Vegas Vengeance Read online

  “And he showed you the source?”

  Once again, the Iraqi hesitated. His eyes searched James Hawker’s face to see if he might attempt a lie. It didn’t take him long to decide. “Yes, Stratton took me there. A shallow valley where they had built a gambling complex and a house of prostitution. I thought it rather funny that the Americans had built their businesses on property that could produce more money for them in a month than their gambling casinos could produce in two years. My … my country, as you may know, is absolutely desperate for a reliable source of pitchblende. It is for that reason we founded this mining operation—to look for such a source. We have looked with only minor success for the entire five years of our existence. And then to have a stranger walk in from nowhere with a truly spectacular find—”

  “So you murdered him. You murdered Jason Stratton and then tried to force the owners of the Five-Cs complex to sell. You hired American killers to do your dirty work so you would not be connected in any way.”

  The Iraqi dropped to his knees, his hands clasped as if in prayer. “You must understand that it was his life against the lives of thousands! Millions, even! My country has the same right to nuclear capabilities as the major powers! Allah has instructed our supreme leader in these matters. We must take our rightful place in this world; we must fulfill our destiny! But Stratton would not listen. He did not believe in us or trust us—”

  “I wouldn’t trust you goat suckers with a firecracker,” Hawker snapped. A cold fury had built in him as he listened to the Iraqi beg. He backhanded Hamadan across the face, a blow that sent the Iraqi sliding across the floor with such velocity that he knocked the nightstand over. The telephone fell on top of him, and the Iraqi’s eyes widened in slow realization. There were two red buttons on the phone, and the Iraqi punched both of them rapidly.

  Outside, Hawker heard the wild wail of a siren. Hamadan had hit some kind of emergency alarm. Hawker turned to the front door and peered out the window. Soldiers were pouring out of the dormitories, dressing themselves as they ran. They were collecting around a small Israeli-built JL-14 armored riot car. The riot car had a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on a turret, and the machine gun vectored toward Hamadan’s quarters as the driver started the engine.

  A noise behind him brought Hawker’s head swinging around. Hamadan was on his feet. Somewhere he had found a gun. A tiny automatic. Found it in the drawer of the overturned table, perhaps.

  The automatic popped loudly, and Hawker felt a dull stinging sensation in his left shoulder. He raised the Smith & Wesson .44 magnum and squeezed the trigger in rapid fire.

  The Iraqi’s face sprayed flesh as the right side of his head disappeared, the impact tumbling him backward onto the bed.

  “Bad choice of weapons, asshole,” Hawker hissed at the corpse.

  Outside, they had heard the shots.

  The roar of the armor-plated riot car was growing near.

  Favoring his left side, Hawker unstrapped the M-72 free-flight missile launcher. He snapped off the protective caps at either end, then pulled out the inner tube and locked it into position. He flipped up the plastic reticle sights before sliding in the two-pound HEAT missile with its M-18 warhead.

  When he was ready, Hawker kicked open the door and stood ready to take the Iraqis with him into the dark and bottomless abyss of death.

  eighteen

  Hawker pressed the trigger button.

  There was a microsecond delay, then the HEAT missile whooshed in a serpentine trail of flame toward the armored riot car.

  Fifteen or twenty Iraqi soldiers marched in disorder behind the small tank. They didn’t even have time to react.

  Traveling at 145 meters a second, the rocket blew the riot car high into the air through sheer impact. The explosion was deafening: a gas ball of orange flame ballooned into the darkness, illuminating the grisly spectacle of dead or dying soldiers on the ground.

  Hawker dropped the disposable launcher on the floor, picked up the Colt Commando and sprinted outside.

  The entire left side of his body ached now, and his black cotton sweater was soaked with blood. But there was no time to stop and take inventory. He knew the chaos wouldn’t last long. If he was to escape, this was the time. And if he couldn’t—then he would hit the electronic detonator in his pocket and take most of “Iraqi” Mining and Assay with him.

