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  “Now listen to me,” Stone said over the mike. “We’ve still got a chance. Wedge the tanks together in a V facing the boulders. When I say go, we all move forward until we meet. Now!” The three tanks moved cautiously forward until they banged into each other, grinding at the outer coverings of surface steel, pushing at one another like bulldozers.

  “All right, stop, stop!” Stone yelled out when it seemed they were as entangled as they could get without wreaking actual destruction. ‘Turn off the engines, so if there’s contact with debris and a gas line somehow gets severed, the feed line will be retracted.”

  “But it’s dark,” a voice said almost hysterically, as all three tanks’ electrical systems suddenly went dead.

  “Relax,” Stone said, “there’s an auxiliary lighting system —should go on any—” Suddenly a small amber light came on directly overhead in Stone’s tank and, he assumed, in the others. They all sat back and waited to see if they would live or die.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  THE STORM seemed to attack them like a living thing. A thing set on destruction, on annihilation of everything it made contact with. First came the winds, twisting in funnels of gray and brown, ripping up everything they touched. Vegetation, animals, birds—all were consumed in their path, pulled up by hundreds of the chimneys of wind that touched down everywhere and then pulled up again when they’d eaten their momentary fill.

  The tanks rocked back and forth, violently banging into one another as the hurricane-force curtains of air slammed into them. The boulders offered some protection, though even they rocked around in place like eggs boiling off the top of their steamers. Within the windstorm were branches, pieces of ground-up cactus, and the corpses of numerous animals and birds, all wildly spinning around as if inside a washing machine. Inside the tanks the men could feel some of the objects slam against the sides or top, banging them like a giant gong, so their brain cavities reverberated with unpleasant sensations.

  But the wind was only the start of it, for after several niinutes the sheer darkness that Stone had seen through the scan system came upon them. And it was a darkness without a trace of light, a darkness of almost biblical proportions. A darkness of sand. A storm of pure sand extending for twenty miles came roaring over them. And it deposited its load on them like a dump truck making a delivery.

  “What the hell’s that?” Bo asked nervously as the first sheets of sand drove into the steel plating. It sounded like a thousand little pings, hardly audible themselves, but put together, like a rising chorus. Within seconds the chorus became a scream, then an avalanche of sound. And suddenly they were being thrown around inside the tanks like rag dolls as the three vehicles bounced up and down and every which way and were attacked by the currents of sand that seemed to come in from every possible angle. Stone prayed the tank was as sealed as it was supposed to be, because he knew that to be exposed to the intensity of particles out there would be instant death. A man would be shred to little tunalike flakes in a second. Still, it’s hard just to sit quietly, wanting to live, while death rages all around you.

  The storm just seemed to get thicker and meaner until the air was nothing but sand, as if the earth itself had risen up and become airborne. And as the waterfall of particles roared into them at velocities up to 250 miles per hour, they etched themselves onto every square inch of the tanks, polishing them, blasting off their surface coating of “impervious” paint. As the sand came, it piled up against the boulders and the tanks, creating a huge dune that quickly rose ten, then twenty, feet in the air. Though it kept sliding down or flying off at the edges, so much more sand was being added to it that the thing somehow grew. It toppled over onto the tanks so that they were nearly covered with the stuff, and then more sand started collecting on the hollow created between tanks and boulders.

  The physics of sand waves dictated that the dune rise and fall, rise and fall, as sand was piled onto it and then washed off. But always it grew a little wider and higher. The men inside the tanks had been terrified when they heard the screeching of the winds, then the sands hitting them. But as it grew quieter around them and, after about an hour, absolutely silent, they all became extremely concerned, having no idea what had happened. With tank systems all down, they couldn’t even check. Thus they sat, three men to a tank, plus one dog, waiting and contemplating the end of their existences. The air felt somewhat stale, though they all knew about the self-contained oxygen supply, having used it just days before to ward off fire. But it didn’t taste good and hardly filled their need for fresh oxygen. So they lay around the floors of the tanks in the semidarkness, in states of panting half asphyxiation.

