“Fuck you, then,” Harris snapped. “I want out of this motherfucker! I only act in self-defense, man. I ain’t part that other shit, that assault on Iron Balls and Bad John.”
“You’ll receive your day in court, and all the evidence will be weighed,” Kirkwood said, looking squarely at Harris. “If the guard attacked you, then we will take that into account. As for some of your other demands, I agree with you. We do need to insist that units visit their members in the brig, and that they provide them support, such as new uniforms, health and comfort items, and communications with their families and other members in their units. Also, prisoners should not have to address any enlisted guard as ‘sir.’ I have already voiced concerns of my own in some of these same areas as well, and I can assure you that we will visit with the commanding general about all of these matters, and some others.”
James Harris smiled and looked at Brian Pitts, and then back at Celestine Anderson, Sam Martin, and Clarence Jones.
“Yo,” Mau Mau chirped. “We gettin’ someplace now.”
“What about the hostages you’re holding?” Michael Schuller asked, and looked directly at Brian Pitts. “Where are Gunner Holden, Gunny MacMillan, and the inmates you have taken prisoner with them? More importantly, what are their conditions?”
“They all just fine!” Harris snapped, and then looked at Brian Pitts, who nodded. “We got them inside. That dude, James Elmore, he joined up with the rangers. He one of us now. Ain’t that right.”
“I’d like to see Mister Elmore,” Kirkwood said. “His attorney has raised concerns about his safety.”
“Fuck his attorney!” Celestine Anderson shouted. “Fuck all you motherfuckers.”
“Yeah,” Harris said, realizing that except for his handful of rangers who remained at his side, the majority of prisoners now made their way through the blockhouse. “We done talkin’. You go see General Cushman and see what he say about what we ask. Then you can come back and maybe we talk about releasin’ them hostages and turnin’ this brig back to you. We let you see Elmore then, too.”
“Very well,” Schuller said, looking across the now empty recreation yard. “If you men wish to surrender at this time, we can avoid a great deal of trouble. It would go well for you, if you surrendered. At least release the warrant officer and the gunny.”
“Fuck that shit! I ain’t stupid. We keepin’ those dudes with us for now, so you all don’t try nothin’. We sure the fuck ain’t surrenderin’. So get that shit out your head, I ain’t doin’ nothin’ until you come back here with General Cushman sayin’ that he’s willin’ to make a deal. Do us right,” Harris said, and then turned his back on the officers. He walked toward his gang of Black Stone Rangers and raised his bat in the air, triumphant, while his men shouted in celebration and Jon Kirkwood and Mike Schuller walked quickly back to the blockhouse.
“WHOA, STICKHORSE!” STAFF Sergeant Abduleses said, catching Kevin Watts by the shirt as he tried to slip past him, just ahead of Randal Carnegie. “This man and that other one there, take them to the side for a little one-on-one.”
“Fuck this shit,” Watts yelped, and then ducked under the hands of the guards who went for him.
Seeing Abdul grabbing at his pal Kevin, the Chu Lai Hippie stepped out of the line of men and dashed away from the blockhouse before anyone could put a hand on him.
“Wait up!” Watts shouted at Carnegie as the two men now beat feet toward the sally port, where their ranger comrades gathered outside and now looked up to see that the entire cell block roof burned out of control.
Several of the Black Stone Rangers began pulling wooden picnic tables and benches into a circle, turning them on their sides and stacking the material to form a makeshift fortress.
Donald T. Wilson helped some of the rangers take the table where he had hidden to the growing pile of outdoor furniture. He fell into line behind the crew, as if he, too, would go back and grab another set of benches and table, but he peeled off at the last moment and jogged to the cell block and fell in with another gang. This new gaggle seemed at a loss of what to do next. They mostly looked up at the roof and watched the fire destroy their last shelter. Some of the men took a seat on the ground or lay down, so the sergeant joined them.
Where he squatted, he could see the sally port and Sergeant Mike Iron-Balls Turner’s metal two-pedestal desk. It stood untouched in the open booth, and Celestine Anderson sat in the swivel chair by it with his feet cocked on top. No one had found the Model 870 Remington twelve-gauge folding-stock shotgun loaded with ought-two man-killers that Iron Balls had hidden in the back of the desk, stuffed between the steel rear panel and the two columns of side drawers.