  Forgetting that he shouldn’t head straight for the hidden Jaguar, Hawker ran toward the section of fence where he had entered. In the knapsack was a TH3 incendiary grenade with which he planned to blow open the electrified fence.

  But as he ran, the guards in the towers spotted him and opened up with their fifty-caliber machine guns. Dirt plumed up in front of him. Hawker skidded to a halt and dove behind an aluminum toolshed.

  The fifty-caliber slugs tore through it as easily as if it were a beer can.

  Hawker got to his feet and sprinted into the darkness. As he neared Hamadan’s cottage, three soldiers jumped out in front of him. Holding the Colt Commando in one hand, Hawker pressed the trigger on full automatic. The soldiers crumpled and were catapulted into the air.

  Behind him, the guards again opened up with their fifty-calibers. Hawker dove behind the hut just as the slugs began stripping off the aluminum siding. The vigilante took a moment to punch out the spent clip and slide a fresh one into the Commando. As he did, he drew out the incendiary grenade and forced it into his left hand—which now served as little more than a claw.

  Ahead of him were the three railroad cars. They were open-bed cars, built to haul ore. Hawker took a deep breath, then ran just as hard as he could toward them. The fifty-caliber slugs clanked off the steel bed in front of him as his left foot found the switchman’s bullard on the side of the car and he threw himself up into the empty car.

  Hawker landed harder than he’d expected. It sent a nauseating wave of pain through his left shoulder.

  Outside, he could hear voices shouting and heavy footsteps as the soldiers descended on his position.

  From the towers, guards sprayed the railroad car so that Hawker could not stand and return fire. The heavy slugs made a deafening clatter as they ricocheted off the thick metal of the car.

  It was then James Hawker realized there was no escape for him. This would be his tomb: a ruststained coffin built to haul earth, not flesh.

  But he wasn’t about to go without taking a few more with him.

  Groggily Hawker sat up. The guards were closer now. He could hear their excited Arabic just outside as they decided who would be the first to risk climbing onto the car.

  Hawker reached into his pocket and pulled out the electronic detonator. It was the size of a pocket computer, but with a telescoping antenna and two toggle switches.

  Then he took the TH3 incendiary grenade from his left hand, pulled the pin with his teeth and lobbed the canister over the wall of the railroad car.

  The grenade, armed with 750 grams of thermate, exploded with a searing flash of streaming white smoke rays. The thermate burned at more than two thousand degrees centigrade, and Hawker could feel the withering heat through the steel walls. The screams were hideous—but gratifying.

  The grenade had bought him time.

  Hawker pulled himself to his feet. The pain was agonizing, but he managed to point the detonator’s antenna over the side of the railroad car, then flip both toggle switches.

  It was like the end of the world.

  The explosion of the chemical tanks threw a brilliant volcanic plume a thousand feet into the air as the ore processing plant and the laboratory thumped and screamed with scarlet flames in a series of smaller explosions.

  The railroad car shook violently as if in an earthquake. Weak as he was, the earth’s rumbling knocked Hawker off his feet, and he fell heavily on his back.

  And still the railroad car vibrated and shook.

  It took Hawker a long moment to realize that the car continued to shake because it was moving. Knocked free by the explosion, the car was rollin
g down the grade, picking up momentum. There was a grinding crash as it burst through the chain link fence. Hawker felt a slight shock. On generator power, apparently, the fence was no longer lethal. The car continued to roll, gaining speed.

  Hawker settled back, too weary even to stand and see what lay ahead—or what followed.

  He concentrated only on breathing deeply, gathering his remaining strength. Overhead, he could see tree limbs flashing past. They were dark and reassuring beneath the blaze of Nevada stars.

  Even though it was really only five or six minutes, it seemed as if he traveled for a long time. Soon the car began to slow; then it stopped, then rolled backward for a short distance.