  After two hours, not having heard a thing from outside, Stone at last made the decision to see just what the hell had happened. He rose and turned on the tank’s systems, and everything sprang to life, but as it did, warnings flashed from every panel. Stone tried to read what they were saying, but it wasn’t at all clear. It was as if the entire operating system of the Bradley were overloaded, as if every defensive sensor were picking up trouble. Stone checked the video scan and got nothing but a pitch-black screen. Then he tried the sighting periscope, with the same result. They seemed to be nowhere, in the middle of nothing. It didn’t make sense. Unless—slowly a thought began entering his head that filled him with real fear—they were buried alive. Tanks and all. Beneath feet, perhaps yards, or more. Beneath tons of sand.

  He had not only led them all into a death trap but had provided the coffins as well—and had arranged for burial. How thoughtful. Stone could feel a fury rising inside that he knew he had to control quickly, a rage at himself that he had led these men to their deaths. To slow, agonizing deaths through suffocation during which they would have hours to slowly hack their way out of this life, seeing their faces grow bright red and then purple as they gasped for the precious air that wasn’t there, for the tank’s oxygen supply was limited to three hours at best. Although he knew in a way that it wasn’t his fault, Stone accepted the responsibility that all leaders must accept for the men they lead into battle. If a commander’s job is to keep his men alive, then Stone had failed miserably. His own death he could handle. But all of theirs? He sat down in a huff in the corner, for the first time at a complete loss as to what the hell to do. He could feel the eyes of Bo and Simpson on him, even the dog. They knew something was up, and knew that he was as lost as they were.

  “What the hell is going on?” a voice blared over the earphones that Stone had slipped back on. Well, he couldn’t avoid the subject of just what had happened to them forever —as much as he would have liked to. “I’m going to open this hatch and see just where the—” Bull’s voice went on from the other tank.

  “No, don’t!” Stone screamed suddenly, pulling down the mouthpiece in front of his lips. “We’re—we’re underground. We’ve been buried in sand. I—I don’t know how deep.” He could hardly talk and said the last words in a whisper, even though he knew it was important to keep up a good front. He just didn’t have it all together right now, mat was all.

  “Holy shit,” Stone heard Bull say, then Hartstein muttered some choice profanities from the other Bradley.

  “Look, I don’t know what to say to you. To be honest, I don’t even know how to proceed. I—” Stone just kept finding himself stuttering whenever he reached for words. There weren’t any words.

  “Son of a rotten fucking son of a bitch,” Bull spat into the microphone, stinging Stone’s ears. The aura of deep depression was palpable right through the walls of the three tanks. Every one of them was feeling the same horror, the same sickening nausea in their very souls, that they were about to be buried alive—one of man’s oldest, most primeval fears, along with snakes and things that go bump in the night. It wasn’t the preferred route of passage.

  “Look,” Bo said with a little cough, off to Stone’s side. He was always too nervous to talk, thinking himself perhaps the stupidest of the attack force. But since no one else was saying a w
ord, he spoke up, self-consciously. “Why don’t we just open the hatch a little and see what happens. We got nothing to lose, right? I mean, it’s not like we’re going anywhere, as far as I can see.” Stone hadn’t even known Bo had brains enough to make a joke like that, and he looked at the big, pug-nosed farm boy with mild respect.

  “You know, I think you’re right,” Stone said, jumping up from the control seat. “Nothing to lose isn’t the half of it.” He went to the ladder and climbed the few rungs so his hands could reach and turn the holding lock of the foot-thick circular covering. The bolt moved, but as he pushed up, he couldn’t budge the cover an inch.

  “Bo, get your ass up here. Lend me some shoulder against this fucker here, it’s stuck.” Bo was up the ladder in a flash, and though it was a tight squeeze with both of them wrapped around the ladder, they both heaved up with all their might. Slowly the hatchway opened a little—just an inch or two—and dark, grainy sand came pouring in.