“Pull everything out from both sides and the shotgun will fall to the floor. It’s got seven ought-two rounds loaded in it, so if you have to use it, make them count,” Turner had whispered to Sergeant Wilson as they approached the blockhouse when the prisoner led them to freedom and saved Lance Corporal Fletcher’s and Lance Corporal Brookman’s lives. Iron Balls had made a special point of letting the friendly inmate know about the shotgun, because he worried that if the wrong man got his hands on the weapon the blame would eventually fall back in his lap. Lieutenant Colonel Webster and Lieutenant Schuller had specifically forbade guards from carrying any firearms within the interior confines of the brig.
When the medical corpsmen took away Fletch and Bad John, both Nathan Todd and Mike Turner gave Donald Wilson a hug. Todd tried to remain in the blockhouse, but Colonel Webster ordered him to sick bay with the others.
“Good luck,” Iron Balls had said, and gave the man another hug and whispered in his ear while he embraced him. “You’re going back in, aren’t you. That’s why I told you about the shotgun. I hope you can get your hands on it before those crazy sons of bitches in there find it. Maybe you won’t have to use it, but it’ll damned sure be good to have if you do need it.”
In some respects, Don Wilson had wished he didn’t know about the deadly weapon hidden only inches from the most unstable prisoner on the loose. Just knowing that the shotgun lay in the back of the drawers and could easily fall to the floor put his stomach in a full twist.
Sitting with his head down, resting it on his wrists with his arms wrapped around his knees, the sergeant tried to discreetly look inside the cell block entrance. He had remained behind, after sending out all the nonviolent inmates, so he could retrieve the shotgun and help his fellow sergeant and new friend, Michael Fryer, escape the rangers, along with the deputy warden and the gunny.
Inside the cell block he could hear shouting, and he raised his head trying to get a better look.
“How come these motherfuckers ain’t dead?” Celestine Anderson bellowed when he saw Mau Mau Harris and the Snowman bringing Gunner Holden, Gunny MacMillan, Michael Fryer, and James Elmore toward the sally port. “They suppose to get cooked in that cell upstairs!”
As the group made their way outside the burning building, Brian Pitts looked at Anderson and smiled.
“So you didn’t send anybody to kill us, huh?” Snowman said, touting the Ax Man. “You lying sack of shit!”
“Fuck you!” Anderson screamed and charged after Pitts.
Calmly, in a fluid motion, the Snowman turned toward his assailant, parried off the Ax Man’s roundhouse right swing with his left forearm, thrust his knee into Anderson’s groin, and slammed his right elbow into the attacker’s throat. Pitts held nothing back, and let the full force of his movement carry through with his blows. The counterattack took the man off his feet and sent him to the ground, where he crumpled in a heap, moaning.
“Damn, bro!” Harris exclaimed and laughed. “I don’t know why I worry about that nigger wasting your lily ass when you the baddest motherfucker I seen lately. Where you learn that shit?”
“Robbie’s Pool Hall on the south side of Kansas City, bro,” Pitts said, taking James Elmore by the arm and leading him toward the pile of benches and tables. Gunner Holden, Gunny MacMillan, and Sergeant Fryer followed close behind, with Harris now covering their rear with the baseball bat in his hands.
Once they had escorted their hostages to the picnic table fortress, Mau Mau turned and raised both his empty hand and the fist wrapped around the handle of the bat, waving them over his head.
“We gonna have court, motherfuckers!” Harris shouted to his congregation, and laughed between each of his announcements. “The gunner and Gunny Mac, they gonna observe. My man, the Snowman, he gonna be judge. The honorable Judge Pitts, presiding! Now, ain’t that the pitts?”
Mau Mau laughed hard at his little joke and then added, “I’m gonna be the prosecutor, and when the Ax Man catch his breath and swallow his sore balls back down out of his throat, he gonna be the defense lawyer for these two ratbag traitor motherfuckers we got on trial here.”
When Mau Mau pointed at Michael Fryer and James Elmore, the entire gathering of forty-four Black Stone Rangers, including the Chu Lai Hippie and Kevin Watts, who had returned to ranger ranks from the blockhouse, cheered. Don Wilson stood, too, and raised his fist like the others, but kept his voice quiet.
