But for some reason, the men on the train hadn't fallen for the hoax. The mile-long collection of locomotives and shuttered weapons cars roared through the false explosions and across the span at top speed, giving the gunmen in the hills a there few seconds to open fire instead of the half minute or so that Heck had originally hoped to have it in his sights.
Within twenty seconds, the last of the train was across the bridge and winding its way out of sight, giving the Burning Cross cameramen only a handful of seconds of usable footage.
"What the
fuck
happened?" Duke Devillian roared at Heck as the German officer emerged a little shakily from his Hind helicopter just seconds after it had touched down at the Burning Cross main observation station.
"I don’t know," Heck stammered. "They must have somehow figured out we wired the bridge with fake bombs."
"Well, that's pretty fucking obvious!" Devillian screamed, a script girl patting his forehead with a wet cloth. "No wonder you guys got your asses kicked down in Panama."
"What could I do about it?" Heck asked, finally snapping out at Devillian. "Only a fucking idiot would go through the trouble of wiring a bridge with fake bombs. In fact, only a
real
fucking idiot would have let that train come this far already!"
Immediately he knew his outburst would cost him his life.
"You're right," Devillian said to him in a strangely tranquil voice. "I
am
an idiot -for thinking that you could really pull it off. You fucking Germans . . . you screwed up two wars; you couldn't even hold on to one lousy canal. Some Master Race. You're just a bunch of fuck-ups."
"Nobody talks that way to me," Heck snarled, reaching for his revolver. Before the gun could clear the holster, however, Devillian's automatic weapon was up and ready. With two bullets, he calmly blew out the Nazi's heart.
Several of Heck's men were standing a few feet away and had witnessed this sudden carnage. Devillian swung his gun in their direction.
"He got what he deserved," the Burning Cross leader barked.
"He told me he could do a job, and he failed. We can't have that kind of weakness in our organization. If you guys can't cut it, then you'll be right after him."
To punctuate his point, he nudged the bloody corpse with his boot, and signaled for the body to be photographed. A barrage of camera flashes later, Devillian turned and walked away, leaving the men staring at the bloody remains of their former leader.
Minutes later, Devillian's own personal helicopter was
touching down at the nearby Grand Canyon National Park airport.
His rage at Heck's screw-up was tempered somewhat when he saw the two rows of shiny F-101 Voodoos lined up beside the small airfield's single runway.
"Finally, someone who can do
something
right!" he screamed at no one in particular as he alighted from the chopper to be greeted by a flurry of underlings.
"Where's the squadron commander?" he yelled.
"Right here!" came the quick sharp reply.
Out from the crowd surrounding Devillian stepped a tall skinny man with a bad facial complexion.
"Colonel Billy Lee Riggs," the man said, giving the cross-eyed terrorist a halfhearted salute. "We finally meet again."
Riggs was a man that Devillian had hated for nearly ten years. A former top officer in the pre-war Imperial Knights of the Klan, Riggs and his boys would frequently do battle against the United Klans of America, the hate group to which Devillian had belonged before World War III.
In the post-war years, Riggs, a well-known air mercenary, had gathered together a dozen and a half likeminded pilots and formed what he arrogantly, yet accurately called the Ku Klux Klan Air Force, or the KKKAF.
Desperate for aircraft after the Santa Fe air strike,
Devillian had been forced to deal with the man. He had struck a bargain with Riggs via the radio several days before, first paying him an exorbitant amount of money to conduct the air raid on LA and then leasing the entire outfit for the duration of the canyon battle. The KKKAF had deployed from their secret base in West Texas to the canyon field just an hour ago. It would be their job to deal with whatever aerial opposition the United Americans would garner-the assignment formerly held by the long-departed Skinheads.
"I'll tell you what I tell everyone else," Devillian said to Riggs. "Play your part right and you'll get more gold than you thought existed. Fuck it up and my pit bulls will tear you all to shreds -one at a time.
They retired to a small tent, where one of Devillian's
lackeys unfurled a map.
"A bunch of Twisted Cross guys fucked up, and the train got across this bridge almost untouched," he told Riggs. "So the script is going to change a little."
Riggs actually took notes as Devillian ordered him to
deploy his fighters in a kind of umbrella formation that would orbit the critical
Ten Miles to Hell
trackbed.
"Your guys have to keep the United American flyboys busy while we hit that train from the ground," Devillian concluded, purposely neglecting to tell him that the train's SAM cars had not been attacked as planned. "Then once we've got enough footage from the ground level, you guys can start strafing what's left of the train itself. Got it?"
"Yeah, I got it," Riggs answered flippantly. "And don't worry, Duke, we won't fuck it up like your German pretty boys did." Three minutes later, Devillian was aloft again, shuttling back to his location HQ. Flying over the approaches to the canyon, he could see the train making its way slowly through the small patches of pine trees of the Kaibab Forest that bordered the tracks before they spilled out beside the rim of the canyon itself.
Devillian grabbed the chopper's radio and contacted Jorge Juarez. The obese bandit leader not only commanded an army of mounted bandits located three miles in from the beginning of the Hell stretch, he also controlled a detachment of troops just a half mile before the Mile One post itself.
"Scratch pages one through four from your script,"
Devillian told the man. "The train got over the bridge without a fucking scratch. This means your men have got to be ready to hit it the fucking instant your cue happens, and it means your mounted guys are going in a lot sooner in the play. Can you clowns handle that?"
The Mexican, as usual, grunted a response. "Don't fuckin'
worry about us," he replied. "We're always ready to
keek
some ass."
"You better be, you fat fucking slob," Devillian replied.
