Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Got a dust cloud coming our way,” Poet stated.

“Yeah,” Ryan said from the captured sec wag’s driver’s seat, “been watching it for a while now.”

Ryan drove the lead wag in a three-wag daisy chain. The other wags were just like his: stiflingly hot and overloaded with passengers. The one-lane road they traveled was the only improved track leading across a plain of yellow dirt and scrub brush to the blue-tinted mountains in the far distance, mountains where Baron Zeal had taken Trader and the convoy.

“He’s really tearing it up,” Hun said, leaning over the back of the front seat for a better look at the oncoming traffic. “Think it’s one of ours?”

“Way he’s moving, won’t be long before we find out,” Poet said.

When the wag was about a quarter of a mile away, Ryan announced, “It’s one of ours, all right. A war wag.”

“Could be Trader got loose,” Hun speculated hopefully.

“Not likely, though,” Poet said.

Ryan had to agree with that. The man had been in chains, and he was unarmed and outnumbered. Even for Trader, escape under those circumstances would be a stretch. “Question is,” he said to Poet, “should we pull off the road, stop and let the war wag pass, or keep moving? I vote for keep moving, right up until the last second. That way, if it’s sec men or Shabazz’s crew driving, they’ll have a lot harder time hitting us with blasterfire.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Poet said.

When the war wag was one hundred yards away, and closing fast, Ryan could see that the driver’s hatch was nipped back and locked in the open position and that the man at the helm had his head stuck out the vent. When the wag was fifty yards away, Ryan could see that Trader wasn’t driving. The man looked clean shaved and his long brown hair whipped in the wind. When the wag was twenty-five yards away, Ryan could see that it was Zeal at the controls and, from the set expression on his face, that he had no intention of swerving to avoid a head-on collision.

“Shit!” Ryan growled as he cut the wheel hard over, sending the sec wag off the shoulder of the road and bounding onto the desert floor. As the vehicle bounced wildly sideways, he steered into the skid, fighting to keep it from rolling over.

On the road above them, there was no sound of collision, just the squeal of tires as two sets of brakes locked up. As Ryan brought his wag to a stop, a huge cloud of dust fanned out behind. The one-eyed man and his passengers bailed out of the vehicle. When the dust cloud cleared, they saw the other two sec wags still clinging to the roadway, half on and half off the pavement. The crews waved out the windows to let them know everything was okay. In the distance, the war wag roared on toward Virtue Lake, leaving a yellow tornado in its wake.

“It was the baron himself,” Poet said. “I saw his gaudy-slut face.”

“He was in a big hurry,” Ryan said.

“Mebbe he chipped a nail,” Hun suggested.

Excitement over, they piled in the wag and Ryan eased it back onto the road. There were no more dust clouds coming at them. The mountain range grew gradually larger as they approached it. When they got within a half mile of its base, they could see the stolen transport wags, all parked in a line on the desert floor.

“Looks like they’re abandoned,” Poet said as they drew closer.

Ryan stopped the wag a short distance from the transports, and they all got out. A quick check proved Poet to be right.

“Abandoned and empty,” Ryan said as he shut one of the cargo-bay doors. “Zeal planned on loading them up with something, that’s for sure. Guess he didn’t plan well enough.”

Poet dispatched half the crew to man the transports and make sure they were ready to roll. After raiding the onboard armories, and passing out the weapons and fully loaded magazines, Ryan waved the remaining road warriors into the sec wags. Climbing back into the first wag with Poet and Hun, Ryan led the short parade through the entrance to the mountain pass.

Things looked normal until they reached the third hairpin bend in the road. “Corpses,” Hun said, pointing out the passenger’s window.

The shot-up bodies of what Ryan assumed were the road’s guardians lay on the shoulder. Scabby-looking bunch, he decided.

A little farther on, they came to the rockfall. Because the sec wags didn’t have the ground clearance to traverse the larger boulders, Ryan and the others had to get out and proceed up the grade on foot.

“Man, this doesn’t look good,” Poet said, eying the size of the recently dropped slabs of bedrock that lay by the side of the road. The slabs were big enough to crush even a war wag if it was hit square on.

Ryan kept the file moving, watching the edges of the cliffs above them for signs of movement. There was none.

He half expected to find the remaining three war wags buried, if not crushed, under thousands of tons of fallen rock around the next bend. Instead, they were parked in a line in the middle of the road.

“Check them out,” Ryan said as he moved toward the MCP.