ALL OF THE inmates who took advantage of the opportunity to leave the riot and surrender themselves peacefully to the guards at the blockhouse back door now ate a hot breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, apple sauce, orange juice, and coffee. Instead of having more food trucked from the Da Nang Air Base dining facility, Lieutenant Colonel Webster arranged for a detachment from First Force Service Regiment to put together a field kitchen at the temporary prison compound across the road from the brig and cook breakfast there. The light morning breeze carried the smell of the food into the recreation yard and wafted where Mau Mau Harris and his rabble now shouted and jeered behind the haphazard fortress of piled-up picnic tables and wooden benches they had built since they could no longer take shelter inside the burning cell block. The provost marshal theorized that the smell of scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee on the morning breeze might help to hasten the unruly mob to give up their stand.
Staff Sergeant Orlando Abduleses had just sat down with his plate of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, and had put a metal spoon in his cup of coffee when he saw a GMC M880 pickup truck with the canvas top taken off the wooden ribs above its cargo bed and what looked like twenty or thirty lumpy duffel bags piled in it.
“Special Services has finally come through!” Lieutenant Colonel Webster said, sitting across the folding table from Abdul and several other prison guards.
“What’s in the bags, sir?” Abduleses asked, while shoving a piece of toast in his mouth, followed by a spoonful of eggs.
“All the baseball and softball gear that wing and division had in Da Nang,” Webster said, smiling.
“We going to play baseball?” Abdul said with a laugh, and looked at the other guards eating at the table with him and the provost marshal.
“Bats,” Webster said, and winked at Abduleses. “I got the idea watching that asshole Harris swaggering around with the one that Gunny MacMillan kept in control. Along with bases, balls, and mitts, each of those bags from Special Services has half a dozen bats inside.”
Abdul the Butcher smiled at his cohorts as Major Jack Hembee came to the table and pointed at the truckload of baseball gear. “I see that the chief of staff worked his magic, and it looks like they brought every sack of equipment in the barn,” the major said with a big grin. “My alpha has one of our reinforced rifle platoons headed over here now. Between your guard company and my guys, we should be able to field at least a hundred batters.”
“We count about fifty bad guys left inside, so with a two-to-one edge, I think that those inmates who might consider resisting will think again when each of them sees two Marines apiece with baseball bats in their hands,” Webster said, smiling confidently.
“BEFORE WE HANG this guilty motherfucker!” James Harris shouted, laughing toward his jury that included Samuel Martin, Clarence Jones, Kevin Watts, and the Chu Lai Hippie along with eight other Black Stone Rangers, handpicked by the Ax Man and Mau Mau together. “We got to have ourselves a fair trial decided by this lyin’ dog’s peers. Now, you jurors that we selected, you the most lyin’ dogs we know!”
All the rangers gathered with their backs toward the burning cell block and laughed at Mau Mau Harris’s comedic routine. Then Celestine Anderson stood up and kicked over the bench where he sat next to James Elmore, tumbling the hapless bum to the ground.
“First of all, Mau Mau, I ain’t no good at this defense lawyer bullshit, mainly because I not only want to kill this motherfucker, but that one, too,” Ax Man said, and pointed at Michael Fryer. “Why don’t you let me be prosecutor, and you defend these two shitbags.”
“Okay, motherfucker, if that make you happy, then you prosecute and I’ll defend,” Harris crowed, strutting to the overturned defense bench where James Elmore sat in the dirt, crying.
Brian Pitts had taken a seat on a picnic table he had set upright as the judge’s platform. He had a yard-long, two-inch-by-four-inch-thick table leg that someone had broken from one of the piled-up picnic sets, and rapped it across the wooden planks where he sat, calling the court to order.
“How does your client plead?” he asked Harris and laughed, waiting for the ridiculous answer he knew he would get from Mau Mau.
“Before I plead this motherfucker guilty as charged, we need to tell the court what this waste of breath done to deserve havin’ his head cut off!” Harris proclaimed, and then laughed at Elmore. “This stupid piece of shit ratted out everybody he ever knew. He stole money from your honor, and got his self busted! To wit!”
Harris laughed at himself, reciting the legal jargon.
“To wit, motherfucker!” Mau Mau said again, and laughed. “Tryin’ to get his slimy ass off the hook with C-I-fucking-D, he ratted out his main man and his only living friend, namely me, and his honor, the Snowman.”