“That’s really smart, Coop, except I’m down to my last clip. How about you?”

  Coop checked his pockets. “Half this one and one more. That’s about thirty rounds, plus the eight in my .45.”

  She got serious. “Save the last two rounds, podna. Trust me, we don’t want to be captured by these bastards!”

  He too became serious. “Got ya, Jers.”

  He handed her one of his last two grenades, then turned and jerked the ring out and threw his as far as he could. He heard a frightened shout as the soldiers saw the grenade sailing toward them; then his ears rang with the loudness of the explosion as it blew bits and pieces of two men skyward.

  Jersey slapped him on the shoulder. “Two down, about twenty to go,” she said.

  Coop pushed her down and fired his M-16 from the hip over her shoulder as a soldier rushed at them from the side, screaming cuss words in Spanish.

  He choked on his words as Coop’s burst of slugs tore his throat out and ripped his chest open, sending his body spinning into the river.

  “Looks like the crocs are gonna have Mexican food for lunch,” Coop drawled.

  The bark on the tree they were behind erupted under an onslaught of bullets from several AK-47’s as several men charged through the jungle, firing from the hip and yelling in Spanish.

  Both Coop and Jersey leaned around the tree and opened fire, spraying 9mm slugs into the men. Their bodies stopped and were thrown backward as if they’d been kicked by a mule, their arms flung wide, their shouts drowning in gurgles and screams as their lives were torn from them.

  Jersey glanced at Coop as her M-16 clicked on an empty firing chamber. Her eyes glittered as she slowly drew her K-Bar from its scabbard, and her lips drew back from her teeth in a savage grin. Coop shivered, knowing now what cowboys had faced when confronted by Jersey’s Apache ancestors.

  He jerked his clip out—two slugs left. Switching his firing pin to single-fire, he pulled his Colt .45 out and handed it to Jersey. “Here ya go, Butch. You got seven in the mag and one in the chamber. Use ’em wisely.”

  He peered around the tree, and could see ten to fifteen men slowly advancing on their position through the jungle, spread out so they’d make tough targets. He figured they had about ten minutes to live.

  Suddenly a redheaded giant appeared in the brush behind the advancing soldiers, holding a funny-looking rifle in his arms.

  “Goddamn,” Coop muttered, “it’s Eric the Red.”

  Jersey looked around the tree in time to see the red-haired man grin as he pulled the trigger. A rapid succession of booming explosions came from what they now could see was a shotgun. It bucked and jumped as it fired faster than any shotgun they’d ever heard of, sending 00-buckshot loads spreading through the soldiers, cutting them down like a scythe, shredding them and sending bodies and body parts flying through the air.

  In seconds it was all over, and the giant walked toward them through clouds of cordite and gun smoke as if out of a fog of death.

  “Jersey, Coop,” he yelled. “We’ve come for you.”

  Coop and Jersey stepped out from behind the tree, shaking their heads. “Jesus,” Coop whispered, glancing around at the bodies scattered like cordwood on the jungle floor.

  The giant grinned. “No, actually, it’s Reno. Harley Reno, at your service,” he said, giving a small bow as Ben Raines and the rest of his team came running into the clearing.

  More gunshots could be heard in the distance as Hammer Hammerick took out the sentries left behind to guard the soldiers’ jeeps.

  Coop grabbed Reno’s hand. “Thanks, podna, you saved our bacon back there.”

  Reno shrugged. “That’s what they pay me for.”

  “Can I see that cannon you were using?” Coop asked, reaching for the SPAS assault shotgun. “The sumbitch sounded like a machine gun.”

  “You two okay?” Ben asked as Corrie, Beth, and Anna ran to Jersey and embraced her.

  “What? No hugs for me?” Coop said, looking up from examining the shotgun, a hurt expression on his face.

  Jersey looked at the Mini-Uzis and Beretta pistols the women were carrying and raised her eyebrows. “Hey, nice ordnance,” she said. “New toys?”

  “Yeah,” Anna replied, glancing at Harley Reno as he talked with Hammer Hammerick. “Harley got ’em for us.”

