Chapter Twenty

Ryan was awakened not by the sound of the shift whistle but by a chorus of wag horns rolling past outside. Familiar-sounding horns, it seemed to him. He pushed out from under the tank at once, and found Hun and Poet standing in the shadows with grim expressions on their faces.

“What’s going on?” Ryan asked them as he straightened. “The whole damned convoy just drove by,” Poet said. “Looks like they’re on their way out of the ville.”

“I stuck my head out the door when no one was watching and got a real good look at some of them,” Hun said. “It was our wags, all right. And they were all running light, too. Way up high on their suspensions, like their cargoes had been unloaded.”

“Fireblast!” Ryan swore.

“We’re in a world of hurt now,” Poet said, shaking his head. “We can’t hostage the refinery for the wags if they’re gone who knows where.”

“Zeal might be selling them off,” Hun suggested. “There’re lots of barons who’d pay large for something like the MGP. Baron could already have his buyers lined up.”

“We’ve got to go after them,” Ryan said.

“Yeah!” Hun said. “Chase and chill.”

Poet frowned. “We’ve got to figure they’re gonna have a good lead on us. The shift doesn’t change for a while yet.”

“Don’t worry,” Ryan told him, “whatever time we lose, we’ll damned well make it up on the road.”

The next half hour was one of the hardest in Ryan’s life.

Like his companions, he had to just sit there, waiting for the time to wind down so he could get out of the plant. This, while every fiber in his body screamed for him to haul out the Blackhawk, blast his way free and catch the convoy before it left Virtue Lake. The reason he didn’t was simple. He could see the value of having the refinery secretly mined. Even if they couldn’t use the explosives the way they’d planned, and there was still a chance that they might, he could foresee a time when the mines could be useful. For payback, if nothing else. Ryan knew he couldn’t shoot his way clear because that would’ve given away the fact that they had been inside, messing around.

It was harder still for Ryan to hang back and let a good third of the workers file out before he and the others slipped into the largest part of the exiting mob.

“I’m driving,” Ryan said as he trotted up behind the commandeered sec wag.

Hun was already at the trunk, popping the lid and pulling out the longblasters. Tossing her 10-gauge side-by-side into the back seat, she quickly passed the other two weapons through the front passenger’s window to Poet. Laying his CAR-15 across his lap, he leaned the scoped Remington muzzle up between the front seats. Ryan started the engine with a roar.

Before Hun got the rear door shut, Ryan stomped the gas pedal and the wag peeled away from the curb.

“Where’re you going?” Hun said.

“We’ve got to get the crew out of jail,” Ryan said, steering out of a wild sideways skid. “We might not be back this way.”

“You’re right,” Poet told him. “We’ve got to try to free them now. We’re not going to get a better chance.”

Finally able to take some aggressive action, Ryan ripped a page out of Hun’s driving manual, pushing the wag to the limit, smoking the tires around corners; on the straightaways, he highballed it, engine howling for mercy.

As the prison came into view over the low rise ahead, Ryan could see the jailers scattered around the site. Two of them were taking turns jabbing long sticks down into the second row of cells—long sticks with sharp metal points. Two other jailers were leaning against the hut; it looked like they were resting. The fifth was nowhere in sight.

Without hesitation, and without slowing, Ryan veered the wag toward the pair doing the poking. It crashed over the curb, went airborne and came down hard on the unfenced border of the prison grounds, thirty feet away.

The two jailers looked up from their fun, astonished to see the sec wag leave the road and roar straight for them. When Ryan drove over the first row of cells, the wag was traveling better than sixty miles per hour. Tires juddered on the bars for no more than an instant before they were on top of the second row. Ryan aimed for the jailer on the left. The guy was too panicked to even try to run. The wag caught him dead amidships. With a crack, the poking pole snapped off against the bumper; with an almost simultaneous thud, the jailer hit the grille, then bounced sprawling over the hood. His head rammed through the glassless windshield, his face contorted in agony. For a second, the guy’s nose was practically in Poet’s lap. Then the war captain reared back with one foot and, before the man could even start to bleed, booted him onto the hood.

As he did so, Ryan raised his Ruger.

“Oh, fuck!” Hun cried from the back seat, clamping her hands over her ears.

The .357 roared like a howitzer. Three feet from the muzzle, the jailer’s head exploded in a puff of pink, and the violent impact literally blew him off the wag’s right fender. “Get that other torturing bastard!” Ryan snarled. After he bounced over the last row of cells, he hit his brakes and spun the wheel hard over, positioning the wag for another pass.

The second poker-man wanted no part of that. He threw down the tool of his trade and ran for his life.

Poet brought the adjustable butt of his CAR-15 to his shoulder and touched off a long, full-auto burst through the front window frame.

It was loud. Really, really loud.

In the back seat, Hun had her hands over her ears and she was yelling to equalize the pressure in her head.

