《The Amtrak Wars I : Cloud_Warrior》13

Hartmann leaned towards the mike.  'Push on, Mister Clay.  I want a
secure five hundred yard perimeter around The Lady by midday at the
latest."

'Anvil Two.  Roger.  All groups Wilco.  Out."

Hartmann turned to the Trail Boss.  'Pick forty strong men, Mr
McDonnell."

'I tapped them on the way up here, sir,' said the Trail-Boss.

'Okay."  Hartmann looked towards the tv image of his engineering
exec.

'Put them to work with your damage control party, Stu, and let's get
this train back on the road."

Barber reached up to lower the visor of his helmet.  He looked
distinctly unhappy.  'Are you sure you can't spare any more hands?

Sixty is nowhere near enough.  The more men I have, the sooner -'
Hartmann cut him short.  'Just do the best you can, Stu.

Put everybody on the rear end.  If Coop can take four or six wagons
down river and up onto either bank it'll give us the firepower we need
to cover the spadework."

'On my way,' said Barber.

I-Iartmann broke the connection with the external monitor screen that
Barber was watching and swung back to the Trail Boss.  'Drive 'em hard,
Mr McDonnell."

Urged on by Captain Clay, the combat groups on the river banks charged
over the top with their rifles switched to full auto.  Several more men
went down before both elements reached a stretch of undulating ground
that provided some semblance of cover but, as they threw themselves
down, Mute warriors' leapt out of shallow grass-covered holes in the
ground behind them and attacked them with knife-sticks and stone
flails.  The hand-to-hand fighting was short, sharp and bloody.

Several linemen fell to the lightning-fast knife-work of the Bears but
in the end, the firepower and the disciplined cohesion of the Tracker
combat squads triumphed.

The suicidal attacks by small numbers of Mutes on the flank units
continued.  Harried by a constantly retreating enemy, the linemen were
drawn further and further from the river bank.  Captain Clay whose own
small command group had been trying to coordinate the action while
killing its own share of M'Call Bears was slow to realise that the lead
flank elements had overshot the five hundred yard radius perimeter line
ordered by Hartmann.  Thus, when the main force of Mutes hit and
overwhelmed the two eight-man up-river squads and swept down the
winding muddy bed towards The Lady, the bulk of his force was spread
all over the landscape.

Hartmann, and his two field commanders, had not fully appreciated the
danger of an all-out attack from this direction.  The relief they had
felt at having weathered the flash-flood combined with their
unshakeable faith in The Lady's impregnability had caused them to
overlook the fact that, with The Lady lying curved across the riverbed,
only the port-side gun positions of the first five wagons could be
brought to bear on an enemy advancing downstream.  But, of the ten
revolving six-barrelled weapons pointing in the right direction only
three possessed their normal field of fire.  The movement of the other
seven was partially, or totally, blocked by piled-up flood debris which
had also collected round the port-side tv cameras.  The other eleven
wagons lay in a line down-river, close to the steep left-hand bank and
below the level of the ground on either side.  And because of the angle
at which the front five wagons were tilted over, the guns in the
turrets on the wagon roofs could only be depressed to within seven
degrees of the horizontal and were, consequently, useless - as was the
considerable firepower on the unaffected starboard side.

Reacting with commendable swiftness, Moore, the Senior Field Commander,
led the rest of his combat squads down the ramps and attempted to hold
a line up-river of The Lady.  Hartmann called up Clay and told him to
fall back to the river banks where he could support Moore with
enfilading fire, and cut off the Mutes' line of retreat.

Hartmann turned to his execs with an exultant smile.  Once that was
blocked it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

The port-side gunners in the first five wagons swept the river bed as
best they could with continuous fire and managed to cut down several
dozen Mutes.  The merciless hail of bullets failed to stop the
advance.

Dozens more unscathed warriors jumped unhesitatingly over the fallen
bodies and surged forward.  As Colonel Moore's linemen emerged
confidently from under the train and fanned out, firing from the hip,
the running, leaping, screaming wave of M'Call Bears burst upon them
like the flash-flood upon the train..

'Close the ramps?  yelled Hartmann.

The systems engineer responded instantly, sealing the belly of the
train.  In the whole history of TrailBlazer operations no Mutes had
ever succeeded in boarding a wagon train but it still remained a
nightmarish prospect that filled every wagon master with dread.  The
trains, and their sterile, air-conditioned interiors were an extension
of the Federation and, as such, were sacrosanct, inviolate.

