The rifle was some cheap piece of Walmart crap with a plastic stock, but it had brass in the chamber when I pulled the bolt back for a peek.
I stepped to the left edge of the hangar door and looked around. Jearl was on the runway, about fifty yards from me, pulling a girl about nine or ten years old along by the arm. There were two men in the back of their pickup, and they had rifles pointed at Armanti, who was stepping from his truck with his hands up.
I braced the rifle against the door and shot the man on the right in the bed of the truck. Worked the bolt. The other one was quick as a cat. He spun toward me, leveled his rifle, and fired. Something burned my neck and my shot went wild. I worked the bolt again and got on him, but he was already going down. Armanti had shot him in the back.
Jearl, the guy in the meadow, held the girl against him with his left hand and pointed his rifle toward me with his right. I didn’t figure he could even hit the hangar with that rifle shooting one-handed from the waist. I rested the rifle against the edge of the hangar door again and looked through the scope. Steadied the crosshairs on Jearl’s head and squeezed one off. He went over backward.
I walked out for a look. The bullet had taken his head clean off. Above his neck only his lower jaw remained.
The girl was sobbing. I picked her up and walked back to the hangar. Armanti was standing, pistol in hand, over the guy I had tamed with a wrench. The guy was coming around.
“You want me to finish him?” Armanti asked me.
“Be as bad as you wanna be,” I told him flippantly.
“Who is this kid?” Armanti asked Benny, who was now moaning and writhing in the dirt.
Benny mumbled something, holding his mouth. Armanti kicked him, and he squirmed and moaned louder.
“I asked you a question, Jack,” Armanti said, “and if you don’t tell it to me straight, things could get really iffy for you. Hold your jaw together and answer me! Who is she?”
With a supreme effort, holding his jaw with both hands, Benny said, “Some kid we picked up. Jearl was porkin’ her.”
“Where’s her folks?”
“Jearl killed ’em.”
I didn’t even see it coming. Bang. The pistol in Armanti’s hand went off, and the guy lying in the dirt was instantly dead with a 9-mm bullet through his head.
Armanti Hall holstered his pistol and came over to me, looked at the girl’s face streaked with dirt and tears. “It’s gonna be all right,” he said softly.
“Take her up to the house,” I said, “then come back and help me fuel this plane.”
He carried the child out to his truck, and I got busy tossing bodies into the back of the junky pickup they had arrived in. The corpses had almost stopped oozing blood, but I got some blood and brains on my shirt anyway. I figured the stuff would wash off. The key was still in the ignition of the truck, so I didn’t have to go through their pockets.
My neck burned like fire and I could feel blood trickling down into my shirt. Another fucking scar! Welcome to the revolution.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The CH-47s dropped Colonel Kevin Crislip and his troops of the 10th Special Forces Group at six bridges across the Canadian River in the Texas panhandle, five highway bridges and one railroad bridge. The Canadian was not much of a river, merely a wet, sandy depression in that cap-rock country, but knocking the railroad bridge down would prevent any trains from using the railroad until it was replaced. The destruction of the five highway bridges across the Canadian would severely inconvenience truckers, who would have to go east to the main body of Oklahoma or west to New Mexico to find an alternate route south.
Colonel Crislip thought this whole mission a bad joke, political revenge on the Texas politicians who had embarrassed Barry Soetoro, but General Seuss and his staff had been trading messages with the Pentagon, so here the Green Berets were, blowing up bridges in the panhandle, each demolition team delivered by helicopter. Crislip consoled himself with the thought that these demolition jobs were good training, if nothing else.
Each bridge had one demolition team assigned and it was delivered by a Chinook, which moved safely away from the bridge after off-loading the team, their explosives, and a few guards. Colonel Crislip accompanied the team blowing the bridge north of Borger. He stood in the warm Texas night listening to crickets and inhaling the faint aroma of cow manure drifting on the breeze while the team worked. Crislip sent the guards up the highway on either side of the bridge to stop traffic. There wasn’t much. A semi came from the north fifteen minutes after they arrived and was waved on through. Five minutes later a pickup full of Mexicans who had been drinking came from the direction of Borger. They were going back to the ranch, they said, so the guard waved them across the bridge. They went by Crislip saluting and shouting and laughing. Although the Mexicans could see the helo parked in a nearby pasture, they couldn’t see the soldiers working under the bridge, so they certainly couldn’t warn anyone that the bridge was soon to be destroyed.
The colonel had never actually demolished a real bridge before; he went down the riverbank and stood underneath, looking up, ten feet, with a flashlight to see where his troops put the charges. They seemed to know what to do and how to do it.
They were planting C-4 charges, which the experts at Fort Carson had assured the colonel were quite enough to put the bridge in the sand of the Canadian River, if, the experts said, they were placed properly.
Always the big if, Crislip fumed. So if any bridge remained standing after its charge was detonated, his troops would take the blame. Wonderful!
He climbed back up the bank and was standing beside the highway listening to the crickets and savoring that stockyard smell when a battered old pickup coming from the north was stopped by the guard. Crislip walked over, just in time to hear his soldier tell the driver to turn around and go home. There were two other people in the truck’s cab, Crislip saw, two women.
“Let him across the bridge if he wants to go,” the colonel told the guard as he walked up.
The driver, who looked to be in his fifties and was wearing a ratty ball cap, asked, “Who is the head man here?”
“I am,” Crislip said. “Colonel Kevin Crislip, United States Army.”
“I live just a little west of here, and we saw you people come in on that helicopter after dark and we been watching you. What the hell is going on?”
The dashboard lights let Crislip see the other passengers, one a woman about the driver’s age and the other a teenage girl. “That’s none of your business, sir. What’s your name, anyway?”
“Zeke Lipscomb, buddy. And telling me to mind my own business ain’t the way we do things here in Texas.”
“Mr. Lipscomb, this is army business. Cross the bridge or go home.”
“I’ll cross.” He put the truck in motion, drove it a hundred yards and stopped right in the middle of the bridge. He killed the headlights, parked the truck, and he and the two women got out.
Crislip strode toward them. The guard was going to accompany him, but Crislip growled for him to stay put.
“I told you to drive across,” he said to Mr. Lipscomb, who had a female on each side of him.
“Well, I didn’t. And I ain’t a gonna. We kinda think you soldiers are up to no good, and we’re not going to let you get away with it.”
Crislip sighed.
The older woman, presumably Mrs. Lipscomb, spoke up. “You federal troops got no damn business in Texas, Colonel, and you know it. We done declared ourselves a separate nation.”