"If not, I'll
keel
both you and your sister-when I find her."
Devillian's next call was to the outpost at nearby Tusayan where the squadron of Hind gunships was waiting.
"Looks like we'll need you sooner than expected," Devillian told the squadron commander, a reject from the New Order named Lt. Nicholai Kolotov. "Skip to page sixteen of the script. That's where you guys come in and strafe the train around Mile Two and a half.
"We'll be there, comrade," Kolotov responded.
Up and down the line, Devillian contacted the various unit commanders along the ten-mile stretch of Hell.
Finally, only one call remained for Devillian to make. He reached the officer in charge of his secret weapon, which was waiting at the far end of the canyon straightaway.
"The plot at the bridge went bad," Devillian told this officer. "So we're tearing up the first four pages of the script.
Understand?"
"We're ready and more than willing" came the reply.
The train had traveled a relatively quiet two miles since the strange incident at Desert Point View Bridge.
Hunter was now airborne and flying low and slightly ahead of the
Freedom Express
as it slowly made its way out of the dense forest and onto the trackbed that ran alongside the Grand Canyon itself.
He actually took a moment to admire the incredible beauty of the canyon. But like everything else, he didn't have the time to dwell on Nature's splendor. He knew that within minutes, the train would enter a killing zone so intense and overwhelming that anyone in his right mind would believe that not even a miracle could help it now.
Still, a low spark was smoldering in the back of Hunter's mind:
"Only those on defense can be truly invincible. It is those
who attack who leave themselves open to vulnerability.
The lull below was short lived.
Routinely monitoring all nearby radio channels, Hunter was astonished to hear a message from the enemy come over the shortwave receiver.
It was a squeaky, high-twanging voice that screamed at the top of its owner's lungs:
"Roll 'em!"
Only later would Hunter find out the voice belonged to
Devillian himself.
Now, before the train had traveled a half mile out of the forest, a blast of fire erupted from the rock formation on the right side of the train. A small missile antitank rocket corkscrewed its way through the air and slammed into the side of the lead locomotive.
At the same moment, a dozen parachute flares were launched on either side of the train as well as from a wide pedestrian footbridge about a half mile ahead.
Suddenly the ever-brightening dawn sky was aburst with the surreal pink glow of the dozens of parachute flares. Then more fiery antitank missile streaks homed in on the train from three sides, joined by a rain of tracer rifle fire.
The running of the gauntlet had begun.
"This is it," Hunter said to himself, immediately arming all his weapons, taking care to pat the front pocket of his flight suit where he kept the meditation notebook and his small tattered American flag wrapped around a worn picture of his love, Dominique. "This is where it gets settled, once and for all."
As always, Hunter was carrying an odd assortment of
munitions under the Harrier's wings.
After first speaking with Fitz in the Control car, he put the jumpjet into a quick dive, pulling up at one hundred fifty feet into a long slow, right-to-left bank. Those on the train saw first one, then two, then a half dozen retarded-flight bombs fall from the Harrier's left wing. They hit the ground with terrifying precision, scoring direct hits on four out of six enemy antitank positions, and severely damaging the other two.
Then without missing a beat, the jumpjet reversed direction via a 180 degree horizontal translation and mimicked the first bombing run, this time over on the other side of the tracks.
Within seconds, five of the six enemy targets were utterly destroyed.
Instantly the enemy rocket and rifle barrage petered out to a few random, badly aimed shots. The train continued plunging forward at full speed through the early morning mist, all of its windows and weapons openings electronically shuttered.
"Everything OK down there?" Hunter called down to Fitz. "So far," Fitz quickly replied, his voice fighting a storm of interference.
"We've got a lot of company up on the overpass ahead,"
Hunter yelled through the static. "So stay locked up."
Captain Luis Repello was the commander of the bandits
stationed on top of the overpass footbridge, and at the moment he was having a hard time calming his troops.
They had just witnessed the Harrier's incredibly brutal air strike on their comrades positions on either side of the tracks.
Now they watched in confused horror as the jumpjet went into a quick hover and then shot straight up into the sky.
"Forget the airplane!" Captain Repello was screaming to his junior officers via his walkie-talkie. "Get your men ready for the train."
Somewhat reluctantly, the first wave of bridge bandits
lined up on the edge of the structure, paired off in twos. Then, with commendable if not exactly rational aplomb, the bandits began leaping onto the train as it passed underneath.
"Go!
Go
!" Repello was screaming so loudly, he didn't need his walkie-talkie. "Keep them moving."
In the midst of the action, Repello was surprised by the enthusiasm of his troops. It seemed as if they were all leaping onto the train at once.
Suddenly, the bandit commander was aware of a strange
high-pitched noise coming from behind him one so loud it even drowned out the roar of the mighty train streaking by underneath the bridge.
Repello turned around to see the Harrier hovering no more than fifteen feet off the opposite side of the bridge, its Aden cannons blazing away.
In an instant Repello realized that the men he saw toppling off the edge of the bridge were not enthusiastically jumping onto the train at all. Rather they were being blasted off the overpass by the jumpjet's guns.
In the last moment of his life, Repello saw the distinctive lightning bolt helmet of the pilot inside the jumpjet, who was cooly mowing down the bandit unit, and in that instant, he realized that this time he had indeed joined the wrong side.
Hunter kept his cannons spitting fire until he had
eliminated most of the soldiers on the bridge.
But nearly twenty-five had managed to drop onto the tops of the cars in the speeding train. Some of them lost their balance and tumbled off to be crushed by the mighty steel wheels of the train below. But the others managed to crawl over the sides of the cars and started firing their rifles through the windows.