  Hawker forced himself to get to his feet. He peered over the walls of the ore car. The railroad track was a shadowy path, empty in the distance.

  The Iraqis had not followed.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Climbing out was not easy. Hawker got one leg over the edge but lost his balance when his right hand slipped and gave way. He fell in a heap onto the rocky base of the railroad bed.

  He knew that inevitably the Iraqis would come for him.

  He knew he had to move, had to use his precious last reserve of strength to get away.

  So he crawled.

  He crawled on his hands and knees into the mountain woods; crawled through the cool brush and the scent of earth musk, over rocks and stumps; crawled for a very long way until he could crawl no more.

  Then he collapsed beneath a rock ledge, curled up in a fetal position, the Smith & Wesson .44 clasped in his right hand.

  Hawker awoke just before sunrise. A pearly fog had settled on the mountainside, so it took him a moment to realize that a person stood over him, watching him.

  He brought the .44 up to fire. But the revolver was gone. Someone had taken it.

  He struggled to get to his feet, but his left arm refused to move.

  Then the figure drew closer and touched his face gently. It was a woman. She wore a shirt and baggy jeans in the chilly morning air, and her blond hair hung down over her shoulders.

  “James, James,” she said softly, “you’ll be all right now. You’re badly hurt, but you’re going to live.”

  It seemed as if the words were coming to him down a long tunnel, and it took what seemed a long time to place the voice.

  It was the free spirit from Spring Mountain.

  “Wendy?” Hawker croaked in a voice that did not sound like his own. “But how in the hell did you find me? How did you know where to look?”

  She kissed him tenderly on the hand. “You called for me, James. All night, you called. I heard you in my dreams.”

  nineteen

  Three weeks later, James Hawker returned to Las Vegas for the first time since his assault on the Iraqis.

  Wendy Nierson and the rest of the Spring Mountain Family had nursed him back to health. They had reacted happily to his demand that they not take him to a hospital or notify the police.

  The Spring Mountain Family had little respect for either.

  But they did agree to call Kevin Smith and tell him where he was and that he would be all right.

  So he lived with them, ate with them and became so used to their nudity that after the first week, Hawker also removed his clothes so he could limp around the camp without drawing undue attention.

  At first, it was a strange feeling. But he soon grew to like it. Almost as much as he came to like Wendy Nierson.

  Wendy was like no other woman Hawker had ever been with. Unlike most of the hippies he’d known back in the sixties, she was a true free spirit. She was tender and sentimental and full of enthusiasm and wild interests. Whenever Hawker asked for more details on how she had “heard him calling in her dreams,” she only smiled mysteriously and changed the subject.

  On the tenth night of his stay with the Spring Mountain Family, they became lovers. And he was gladdened to find that while Wendy Nierson might be a laid-back pacifist by day, she was an absolute tigress by night. After their first coupling, she told him firmly that she knew he would ultimately leave her; knew he was not a one-woman man; and, because she knew all these things, that he should feel no guilt when the day for his leaving came.

  The woman could be such an enigma with her sly smiles and her gift for extrasensory perception that Hawker had, in those first days, wondered if she might be the mystery woman who had come to him that night in the Doll House.

  The logistics troubled him. For one thing, how could she have made it through the tight security of the Doll House? But his suspicions were all laid to rest their first night in bed together.

  Wendy Nierson was mysterious. But she was not the mystery woman. In bed, she was completely different from that unknown woman with the odd musk perfume.

  It was a strange three weeks, living with the Spring Mountain Family. But a good three weeks. It was an alternative life-style that Hawker would have scoffed at in earlier times. So he was surprised at how attractive he found it. Home-grown food. Honest talk. Discussion about subjects Hawker had barely considered before.

  The Spring Mountain Family, of course, had no televisions or radios, so Hawker was honestly touched when Wendy one day surprised him by appearing in camp with an armful of Las Vegas newspapers. It was through them that he anxiously traced the follow-up stories on the Iraqi mining camp.

