121215.fb2 Blood Lust - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 51

Blood Lust - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 51

"Not a chance," Remo snarled, gunning the engine.

The prince general jumped back. He wasn't accustomed to disobedience. While he was getting used to it, Remo slammed the door.

Turning, the prince general gave out a cry. The trucks started up. They advanced. That is, they went south, driving toward Remo, their fans blowing to beat the band, but doing nothing more to dispel the sandstorm.

Carrying Bazzaz, the helicopter lifted off in the swirl, turning its tail and flying low to the ground. And the truck line roared past Remo.

The dashboard gas sensors raised their screeching to a new level. Remo reached up under the leather and found a nest of wiring. He pulled them loose. The screeching stopped, although a few angry lights still winked.

"That's better," Remo muttered, sliding behind the wheel. He started the APC lumbering forward.

"Abominadad, here I come," he said.

Remo sent the APC bouncing over the dunes and wadis. Visibility soon dropped to zero. The color of the sandstorm slowly changed. It went from dun to a mustard yellow, until it resembled airborne diarrhea.

Holding the wheel steady, Remo relied on his natural sense of direction. He knew, somehow, that he was driving true north, and that was all that concerned him.

He didn't see the oncoming truck until its sand-colored grille emerged from the swirl like a shark with bad teeth.

It was a light truck, Remo realized. It was barreling straight at him, a goggle-eyed driver behind the wheel and canisters spewing the diarrhea-yellow gas mounted atop the cab.

"Screw him," Remo said, holding his course.

The heavy APC slammed into the truck without stopping. The grille caved in, its front tires lifting high. It tried to climb the APC roof, but its rear wheels lost all traction.

It bounced away, upsetting its twenty-foot rear-mounted fan. The cage crumpled when it struck sand. The blades chewed themselves to pieces against the mangled framework.

Remo wrestled the wheel around to get a better look at the truck. It lay on its side, wheels spinning. The fan lay several feet away. From the overturned cab, hissing yellowish billows of vapor spewed angrily. Remo glimpsed a battery of spilled gas cylinders, now no longer bolted to the dented cab roof.

The cab had been split open and a driver sprawled in the sand, holding his throat and gulping like a beached flounder.

His gas mask lay at his elbow, but he was too busy dying to look for it.

"Remind me not to crank down the windows anytime soon," Remo muttered, grateful for the sealed gas-proof vehicle.

In the distance, a line of similar trucks barreled south, as if impelled by their great fans. But the fans were pointed in the direction they traveled, pushing churning billows of gas ahead. Wind resistance pushed it back. The gas went everywhere except where it was supposed to.

"What the hell," Remo said to himself. "Juniper can cool his heels in Mad Ass's dungeon a little longer."

He sent the APC rolling after them.

Remo drew up alongside one, and pulling the wheel to the right, inexorably crowded the truck into the next one in line.

The drivers' peripheral vision was impaired by their gas mask goggles, so the first time they realized they were in trouble was when their spinning wheels rubbed one another.

At the speed they were traveling, that meant instant disaster.

Remo watched the first two trucks collide and spin away, tumbling, throwing off whirling fan blades and rags of gas.

They landed wrapped together in an impossible contortion of metal.

From that point on, it was just a matter of sideswiping each underweight truck with the armored APC until it tipped over or lost control.

After the last truck ate sand, Remo wrestled the APC north once more and played with the steering until his body told him he was attuned to magnetic north. The approximate direction of Abominadad.

He settled down for the ride, one thought uppermost in his mind.

How had Chiun done it all those years? The damn kimono was hotter than hell.

Chapter 31

Major Nasur Hamdoon was tired of shooting Kuranis.

He had been glad to shoot Kuranis during the early heady days of the reclamation of Kuran. Especially when the ungrateful Kuranis resisted being returned to the Iraiti motherland with their puny small arms, stones, and Molotov cocktails. Who did they think they were-Palestinians?

Did they not understand that all Arabs were brothers, and destined to be united? It was very strange. Nasur had expected to be welcomed as a liberator.

So when the liberated Arabs of Kuran turned on him with their pitiful weapons, Nasur indignantly shot them dead in the streets. The surviving Kuranis went underground. They planted bombs. They sniped from rooftops.

And the Iraiti troops under Major Hamdoon's command simply rounded up civilians at random and had them executed by various methods. Sometimes they were simply bled in the streets, their blood collected in glass beakers to be stored as plasma in the unlikely eventuality the Americans summoned up enough courage to attack.

This had been the good old days, Major Hamdoon thought unhappily as evening came to the Kurani desert. There had been many Kuranis to shoot and many excuses to do it.

Not now. Now he lived in his lone T-72 tank-practically the only safe haven in the entire country. In fact, it was virtually the only habitation in Maddas Province, as occupied Kuran was now called.

Perched high in the turret, Major Hamdoon trained his field glasses down the lonely trait-Kuran Friendship Road. It stopped dead only twenty kilometers south of here-the Hamidi Arabs having impolitely declined to pay for extension in the good old days when Irait battled Irug in another war of President Hinsein's creation. But for their stinginess, Major Hamdoon thought morosely, they would have been liberated as well. Major Hamdoon looked forward to their ultimate liberation. As he was based in the inhospitable marshy southern region of Kuran-now Irait's thirteenth province-he had had no opportunity to share in the redistribution of wealth imposed on fat, too-rich Kuran.

For there was nothing worth stealing in southern Kuran.

So Major Hamdoon bided his time and hoped the Americans would finally attack. That would provide the excuse to assimilate the corrupt and lazy Hamidi Arabs. And he would have plenty of U.S. Marines to shoot. Major Hamdoon had grown sick at heart from shooting fellow Arabs-even ones who had the indecency to make themselves prosperous while other Arabs went without.

A throaty engine roar pricked up his ears. It came from the south. He raised his field glasses. An unfamiliar squarish vehicle was coming up the Friendship Road-which was very interesting, since, technically, it went nowhere.

Major Hamdoon squinted through the field glasses, cursing the infernal dark. When the Americans made their inglorious but inevitable tactical mistake, he expected to plunder their night-vision goggles from their dead bodies. He had heard that they cost four thousand dollars each. That was five figures in Iraid dinars.

Moonlight caught and silvered a fast-traveling vehicle coming up the road. Major Hamdoon's heart quickened with anticipation. The vehicle was traveling without lights. It must be the Americans!

Reaching down into the hatch, he touched the turret-turning lever, sending the smoothbore cannon grinding toward the road. His tank lay athwart the road. The vehicle, whatever it was, could not pass.

His hand leapt to the cannon trigger. But on reflection, he held his fire. A 125-millimeter shell would no doubt ruin his expensive night goggles. He would intimidate the Americans into surrendering, instead. But he would not bleed them. Their blood was not good enough to sustain Arab lives.

The vehicle was low and wide and armored, Major Hamdoon saw when he turned on the gimbal-mounted spotlight.

"Halt!" he cried in thick, accented English.

To his pleased surprise, the vehicle obediently coasted to a stop. A door clicked open and a man stepped out. He was tall and lean, walking with an easy confident grace. He wore a long black garment like a Hamidi thobe or a Kurani dishdash.

He was no American, Major Hamdoon thought disappointedly. And he wore no night-seeing goggles.