  “Oh, my God,” Simpson said from below them where he had been watching them. “We’re going to die. We’re going to fucking die. Like this. I can’t believe it.” He started sobbing loudly, and Excaliber joined in howling, too, so the whole tank was quickly filled with the merry sounds of the terrified.

  “Should I close it, should I close it?” Bo screamed out as sand streamed down over his shoulders and head.

  “Yeah, pull,” Stone said, and they pulled down hard so that the hatch closed partially again. Now it couldn’t be closed all the way, as sand was already spilling in, nor opened. Like an hourglass, the sand started pouring down and onto the steel floor of the Bradley. Even Stone felt an awful kind of icy terror gripping his heart.

  “Let’s try to open it again,” Stone suddenly yelled out, as be couldn’t stand just watching the porous grains fall down on them. “Our only chance is that the top of the tank is only covered by a few feet of the stuff. If we push hard, maybe we can dislodge it.” Bo looked at Stone skeptically, but he knew they had to do something fast. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of time left. They set themselves and heaved up, and this time the hatchway went up nearly a foot. And as it did so, a wall of the stuff started pouring in, all over their chests and legs. Before he knew what was happening, Stone felt Ex-caliber suddenly leap up from the tank floor and grab onto the edge of the hatchway where the sand was pouring through. The English bullterrier seemed to take a deep breath, then its second, protective eyelids closed over its eyes and it shot into the dark, shifting sands above like a torpedo.

  Stone could hardly believe his eyes but had little choice as the animal started kicking and digging up a storm. The sand flew into his mouth and face and down past his shoulders. Stone gagged for a second but held his end of the hatch. He could feel the pressure of tons of sand trying to press it down from above. Bo caught his glance for just a second, and they both had to grin—even in the very jaws of death—at the digging machine that the pitbull had transformed itself into. Its back legs just churned away, almost in a blur, as its head and front paws disappeared into the sand. It dug and it dug, straight up for the surface, knowing instinctively through the moisture and scent it picked up in its sensitive nose just where the nearest air was. As if it were digging a hole into the ground to bury a bone—only this was one straight up instead of down—Excaliber headed inexorably through the sand.

  Suddenly the pitbull’s head broke surface, and he shook it to clear the sand from over his eyes. Then the slits opened and the canine looked quickly around to make sure it had really done it. It could feel its master grabbing around its back feet, ready to pull it back in, but instead the canine surged forward, pulling itself up onto the sand that covered the tank, nearly dragging Stone along behind it. Feeling the animal move so freely all of a sudden, Stone had to assume it had made it up, and taking perhaps the biggest leap of faith he had ever made in his life, Stone gave Bo a weird grin, closed his eyes and mouth, and followed the dog, letting the pull of its legs as it guided itself out help suck Stone toward the surface. Halfway up, he lost his footing as Ex-caliber jumped free. Stone nearly panicked, feeling himself stuck nowhere in the middle of a universe of silence. But then he felt Bo push hard from below, and before he knew it, Stone found his head popping free of the grit and he was looking at desert. The two other tanks, just yards away, were totally covered, as were the boulders that had once stood next to them. There was sand as far as the eye could see, as if they had been transported to the Sahara. Stone wiggled his foot below to signal Bo to follow and then set his elbows up on the sides of the sand walls that were slowly falling down the hole his body had created. Slowly, as if pulling himself out of quicksand, Stone lifted his body up and out onto the ridged waves of sand that blanketed the world.

  “Thank God,” he muttered, looking up at the sky with a quick glance of gratitude. Far to the east, the storm of total death moved on, blocking out that whole portion of the horizon as if a black wall had been erected. But it was past them. Bo came up next. Then the whimpering Simpson. By then so much sand had fallen into the five-foot path they had to travel to the surface that they could pretty much climb in and out of the tank directly, though the thing was two thirds filled with the grit inside. Stone had them take out some shovels from the supply box. Then it was lots of digging as the three of them first shoveled out the top of Bull’s tank, men, joined by that crew, freed the men of Hartstein’s tank. They all stood around in a kind of daze, just staring at the sand, which stretched off like an endless black beach all around them. After a few minutes of letting their pounding hearts start heading back to normal, Stone spoke.