  Jersey noticed the adoring look in Anna’s eyes when she stared at Reno. “Harley, huh?” she asked, a smile curling her lips. “Do I sense more than a professional interest in the red giant?”

  Anna’s face flamed bright red and she stammered, “I . . . I don’t know what you mean.”

  Both Corrie and Beth laughed and nodded. “I’m afraid Harley is causing our girl some sleepless nights,” Corrie said.

  “Is not!” Anna replied, looking away as she blushed even more.

  “Okay, guys,” Ben said. “Tell me what you two have been up to while we’ve been slaving away in the States.”

  As Coop and Jersey filled Ben in on their recent activities, El Gato and his men hung back, keeping watch on the jungle in case more soldiers showed up.

  Twenty-five

  Sam Gentry was at the wheel.

  Billy Bob Collins, Nick Lewis, and Bob Madden sat quietly in the battered Subaru station wagon as they reached the checkpoint outside of Indianapolis, driving empty roads from Tennessee in the dark to carry out their assignment. They were ex-Blackshirts who’d been handpicked by Herb Knoff and General Bradley Stevens, Jr., to carry out what they’d been told was the most important assignment of the war. To kill the men who’d deposed President Osterman and ordered the disbanding of their Blackshirt units.

  It had been difficult to find gasoline in places, but Sam had a crew with him who knew how to find things when they were scarce. Showing a gun often made gas station owners less reluctant to part with their precious stores of fuel, now that the country was in chaos after the bombings and raids by soldiers from the SUSA.

  Gentry slowed when he came to the perimeter fence, a maze of razor wire and electrically charged chain link around what had been called the War Room, a heavily guarded military compound that had once been President Osterman’s underground headquarters before Ben Raines and his Rebels struck, sending Osterman into hiding in Tennessee.

  Armed soldiers came out of the guardhouse. Gentry braked to a halt in the light from a pair of mercury vapor lamps. The rest of the compound was cloaked in darkness.

  “What’s your business?” a uniformed soldier asked, peering into the car window, his eyebrows raising at the sight of their black uniforms.

  Gentry took out his false papers, a good forgery even in bright light. “We’re here to see General Joseph Winter and Mr. Otis Warner. A Code Seven. They’re expecting us.”

  The soldier glanced at his identification, then at the other three passengers. “I thought all the Blackshirt units had been disbanded.”

  Gentry smiled. “Most of ’em have, but we’re on special assignment. That’s what we’re hear to report about.”

  “What’s this Code Seven?”

  “You’re supposed to know about it.”

  “I’ll have to check,” the soldier said. “Can’t let you in without authorization. Stay put while I call down to the command center. I never heard of Code Seven.”

  The guard walked away. Gentry spoke softly over his right shoulder. “This may not work. President Osterman said a Code Seven would get us in.”

  “I say we just kill these sons of bitches,” Bob Madden said, his fist wrapped around a Glock .45 with a silencer, hidden inside his coat. “We can cut the phone lines and bust their radios.”

  “I agree,” Nick Lewis said. “This is bullshit. If we keep sittin’ here, they can kill us real easy.”

  “Five guards,” Gentry observed. “We’ll have to take ’em fast and quiet.”

  “Let’s do it,” Billy Bob Collins said, a strange glint in his eyes. “The way we are now, we’re sittin’ ducks.”

  He jerked a silenced Colt .45 automatic from his belt and opened the door on the Subaru. “I’ve got the electronic passkey Osterman gave us. We kill these sumbitches an’ drive in. Then we kill Warner and Winter and get the hell out of here before they know what hit ’em.”

  Lewis was not waiting for further encouragement. The money President Osterman was paying them to assassinate General Joseph Winter and Otis Warner was enough to be worth taking a few chances, not to mention the opportunity to have their Blackshirt units reinstated. As a hit squad, Sam Gentry’s group had never failed to carry out an assignment.

  “Hey, there!” Lewis shouted to the soldier inside the guard station. “I’ve got somethin’ else I want to show you.”

  The others got out slowly, as though with no real purpose in mind.

