“When will they give them their ammunition?” Good Star asked, ruthlessly practical.
“When the aircraft take off, not before,” Tom said.
“But first, we have a little problem,” Adrienne put in, and pointed. Tiny boxy shapes at this distance; the glasses showed him the angular welded contours of light armor.
The Nyo-Ilcha chief grunted as she handed him the binoculars; he’d picked up on how to use them very quickly.
“Three of them. Killing Turtles. We know them—you Deathwalkers send them against us when you make reprisals. Bad medicine.”
Tom wasn’t quite sure if that last phrase was a joke, or not: Good Star seemed to have a keen ear for what the local white men expected of Indians, and an ability to play off it. Tom was sure that the sight of the armored cars made the Nyo-Ilcha chieftain uneasy. Tom didn’t blame him; none of the weapons his people had would make much impression on even thin steel plate, and armored cars were a lot faster than a horse.
Hmmm, he thought, distracted for a fractional instant. Of course, you could make a Molotov from alcohol and tallow, or lure one into a canyon, or put a lot of musket charges together into a satchel charge and throw it underneath. Determined men always had some chance, even against superior weapons. But that’s all we-regret-to-inform-you and posthumous Medal of Honor stuff.
“Two Cheetahs and a Catamount,” Adrienne went on to Tom. “Two light armored cars with twin Browning fifties, or one and a grenade launcher. And a six-wheel heavy with a Bofors gun in the turret and a coaxial MG. Probably manned by Colletta household troops—there to keep the mercenaries in line until they get on the transports.”
“But available for other purposes,” Tom said.
Like massacring our Indian allies here. That wouldn’t cause Adrienne any grief, I think, but I’m a bit more squeamish. Besides… hmmm…
Good Star’s men were skilled and tough and brave, deadly dangerous killers in their own warrior’s life of skirmish and ambush. His own brief experience with their Akaka cousins had vastly increased his respect for the Indian fighters of FirstSide history, who’d broken tribes like this with nothing better than single-shot rifles. But the Nyo-Ilcha war band weren’t disciplined soldiers, and they had a well-founded dread of armored vehicles and aircraft and automatic weapons. They weren’t going to do a kamikaze for the sake of the House of Rolfe, that was for sure, even if Good Star told them to. Which he wouldn’t.
He’d worked with… indigenous forces, was the polite phrase… before, during the war back FirstSide. The trick was to use their strengths, and avoid situations where their weaknesses were important. You couldn’t ask them to do too much.
“We’ll have to take out the armor ourselves,” he said. “And those guard towers will be a problem. If we can do that, and Good Star’s men can get stuck into the mercenaries before they’re issued a combat load, we can do this.”
Tully looked at him, a glimpse of movement in the dark. Have you been watching too many of my old movies, Kemosabe? went unspoken between them. Adrienne sighed; he could read that, too.
And I would so have liked to do that marriage and children thing. Or another thought as pessimistic.
In fact, he suspected that the only person on the ridge who wasn’t thinking something like that was Sandra, and that would be because she didn’t have enough experience at this sort of situation to judge the risks properly. He felt bad about her, in an odd way worse than he did about Adrienne. He was worried about Adri, but he also had a lot of confidence in her ability to take care of herself, and she was a professional whose trade involved deadly force, if not on this massive scale. Sandra was just a nice, brave kid who liked horses. He wished intensely that Henry Villers was available, but the head wound had left him with loss of balance and peripheral vision that would probably last for months, if not forever.
He turned his head to Good Star. “The only advantage we have is that all the enemy’s armed troops will be guarding the mercenaries. That’s where they expect trouble.”
Simmons snorted. “I’m surprised they can get their Russian cadre to get on the planes when the men are armed,” he said. “After the way they’ve been treating them.”
“They’ll be in the air, then,” Adrienne pointed out. “And the Zapotecs’ only hope of ever getting home will be to win and fulfill their king’s contract with the Collettas and Batyushkovs. If they did that and got home, they’d be the next thing to kings themselves, or at least rich nobles. His elite strike force. Their time in hell’s about over—they just have to get through a battle, and I don’t think getting killed in a fight is something any of them desperately dread.”
Tom nodded; from what One Ocelot said, they were all veterans—and of a school where combat meant facing edged metal at arm’s length.
She turned to him. “Tom, you’re the field man here. What’s your advice?”
“OK,” Tom said easily. “Here’s what I think we should do.”
She listened, nodding now and then. Tom wished he hadn’t been aware of Tully’s eyes going wide with horror as he laid out the plan.
“These are—” Tom stopped and looked at the Nyo-Ilcha warriors as Good Star translated his instructions. “Like gunpowder. Only much stronger.”
He held up a one-pound brick of the plastic explosive. Semtex had the consistency of stiff bread dough, and it was about as safe; it could be rolled, pinched or pushed into any shape you wanted. You could set small pieces of it on fire with a match, and it burned very hot—but didn’t explode. Ditto hitting it with a hammer. Bury a detonator in it, and it went off like TNT, only better. One version or another was used by every army on FirstSide for demolition and engineering work, and terrorists loved it because it was cheap and hard to detect.
“Take each one and plant it against the legs of the wooden towers. Where the beams come together—in the crutch of the beams. Do that very quickly—you must not stop between here and there. The men in the towers will be looking inward, toward their own soldiers, but you must be quick and very quiet.”
He demonstrated with his arms how he wanted the charges placed; if you crammed it into a joint, one charge should be ample to sheer twelve-inch beams and the steel bolts that held them together.
“Then leave them there. We can set them off. You just pull back, and when the towers fall, attack. That will be no later than—”
He gave the time to Good Star; the chief said something in his own language, and all the shadowed heads followed his arm as he pointed to a star, named it, and drew his finger down to the horizon. Not as accurate as a watch, but Tom would be willing to bet that it would work within five minutes or so.
“Everyone understand?” Tom finished.
Oh, Jesus, help us, he thought, as the half-seen ranks of faces nodded eagerly, scars and tattoos and animal-skin headdresses, braided hair and massed stink. On second thought, maybe Old Scratch would be more helpful.
They filed off into the darkness; there was a dull jingle of harness padded with scraps of leather and cloth, a surprisingly muted drum of hooves, fading as they split into small parties and rode east through the canyon mouth and into the valley plain. The ones with the explosive would dismount and crawl in like leopards when they got closer. There was no use in worrying about it, and sneaking around in the dark with hostile intent was something well within the nomad warriors’ area of expertise. Now they could only wait.