Garthul smiled. That would indeed be good news. Pre-atomic civilizations were always easy to overthrow, whereas some of the post-atomic ones had given them trouble in the past.

At that moment, the captain strolled into the control room. Garthul noticed the captain's chest and genital area were as flushed as his were. Perhaps the captain too had 254.

missed feminine companionship in the fifty years of their sleep.

"Science Officer, what do you have to report on the status of this planet?" he asked.

The science officer snapped to attention, carefully keeping his eyes off the flushed, swollen genitals of the captain.

"It looks well so far, sir," he replied. "The ambient temperature, while a little low for optimum levels, is certainly within our parameters, as is the atmosphere."

While his officer was reporting, the captain bent and peered through one of the telescopic screens at the surface of the planet below. "What are those flashes I see?" he asked, looking up from the screen at the science officer.

"There appears to be a war going on, sir."

"No increase in radiation levels?"

"None."The captain gave a rare smile. "Good. Then we shall send a message back home that we've found a planet that looks suitable for colonization.

That will make the supreme commander very happy, as I'm sure the population pressure is getting stronger by the day."

The science officer snapped off a salute. "I'll ready the subs.p.a.ce probe immediately, sir."

"Garthul," the captain said as he lowered his head to the screen again, "make a circle of this planet. I'd like to see what this misbegotten hunk of rock looks like from all sides."

He grinned out of the side of his mouth. "After all, if it is to be named after me, perhaps I should know what I'm getting as a namesake."

"Yes, sir," Garthul answered, and he began to change the dials on the console.

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"Uh, one thing, sir," the science officer said hesitantly.

"Yes?"

"From what I've seen, almost two thirds of the planet is covered with water and will be totally useless to colonization."

"No matter," the captain replied, his grin fading. "A few thermonuclear charges should take care of that. Within a few kronons, the areas will be as dry as a tri-tonare's tongue."

Both the navigator and the science officer laughed at the slightly off-color joke.

256.

Major Jackson Bean elected to stay with the soldiers guarding the building where Buddy Raines was sleeping. He did send his squad leaders out with the mobile patrols to hara.s.s and bedevil the invading terrorist troops, and hopefully slow them down until help from Ben Raines could arrive.

Willie Running Bear and Samuel Clements couldn't wait to get a chance at the invaders, but Sue Waters hesitated as she left the room. She turned in the doorway, her hand on the jamb, and asked, "You sure you don't want me to stay here with you, Chief?"

Bean shook his head. "Naw, I wouldn't dare try and keep you from sending a few of our visiting friends to see Allah, Sue. Go ahead on, these boys here will keep Buddy and me safe."

Sue gave the Scouts in the room with Bean a somber stare. "They'd better, or they'll have someone a lot worse than those ragheads to worry about!"

She whirled around and ran from the room to join her friends as they rounded up some transportation to carry them out into the desert andaway from the city.

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257.

As Jersey drove out into the desert in the jeep she'd commandeered for her and Coop to use, she saw the lights of the huge convoy of troops and vehicles as it turned from its a.s.sault on the oil fields and headed back toward Tehran.

"Jesus, look at that," she said, loudly enough to be heard over the engine. "There's a lot men who're gonna be awfully p.i.s.sed at the surprises Harley left for them."

Coop smiled as he checked the loads in the magazine of his Heckler and Koch MP-10 machine gun. "Yep, I reckon so," he drawled in a very bad Gary Cooper imitation.

Jersey glanced at him and shook her head. "What? Now you're pretending to be John Wayne?"

"John Wayne?" Coop protested. "Are you deaf? That was Gary Cooper."

"Gary Cooper never played in any war movies," Jersey said, grimacing as the jeep bounced into the air as it ran over a boulder in the middle of the camel track that was supposed to be a road.

"Oh, no?" Coop jeered. "What about Gunga Din?"

Jersey nodded, conceding the point. "Okay, I'll give you that one. Of course, I'm not old enough to remember those old movies you love so much."

"You think it's about time we turned the headlights off, dear, or do you want them to see us coming?" Coop asked, pointing at the line of lights on the main road off to the side that the terrorists were using.