  “Stay in the car!” a soldier commanded. “You’ve gotta wait until Sergeant Drake gets clearance for you.”

  Bob Madden walked up to the guard. “Fuck you,” he whispered as he stuck the barrel of his silenced Walther against the soldier’s belly.

  A puffing noise followed. The guard’s eyes bulged as his knees gave way. Blood poured from a huge hole in his back where the shell exited. Pieces of his spinal column jutted through his camouflage shirt.

  Billy Bob Collins fired three whispering bullets into a guard slouched beside the gate.

  The soldier collapsed in a heap beside the chain-link fence and groaned, letting his rifle fall to the damp ground where he sprawled, bleeding.

  Gentry shot the guard in the guardhouse. The other soldiers were killed instantly when Bob Madden turned his gun on the remaining men.

  “Open the gate, Billy Bob,” Gentry said. “Nick, you cut the phone lines and take out that radio. We’ll pull the bodies out of sight and close the gate behind us. That way, it’ll look like it’s supposed to look.”

  Gentry fired his Glock at a soldier still squirming beside the guardhouse. The thump of molten lead entering flesh was muted by the quiet throb of the Subaru’s engine.

  “Let’s go,” Lewis said after he pulled the guard’s body out of sight behind the guard station. Lewis was the last man to climb back into the car when the gate was closed.

  “I cut the phone lines and smashed the radio,” Madden said as Gentry put the car in low gear. “With any luck at all we’ll be out of here in ten minutes.”

  “We gotta kill both of them,” Gentry said, aiming for a bunker a quarter of a mile away where two more guards stood at the top of a stairway leading underground. “And we’ve gotta kill these two guards without any noise.”

  “Give ’em the Code Seven bullshit again,” Billy Bob said from the backseat.

  “Yeah,” Lewis said. “While you’re tellin’ them about Code Seven, I’ll climb out this back door and blow their fuckin’ heads off.”

  Billy Bob chuckled softly. “That’s what a Code Seven really is, Nick. It’s a death sentence, an’ we’re the ones who are here deliverin’ it.”

  “Keep your guns out of sight,” Gentry warned, drawing closer to the underground compound. “Smile the prettiest smiles you’ve got and act natural.”

  Tommy Davis had been expecting trouble for weeks. Rumors that President Osterman was dead couldn’t be verified. He watched the yellow Subaru station wagon approach the entrance to the underground command center where General Joseph Winter and Otis Warner were trying to control a war-torn country.

  “Something smells like shit,” Davis said. “I don’t like the looks of this car. We didn’t get any clearance from the gate, so be ready. I’ll call the front gate to see who these people are, and what they’re doing here.”

  Herbert Faust readied his Uzi, jacking back the loading mechanism. “You give the word, Captain, an’ I’ll blow that little yellow car to bits.”

  Davis keyed the mike on his radio. “Main Gate One. Who is in the yellow station wagon?”

  He got no answer. Davis picked up the telephone connecting the guardhouse with the bunker. “Sergeant Drake?” he asked into the mouthpiece.

  Again, he got no reply.

  “What did Sergeant Drake say?” Faust wanted to know.

  “He didn’t pick up the phone,” Davis replied.

  “These motherfuckers broke through,” Faust snarled, rising above the concrete wall in front of the entrance with his Uzi in both hands. “I’ll kill them.”

  “Wait until we hear their story. The communications lines could be down,” Davis said.

  The Subaru ground to a stop in front of the entrance into the War Room. Four men got out.

  “What are you doing here?” Captain Davis asked, his hand resting on his own Uzi.

  “We’re here to see General Winter and Mr. Warner,” the driver said. “It’s a Code Seven.”

  Faust grunted. The old entry codes were no longer valid. General Winter had changed all the old signals when he took over command of the USA forces after President Osterman was reported killed.

  He rose up and aimed his machine gun at the strangers. “Code Seven has been discontinued,” he said. “Put your hands where I can see them or you’re dead meat.”

  The slender one, the driver, came out with a pistol. It was all the prompting Herbert Faust needed.