Captain Virgil Clay contacted his scattered combat squads on the east
and west banks of the river and told them to fall back towards The
Lady.  The two South Side squads he had sent downstream had been pinned
down by fire from hidden crossbow snipers and had then been badly
mauled in hand-to-hand combat.  Now down to half-strength it had,
nevertheless, achieved a kill-ratio of at least fifteen to one.

Clay called up The Lady and requested additional firepower to be sent
down-river to cover the fall-back.  The North Side had earlier
signalled that they were under heavy attack and had broken off in
mid-transmission.  Clay had tried repeatedly to renew contact but his
radio messages had remained unanswered.

The MCall Bears who had overrun and killed the two eight-man squads
holding the line upstream did not have time to figure out how the
Tracker's 'long sharp iron' worked.  Without Mr Snow's help, it was
unlikely they would have managed it in a week.  To the warriors, the
three~ barrelled air rifles were nothing more than odd-shaped clubs.

The machetes, however, were a real prize.  The belts and scabbards were
quickly stripped from the fallen linemen and clipped around the waists
of their proud new owners - of which Motor-Head was one.

The screaming charge down the debris-littered river bed was accompanied
by the eerie howling noise made by wind-whips.

Perforated strips of wood tied to short sticks which, when whirled at
great speed, emitted a variety of chilling tones; others made harsh,
dry clicking noises like cicadas.

To the raw wet-feet in the combat squads, the first sight of the M'Call
Bears with their bizarrely-clad, striped and spotted malformed bodies
the legacy of generations of mutant genes - was like a vision of
hell.

A gut-shrivelling eruption of primal savagery allied to mindless brute
strength.  A seemingly unstoppable threat to everything the Amtrak
Federation stood for.  The horror was increased, etched deeper upon the
psyche by the sight of the severed heads of their comrades, still
encased in their helmets, bobbing on the end of stakes above the
advancing throng.

There was a fleeting moment when time stood still, when the brain
froze, then the months of rigorous training, the years of
indoctrination from cradle to combat academy came on stream,
transmitting red-alert signals to brain, eye, limb and trigger-finger;
sending adrenalin surging through the system to line the stomach with
steel; flooding the heart with cold, implacable hatred.  What the
linemen saw then were deranged travesties of humankind; the despoilers
of the blue-sky world, whose poisonous presence filled the air with
lingering death.  Nobody faltered.  Nobody flinched.  Wet-foot and
trail-hand gave vent simultaneously to an exultant rebel yell and
charged forward into battle.

Deafened by the buzz of chainsaws and the noisy clatter of a small,
tracked excavator, Barber and the sixty-strong party working under the
rear wagons did not hear the chilling battle sounds made by the
advancing Mutes.  The first warning they had that fighting was about to
engulf The Lady was an over-the-shoulder glimpse of Colonel Moore's
linemen charging down the ramps of the wagons on either side of the
flight section.  The next sign that things weren't going too well was
the reappearance, on the river bank, of Captain Clay and what was left
of his perimeter force.  Clay's squads had been obliged to fall back
over open ground harassed by sporadic fire coming from both front and
rear as Mute crossbow men, positioned behind the main force fired at
them from the cover of the river bed.  Barber kept levering away at the
flood debris clogging the drive motors but, like the rest of his men,
he found it difficult to concentrate when it became apparent that the
four squads which had doubled downstream were covering the retreat of
the force despatched earlier.  His concentration was further diminished
when the driver of the excavator was blown out of his seat by a bolt
that went in under his right armpit and came out between the collarbone
and shoulder blade on the other side.  Barber threw down his crowbar,
grabbed his rifle and took cover behind one of the huge, steel-clad
wheels.

The rest of the damage-control party did likewise.

Buck McDonnell ran under the length of the train to where Barber knelt
and drew his attention to the pitched battle he had just left and which
was raging less than a hundred yards upriver of the lead wagons.  The
Trail Boss pulled the empty magazine from his rifle, threw it aside,
clipped in a new one then checked the reserve air pressure.

The short bayonet fixed under the barrel was smeared with fresh
blood.

'These lump-heads are a bunch of real ballsy guys,' he breathed
hoarsely.

Barber's fingers flexed nervously around his own rifle.  'Is Moore
going to be able to hold them?"

