Vampire Apocalypse: Fallout (Book 3) (24 page)

And then he would see what he
could do about Von Richelieu.

Chapter 15

Philip Warkowski lined up the
approaching truck in the sights of his Barrett XM-109. The .50
calibre weapon could easily punch through the windscreen, even from
this distance, but he left his finger outside the trigger guard.
There were still a few minutes before the others would be in
place.

They had had to change the plan
to take account of April’s revelations. God, if they had gone ahead
with the original plan those poor prisoners would have been driven
directly into the radiation and died horrible deaths. Not to
mention the fact that they would have had a full platoon of thralls
coming right up behind them undetected. They would have been
sitting ducks.

Now, though, they had had to
adapt the plan and get into their new positions in a very short
timeframe. They had considered putting off the attack, but it might
be over a month before another convoy was put together and they
couldn’t afford to wait that long. Luckily for them, travelling
across country was far faster than travelling on the roads. The
trucks had to travel a very long circular route to get to the main
highway and the truck with the radioactive payload had to travel
slowly. He scanned back toward the plant and could see two more
trucks leaving with thralls and prisoners loaded into the back.
They would catch up and pass the waste transport in fifteen minutes
or so, he estimated.

Harris had decided to hit the
prison transport after it had passed the waste transport and had
travelled on for another two miles past the convoy. This would
leave them within earshot of the nearest town but that couldn’t be
helped. It was still dark and that would help. Dawn wasn’t too far
away though and already a thin line of light, like molten gold
poured between the distant mountains and the horizon, threw a faint
glow over the landscape and chased the shadows across the fields.
They had to split their forces to hit both transports at the same
time so if anything delayed either ambush they could be in trouble
with re-enforcements from Fort Wayne.

They hadn’t planned on rescuing
anyone on this trip as they had such a long way to travel to get
back home, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to move
around undetected, let alone travelling with so many serum junkies.
It would put them all in danger, but Harris had refused to leave
the people behind. There was just too much chance of the radiation
spreading on the wind, and leaving them behind would be a death
sentence.

Warkowski was practical enough
to realise that every war resulted in civilian deaths but he knew
that Harris hadn’t become hardened to that fact as yet. Warkowski
was no leader but he had served under enough commanders and had
been in enough wars to know that Harris would never become the
leader they all needed him to be until he could divorce himself
from the very humanity that gave him his strength.

There was no place for
uncertainty in war, not if you wanted to win. Sometimes sacrifices
had to be made for the greater good, but Warkowski knew that Harris
wasn’t there yet. He wondered briefly if Harris would get to that
point before he died. It was ironic that Harris would have to lose,
or suppress, that which defined him before he could become the
leader they all needed him to be. Warkowski thought briefly of his
wife, Sarah, and his daughter, Jill. Would he ever see them again?
He made a point of telling them everyday that he loved them so
that, one day, if he didn’t come back, they would know how deeply
he cared for them. He hoped that they would find some comfort in
that.

There was no way he could have
let Harris leave the community without going with him, and he knew
that Sarah understood. She might not agree with him, and she had
made her views very clear about that as they had settled into their
new home in the Cave. But she also accepted that her husband would
not be able to live with himself until he had paid in full the debt
he felt he owed Peter Harris. Warkowski did not give his loyalty
easily, but when he did you might as well try to stop a speeding
truck than try to stop him. He smiled wryly as he thought of his
family, and then he checked his watch again.

Ten minutes.

Dust hung heavily in the
stagnant air as the transport continued its approach. From this
distance it looked as though the vehicle wasn’t moving at all. For
a moment its lights even appeared to be hovering higher than was
normal between the road and the horizon. A blizzard of dust
surrounded it, caught in the glare of the lights from the vehicles
behind, and billowed behind like a huge wake marking its passing.
The road’s surface was not used so much anymore and nature had a
way of reclaiming that which had encroached upon her and, already,
Denis Jackson could see that the road was already covered in a
thick layer of dust.

He had thought Harris mad to
attempt to attack both convoys at the same time, especially with
them being so close to the local garrison, but he now realised that
they could have attacked the convoy a few meters outside the
garrison and still not be seen with this amount of dust. Of course,
the cover that the dust would afford them would also lead to its
own set of problems. There could be no co-ordination, no
possibility of reacting to anything that didn’t go to plan. They
would have to operate in total isolation to each other and hope
that everything went like clockwork - which, of course, it
wouldn’t.

Jackson settled himself behind
his cover and checked, yet again, that the explosive charge was
connected to the detonator. Harris had told him that they had
learned over the last two years that radio detonators, lit fuses
and even electronic pulses were all prone to failure at the most
inopportune time and now, almost always, used wired connectors into
a handheld detonator. It did mean that whoever set off the charges
had to be closer than anyone would like, but it also meant that the
charge would go off exactly when they needed it to. It was
Jackson’s turn today and his hands were slick with sweat as he
constantly passed the detonator from hand to hand as the truck and
its cloak of dust slowly approached.

He could just make out the
outline of a much smaller vehicle in front of the transport and a
slightly larger truck just behind, but it was difficult to be sure
in the gloom. Both vehicles were dwarfed by the huge transport
whose headlamps speared through the darkness like a lighthouse and
nearly blinded him when the glare passed over his position. He
imagined the truck’s squat, deadly cargo on the container behind
those lights and, for a moment, it seemed that the truck had taken
on the appearance of a deadly dragon with large, luminous eyes. He
shook his head to clear the image and concentrated again on the
vehicles’ positions. When the convoy had set off from the plant the
truck carrying the thralls had travelled behind the transport, but
the dust had obviously proved too heavy for the truck and they now
travelled out in front.