  He sprayed the Subaru and the newcomers with a hail of bullets, the hammering of his Uzi ending a quiet around the compound at Indianapolis.

  Two men went down with his first burst of gunfire, blood spattering all over the yellow station wagon as their bodies danced and jigged under the onslaught of the molten lead ripping into them.

  A shot was fired by a man behind the Subaru, his bullet tearing a chunk of meat out of Captain Davis’s shoulder and spinning him half around. Faust directed his fire across the luggage rack of the car, ripping the man’s head off when a string of bullets crossed his throat.

  The last man to go down was killed by Captain Davis with a short burst of automatic-weapons fire fired one-handed, his left arm hanging useless by his side.

  “We got ’em,” Faust said.

  Captain Davis nodded, his face screwed up in pain from the wound in his shoulder. “Make sure they’re all dead,” he growled. “Then go through their pockets and find out who they are . . . who they were. I’ll inform President Warner there’s been an attempt on his life.”

  Twenty-six

  Comandante Perro Loco stood by a window of the hacienda while a radio operator, Sergeant Manuel Ortiz, adjusted the dials on a shortwave set sitting on a desk against a far wall. The dark-haired American prisoner stood by to give the operator instructions for the frequency Ortiz would need to contact President Osterman.

  Manuel looked up when he found a garbled speaker’s voice on the dial. Radio transmissions across most of Central America were subject to weather conditions and the strength of the signal.

  “Someone just said an announcement was forthcoming from the military headquarters of General Ben Raines,” Manuel said. “It is a special broadcast given by General Raines. It is being relayed all over the North American continent. The speech will be translated into Spanish as well as English. Do you want to hear it, comandante?”

  Perro Loco’s jaw jutted unconsciously despite being preoccupied with other matters. He stared blankly out the window while static crackled from the radio’s speaker.

  “Yes. Let’s hear what the mighty general from the colossus to the north has to say.”

  “We have a message from General Raines,” a deep voice announced. “A reading of the Tri-State Manifesto, which the general says will govern policies all across North America from now on. Here is General Raines.”

  A deeper voice began speaking.

  “As advocates and supporters of the Tri-State philosophy, we believe that freedom, like respect, is earned and must be constantly nurtured and protected from those who would take it away. We believe in the right of every law-abiding citizen to protect his or her life, liberty, and personal property by any means at hand, without fear of arrest, criminal prosecution, or lawsuit. The right to bear arms is essential to maintaining true personal freedom.

  “We believe that politicians, theorists, and socialists are the greatest threat to freedom-loving peoples and that their misguided efforts have caused grave injustices in the fields of criminal law, education, and public welfare.

  “Therefore, in respect to criminal law, an effective criminal justice system should be guided by these basic tenets: Our courts must stop pampering criminals.

  “The punishment must fit the crime.

  “Justice must be fair, but also be swift and, if necessary, harsh.

  “There is no perfect society. Only a fair one.

  “Therefore, in respect to education, education is the key to solving problems in any society and the lack of it is the root cause of a country’s decline.

  “An effective system of education must stress hard discipline along with the arts, sciences, fine music, and basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. It must teach fairness and respect. It must teach morals, the dignity of labor, and the value of the family.

  “Therefore in respect to welfare. Welfare—we prefer workfare—is reserved only for the elderly, infirm, and those who need a temporary helping hand.

  “And the welfare system must also instill the concept of honest work for honest pay. Instill the concept that everyone who can work must work, and be forced to work if necessary.

  “It must instill the concept that there is no free lunch and that being productive citizens in a free society is the only honorable path to take.

  “And that racial prejudice and bigotry are intolerable in a free and vital society. No one is worthy of respect simply because of the color of their skin. Respect is earned by actions and by deeds, not by birthright.

  “There are only two types of people on earth . . . decent and indecent. Those who are decent will flourish, and those who are not will perish. No laws laid down by a body of government can make one person like another.

  “A free and just society must be protected at all costs even if it means shedding the blood of its citizens. The willingness of citizens to lay down their lives for the belief in freedom is a cornerstone of true democracy. Without that willingness the structure of society will surely crumble and fall into the ashes of history.