Dark Resurrection. James Axler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ culture, and thereby get his hands on some of its fabled material wealth. But after seeing what the dreadlocked emissaries of that culture had done to Padre Island, the entrepreneurship fantasies vanished. Payback had become his single-minded goal.

      And payback was his forte.

      Like other Deathlands traders, Harmonica Tom Wolf had committed his share of morally questionable deeds over the years—some might even call them “atrocities.” It was part of staying in business, and staying alive. He had systematically eliminated rivals trying to encroach on his territory. He had closed deals with hot lead and cold steel instead of smiles and handshakes. He had transported cargos of uncut jolt and high explosives without thinking twice. He had never purposefully messed with women and kids, though. And when he had sent another trader or coldheart on the last train west, it had always been a chill-or-be-chilled situation, and it was usually face-to-face, if not nose-to-nose.

      The horror he had seen at Padre had transformed him, and not in a good way. Images of the dead and dying in that shantyville were branded into the root of his brain. Whenever he managed to grab a few winks of sleep, they invariably shook him awake. He came to gasping for air, spitting mad, fingers clawing for the butt of his stainless-steel .45 Smith wheelgun, looking around for someone to chill.

      The Nuevo-Texicans’ passing hadn’t been quick or clean, not like getting shot or stabbed or fragged by shrap. They had disintegrated from the inside out, cooked in their skins by fever, laying helpless in pools of their own bodily waste. These were folks he’d done business with for years. Folks he respected. He even knew their kids by name. Kids who’d died the same awful way. He’d had three weeks to stew over what had happened to them, and why.

      From the evidence on the scene it looked like disease had ravaged more than half the population before the pirates showed up. Tom had never seen or heard of anything like it. Of the islanders who were stricken by the plague, no one recovered. It was one hundred percent debilitating and one hundred percent fatal. And that wasn’t the whole story. The outbreak had peaked just in time for the naval assault and invasion.

      An unlucky turn of fate?

      Harmonica Tom didn’t think so.

      The Nuevo-Texicans were anything but pushovers. Every man, woman and child older than the age of eight could handle a blaster, and they had plenty of ammo and heavy automatic weapons. Through cagey barter they had accumulated some explosives, too—they had a good stock of Claymore anti-pers mines. For thirty years the islanders had successfully defended their grounded freighter and its stores against all comers. The question was, could a small force of Matachìn have overwhelmed the hardened, battle-tested defenses and superior numbers without help from the plague?

      Definitely not, Tom had concluded. The pirates lacked the manpower to take Padre Island hill by hill, and long-distance shelling alone couldn’t do the job.

      Disease as a weapon of war, of conquest, of genocide wasn’t anything new in the history of the planet. Tom remembered reading about small pox–infected blankets somewhere in his shipboard collection of predark books. Long before Armageddon, they had been handed out to reservation Indians to make them sick and wipe them out. The how of what had happened at Padre was a mystery that might never be solved, but Harmonica Tom was damn well sure the appearance of the plague was no coincidence.

      The objective of the invasion by sea hadn’t been simple, familiar robbery, either. The Matachìn had blown apart the beached freighter that contained all of the islanders’ worldly goods, and having done that, they just left it to burn, as if it held nothing worth stealing. The objective apparently had been the destruction of all life and property. Tom took that as an insult to Deathlands, and to the best of its hard-pressed survivors. Moreover, he took it as a personal affront.

      And then there was the matter of Ryan Cawdor and his five companions.

      No doubt about it, he had dragged those good folks into a world of trouble and hurt. They’d wanted to head east to off-load the 125-pound cache of C-4 they’d snatched, but he’d told them they’d get a better price if they sailed west and dealt with the Padre Islanders. When the shit hit the fan on Padre, things had broken badly for Cawdor and the others. They were still alive when Tom had hightailed it for Tempest, but the last he’d seen of them, they were pinned down by pirates who were closing in fast. If they had managed to live through the assault, they would have been taken as slaves for the galley ships. In the three weeks since Tom had made his solo escape, they could have all died at their oars.

      Death en route was a definite possibility.

      More than once he had come across big-ass sharks lazily schooling around a headless floating torso with flesh hanging from it in a pale, bloodless fringe. Every time he saw the rad-blasted black fins circling on the surface, he’d divert course to see if it was anyone he knew.

      Harmonica Tom had a very straightforward rule for survival that had proved itself over the years: when the odds were good, hit; when the odds were shit, git.

      No way could he fight the convoy at sea and hope to win. There were too many opposing vessels, and three of them had massive diesels and twice his speed. If he tried to engage them in open water with Tempest, he knew he’d be outmaneuvered in no time and once committed to the attack, he’d never escape.

      In one sense, the farther south he sailed the longer the odds got; in another sense, they actually improved. Though he had penetrated deep into Matachìn territory, nobody in these parts had ever heard of Harmonica Tom. Off his ship he would be unrecognizable, even to the pirates he had outcaptained and outfought along the treacherous Texican shoals. And if the pirate cities were jam-packed with people like the fire talkers said, that gave him the advantage of invisibility. A man who was careful and quiet could get lost in a crowd.

      From the angle of the ship lights relative to the shore, Tom figured the convoy was going to make its first landfall at Veracruz. He backed the throttle to idle but left the engine in gear, then lashed off the helm to maintain a steady course. He’d had three weeks to consider the best plan of action. What he’d come up with involved taking some big chances, but none of them were new.

      It was called going for broke.

      He opened and swung back the cockpit door, then turned to the box-fed, Soviet PKM pivot mounted on Tempest ’s stern rail. Unlocking the canvas-shrouded machine gun from its swivel, he carried it down the steep steps to the cabin. He removed the shroud, then fitted the weapon onto the sandbagged tripod already set up at the foot of the stairs. He opened the feed cover to make sure there wasn’t a round chambered. After angling the barrel up to cover the entryway above and cockpit beyond, he locked the elevation.

      Tom scrambled up the stairs and attached the end of a steel trip wire to an eye-screw on the inside of the open door. Descending again, he fed the wire through other strategically placed eyes on the staircase, bulkhead wall and the back edge of the galley table on the far side of the tripod. He tested the run of the wire back and forth for smoothness, then inserted the free end of it through the weapon’s trigger guard. He depressed the trigger until the firing pin snapped on the empty chamber. Holding down the trigger, he looped the wire around it, pinning it as far back as it would go. Up the steps one more time, he pulled the cockpit door closed, which released the tension on the wire and allowed the trigger to snap back to ready position. Back beside the machine gun, he set the safety switch to “fire” and cocked the actuator, racking a live 7.62 mm round.

      The next time the cockpit door was opened, the wire would draw tight; at the door’s full, outward arc, the pullback tension would break the trigger and hold it down. The PKM was a sweet blaster, low recoil, no muzzle climb to speak of. It would continue firing until it came up empty—one hundred rounds down the road. Or СКАЧАТЬ