That was how Callahan became so powerful. Who or what could possibly stand up to that tank? All of the jets on Bolivar Air Base would surely have been destroyed, not that a jet could necessarily destroy a tank like this. Whoever took over Fort Clinton Army base might have similar tanks.
I pulled out the binoculars and took a closer look at the situation. These were cheap “bird watcher” quality gear, but they gave me a better view. I could read the markings on the tank as it rolled to within a few feet of that lighted building. I was just lowering the binoculars when an officer stepped out of the building. For an odd moment I thought it might be Colonel Phillips. I brought up the binoculars again.
Jimmy Callahan, wearing one of Bernie Phillips’s colonel uniforms, strutted down the stairs like a made man who owns the future. His arms swinging at his sides and his head held high, he surveyed his troops. He barked orders and strutted around the tank pretending to inspect it. I did not even need these lousy peeps to see the self-satisfied expression on Callahan’s face.
“See any reason why I shouldn’t cap him?” The voice was so low it sounded like a whisper. Ray Freeman knelt beside me. He held a sniper’s rifle in one hand and a rocket launcher in the other.
I pretended to have known he was there all along. “I don’t see the point in it,” I said.
“Looks like we’re going to be stuck on this planet for a long time, Harris,” Freeman said. “And I don’t want Callahan for president.”
He raised the rifle and sighted Callahan. It was a top grade rifle with a built-in silencer. No one more than twenty feet away would hear shots from that gun. Because of our elevated location, no one would spot us.
“So you’re bringing democracy to New Columbia,” I commented.
Freeman, who was about as likely to appreciate ironic humor as he was to learn ballet, merely grunted.
“What about the tank?” I asked.
“You worried about it?” he asked.
“Not especially,” I said. I wasn’t. I was more worried about the jeeps. In this gravity, the tank would rumble along so slowly that a five-year-old could outrun it.
“I didn’t think so.”
“But I’m not worried about Callahan, either,” I said, taking a quick glance at him through the binoculars. I was about to tell Freeman that I had a self-broadcasting ship.
“Me, either,” Freeman interrupted. And with that he pulled the trigger. Two hundred yards below us, a misty red halo formed around Callahan’s head, and he dropped to the ground. While the people below shouted in confusion and scattered, Freeman picked off the four sharpshooters on the top of the building. Let me rephrase that—he picked off the three snipers I had seen, plus the one that I had not noticed.
Two of Callahan’s soldiers ran for a jeep. Freeman picked off the faster man before he reached the vehicle. He shot the second man as he tried to climb into the driver’s seat.
Total chaos broke out below. The men in the machine-gun nests fired into the hills. Only one of the guns fired even near our direction. Freeman shot that gunner first, and then he took out the gunners in the other nests.
“You here to watch or help?” Freeman asked.
“You have things under control,” I said as I picked up the rocket launcher and aimed at the tank. Thinking this rocket would destroy that tank was the only miscalculation Freeman made. A shoulder-mounted rocket like this might damage that LG, but it sure as hell would not stop it.
“Do you know what to shoot?” Freeman asked.
“The tank?”
“Not the tank, the fuel depot.”
Located at the edge of the darkness was the fuel depot that the late Jimmy Callahan used to fill his vehicles. Somehow it had survived the Hinode Fleet’s attack. I aimed the rocket at a fuel tank and fired, triggering a grand explosion that lit up the night. The explosion was deafening.
Hidden up on that hill, I heard it and felt the percussion. The force of the blast shook the ground and the sound thundered in my ears so that the vibrations became intermingled as one in my head. A fireball shot sixty feet into the air. It towered over smaller eruptions as underground tanks, pumps, and piping blew into shrapnel. Flames shot in all directions lighting the area with a golden glow.
The rocket set off a chain reaction, igniting a network of underground fuel tanks that extended below the road. Fuel tank after fuel tank exploded leaving huge craters in the road. Made for use in a low gravity theater, that LG tank could not possibly come out after us.
Callahan’s troops were thugs, not soldiers. They would not regroup as quickly as Marines, but they would regroup. They would send scouts and assassins out to find us soon enough. We did not wait. Once he was sure that the tank and the jeeps could not follow, Freeman turned to leave.
I watched men running around near the flames. The muffled bang of underground explosions, so different from the crackle of gunfire, echoed through the night air. The late Colonel Callahan’s men would not get their LG tank out of that cul de sac anytime soon. They might fill the craters if they became desperate or ambitious enough to mix tons and tons of concrete. That might work. They certainly did not have enough technical know-how to build a bridge over those pits.
Looking back behind me as I left the rise, I saw the tree under which I had hid. I saw the bodies dangling from its lowest boughs like strange black fruit against the orange hue of the fire.
“You didn’t have to kill Callahan,” I said as we crossed the fence and left the base.
“I wanted to,” Freeman said. He led me to a house on the same street as the house I had used.
“My Starliner is self-broadcasting,” I said, sounding even more annoyed than I felt. “We can leave anytime that we want.”
Freeman stiffened and looked back at me. “Self-broadcasting? We’re getting off this rock.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if Callahan was president of the friggin’ Orion Arm,” I said. “He wouldn’t have been able to touch us.”
Freeman thought about this for a moment then grinned. “So killing him was a bonus.”
Ray Freeman did not talk much. When he did speak, he seldom talked about himself. I gleaned some of what had happened from things he said over the next few days and constructed the rest of it in my mind. This is what I think happened when Freeman landed in Safe Harbor.
Freeman came in a few days before me. He arrived before the Hinode Fleet defeated the Earth Fleet and destroyed the Doctrinaire .
Freeman stole a van at the spaceport and drove until he reached that stretch of road that was too destroyed to pass. He left his van and hiked into town and found his way to the Marine base. Like me, Freeman did not believe that the Hinode Fleet could survive a battle with the Doctrinaire . I think he hoped to find Callahan and bring him to Earth for safekeeping.
When he got to Fort Washington, he found men wearing fatigues and armed with M27s gathering bodies. Here Freeman made a rare mistake. He assumed the men with the M27s were Marines. When he asked about their commanding officer, they took him to go see “the colonel.” Freeman did tell me that Callahan referred to himself as “the colonel.”
Alert as he was, Freeman would have noticed that Callahan’s thugs did not carry themselves like real Marines. He would have noticed the casual way they handled their firearms, the way they spoke to each other, and the slow pace at which they worked. Real enlisted men were clones. Unless all of Callahan’s men wore officers’ insignia, Freeman would have noticed that the men around him were not government-issue.
They took Freeman to the building Callahan used as his headquarters. That was a mistake. Freeman quietly surveyed the field, looking for strategic locations and tactical advantages. He had an eye for this. He would have spotted the tree at the top of the rise and known it was the perfect spot for an attack.
By the time Callahan came out to speak, Ray Freeman knew how many snipers Callahan had on the roof and where they were positioned. He knew how many machine-gun nests were along the veranda. He would have seen the LG tank rumbling around the parade grounds, and he would have taken note of the fuel depot as well.