  According to the papers, the Iraqis had plotted to mine their own uranium and ship it out of the country to Iraq, where a nuclear reactor was already under construction.

  Somehow, according to the newspaper, an American vigilante group had found out. They attacked and destroyed the camp. According to the few Iraqi survivors, it was a vigilante army of twenty or thirty Americans.

  News of the battle brought in the FBI, and now the whole incident was under investigation. Proving to be of great help to the FBI’s investigation were the alien group’s records, which had been sent to Washington by an anonymous source, presumably the American vigilante group.

  Nevada Mining and Assay, of course, no longer existed.

  Congressional liberals raised a great hue and cry over such outrageous right wing behavior. They placed a motion before their fellows calling for a public apology to Iraq.

  The motion, of course, passed.

  Hawker thought about all these things as he maneuvered the Jaguar down the mountain road into Las Vegas, then turned up the drive to the Doll House. Barbara Blaine had tried to visit him twice during his stay on the mountain. The first time he was still unconscious and could not see her. The second time he was out hiking with Wendy, so he missed her again.

  So now he came for both a reunion and a farewell. He was going back to Chicago because he didn’t want to be around when the FBI investigation hit full stride.

  Besides, his work in Las Vegas was done.

  Barbara Blaine was in her suite when Hawker arrived. She wore white slacks and a pale orange blouse, and her ebony hair was braided and hung to the middle of her back. When she saw Hawker at the door, she trotted toward him with her arms thrown out.

  “It’s about damn time you came to see me!” She looked up at him with misty eyes, then drew back quickly when she noticed how he winced and favored his left side. “You’re still hurt, James. Maybe you shouldn’t be up!”

  Hawker smiled and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’m fine. Just a little sore. But that’ll be gone soon.”

  “You can stay for a while?”

  “Awhile. I have a plane to catch in the morning.”

  “So we can talk over lunch?”

  “If the lunch comes to us, we can talk all you want.”

  The woman ordered food while Hawker found himself a cold Tuborg in the refrigerator—his first beer since going to the mountain. And then they sat on the patio and Hawker gave her an edited version of what had happened in the Iraqi camp, taking special care to leave out the horror of it; the sounds, the smells, the screams and the acid stink of his own perspiring fear.

  Then it w
as the woman’s turn. She told about reading Jason Stratton’s journal. She described the shock of learning that the Five-Cs was built over a massive deposit of pitchblende. Then she told him about something that surprised even Hawker.

  “They found Jason two days ago,” she said in a small voice.

  “They?”

  “The FBI. It was in the papers. They found him in a mine shaft not far from Nevada Mining and Assay. He was still in his jeep. They had sealed the shaft with rocks. He had been shot.”

  “I’m sorry, Barbara.”

  “Reading his journal … it was like talking to him again. It reminded me of how very valuable he was. And how much I loved him.” She looked up at Hawker suddenly. “I think Jason was my one chance at a normal life, Hawk, a life of husband and kids and a house in the country. Does that seem like a tragic thing to say?”

  “No. But you’re still in mourning, Barbara. Don’t give up on your life yet. You may feel differently a year from now.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe I will, James. But you know something of my past. I don’t meet many men that I find interesting. And that’s why I’ve decided to keep the Doll House as it is. I had to do a little research as I read Jason’s journal. I found out about pitchblende, so I know just how valuable it is. I suppose I could be a millionaire many times over if I chose to have this property mined. But where would my girls go? What would I do?” She smiled at him as her brown eyes filled. “I have a chance to do some real good here; a chance to help women make their own way in the world. And that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do. And, James?”

  “Yes, Barbara?”

  “If you would like to stay here for a while … a few weeks or even longer, I’d be happy to have you. Not as a lover, but as a friend. The girls like you. I like you. It would be a comfort to us all having you around. No one would even have to know. And from the looks of you, a little more time to recuperate wouldn’t hurt.”