Jersey leaned forward and snapped off the headlights, letting the jeep slow so she wouldn't run too far off their trail in the sudden darkness.

As the jeep slowed to a stop, she looked over at him. "Okay, Gary or Gunga, or whatever you want me to call you . . . what's your pleasure?

Do we sit back and stay 258.

on the edges of the troops and snipe them a few at a time, or do we charge in like the Light Brigade and do a little maximum damage before turning tail and running back out into the night?"

"Well, since our only purpose is to slow them down and confuse the h.e.l.l out of 'em, it won't do much good to kill a few at a time," Coop said, his eyes glued on the enormous amount of men and machines slowly pa.s.sing a couple of kilometers away.

"My thoughts exactly, Coop old boy. You may be a chauvinistic pain in the a.s.s, but we do speak the same language when it comes to wasting enemies," Jersey said as she fiddled with the gearshift.

"Well, thank you, Jersey," Coop replied, his lips curling in a halfsmile. "And even though you are a ball-breaking, dyed-in-the-wool feminist man-hating a.s.shole, there's no one I'd rather be in a firefight with than you."

Jersey laughed. "Thanks, Coop, I think," she said. "But seriously, Coop, I don't hate men . . . just jerks."

As the last of the vehicles in the convoy rolled past, leaving nothing but darkness in their wakes, Coop got up on the backrest of his seat with his feet on the seat itself. He jerked back on the loading lever of his MP-10, clicking a sh.e.l.l into the firing chamber. "Hand me that gym bag on the floor there, will ya?" he said.

Jersey finished getting her Uzi ready and then handed Coop the gym bag.

She'd picked a Mini-Uzi so she could fire it one-handed while steering the jeep with the other hand. That would have been impossible with the MP-10 she preferred for normal combat.

Coop opened the gym bag he'd brought with them and took out four fragmentation grenades. He hung them on his belt by their trigger-levers, settled himself back with 259.

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his MP-10 held in both hands, and looked at Jersey. "Ready to rock and roll?" he asked.

"Let's boogie!" Jersey growled, and she jammed the jeep into gear and popped the clutch.

The rear wheels spun and the rear of the jeep veered around until they were headed toward the road the terrorists were using to approach Tehran.

The rear of the terrorist column was about a hundred yards ahead of them on the road when Jersey got to it and swerved onto the potholed tarmac after them.

She quickly ran through the gears until she was in high, and then she took her Uzi and held it out over the door with her left hand, flicking the safety off with her thumb.

As they drew closer to the last vehicle in line, a deuce-and-a-half with a canvas top that was full of foot soldiers, she and Coop both began to fire, sending a stream of 9mm slugs into the ma.s.s of soldiers in the rear of the truck.

Swerving again at the last moment, she swung off the road and sped past the truck while Coop emptied his magazine into the driver's compartment.

When the driver's head disintegrated into a ma.s.s of bone and hair and brains, the truck veered to the side and overturned. It rolled twice before its gas tank exploded, sending pieces of soldiers and metal and canvas flying through the air.

The next truck in line slowed, and the soldiers inside began to aim their rifles and open fire. The jeep's windshield shattered, a dozen bullet holes in it, as Coop pulled the ring out of one of his grenades with his teeth and pitched it into the back of the truck.Jersey yanked hard on the steering wheel, almost throwing Coop out of his seat as she turned hard to the left.

260.

The grenade went off and blew the canvas top off the truck, and most of the soldiers out onto the road behind the truck. The rear wheels, flattened by the force of the blast, sent out a stream of glowing sparks as the tire rims skidded on the road's surface. The driver of the truck, killed by a piece of shrapnel through the back of his skull, leaned forward on the steering wheel and the truck slowly turned out into the desert away from Jersey and Coop's jeep.

Jersey kept the jeep headed out into the desert at right angles to the road, heading away from the convoy so she and Coop could reload.

Behind them, they could see the lights of several vehicles turning toward them as the terrorists began to give chase.

