His helicopter had barely touched down when he leaped out and ran to the nearest house. He found his men inside, puzzled, clumsily knocking over antique furniture as they searched for victims who were not there.
“Search the cellar!” Helmut commanded. One of his men opened a door to a dark basement, and tossed a grenade down the stairs. The house reverberated, windows shattered, and when the debris settled, one of the soldiers ventured into the cellar and returned to report, “Nothing but stored things down there. Canned tomatoes, peaches, ail kinds of stuff, blown to smithereens.”
Helmut Went out to the street. Up and down its length, the story was the same: his men could find no one.
A lieutenant rushed up to him. “They’re hiding, sir,” he reported nervously. “What shall we do?”
“Find them,” Helmut said coldly. Then, after a moment’s thought, he added, “Burn one house on each street.”
He watched with little satisfaction as his men rushed to obey his order. Within minutes, four houses were ablaze and smoke rose high above the town.
Helmut received a radio message from one of his patrol helicopters.
“Major? Are you there?” The sound of heavy static and machine-gun fire almost overpowered the radio operator.
“Yes, what is it?”
“We’ve found them. They’ve fired on us.”
“Where?”
“In the gram silos, south of the town.”
“Let’s go,” Helmut shouted, and leaped into his helicopter to lead the attack.
Amanda became aware of the gunfire at the same moment that Jackie left Justin’s room and ran downstairs to ask what was happening.
“I don’t know,” Amanda admitted.
“Don’t you care?” her daughter asked.
Amanda shut her eyes. “Maybe I’d rather not know,” she said. It was true. She knew that Devin was out there, starting his revolution, risking his life, pursuing his mad or noble destiny, and she did not want to imagine what his fate might be.
Someone knocked on the door. After a moment, Amanda opened it, and found two members of their defense force detail there, with a young woman whose face was somehow familiar. “She says she’s supposed to be here, Mrs. Bradford,” one of the soldiers said.
Amanda stared at the woman in confusion. “I’m Kimberly Ballard,” the newcomer said. “Devin sent me.”
“Let her in,” Amanda said, and Kimberly stepped inside, looking terribly weary.
“How is he?” Amanda asked. “Devin?”
“I don’t know,” Kimberly said. “We were up all night, getting ready for the… the attack. He wouldn’t let me go with them. He told me to come here. I almost got caught; it’s terrible in town.”
“You must be tired,” Amanda said. “You can have my room.”
Then Jackie, who had silently watched this exchange, pointed toward the window. “What’s that?” she cried.
They looked out the window and saw the smoke rising above the town, less than a mile away. “My God, Mom, it’s like a war,” Jackie cried. “What if they come here?”
The three of them went onto the porch for a better view, and the young defense force lieutenant who was in charge of their protection rushed up to them. “Please, ladies, stay inside,” he said.
“What’s happening?” Amanda asked.
“It looks like the SSU is attacking the town,” the soldier said.
“That can’t be,” Amanda said. “I talked to my husband last night. Colonel Denisov gave orders for the SSU to stay on its base.”
The lieutenant gazed again at the four pillars of smoke rising over the town. “Ma’am, it looks like those orders have been disobeyed,” he said.
“They won’t bother us, will they?” Jackie demanded.
The lieutenant looked at Jackie with a quiet resolve on his face. “I hope not, miss. Now, if you’ll all please come inside.”
When the women had returned indoors, the lieutenant ran to the communications truck parked in the driveway. Soon he had the force’s Chicago headquarters on the line. “We’re under attack,” he shouted. “Repeat, under attack. SSU forces are in full assault on the town of Milford. We need help!”
As Gurtman’s finely honed troops raced toward the silos south of Milford, a ragtag band of nearly a hundred townspeople and Exiles finally began its attack on the SSU base to the north of town.
Two ancient Caterpillar bulldozers, borrowed from a nearby construction site, emerged from a ravine and went rumbling toward the fence surrounding the base, drawing heavy fire from the twenty-odd soldiers who had been left behind to guard the barracks. As the defenders fired furiously at the bulldozers, a hundred men, townspeople and Exiles, scattered around the perimeter of the barracks, attacking the fence with explosives. By the time the first bulldozer crashed through the fence, a dozen explosions had shattered its perimeter and the invaders were pouring into the compound, firing as they came.
The outnumbered SSU troops fought back with then-superior firepower. Devin, Jeffrey, Clayton, and Alan were soon pinned down behind a burning truck. Devin and Jeffrey fired back with M-16s; Alan carried only a doctor’s black bag.
“Haven’t got a grenade in there, do you?” Devin yelled.
“Scalpel, just in case things really get tough.”
“Where the hell did Alethea say the damn communications center was?” Clayton asked.
“We got separated from her,” Jeffrey said. “I think she said it’s in that middle barracks, across from Gurtman’s apartment.”
Devin stuck his head up, then hit the dirt as another burst of automatic-weapons fire raked the truck. “It’s times like these that make me wonder whether it would’ve been easier to put a message in a bottle and float it down the Missouri,” Devin said, deadpan.
The towering grain silos stood like sentinels on the outskirts of Milford, monuments to the county’s more prosperous past. The concrete loading pads, grain cars, and storage silos that surrounded them formed a natural fortress.
Helmut, high above them, nodded with approval. It was a good place for the townspeople to make their stand; resistance always made the game more interesting, the victory more sweet. He nodded for one of his attack helicopters to go in for a closer look. It dropped within a hundred feet of the nearest silo, when suddenly a barrage of small-arms fire blazed from one of the grain cars. The helicopter shuddered, struggled for an instant, then crashed and exploded into a mighty bail of flame.
“Pull back,” Helmut commanded. “Wait for our ground forces.”
Ten minutes passed before his tanks and attack vehicles could traverse the narrow road that led from the town south to the silos, but Helmut waited patiently, savoring the battle to come.
His tranquility, however, was shattered by another radio message, an emergency broadcast from his base.
“We are under attack,” it said. “Outnumbered…
Helmut gasped, then bellowed out the order for everyone to return to the barracks.
Chapter 17
As soon as Peter got the call from Fred Sittman he raced up the stairs to the helicopter pad atop the Federal Building. Within minutes, Sittman himself arrived, piloting an old U.S. Army chopper, and Peter scrambled aboard. Four old transport helicopters hovered nearby, packed with armed guardsmen.
“Our equipment’s no match for theirs—but I bet our boys are,” Sittman declared.
“Dammit, Fred, what the hell’s that madman Gurtman up to?”
“I dunno. He’s not answering our messages. But according to my boys at your house, he’s flat-out declared war on the town of Milford.”