Vengeance Trail. James Axler

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СКАЧАТЬ remained and now joined the charge on their painted ponies.

      And finally, twenty or so random chillers, who had drifted into the army at large, but not yet into any kind of affinity group. These loose ends had been sent off with the main body under the command of Bug Eye Mueller, who was suspected by many of being a mutie because of his unfortunately protuberant eyeballs, but who was so mean nobody ever so much as mentioned it.

      The throat and purse-slitters of El Abogado, snoop and poop specialists all, formed no part of the attack. They had their own assignment.

      And finally, Chato himself sat nervously on his paint pony atop a hill well to the south, leading from the rear where he could keep a good eye on the proceedings as was appropriate to a coldheart warlord of his stature. Or so he’d told his faithful followers.

      No, it wasn’t a good plan. But it was shitloads better than admitting he’d drawn a blank, and having his coldheart followers decide to see what his insides looked like, preparatory to picking out a new leader.

      “DOWN! Everybody get down!”

      J.B. had already followed his own advice, and was speed-crawling toward the fallen corporal on leather-jacket clad elbows. Mildred, as seasoned a combat veteran as any, had also hit the dirt before the shot finished echoing.

      Pretty much everybody else, guards and captives alike, was standing around, completely clueless to what was going down—even as two more guards were nailed by snipers.

      However, not even the slowest or most stunned of wits could long mistake about 150 coldhearts, armed to the eyeballs and howling for blood, charging at them on horses, outlandishly modified motorcycles, and their own hind legs. The soldiers on guard, well-trained by Deathlands standards—meaning they had some—unslung their blasters, took up firing positions and started shooting.

      So did the crews manning the heavy weapons mounted in casements and pop-up turrets on the armored wags of the train. MAGOG was like a weird monster millipede: its first ten or so segments were armor-plated, as were the very last two wags, a second engine and a gun-bristling caboose. Other armored wags were spaced at intervals among the more conventional freight and passenger wags. As he pulled Moredocks’s Beretta from its flap-covered field holster, the Armorer heard the snarl of 5.56 mm machine guns, the throaty growl of 7.62 mm M-60s and, sweetest of all, the Thor’s-hammer pounding of the .50-caliber Browning M-2. He could feel the muzzle-blasts, beating on the back of his jacket and stinging the exposed back of his neck.

      Looking up, he saw the nearest attackers were still 150 yards off. He rifled the stiff for spare mags.

      AS PLANS WENT, Chato’s wasn’t really all that bad. Given the resources, it was about as good as might have been come up with.

      Of course, it was doomed. He’d been right about that.

      For one thing, MAGOG carried more dedicated fighters than Chato had, not to mention another hundred or so support types, cooks and clerks, who could fire a CAR-15 or submachine gun out windows and firing ports about as well as anybody. And neither Chato nor any of his followers had the remotest conception of how much sheer firepower MAGOG mounted.

      Two could play the sharpshooting game, for instance. There were four dedicated antisniper turrets, each containing a shooter behind a Barrett Light Fifty sniper rifle and a separate spotter, each using mounted optics far superior to what Ironhead Johnson and his boys had. As Johnson realized, peering at the train through ancient but excellent Zeiss binocs for the few short heartbeats before his head turned into pink mist. Not even iron was proof against a 709-grain jacketed slug traveling about four times the speed of sound, it turned out.

      Nor had the coldhearts grasped the fact the General had dozens of machine guns of various calibers at his command. And here came the first serious hitch in the plan: however reluctant the rail wag soldiers may have been about firing up their own buddies, much less the laborers, many of their machine guns were mounted on top of the train, where they could fire right over the heads of guards and prisoners alike.

      Then there were the automatic grenade launchers, and the 82 mm mortars that quickly began to chug and cause big gouts of earth and assorted body parts to spout up out of the desert.

      And Wild Wess Wilhelm received the surprise of his life—and death, as it happened—when a rack popped out the top of the train’s engine. He didn’t see it, because it was infrared and invisible to the unaided eye, the laser-designation spot painted right on the pearly third snap-button of his shirt as he rode standing up behind the roll bar of his Baja buggy. He did see the puff of white smoke as the Hellfire antitank guided missile came off the rack, however.

      He had time to shout a hysterical command to his driver, who was already yanking the wheel hard right in a turn, which would have rolled the buggy and spilled them all out to their deaths or at least painful and crippling injury. The huge missile, however, struck the lower edge of the roll bar before the tires had even broken loose in a skid. A jet of copper from the shaped-charge warhead, so incandescent hot it was almost plasma, simply vaporized young Wilhelm’s midsection and right shoulder and about half the head of the driver. Then the speeding wag began to roll broadside, but now as a ball of fire, trailing blazing fuel and a giant caterpillar of black smoke. Another buggy lost it, veered from the road and took off end for end trying to avoid the blazing wreck, scattering its occupants in every direction. And then the machine guns began raking the wags that were attacking along the road.

      The second serious problem with Chato’s plan now appeared: the expectation that the slaves would either flee in panic, disrupting the defenders, or better still actually begin to fight with their guards. But few of the captives had grown up in what anybody would call sheltered circumstances; life really was tough all over. As for regarding the attackers as liberators, trust of scruffy wild-acting guys with blasters wasn’t deeply engrained in the contemporary psyche. After all, however badly the soldiers had treated and were treating their slaves, it was the coldhearts who were shooting at them.

      Of course, there are always a few who don’t get the message. Ten or fifteen captives did try bolting and got ripped to wet red rags, some with fingertips scraped bloody from trying to claw their way up the steep railway embankment. Most of the slaves had too much sense to try to outrun the bullets cracking past their ears, and instead just dropped flat against the ground.

      Doomed, but not entirely futile. The attackers boiling out of the arroyo had appeared suddenly and were fairly close at hand. A lot of the slower ones got minced and mulched by the horizontal lead storm. Others went to their bellies and opened vigorous, if not particularly accurate, fire.

      The rest quickly got under the heavy weapons’ arcs of fire, so close the blasters mounted atop the train couldn’t depress any farther to track them. It was one of the few true cracks in mighty MAGOG’s defenses. And eighty or ninety armed and angry coldhearts were pouring through it.

      Crawling with less alacrity than J.B., Mildred had reached the body of a soldier downed in the first ragged volley of sniper fire. With MAGOG’s blasters thundering overhead and shutting out the screams of the injured, she pulled free his M-16. She assumed a classic prone firing position, her body at forty-five degrees to the target, behind the stiff, using him as cover and a rest. She was a devoted pistol shooter—an Olympic competitor, in fact—but she could shoot a longblaster with a high degree of accuracy.

      Clicking the selector to single shot, she began to take out targets. She aimed at the coldhearts she deemed most threatening—the ones who seemed to be shooting most effectively themselves. At almost every shot, a bandit dropped.

      J.B. had taken cover behind the late Corporal Moredock and was firing aimed singles from the Beretta СКАЧАТЬ