Coop looked up from fumbling with his spare magazine, and grimaced as Jersey raced blindly into the darkness with her lights still off.

"Jesus," he yelled, "I hope there aren't any trees out here!"

"When's the last time you saw a tree in the desert?" Jersey yelled back at him without taking her eyes off the front of the jeep, even though she couldn't see much past the hood.

The jeep hit a rise in the ground that was invisible in the night, and all four tires left the ground as the jeep became airborne.

Jersey had time to yell, "Oh s.h.i.t!" before the jeep hit the ground again, bouncing and jigging from side to side as she slammed on the brakes. Luckily, the jeep was barely moving when the left front tire exploded and the jeep jerked hard left and overturned, throwing both Jersey and Coop out onto the sand and gravel.

Jersey shook her head and scrambled around on her 261.

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hands and knees until she found her Uzi. She looked around and saw Coop lying on his side with his leg bent under him and his arms bent around his abdomen.

She took a quick look, and saw the vehicles from the convoy a couple of hundred yards away, but headed right for them.

She crawled over to Coop and shook his shoulder. "Coop, Coop, are you okay?" she asked anxiously.

He opened one eye and stared at her as if she were crazy. "Are you kidding?" he asked. "Of course I'm not okay. I was just in a car wreck!"

Jersey laughed, glad to see he hadn't lost his sense of humor. "Well, you'd better get off your a.s.s and on your feet, 'cause we're about to have some company."He craned his neck to the side and saw the headlights of several vehicles headed their way.

"Come on," she urged, pulling on his arm. "Let's get over behind the jeep. At least we'll have some cover."

Coop moaned as he tried to straighten his leg. "A lot of good that'll do us," he groaned, but he managed to get up on hands and knees, and crawled after Jersey back to where their jeep lay on its side, its rear wheels still slowly turning.

As he scrambled behind it, he saw Jersey crawling inside and fumbling with the seats.

"What the h.e.l.l are you doing?" he asked.

"Looking to see if that bag of grenades is still here," she answered.

Coop felt his belt. Only one grenade was still there. He figured the others must've fallen off when he'd been ejected from the jeep.

"I've got one," he called, taking it off his belt and laying it in the sand next to him as he got up on his knees and sighted his MP-10 over the rear part of the jeep.

262.

Suddenly, Jersey was kneeling next to him. "I found the bag," she said, rummaging inside it. "It looks like there's four more grenades in here."

"Good," Coop said, staring at his sights as four pairs of headlights bore down on them. "I'm gonna try and put their lights out with the MP-10. Maybe that'll slow 'em down enough for you to put a grenade in their laps."

"Go for it!" she said, taking a grenade in her right hand and putting her left index finger through the ring.

Coop took dead aim and slowly squeezed the trigger on the MP-10. His first burst took out both headlights on a large HumVee, drawing return fire from the fifty-caliber machine gun in the rear.

Jersey didn't duck as the slugs pinged and screamed off the metal of the jeep. She jerked the pin, laid her arm back, and lobbed the grenade toward the oncoming Hummer.

It missed to the side, but exploded in the air above the HumVee, and killed the driver and machine-gunner in the rear. The pa.s.senger jumped out of the big truck just before it ran full tilt into the jeep.

Jersey and Coop barely managed to get out from behind the jeep before the collision. Somehow, the HumVee didn't flip over, but just ground to a halt up on top of the jeep, its front wheels still spinning.

The other three vehicles behind veered off to the sides and ran by the jeep, their drivers trying to see what had happened.

Jersey wasted no time. She grabbed Coop by the arm and pulled him up into the HumVee. She managed to push the dead driver out of the door andtook his place.

"Coop, see if the fifty's still working," she yelled.

Coop, sensing what she had in mind, climbed in the back seat, ignoring the bleeding body of the gunner. He 263.

263.

felt around the machine gun, and thought everything was in good working order. "I think it's okay," he said. "Let me give it a try."

He aimed the gun off to the side and jerked the trigger once. The gun burped and chattered out fifteen bullets before he could let go.

"She's fine," he hollered. "Now, see if you can get us outta here!"