  “Okay, let’s take these shovels—and dig. Ws got three tanks to uncover.” It took them nearly six hours of nonstop digging to be able to get all three war machines completely free of their sand tombs. Then another two hours to clean them up, as they had all become inundated with sand. But fortunately the makers of the Bradley III foresaw just about everything, and the armored vehicles came equipped with wet/dry power vacs on the insides, which sucked the sand up and poured the stuff back out into the world from whence it came. As shaken up as the men were, they were all in a good mood. There’s something about walking away from the Grim Reaper mat puts a twinkle in a man’s eye.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  THEY WOULD never get all the sand out of these tanks—no one would. But the things seemed to be basically functional, and soon they were moving across the recently created desert. They traveled over a good thirty miles of the loose-packed black dirt, the tanks spitting out trails of soot behind them, which rose like the waste of a chemical plant. At last the deposits of the sandstorm came to an end, and they were once again on the hard-packed prairie surface. It felt good just to see living things, even scraggly, flea-bitten cacti, after the sterile lifelessness of the sand world behind them.

  As triple peaks lined up along the horizon, Stone brought up the mag grid for this part of the territory and searched for Livermore.

  “Distance from present location to Livermore,” Stone keyed into the control panel.

  “17.587 miles,” the computer read out on its display monitor. It flashed the correct compass heading on another panel, and Stone slightly reset the course they had been following, off by less than a degree. The flat land ended, and they came to low foothills that rose up and down like jagged breasts. Rising to the top of the first hill, Stone suddenly was alerted to a radio transmission on the same frequency as the tank’s by a panel readout. He had the receiver zero in and through the earphones heard men shouting orders to each other.

  “This is K Captain, reporting to L base. We are in pursuit of intruder in Sector-Seven. My force consists of three Bradleys, two Hercules light tanks, two armored vehicles. Intruders are three late-model cars—there should be no need for additional force.”

  “Copy, K Captain. This is L base.” Stone heard the counter signal sweep back through a little bit of static. “Carry on attack but report back every hour—and advise if additional armor o
r chopper assistance is needed. Out.”

  It was Pattern’s boys. Without question. No one else had that military mode of operation. Stone slowed the tanks down until they were moving at only about ten miles per hour. They went down a long, flat slope and then up another mat followed some sort of trampled-down migration trail and was just wide enough for a single tank to fit by at a time. At the top of the next slope Stone could see ahead for miles as the land once again dropped off dramatically and formed a five-mile-square plain before rising into high mountains at the far side. And below, Stone suddenly saw through the video monitor, were tanks, rows of them, over two dozen standing side by side. He slammed the brakes on, screamed into the mike for the others to stop, and started backing up before the other two had a chance to throw then-big war wagons into reverse, so that Stone was half pushing them back down the hill.

  But he didn’t want to be seen. If the bastards were really so unprotected—all their heavy armor just waiting there like sitting ducks—Stone and his men might have a chance. He pulled the Bradley off to the side and through a passage in some woods until they were several hundred feet inside, snapping off branches everywhere around them. He came to a clearing just big enough for the three tanks and swung the big machine around as the others followed suit.

  “I’m going to check it out on foot,” Stone said. “It could be a trap. Keep the systems shut down. And don’t broadcast between tanks—they may be tracking us already.” With that he climbed the ladder and stepped out the hatchway. As he hit the ground Stone heard a sound right behind him—Ex-caliber. The pitbull felt like taking a little constitutional. They moved through the woods, and then, rather than going along the open pathway, Stone edged his way up a series of boulder falls until he reached a peak of solid granite, the highest point for miles.