This suited Jackson as it meant
that he could take out the transport’s protection with one blow, if
he timed it right. He hadn’t believed Harris when he had said that
both guard vehicles would end up in front. He hadn’t even noticed
the dust on the road if he was honest, let alone factored it into
the plan. It was just as well Harris had or their plan would
already have become unworkable. He sighed as he passed the
detonator from hand to hand.

He had worried that with
Steele’s death Harris might struggle. Harris had always had either
Steele or Sherman to sanity-check his plans, and they had made the
tweaks that were necessary to turn a daring, and sometimes quite
dangerous, plan into one which was survivable. Of late, there had
been a few close calls as Harris had struggled to adapt and had
made numerous mistakes. He was finding it hard not to have someone
with experience to walk through the plan with him. The last ambush
had been very close and Jackson had worried that Harris had been
too shaken after their close call to plan something so big so
soon.

The thralls were better trained
than before and they were expecting trouble now. It was no longer a
case of hitting soft targets. The rules had changed and Harris
would have to step up to the plate or they would all die. Jackson
had read somewhere that throughout history battles had been won by
commanders who had stood tall and given clear and confident orders.
Those orders might not always have been the best, tactically, but
their conviction and strength had infused their men with confidence
and that, more often than not, had won the day. Harris’ plans may
not have always been the most strategically sound, but he had
always had an abundance of confidence that had bolstered those he
led. Of late, though, he seemed to have lost some of that
confidence.

Harris had remained far more
aloof than usual on this trip and he had poured over his notes of
the plan incessantly on the way here, as if he himself did not
trust the plan, and this had made everyone else nervous. Denis knew
that Harris was the glue that held them all together; his humanity
and drive had given them all strength in the last two years. The
betrayal of the community and the setbacks of the last few raids
had shaken their confidence though. Added to all of that, the
second convoy was a curve ball no one had expected and Harris’s
plan had had to change drastically to accommodate it.

Jackson had no idea whether this
new plan was a good one or not. It seemed a little desperate to
him, but he really wasn’t qualified to judge. Having said that
though, Harris wasn’t exactly qualified either. To the man’s
credit, though, at least he was prepared to stand up and put a plan
together. None of the others, himself included, were prepared to
come up with anything remotely resembling a strategy.

One thing that had given Jackson
hope was that Harris had taken the new development in his stride
and had laid out the changes to the plan confidently. Having to
plan under pressure did not allow Harris the time to second guess
himself, and he could see that Harris himself seemed more animated
than he had been for quite some time. He just hoped that, this
time, things went well. Harris could certainly do with the boost.
And it wouldn’t harm the confidence of those who followed him
either.

The plan worked perfectly, right
up to the point where the first explosion shattered the morning
air. After that it went to shit. Jackson had meant to set the
charges off just as the lead jeep passed so that the blast would
take out both the jeep and the closely following truck at the same
time and leave the transport unprotected. Unfortunately things
hadn’t gone at all to plan. The distance between the two vehicles
had lengthened when the thrall driving the truck had missed a gear
a few minutes before and, rather than shifting down to regain the
lost speed, he had instead pushed his foot further on the
accelerator in too high a gear. The truck shuddered as it struggled
to regain speed and the truck had dropped back.

Once the thrall driver had
fallen back a short distance the dust from the lead jeep had
immediately covered the truck’s windshield and the driver of the
truck had pulled out of the slipstream of the jeep and onto the far
side of the road so that he could see where he was going until he
regained his position behind the jeep in the relatively clear
air.

All Jackson could see of the
convoy was the lead jeep and the mass of dust that followed it. He
couldn’t see any detail of what came behind the jeep but he had
timed their positions when they had been observing the convoy from
his elevated position earlier. He saw the truck shoot past him,
counted to three, and pressed the detonator. The charges had been
set into the road itself and when they blew great chunks of the
road shot up and outwards with the force of the explosion. The jeep
lost its back wheels and the vehicle swerved to the side and
tumbled over, flipping three or four times as metal and flesh tore
and ripped with equal abandon before the gutted wreck finally came
to rest on its side far out on the right side of the scrub
surrounding the road.

The driver of the truck carrying
the thrall guards slammed his foot on the break as soon as he saw
the explosion and pulled the wheel to his left. The tyres struggled
for grip on the dust and locked up as the thrall, panicking with
the unexpected explosion, left his foot hard on the breaks. The
truck was far heavier in the back than the front and the vehicle
skidded with the back end coming forward. The tyres skipped over
the dust as if it was ice and the truck continued out over onto the
grass to the side of the road. Here the tyres bit deeply into the
dry earth and the truck began to lose speed rapidly.

The driver of the transport
hadn’t seen anything of the explosion. He had leaned down to his
feet moments before to relieve the pressure of his combat boots.
They weren’t his boots but his had been filled with vomit this
morning when he had gone to put them on so he had had to borrow
another pair and these were too small. Someone would pay dearly
when he found out who the joker was who had soiled his boots and
his mind was on revenge as he leaned down and tried to keep the
tight laces away from his instep.

He heard an incredibly loud
explosion and snapped his head up, striking it against the side of
the steering wheel in his haste. He howled a curse as he brought
one of his hands to his throbbing head. By the time he had
straightened up to look at what had caused the explosion, the
transport had already shot over the gaping hole torn into the road
by the explosion. The vehicle suddenly slumped down on one side as
the left tyre crunched into the jagged hole. The tyre blew and the
thrall pumped the brakes.