Buck McDonnell replied with a grim smile 'If he doesn't, we may end up
with stiff necks."

This grisly reference to the Mute's habit of carrying the severed heads
of defeated Trackers on stakes wasn't really the kind of thing the
First Engineer wanted to hear.

Looking back downriver, Barber and McDonnell saw Clay's men on either
bank launch a counter-attack against a Mute force that was hidden from
the wagon train by a bend in the river.  They saw the orange flash from
exploding flame-grenades and the rising plumes of black, oily smoke.

Three wounded linemen stumbled back up the muddy river bed towards The
Lady.  One of them sank to his knees and pitched forward face-down in a
shallow pool.  The Trail Boss tapped three men and led them downstream,
covering them while they picked up the prostrate lineman by the arms
and legs and ran him back towards the cover of the train.

As they reached the rear command car, a Mute warrior leapt into view on
the right bank, sighting down his crossbow.  McDonnell, his reflexes
honed by twelve years of overground combat, whirled round and dropped
the Mute with a single triple volley.  When the wounded had been passed
up through an emergency escape hatch into the hands of The Lady's
paramedics, McDonnell rejoined Barber in the shadow one of the huge
wheels.  'I had a feeling when I woke up this morning that it was going
to be one of those days."

Barber was not in a mood to take things so lightly.  'This is murder.

What are we going to do?"

'Well, these guys shouldn't be sitting here on their asses, that's for
sure,' growled the Trail Boss.

'But we can't clear this shit while we're under fire,' protested
Barber.  'It's impossible!"  McDonnell shook his head.  'Not
impossible.

Just difficult.  If we can free this tail end back to the flight
section, we can roll right over these bastards."  He pointed to the
small excavator that had run driverless halfway up the steep slope of
the right-hand bank before stalling and slapped Barber on the back.

'You drive, I'll ride shotgun."

Lieutenant Commander Barber swallowed hard, tightened his grip on his
rifle, and doubled across to the excavator with McDonnell on his
tail.

They climbed aboard, the big Trail Boss bracing himself behind the
driver's seat, rifle at the ready.  Barber brought the excavator's
motor back to life and reversed down the slope.

The tracks churned up the mud as he worked the levers to bring the
machine round to face The Lady.  It took him a couple of minutes to get
his act together then he lowered the shovel and trundled forward to
clear another load of sawn tree sections and boulders.

McDonnell raised his visor as they neared the wagon train and waved
vigorously at the linemen crouching underneath.

'Okay, come on!  Everybody back to work!"  he bellowed.

'Let's put some life in this Lady!"  Responding to their example, the
linemen laid aside their rifles, picked up crowbars, shovels, machetes
and chainsaws and set about clearing the rest of the debris.

Up in the saddle, Hartmann, the wagon master, fought a silent battle to
clear the mental sludge that had clogged his brain since rising at
dawn.  He had no doubt about the ultimate outcome of the battle.  The
Lady would emerge the victor even if she lost most of the linemen now
committed to battle.  She would triumph because the Mutes did not
possess any weapons that could cause her irreparable damage.  The crew
inside merely had to sit tight and ride out the attack with the aid of
the wagon train's own defences.

'Sitting tight', however, did not form part of the TrailBlazer's combat
philosophy.  The most favoured posture was one of aggressive pursuit of
hostiles in which the wagon train acted as a mobile fire-base giving
close support to its linemen on their overground sorties.  Ideally, the
combat squads were used to flush out hostiles from unfavorable terrain,
like beaters putting up game, and for mopping-up operations.

The Southern Mutes he had dealt with hitherto usually avoided pitched
battles and whenever a stand had been made, he had always been able to
bring the fearsome firepower of The Lady to bear.

It was for this reason that Hartmann was unhappy about the jam The Lady
was in.  The wagon master was convinced that the clan now attacking
them possessed a summoner.

The storm had been too swift and, like the cloying mist, too localised
for it to be part of a larger weather pattern.  There was also another
disquieting factor.  The tactical movement of the Mute warriors showed
an unnatural coordination.

From the secret talks he had had with other wagon masters, Hartmann
knew of only one explanation for this: the Lady's attackers were being
controlled by an over-mind - the mark of the highest known grade of
summoner.  If so, he was facing an intelligent and highly dangerous
opponent able to summon up immense and totally unpredictable forces.

