In any case, he had no time to do more. Leaving the established rendezvous now, he literally ran the more than twenty kilometers back to the supply point.
He arrived no more than three-quarters of an hour later than he had originally planned. The two Militiamen were still there, although their personal gear was packed and ready for their leaving. Puzzlingly, the pile of unopened supplies was also still there; and Hal, sweating and exhausted from the past eight and a half hours of extreme exertion, was left to worry over the possibility that some of Barbage's Militiamen from the pursuit team might appear at any minute to pick them up. If half a dozen more armed men should arrive just when the truck was here to pick up the two on sentry duty, he would be facing an impossible situation.
But there was nothing for him to do but wait; and one of the advantages of waiting was that it gave him a chance to rest before the next demand upon him. He lay on the slope, accordingly, not even bothering to keep an eye on the camp below him, since his ears gave him a clear image of what was going on down there. His only concern now was stifling the urge to cough that, now the excitement and adrenaline of his earlier exertions was over, was threatening to betray his presence to the men below.
In the end it was necessary to use one of the techniques Walter the InTeacher had taught him for emergency control of the body's automatic processes, knowing as he did that he was further draining his strength to do so and putting himself at least partially back into the berserkedness of overdrive. But the exercise effectively silenced the cough for the present; and, after a while, his ear picked up the distant sound of blowers that signalled a truck making its way up the slope of the highway to the supply point.
It was roughly an hour and a half late. He could, if he had known it would be this dilatory, have returned from where he had left the donkeys at no more than a good walking pace. So much for lost opportunities. An hour and a half overdue was almost to be expected in military schedule-keeping; but, he told himself, if he had counted on the truck being late, as surely as this day would end, it would have appeared on time.
The truck came on. The two Militiamen were standing, waiting, out by the side of the road, with their packs and other gear piled behind them. The vehicle was a heavy-framed, military version of the farm trucks the Command had made use of in the Masenvale raids on the fertilizer plant and the metals storage point. It came on, stopped, turned about and backed up to the pile of boxes.
Clearly, it was intended to take back whatever was in the boxes to the supply center. The two Militiamen who had been waiting went back to the boxes themselves, to load. Hal, holding his cone rifle in his right hand and with the flap up on the power pistol holstered on his leg, slipped down until only a small screen of bushes and some four meters of roadside dirt separated him from them. With the back of the truck open now, he could see into the cab. The driver alone was still in the truck, behind its wheel. One other Militiaman had come out of it and was helping the two who had been on duty here to load the boxes.
Hal stepped quietly from the bushes with the cone rifle in his arms.
"Driver, get out here!" he said. "The rest of you - stand still!"
They had not seen him until the sharp snap of his voice brought their heads around. Inside the truck, the driver's head jerked back to look over the top of his seat. His face stared.
"Back through the truck and stand here with the rest of them!" Hal said to him. "Be careful - don't make it look as if you're trying anything."
"I'm not…" the driver almost stammered.
He lifted his arms into view beside his head and worked his way clumsily between the two seats of the cab, then came back through the empty body of the truck to jump down and stand beside the other three. Hal turned his attention to the others. One was an older man. The two who had been on sentry duty were plainly only in their teens. Two pale young faces stared blankly at him with the expressionless terror of children.
"Are you - are you going to shoot us?" one of them asked in a high voice.
"Not yet, anyway," said Hal, "I've got some heavy work for you to do, first."
Chapter Thirty
"Take it between those two large trees there. Slowly," said Hal.
The driver was seated at the vehicle's controls beside him, with the barrel-end of Hal's power pistol touching his ribs. Behind them in the body of the truck, the three other Militiamen sat against one side of it, with their hands in their laps, looking into the small dark circle that was the muzzle of Hal's cone rifle, aimed at them over the back of the seat. Except for the fact that Hal had to keep his attention at once on the route on which he was directing the driver, the driver himself, and the three in the back, the situation was almost comfortable.
"A little farther…" said Hal. "There!"
They emerged into the area holding the donkeys he had not taken to the rendezvous point.
"Over there," he told the driver, and coughed harshly. "That stack covered with tarps. Bring the truck up to it, turn around and open your back doors. We'll be loading."
The driver swung his steering knob and punched keys on his console. The truck's blowers shut off and the vehicle sat down on the ground. Hal herded the driver and others before him out the open rear doors onto the ground beside the pile of explosive materials.
"All right," he said. "All of you - yes, you too, driver - start putting everything from that stack into the truck."
It took the four of them, at gunpoint, only some twenty minutes to load what had taken Hal several hours to unload, pile, and protect from the weather. When it was all in the truck, he set his prisoners to work turning the remaining donkeys loose and shooing them out of the clearing. When the last beast had been chased off, Hal brought the men back to the truck. Leaving them standing on the ground before the open back doors, he climbed back inside alone and went forward to the driver's seat.
Taking the driver's seat, he rested the cone rifle on the back of it, covering them.
"Now," he said, "driver, I want your uniform, including your hat and boots. Take it off."
The driver looked at him grayly. Slowly he began to undress.
"Good," said Hal, when he was done. "Throw them here - all the way to me. That's right. Now, the rest of you, take off your boots and toss them in the back of the truck."
They stared at him.
"Boots," he repeated, moving the rifle sights from left to right across their line. "Off!"
Slowly, they began to remove their boots. When the last piece of footwear had fallen with a thump onto the metal bed of the truck, Hal gestured once more with the cone rifle.
"Back off across the clearing until I tell you to stop," he said.
They backed, lifting unshod feet tenderly high above rocks, sharp twigs and spiny-leaved vegetation.
"That'll do!" Hal called, when they were a good twenty meters from him. "Now, stay there until I leave. After that, you can make your own way back to the road and either wait for help, or go find it."
He keyed the truck to life and lifted it on its blowers.
"You can't just leave us out here, without boots!" the driver called. "You can't - "