The door was unlocked. He entered the hallway with the Blackhawk leading the way. Hun moved in behind him. A bow-to-stern check of the wag turned up no signs of life. No signs of death, either.

Wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, he looked at Hun and shook his head. “Looks like nobody’s home.”

“In here!” a woman’s muffled voice cried. It was close by. “Ryan, we’re in here!”

When Ryan opened the locker, he was relieved to see Trader, J.B. and Sam smiling at him.

“We didn’t hear any blastershots,” Trader said as he stepped into the corridor. “You didn’t have to fight your way up here?”

“We crossed paths with Zeal on the plain,” Ryan said. “He had one of our war wags and he was heading for Virtue Lake. Other than that, there’s no sign of anybody outside.”

“That’s impossible,” Trader said. “There had to be twenty, mebbe twenty-five crew with Zeal and Shabazz.” He pushed past Ryan and jumped down from the MCP’s doorway.

Outside, Poet and the others had just freed the hostage drivers and crew from the lockers in the two small war wags. It looked like they hadn’t lost any more people.

Trader walked up to the row of rocks and stared at the cliff face. There was no place for the pirates and sec men to have gone. The road dead-ended. Cliff walls rose on three sides to heights of hundreds of feet.

As Ryan came up alongside him, he noticed there was a chill to the air, despite the bright sunshine. And though no blood was in evidence anywhere that Ryan could see, there was the coppery smell of blood, and it hung real heavy. Slaughterhouse kind of heavy. Looking at that open space, smelling that smell, Ryan got a strange feeling—strange to him, anyway. It was fear.

“What do you want to do?” Poet asked Trader.

“I got a score to settle with Baron Zeal,” Trader said, rubbing gently at his stomach. “Bastard stole my wags and took my cargo, and he chilled some of my crew, chilled them real ugly. Can’t let him get away with that. There’s too many others out there in the world who’d take it as a sign of weakness. Folks start thinking we’re easy pickin’s and we’ll be fighting every mile of our circuit from now until the next skydark.”

Poet grunted in agreement.

“Let’s get the small wags turned,” Trader said. “Drive them down the pass. Gorge is so narrow, we’re going to have to back the MCP all the way to the bottom. Come on, Ryan, give me a hand getting rid of these chains. They’re starting to really piss me off.”

At the bottom of the grade, they joined up with the waiting transports. Then, with the MCP in the lead, the convoy headed back down the road toward Virtue Lake.

Ryan and Trader sat in the jump seats along the back wall of the driver’s compartment. The front hatches were wide open, and the air rushing in over them felt good, as did the familiar bass rumble of War Wag One’s wheels on the road.

When Ryan looked over at his boss, sitting close as they were, he saw crow’s-feet at the corners of Trader’s eyes. He hadn’t noticed them before.

“You and Poet didn’t chill each other, I’m glad to see,” Trader said, pulling out a fresh cheroot and lighting it up.

“It was close, Trader. Real close.”

“You two come to terms?”

“Mebbe. Time will tell,” Ryan said. Then he changed the subject. “How’re we going to handle Zeal?”

“He saw you when you saw him?”

“Yep, couldn’t miss us. Passed within a few feet.”

“Well, I’d say he’s got to figure we’re coming back for him. First thing, he’s going to consolidate his forces around his most prized possession, the refinery. He’s probably there right now, trying to figure out a way to keep us from gettingto it.”

Ryan reached in his pants pocket. “Look here,” he said. He showed Trader the two detonators, then held one of them up. “This will set off a neat little charge of high-ex. We left it just outside the refinery on our way to collect you. It’s the eye opener.”

“What’s the other one?”

“We mined the whole damned plant with C-4,” Ryan told him. “We used J.B.’s motion-sensing detonators.”

“I like that,” Trader said. “I like that a lot.” He held out his hand. “Give them here.”

Ryan passed him the detonators.

“So, if I push this one, like this,” Trader said as he pointed the device out the front hatch and depressed the red button, “we wake Zeal up to the fact that his precious refinery has been penetrated and mined.”

In the distance, over the roar of the wind and the engines, they heard a dull whomp.

“You just woke him up,” Ryan said.

Trader raised his other hand, aiming the second detonator toward Virtue Lake. “And all I have to do to arm the motion-sensing C-4 charges is to push this little button

“

Ryan nodded.

“Well, then, let’s let her rip,” Trader said, and he pushed the button.