It was this last thought that prompted Hartmann to order the Skyhawks
to make the planned attack on the Mute cropfields and forest
hide-out.

The dawn raid, delayed by the weather, would create a diversion that
would sap the morale of the attacking Mutes and might even cause them
to break off the engagement - giving Hartmann's men a much-needed
breathing space in which to right the battered wagon train.  There was
the further possibility that the attack might incinerate the summoner
who was orchestrating the movement of the Mutes and was responsible for
The Lady's present perilous condition.

The klaxon sounded in the two wagons that made up the flight section.

Everybody turned towards the nearest overhead tv monitor.  The head and
shoulders of Baxter, the Flight Operations Officer appeared on the
screen.  'Ryan?"

The senior wingman who was now acting section leader hit the button
which put him on camera.  'Sir!"  'Okay, hear this,' said Baxter.  'We
have a green on the strike planned for this morning.  Prepare to launch
eight aircraft.  You will lead the first group - consisting of
Caulfield, Naylor and Webber - against the forest.  I will lead the
other group and fire the cropfields.  Get Murray to rig and load one of
the spare 'hawks for me."

Murray was the grizzled crew-chief.  He nodded and indicated to Ryan
that it would be no problem.

'I want the first plane off the ramp in fifteen,' concluded Baxter.

'Loud and clear, SIR!"  snapped Ryan.

The flight section erupted into a controlled flurry of activity.

Ground crewmen hurried to ready the aircraft for lifting onto the
flight deck; the crew-chief ordered a detail to prepare a Skyhawk for
Baxter, then called up the rear power car and asked for steam to power
the catapults.  Steve and the other wingmen grabbed their helmets, made
sure the folded maps in the clear pockets on their thighs showed the
correct section of terrain, checked that their holstered air pistol was
secure, that their combat knife was firmly clipped in its scabbard on
the outside of the right calf, and that the zips on the leg and chest
pockets holding their emergency water filter and survival rations were
properly closed.

Ryan called them to attention.  'Okay - Webber, Caulfield, you're
number one and two to go.  I'll follow, with Naylor on my tail."  He
turned to Steve, Gus White and Fazetti.  'Baxter will give you the
line-up.  Meantime, I want you and as many guys as Murray can spare up
in those duckholes ready to pump lead.  This could be tricky."

It was.  Webber and Caulfield were both hit in quick succession as
their Skyhawks sat poised on the catapult ramps.  Oblivious of the
danger from the hidden Mute marksmen, Steve and fellow-graduate Fazetti
leapt up onto the flight deck and aimed repeated volleys of fire up
over the river banks while Murray and three of his ground-crew freed
the two pilots from their safety harnesses and lifted them out of the
cockpit pods.  The seventeen-year-old Webber had been killed
outright.

Caulfield was not so fortunate.  A bolt had entered the side of his
helmet just behind his left eye, driving the barbed point through his
head and out through the matching spot on the other side.

When the crew-chief lifted Caulfield's visor to check if he was still
alive, Steve glimpsed the full horror of what had happened.  The shock
wave generated by the bolt's impact had blown his eyeballs out of their
sockets.  While the battle raged around them, Caulfield sat, silent and
uncomprehending, his grotesquely dislocated face streaked with blood.

It was only when the ground-crewmen attempted to move him that he began
to kick and scream.

Steve helped hold Caulfield down while the crew-chief tied his arms and
legs together then lowered him over the side to Gus White and the three
medics sharing his duckhole.  'Get him to the surgeon-captain,' shouted
Murray.  He returned dragging Webber's limp body.  'And put this one in
a bag."

Undeterred, Ryan climbed into the cockpit of Webber's Skyhawk and
quickly satisfied himself that the controls were undamaged.  Naylor,
the remaining wingman in the first wave tried to restart Caulfield's
plane but failed.  One of the ground-crew found a vital lead that had
been severed by a second bolt.

Naylor jumped out and helped pull the disabled aircraft off the
catapult.  'It's good to know they miss now and then!"  he said, with a
quick, edgy laugh.