As a cascade of smoking hulls clattered against the passenger’s door, downrange the 5.56 mm tumblers whacked the dirt, sparked off the cell bars and chopped down the fleeing jailer in his tracks. Hit a half dozen times, the man stumbled and fell, sliding face first over the bars of a cell.

Swerving to the left, Ryan fought to bring the wag in line with the little jailers’ hut. The wag hesitated, still sliding sideways on the smooth ground between the rows of cells. Gunfire erupted from around the hut, and 9 mm slugs drilled into the vehicle broadside. Then Hun’s 10-gauge boomed out the rear passenger’s window.

Ryan had a glimpse of a man flying off his feet, arms outstretched as if crucified, crashing against the wall of the hut.

The fourth jailer knelt beside the hut, which was the only cover he had, and continued to fire at them with his machine pistol. There was a shaky hand on the trigger. Bullets sprayed around the onrushing wag, but not into it. Both Ryan and Poet opened fire over the hood. Ryan drove with his left hand, and fired the big blaster with his right.

The hail of high-powered slugs jerked the man up to his feet, then hammered him into the earth.

Ryan skidded to a stop beside the hut and jumped out with the Blackhawk cocked.

“This guy’s gone,” Poet said, after giving the bad shot a sound kick in the head.

“Gotta be one more,” Hun said, slipping over beside the hut. “Yoo-hoo!” she called. “Anybody in there?”

By way of answer, autofire ripped through the corrugated-metal walls. Nine millimeter slugs whizzed high and wild, making Ryan and Poet duck behind the wag.

But Hun was ready. Standing her ground, she cut loose with both barrels at once. Though she was well braced, the recoil of the 10-gauge knocked her back a full step. The double dose of double-aught buck cut a ragged two-foot gash in the side of the shack at about knee height. The impact against the wall of the structure raised a big cloud of dust.

Hun shifted the shotgun to her left hand and drew her Beretta from the small of her back. She ducked her head low around the corner of the shack’s doorway and stole a look inside, then ducked back.

Whatever she saw in there, it had to still have been alive.

She rounded the doorway with the Beretta out front. Ryan was sure he heard her say something to the wounded man inside. He couldn’t make out the words; she didn’t repeat them. They were punctuated by three shots from the 9 mm pistol.

“Get the keys!” Ryan said as he stepped around the wag’s grille.

Poet was just straightening from one of the dead jailers. “Got them.”

They hurried to the nearest cell, and Poet knelt and unlocked the door.

Loz, the cook for War Wag One, stared up at them; the relief on his face was almost comical. “Never thought I’d ever see your ugly mugs again,” he said. Then he held up his arms so the two men could pull him out.

The second man out was Abe. “Zeal and Shabazz took about a dozen of the crew away,” he said excitedly. “Must’ve been forty minutes ago. Took Trader, too. I didn’t get a look, but it sounded like they had the whole convoy up and running.”

While Poet and Hun moved down the line of cells, freeing their comrades, Ryan handed Abe one of the jailers’ machine pistols. “We’re going after the convoy and Trader,” he said as the little man dropped the SMG’s magazine, checked the round count, then snapped it back in place. “But we only got the one wag. We need mebbe four more to carry everybody.”

“Well, here come two right now,” Abe said as he gave the charging handle a quick flip.

A pair of sec wags zoomed over the crest of the street. They were really flying, dropping by to check out all the blasterfire, no doubt.

Ryan didn’t have to warn anybody about avoiding the tires, engine compartments and fuel tanks.

Five or six blasters cut loose on the sec wags. The hands holding these blasters weren’t shaking. They were rock steady. The windshield of the lead wag shattered, then the vehicle slewed in a long, out-of-control skid. The second wag swerved to avoid a collision and took dozens of rounds at side window and door height. Over the sights of the Blackhawk, Ryan saw the torsos inside kicked around by the volley of lead.

Both wags slammed sideways to a stop against the curb; one of them half hopped it before coming to a halt.

Right away, Ryan knew the two wags were all they were going to get. There had been too much blasterfire. If they waited around, they’d have the baron’s entire sec force on top of them. And then they’d never make it out of the ville.

“Come on!” he shouted as the last pair of captives was freed. “We’ve got to roll!”

Then, like the pack of pinhead clowns in Gert Wolfram’s carnival, the crew hurriedly crammed themselves into the three commandeered sec wags. Only in Wolfram’s carny show, dirty faced savages didn’t hang out the windows waving submachine guns.

After wedging himself back in the driver’s seat, and slamming the door with difficulty, Ryan dropped his wag into gear and beelined for the street. The wag picked up speed very slowly, and the steering had gone all soft. When he drove over the curb, the weight of all the people riding with him made the frame scrape on the concrete.

Ryan wasn’t worried about the quality of their transportation. Even as loaded down as the wags were, they could make much better time than the convoy, assuming of course that the springs didn’t bottom out on a deep pothole in the road and make them break an axle.

He was worried about the barricade, and the sec men that he knew would be waiting there, ready for them.