armed and ready. That’s where Parton’s gone, I know it. You haven’t bought time—just minutes.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  “JESUS FUCKING Christ,” Stone said, his face growing I as pale as a Ku Klux Klanner’s freshly laundered sheet.

  “I’ve got to get my men the hell out of here,” Little Bear said, his own coppery tones going to the chalky end of the color chart. He whipped out a small, fat pistol from behind his belt and raised it straight up in the air. He pulled the trigger, and a rocketlike shell rose rapidly about two hundred feet up, trailing a thin white stream. Suddenly it burst and lit up in a star pattern off to the side of the still burning missile silo.

  Within about five minutes, six of the three-wheelers showed up, along with both tanks that had been captured from Stone’s force. His men had taken them back again, Stone was proud to see, as they came toward the silo, battle-scarred, but treads still turning, still grinding on. A line of the all-terrain vehicles and the tanks pulled to a stop in front of Stone, and heads popped up from the turrets of the Brad-leys.

  “There’s no time to bullshit or congratulate ourselves,” Stone yelled at the top of his lungs, standing on the seat of his three-wheeler, which he had dragged out from the shadows. “Pattern has escaped and there’s a missile coming at us—right now. We don’t have a chance in hell, but we’ve gotta try. Don’t wait up for anyone if they falter. Go straight south. If you find a mountain or a high dirt rise, hide. And whatever you do, don’t get caught in the direct blast or—”

  “Good luck, you bastards,” Stone yelled out to them as he started to slide down into the three-wheeled vehicle. “It’s been a privilege to fight alongside every one of you—” But the last few words got drowned out as the motors started up again in a roar, as if a drag race was about to take place. And it was. The three-wheelers and the tanks tore ass away from the flaming wreckage of the silo. All around them, fires rose from the damage the twin attack forces had caused, secondaries still going off from time to time and sending up big fountains of glowing shrapnel and smoke high into the night air.

  Part of the steel-mesh, barbed-wire-topped gate was still standing at the southern end of the fort, and the three-wheelers slowed down as they let the tanks slam through, their heavy bodies flattening the poles, their treads grinding the mesh into broken wire beneath them. Stone rode in the tri-bike he had come in. He was happy to see that his Harley was still up on the back of the tank he had been commanding. Not that it was too likely he’d ever get to use the fucking thing again. Excaliber rode crunched down in the seat alongside him. And in the nearest three-wheeler, driven by Little Bear, Carla was squeezed in tight, madly fiddling with the many controls of the device she had expended so much energy to save. They drove out of the fort and across the prairie, the three-wheelers turning on their headlights to full magnitude, as there was no one to hide from anymore. Except an atomic missile. And that didn’t need too many clues to find them.

  They drove for miles, all of them looking up every minute or so, glancing over their shoulders. They were being pursued by death itself, no ifs, ands, or buts. The tension was unbearable. A race against time,
only they had no idea how long the contest would last—or what the outcome would be. So they just drove their asses off, the tri-bikes pulling slightly ahead of the two tanks, which moved about five miles per hour slower at thirty-five.

  Stone kept noticing Carla playing with her machine as it lit up here and there and let out a few beeps that he could hear, even while riding ten feet to the side.

  “What the hell is that?” Stone yelled over, above the roar of the fleet of vehicles.

  She couldn’t hear and wrinkled up her face to show it, but Little Bear had, and he said to her in exactly the same phrasing Stone had used, “He wants to know, what the hell is that?”

  “It’s an—MTO, a missile trajectory overrider,” she said, stuttering nervously, hardly able to work the thing and hang on to her minute amount of space next to the Cheyenne at the same time.

  “She says it’s a missile something overrider,” Little Bear shouted back at Stone with something approaching a grin on his usually inscrutable face. “Just what we need.”

  “What the hell is a missile overrider?” Stone screamed back, steering a little closer to the other vehicle until they were tearing along side by side near the back of the pack of the all-terrains but a good fifty yards ahead of the two tanks.

  “He says, what the hell is a missile overrider?” Little Bear yelled at the woman, though she sat only inches away.

  “It overrides missile commands,” she answered, hitting at the machine as she tried to make it respond to her commands, which up until then it hadn’t been doing. “It’s experimental,” she went on. The Indian looked at her as if she were slightly mad. “I can’t promise it will work—or even that I can make it work. But if I can, then it could…” She trailed off into mumbles as she started working at the complex-looking portable device again, trying to get the right sequences of commands to make it operational.

  “She says…” Little Bear started to yell, turning to Stone. “Oh shit, I don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about,” the Cheyenne said, waving his hand at her as if she were perhaps slightly cracked. “I don’t think she knows, either,” he added, cupping one hand over his mouth so she couldn’t hear. Which she didn’t, but it hardly mattered, since she knew, as none of them did, that what she was doing would determine whether or not they lived beyond the next ten minutes.

  It didn’t even take that long for the moment of truth to arrive. Excaliber was the first to sense it. Stone felt the animal jump around on the seat beside him. Then its paws were up on his shoulder so that it was standing almost straight up on its hind legs, its muzzle pointing up at the sky in a hunting posture. Stone slowed the all-terrain slightly and twisted his head around. He felt his heart tighten up into a nice tight little ball about the size of a BB, for the missile was coming straight down on them. It was clearly visible, as big as a match head, leaving a long, thin trail behind it across the night sky, a little tongue of fire spitting out behind. It was coming from due north and at the angle that it was descending from, about ten thousand feet, it would go off just about between their eyes. Within seconds the rest of the crew saw it, too, the Cheyenne fighters twisting around and looking with horrified eyes, the tanks in the rear being warned by numerous built-in defensive systems that they were being tracked by a radar signal. They knew—every one of them—that they were about to be consumed in atomic fire, their bodies turned into atoms screaming off at the speed of light. They each prayed to their own private god, and those who had no gods wished that they did.