Crouched on the deck to Ryan's right, Murray signalled

to him to wind the motor up to full power then swept his arm forward
as the catapult was released.  The Skyhawk soared into the air, climbed
steeply to the right, then rolled on its back at about two hundred feet
and went into a corkscrew dive.  The sickening crunch of Ryan hitting
the ground was obliterated by a muffled boom as his load of napalm
exploded.  Steve and the other people on the flight-deck winced with
horror but watched with morbid fascination as a searing burst of
brilliant orange fire ballooned outwards from the point of impact then
rolled in on itself and lifted to become a mushroom cloud of black
smoke, leaving the mangled carcass of the Skyhawk silhouetted in the
middle of a circle of blazing grass.

Steve made an effort to swallow but his throat was dry.  He was not
squeamish at the sight of blood, or ruptured flesh, and was confident
of his ability to kill when the time came but he could still not get
used to the frightening rapidity with which someone like Ryan, a
living, thinking human being, who had been there talking to him only
moments before, could be transformed into an unrecognisable lump of
charred meat.  Jodi, Booker, Yates, Webber and now Ryan.  He recalled,
with a flash of anger, his sister's words back at Roosevelt Field
'don't start telling me how dangerous it is to be out there fighting
Mutes'.  Roz should be here now, prizing what was left of Ryan out of
the smouldering, twisted cage of struts up there on the river bank.

She would realise that Trail-Blazer expeditions were not the
'cake-walk' she had claimed them to be.

Hartmann, the wagon master, who had seen the slaughter on the flight
deck and Ryan's death dive on the battery of screens in the saddle
quickly decided that to have three wingmen taken out of the air in
under five minutes was an unacceptable loss-rate.  He put himself on
the visicomm system and faced-up with Baxter.  'Put the air strike
on"hold" and call everybody in off the flight deck.  We're going to try
and break up this attack another way.  Stand by to launch two and
two.

You're to stay on the ground.  With the kind of luck we've had so far
today I'm not prepared to risk the whole of my air force."

Baxter, the F.O.O acknowledged the revised orders and halted the lift
taking Naylor's Skyhawk up to the flight-deck.

Naylor, who was already seated in the cockpit, steeled for his turn at
Russian Roulette on the catapult, unstrapped himself and jumped out
with evident relief.  Baxter felt relieved too.  Like all pilots, he
was prepared to face death in the air, on a mission; that was the
constant risk all fliers faced.  But nobody wanted to get himself
killed sitting in a grounded aircraft.  That was about as useless as
tripping over the bathroom mat and drowning with your head jammed down
the john.

Hartmann radioed Colonel Moore and told him to fall back with his men
towards The Lady and form a new defence line beyond the five wagons
jammed across the river bed.

'Anvil One, all groups wilco, out,' said Moore.  He understood
immediately what Hartmann intended to do and hoped like hell that he
would wait until his loyal Field Commander had got clear.

The wagon master then contacted Captain Clay and ordered him to pull
his squads out of the main engagement so that he could reinforce and
hold the downstream line.

Finally Hartmann managed to get Barber in front of one of the external
cameras and told him what was about to happen.  'How's it going?"  he
asked.

Barber sounded exhausted.  'The three tail cars are clear."

'That's not enough, Stu,' snapped Hartmann.  'I asked for six."

'We're doing the best we can,' replied the harassed First Engineer.

'I've got eight dead, another fifteen men wounded and -' Hartmann
interrupted him.  'Stu, I don't need statistics, what I need are
results, okay?  Just do it."

Clay's voice came over the speakers.  'Anvil Two downstream and
holding."

'Roger, Anvil Two,' said Hartmann.  'Just grind them down.  No pursuit,
over."

Clay came back on the air.  'Anvil Two.  Don't worry, Lady Lou.  I
wasn't planning on going anywhere.  Too out of breath."

His words broke the tension in the saddle and brought grins to the
faces of the execs.

'Stand by on one to eight, Mister Ford,' said Hartmann.

The Second Systems Engineer activated a bank of switches on his control
panel and checked the readouts.

'Head on eight."

Hartmann's throat felt constricted.  'Put up the CQ's, please."

The fingers of the VisiCom Tech flickered nimbly over the line of
switches giving Hartmann a comprehensive picture of the underside of
the train and the ground on either side of it.  The wagon master and
his execs could see Moore's combat squads falling back, locked in a
running fight with the hordes of Mutes.  Downstream, under the rear
wagons, the damage control party worked feverishly to clear the
remaining debris.  Hartmann recognised the broad-shouldered figure of
the Trail-Boss perched behind the driving seat of the excavator that
Barber was now handling with confident ease.

'Anvil One moving back under the train."