Callahan decided to have Freeman killed. He must have decided that since he and his thugs had the guns, they would have no trouble executing the gigantic black man. They probably took him to the same field where they did their officer executions. The moment Freeman decided the odds were right, he killed his would-be executioners.
Freeman never left an attack unavenged. He hiked to Fort Clinton the following day. Knowing that the Army base would be under gang control as well, he presented himself with a winning offer. In exchange for a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, and a ride back to Callahan territory, Freeman offered to cripple the gang holding Fort Washington. How could the gangsters at Fort Clinton refuse? They gave him a stealth jeep and the best sniper rifle they could find.
That night, as he returned to even the score with Callahan, he found me.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Freeman had a stealth jeep, but he did not want to use it. The gangs whose territories bordered the Marine base would have heard the shooting. Anybody within thirty miles would have heard the fuel depot explode. Our attack would have touched off a feeding frenzy in Safe Harbor.
“How long did it take you to get in from the spaceport?” Freeman asked.
“Two days,” I said. “One day to reach town and one day to cross town.”
“Two days,” Freeman repeated.
“We could cross town in less than an hour in that jeep,” I said. “We’d be at the spaceport by sunup.”
Freeman shook his head. The house was dark inside. We were in a basement with only subterranean windows. We could see up and down the street from our ankle-high perspective. The street was dark and still, but we expected marauders to follow soon. Callahan’s troops would come looking for us. So would his enemies.
“How did you come through town?” Freeman asked.
“On foot,” I said.
“Did you cross main roads?”
“Alleys, mostly,” I said. “I hiked through a couple of department stores to avoid being seen.”
“The main roads are broken up,” Freeman said. “We’d end up driving through the neighborhoods.”
“We would be sitting ducks,” I said. “There are gangs everywhere. All it would take is some hotshot with a roadblock and a bazooka.”
Freeman watched me figure this out. Too silent by nature to help me catch up, he was often one step ahead of me. There was a flicker of movement on the street. He rose to his feet and moved toward the window, his massive body forming a black silhouette in the thin light.
Up the street, five men moved slowly toward us. Four of them formed an uneven picket line, with the fifth covering their back. These were, as I said before, thugs, not soldiers.
They walked right up the middle of the street apparently giving no thought to cover. They had torches attached to the barrels of their rifles, and they swept the ground before them with the beams of those torches. They made splendid targets.
“Think those are the scouts or the hunting party?” I asked.
“What difference does it make?” Freeman asked as he raised that sniper rifle and pointed it out the window.
“They’ll be looking for us,” I said. “However many men Callahan had in his gang with whatever weapons they have left, they will be looking for us.”
Freeman nodded. In the waning light, I could just make out the features of his face. “Smashing a crippled gang is easier than smashing a whole one.”
“So do we stay here tonight?” I asked. I could not help wondering when the killing would end.
We could simply hide in the basement and pick off gang members as they approached. Freeman could hold down the fort, but one of us, meaning me, would need to check the street. I pointed this out, then ran up the stairs and slipped out of the house.
It was a silent, balmy night with the first hints of a cooling breeze. The snap and crackle of the fire on the base carried in the air, but it was far away and the big explosions had stopped. It now sounded like a large bonfire. I moved along the edge of the house then crossed twenty feet of grass to crouch behind a hedge. Maybe eighty feet away, the men with their glaring flashlights marched up the street. Their whispering carried so well on the soft breeze that they might just as well have been shouting.
Sprinting to a tree, then crawling behind a hedge, then kneeling beside a garage, I advanced along the street. From where I hid, I could see the dark barrel of Freeman’s rifle poking out from the basement window.
As I watched the white eyes of the torch beams travel up and down the street crossing and tangling and illuminating bushes and lawns, I realized that I was about to do what I was created to do. I was designed for combat and for killing. This would be murder. These men had no chance of saving themselves.
I recounted their flashlight beams. There were five of them.
Freeman and I needed to kill these men so quickly that they would not make a sound. There might be another party of five searching the next street and another five on the street after that. There might be an army of thirty or forty men waiting to hear what happened with these five scouts. I remembered the soldier with the rocket launcher slung over his shoulder. Now, with Freeman hiding in the basement of a house, that rocket launcher was worth a dozen machine guns. Fire a rocket at a bungalow like the one in which Freeman now hid, and no one could possibly survive the attack.
“I’m not sure what we’re going to do about that damn tank,” I heard one of the men say. “Maybe we can take it apart and rebuild it on the other side.”
“What? And carry the parts? That specking thing must weigh one million pounds. Just them treads weigh a ton!”
“What about fuel?” a third man asked. “They got the depot.”
“Shit, there’s more gas,” the first man said. “It’s a big base. There’s got to be more fuel.”
They were so wrapped up in their conversation that they did not even notice when the man in the rear got hit. He had been walking a good twenty paces back from the rest of the group. Freeman picked him off with a shot to the head, and he fell in the deep grass. No one even looked back for him.
Freeman’s next shot was not so skillful. He hit the man in the head, but the man managed to yelp as he died. He staggered forward and dropped his machine gun on the road. It did not fire, but the racket was jarring on this otherwise silent street.
I fired my pistol and hit the two men closest to me. The green beam caused their torsos to burst. The kills were neither silent nor pretty. Both men dropped their guns, causing more racket.
The last man turned and tried to run. Freeman’s silent shot struck him from behind, tearing away two-thirds of his neck. He flopped to the ground as if there was not so much as a rigid bone in his body.
Others would come. If they did not locate us, they might burn the entire neighborhood down.
We needed to put a couple of miles between us and Callahan’s remaining soldiers before daybreak. We started down one street, saw men with lights, and then went down the next street. We zigged and zagged our way through the sleepy officer’s suburb hiding beside houses and sometimes dashing into backyards.
Like the base itself, this housing area was a maze. Roads formed cul de sacs and concentric circles. Tall brick walls separated communities that should not have been divided. Coming to an intersection of two small roads, I heard voices and stopped Freeman. I pointed to a hedge, and we both hid behind it. Seconds later, a parade of forty or fifty men walked by. These men carried rifles and pistols. They were not dressed in fatigues but in a variety of civilian clothes.
These men did not speak. They meandered ahead. They did not use flashlights or bright lights that would give themselves away. Hiding a mere five feet from these ghostly soldiers, I watched them pass then turned to Freeman. “Those aren’t Callahan’s,” I said.