  “Stop!” Carla suddenly screamed out to Little Bear. “Let me at least try to use this thing. We’re not going to outrun the bomb now—that’s for sure.” She looked up and saw it starting its long, slow descent, as if it had all the time in the world. One always came late to one’s own party.

  “All right, all right,” the Cheyenne screamed back in frustration at being able to do nothing about his demise. He slammed the brakes on, and she almost fell out of the thing, jamming her feet forward and wedging herself in. She jumped from the three-wheeler and set the beeping, blinking device down on the ground. With both hands able to work on the thing, she suddenly clicked the right sequence in. Saying a quick prayer and crossing herself, she pressed the “Command Override” button. Carla stared up at the sky, her eyes again filling with tears. She just couldn’t help it. She wanted to be brave, but she didn’t feel that way at all. Not at all.

  Nothing seemed to happen—at first. The missile was definitely descending, making a long curve from the left like a jet coming in for a landing. Now they could actually see its fins, the size of the warhead that was about to detach itself. But as the entire crew stopped in their tracks and looked up, the missile suddenly seemed to pour on a little extra flame. The ICBM kept curving over them, then past them. Now it was rising again, definitely rising, going higher up by the second and curving all the way around so that it had completed a 180-degree turn. It was headed back north—back where it had been hatched.

  The men cheered, standing on their vehicles, the Indians screaming out sharp Cheyenne war cries, the tank boys rebel yells. But it all meant the same thing. Their assholes were still attached to their asses, which, all things considered, was doing pretty good.

  “We can’t rest,” Carla said, standing up and lurching over as if she were about to vomit. She collapsed in the seat next to Little Bear. “I couldn’t direct it far,” she said, holding her head in her hands as if the pressure were about to make her collapse.

  “All I could do is send it back toward its originating command signal. That’s about twenty miles north of here. We’re still going to get caught in the blast. Go, go, go—make this thing go, will you?” She burst into tears and bent forward so that her head was between her legs. But they had all heard the outburst, and smiles quickly turned to frightened expressions as they threw the many vehicles into gear and, tires and treads squealing out dust from beneath them, they shot forward like rocket cars. There was no tomorrow and they drove like it—with utter disregard for life or limb. The all-terrain vehicles hit speeds up to fifty, flying up into the air sometimes as they went over bumps, barely skirting cacti that reached out with long spikes. The tanks hit forty, then forty-five miles per hour, everything inside being thrown around as if they were in an earthquake, all the dials and panel lights blinking, warnings of every kind going off as if the tank was screaming at them to get the fuck out of there.

  Bull, in one of the Bradleys, saw it first, using the tank’s long-range sighting equipment—a drop-off ahead about two miles to the left. It would be worth heading for, as his long-range radar showed the decline to be at least twenty feet. He radioed to the other tank, and they each sent a man up to yell down to the Cheyenne and Stone what was up. The fighting column swung to the left, following Bull, who guided the way using the electronics of the Bradley. Then, as they came out of a thick grove of cacti, the tanks rolling over most of the smaller ones, they were suddenly looking out over an almost barren terrain and the sudden and steep drop-off to it—about a hundred yards off. From the closer vantage point they could now see that it was, or had been, a highway. An interstate with raised, four-lane concrete roadway that had been built right along the edge of the thirty-mile-long rift in the earth running east to west. Now the highway was just an obsolete relic, collapsed, broken down everywhere like a child’s fallen house of cards. But even in its disintegration it might help them, shield them—if they could get to the other side:

  The fleet made for the cracked highway, every man now accelerating for his own ass, the vehicles tearing along like they were coming in on the finish line at the Indianapolis 500. They spread out in a long line, approaching the highway and the drop beyond from different angles and speeds. Stone took his all-terrain to the limit, pushing and pulling every fucking thing that made it go, and the engine screamed out in protest but seemed to shoot forward an inch or two faster. He reached the edge of the interstate and felt his heart speed up, for it suddenly looked like a lot deeper drop on t
he other side than he had thought. Stone slapped the dog on the head, warning it to hold on tight and then set his own body.

  The three-wheeled vehicle shot across the cracked four-laner and then right over the edge of the precipitous drop in the earth as if going off a ski jump. It soared through the air over huge chunks of jagged concrete set in the white, grainy sand below. Stone swore he was airborne forever and thought he could see other three-wheelers flying wildly around him. Then the ground was coming up fast and they hit—hard. Somehow Stone hung on to the vehicle with every bit of strength in his clenched fists and brought it to a reeling stop, the pitbull slamming up against him. Stone wheeled the oil-smoking three-wheeler around and searched for the others.

  They were flying over the edge of the highway one after another, steel lemmings leaping in ungraceful, wheel-spinning arcs into the rocks and the dirt below. As his eyes scanned across the bizarre airborne fleet, Stone’s head suddenly stopped short, almost wrenching his neck. There, beneath the highway they were all departing posthaste, was a tunnel of some kind. It had a few feet of sand in front of it and a door-sized slab of concrete, but inside it quickly disappeared into darkness—protection, a shelter.

  “This way!” he screamed out as he started forward through the rubble toward the opening, about fifty feet off. “This way!” He tried to find them all, standing up on the footrests of the all-terrain. They had all landed, he could see, basically in one piece. Even the tanks had hurtled off the side like overweight mammoths and come down after about forty feet of flight. But suddenly Stone saw even from the fifty yards or so that separated them that one of the Indians had cracked up bad, his three-wheeler coming down smack in the middle of a bad-ass boulder with sharp, poking edges. His brains and guts lay splattered all over it, drenching the rock in red. But the rest of them, although they looked dazed, seemed okay.