Chapter Three

Ryan stood looking at the object clinging to the outside of the windshield for only as long as it took to blink an eye, but thought and images torrented through his mind.

The window was a goner; nothing could be done about it. If he had armor-piercing rounds in his mag he could blast the window, punch the bomb away. But that would still open them up to the outside, and in any case he didn't have APs up the spout and by the time he banged a fresh mag in, that limpet would have blown and they'd be holed anyhow.

He wondered for an instant whether Ches, one of the newer drivers, only recruited in the past twelve months and lacking the experience of some of the older guys, had, as soon as the alarm had erupted, stabbed a forefinger at one very special button on his console beneath the war wag's massive wheel — and then he bawled, "Back!"

The Trader plunged past him, Ches and Cohn tumbling after. Ryan's men were already diving for cover. Ryan jumped for the bunk room passage, hit the deck, found himself lying beside Ches.

"The E-button!" he shouted — but the driver's reply was lost in the roar of sound from up front. Flame bloomed, the shock wave sending debris hurtling through the air.

Ryan brushed glass shards off himself as he scrambled to his feet and ran for the front of the cabin.

The screen was out except for thick, jagged ridges of glass poking up through swirling black smoke. The metal surround near where the limpet had been placed was sagging up top, buckled below. Two of the team began spraying foam at the flames, killing them, and Cohn was already at his radio again, throat mike in place, his fingers working switches.

"She's okay. We're still on line, still connected."

Ryan crouched in the dying smoke, squeezing short lead-bursts out into the night and downward, at a high angle, trying to clean off any stickies that might still be hanging to the war wag's snout, although he guessed that whoever was hitting them would almost certainly be back underneath, clinging on, waiting to make the next move.

"Get the gas masks ready, but don't put 'em on."

The smoke was clearing fast, the flames dead. Ches was back at the wheel again, body armor now buckled over his chest. The spotlights still lit up the road ahead, and now Ryan could see what looked like fireflies dancing up in the rocks to each side — snipers homing in on them. Above, O'Mara's MG began stuttering, trying to keep the bastards' heads down.

Ches said calmly, "I've been meaning to tidy up that shelf below the window. It was getting clogged up with all kinds of crap. Those guys did a sweet job."

"You hit the button?"

"Sure I hit the button — and we're still in business. Far as I can tell the worst damage is to the glass and frame."

"That figures."

"Yeah, well you'd better pray it ain't gonna snow, Ryan, because I don't like driving in a blizzard, specially if that blizzard's coming in at me." He glanced around, and Ryan could tell that although the kid had shifted the vehicle into automatic, he was still putting on a show. "Do I clean 'em off now? Fry them out?"

"No. Not yet. Wait."

The E-button. A nifty device dreamed up by J. B. Dix for just such an emergency as this. Plate-metal strips around each war wag, topside and underside, were connected to the powerful generators at the rear but insulated from the rest of the chassis and frame. The E-button was a failsafe. Now all it needed was the tug of a lever and anyone or any thing touching those innocent looking rods got instant heartburn. Not to mention everything-else burn.

But Ryan did not want to blow that one until they had reached a last-ditch situation. It used up far too much power.

He could hear bangs and cracks outside, short rattling bursts of auto-fire, the hammer effect of rounds pounding the exterior. It wasn't exactly a standoff, but he figured their attackers were conferring somewhere, probably in the tunnels below the road. He idly wondered if they were new tunnels or old tunnels, tunnels maybe dug out by the guys who'd built the Stockpiles. They were more likely new ones, excavated for just such ambushes as this. He half turned, snapping his black-gloved fingers.

"C'mon, c'mon!" His voice was laced with urgency.

Two men shoved past him holding a wood frame that enclosed a crisscross of fine steel mesh. They leaned over Ches, ramming it into place over the buckled screen frame, and clipped it.

"Now let 'em try lobbing a gas can in."

Everything was smooth, thought Ryan, relaxing slightly. He checked his watch, noted that there still remained two and a half minutes to go before the booby in Four blew.

"Lint. Hooley. Up top."

The two men who had carried the wire barrier followed him at the run down the cabin. They threaded into the bunk room passage, waited while Ryan slid open a side door into a ladder well. Ryan mounted the ladder fast but silently, checked out the view ports at the top. Nothing. He began flicking at well-oiled bolt levers in the darkness, slicking them back. Then he slid the hatch sideways softly on its specially fixed runners until it would go no farther, and stuck his head out into the cool air.

Far to the east the gray twilight was gradually easing into milky dawn, but here a wash of flame from the now fiercely burning truck was the only light that mattered, casting a lurid glare over the scene, causing shadow dances on the blacktop, highlighting lurking figures among the roadside rocks and boulders.

There was a gap in the convoy. It was now split into two distinct sections fore and aft of the blazing truck. Ryan's war wag had pulled well forward, and Trucks One, Two and Three had followed. Far down the road Ryan could see the snub-nosed bulk of the second war wag, with the rest of the convoy trailing behind it.

Auto-rifle fire rattled, weaving its high-pitched chatter around single-shot cracks and the roar of the flames. Ryan focused his one eye on the roof of Three and saw that it was clear. Either the guys from Four had managed to tumble down through the truck's roof hatch into comparative safety, or they were dead meat on the road. He could see no one on the other trucks, but that didn't mean there weren't stickies clinging to the sides.

He crawled out into the roof gully, which ran the length of the vehicle, front to rear, wide enough for two men to lie side by side and be hidden from view except from above. Another idea of Dix's: it enabled a war wag commander under ground attack to slide men up unseen into sniping positions. On each side of the roof, maybe less than a meter in from the edge, were clamped two long metal rods running the length of the vehicle — on the face of it a stupid piece of construction since it allowed attackers climbing up the sides an easy handhold to enable them to pull themselves on to the roof, where a surprise awaited them.

Ryan crawled to the rear, hearing Hooley follow him. Lint would stay in the ladder well, rifle ready.

He reached the end of the roof and stared down at Truck One below him.

Truck One was a big trailer rig, its rear end converted in a very special, but unobtrusive, way. Truck One always followed the Trader's war wag in convoy: Strict Rule A. Strict Rule B was that it closed up tight to the war wag whenever the convoy stopped anywhere. Real tight. Strict Rule C was that Truck Two always pulled well back from One, giving it plenty of space at the rear.

Just in case...

Ryan grinned a feral grin. The jump from here was an easy one, no more than a couple of steps. And once he'd landed it would not take two seconds before he'd be sliding through the instantly opened hatch above the rig's cab to drop into the interior.

Still smiling, Ryan edged himself over the lip of the gully and began to crawl across the flat roof toward the port side of the vehicle. He wanted to get a better look at the roadside, see if there was much congregating going on below. He had an idea there probably was. He half turned his head to check back on Hooley, but the guy was still in the gully.