Rolling Thunder

As he drew closer to the meadow, James spotted a few dozen sheep grazing in the tall grass fifty yards to his right, watched over by a young boy and a large black sheepdog. He tugged at his shroud lines, trying to veer as far away from them as possible. The boy had already spotted him, however, and soon the dog had turned and begun charging through the grass toward him, barking loudly.

“Beat it, Lassie,” James muttered under his breath as he prepared to touch down. “You’re blowing our cover.”

The dog continued to yelp, but the moment James hit the ground, it stopped in its tracks, apparently intimidated by the size of James’s quickly collapsing chute. James tumbled expertly and was already unhitching the chute harness when he rose to his feet. He jerked at the lines and hissed at the dog, sending it chasing after Hawkins and Encizo.

Once he’d gathered up the chute and bunched it into a ball, James stuffed it beneath a nearby bush, then strode quickly toward the young shepherd, putting a finger to his lips. The boy, no more than eleven years old, took a tentative step back. A black beret was cocked at an angle on his head, and his hands were clenched around an old Steyr SBS Forester rifle. The weapon was nearly as big as he was, but James had the sense that the boy knew how to fire it.

James had learned to speak Spanish while growing up in a Chicano neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, but he knew that the boy most likely spoke Basque, a language as dissimilar from Spanish as it was from English. Still, he needed to say something to calm the boy. The last thing he wanted to do was to have to draw on him.

“¡Hola!” he called out softly, holding his hands out at his sides. Continuing in Spanish, he said, “Don’t be afraid. We come as friends.”

The boy’s expression remained unchanged and he continued to aim the rifle at James. Finally he spoke, not in Spanish or Euskara, but in English.

“Why should I believe you?”

James was momentarily taken aback. By now Hawkins and Encizo had landed and were headed toward him, the sheepdog barking at their heels. The boy took another step back, fanning his rifle back and forth to keep all three men covered.

“He doesn’t trust us,” James told the others out of the side of his mouth.

“I gathered that much.” Encizo stopped alongside James and sized the boy up, then offered a disarming smile. “Your papa taught you well,” he said. “Atzerri otserri, eh?”

It was the boy’s turn to be surprised. He kept his rifle aimed at the men but slowly lowered the barrel as he called out to his dog. The dog fell silent and scampered to the boy’s side, then sat on its haunches, tongue trailing from its mouth as it caught its breath.

“Where the hell did you learn how to speak Basque?” Hawkins asked Encizo.

“There was a Basque janitor at my high school,” Encizo said. “We got to know each other with all the time I spent in detention. I picked up a few phrases.”

“What was the one you just ran by him?”

“‘The alien’s land is a land of wolves,’” Encizo said.

“Well, tell him the wolves he ought to be worried about are gonna be here any second.”

Encizo turned his attention back to the boy, who’d clearly been listening to the conversation.

“What other wolves?” he asked. “BLM?”

Encizo nodded. “Yes,” he explained. “There are perhaps two dozen of them, and they’re armed. You need to get out of the way and take cover while we—”

Encizo’s voice was drowned out by the thundering echo of a single gunshot. A split second later, the sheepdog howled and toppled onto its side briefly. As it tried to get back on its feet, blood began to glisten on its fur where it’d been shot. The boy stared down at the dog and was crying out its name when another shot ripped its way through the nearby grass a few feet to his right.

James instinctively lunged forward and pulled the boy to the ground as he cried out to the others, “Ready or not, here they come….”

PEERING OVER the boy’s shoulder, James stared past the scattering flock of frightened sheep. More than a dozen BLM gunmen, all wearing trademark red berets, had appeared at the edge of the meadow. Four of them walked carefully alongside a slow-moving ATV, each holding a rifle in one hand while they used the other to steady the vehicle’s cargo, a large, rectangular wooden crate loosely tethered in place by shock cords. Given the crate’s dimensions, James could understand why AMI suspected it might well contain the missing warheads.

THE OTHER SEPARATIST fighters had fanned out and were scrambling up into the nearby foothills, which were strewed with rocks and boulders. The terrain provided ideal cover; in fact, it was the same area where Phoenix Force had planned to take up position in hopes of pinning down the BLM forces once they reached the meadow. Now, unfortunately, the Basques had beat them to the higher ground, and it was Phoenix Force that had been placed at the disadvantage.

The gunner who’d fired the first shot was crouched on a low promontory thirty yards up the mountainside. He was lining up James in his sights, but before he could get off another shot, James hurriedly brought his M-14 into play and fired an autoburst across the meadow, driving the man to cover.

As he scanned the foothills for another target, James noticed, for the first time, a small stone hut concealed in the shade of two large chestnut trees less than fifty yards from where the BLM was swarming. A split-rail fence encircled the hut, and a rusting metal water trough sat near the pen’s open gate. Just beyond the corral’s perimeter, a crude knee-high wall of stacked boulders had been erected behind the house to act as a barrier against rockslides from the mountain.

“Is that where you’re staying?” James whispered to the boy.

The boy nodded fearfully. James ducked as another shot whistled past, then asked the boy, “Is anyone inside?”

“My papa,” the boy replied. Tears began to well in his eyes. “He’s sick. I was tending the sheep so that he could sleep.”

James looked over his shoulder and quickly passed the information along to Encizo and Hawkins, who’d both taken cover behind a cluster of boulders rising up through the grass a few yards behind him.

“I’ll try to get to him,” Hawkins replied. He fired his carbine into the foothills, then split away from Encizo, rolling down into a shallow ditch. Once he’d crawled back up to where he could see the enemy, he called back to James.

“I don’t know, Cal. They’re a hell of a lot closer to the hut than we are. Getting there ahead of them’s gonna be tough.”

“We need to try.” James turned to Encizo. “Give them a grenade or two but stay clear of that crate they’re hauling.”

“Sure thing.”

Encizo leaned back as a spray of gunfire chipped the boulders he was crouched behind, then countered with a round from his M-14 before turning his attention to the carbine’s submounted grenade launcher. James, meanwhile, huddled close to the boy, whose gaze was still fixed on the sheepdog, which now lay still in the grass.

“I’m sorry,” he told the boy, “but there’s nothing we can do for him now. You need to get down in the gully with my friend, okay? Crawl all the way and keep your head down. I’m going to check on your father.”

The boy sobbed faintly and wiped back a tear, then grabbed his rifle and followed James’s instructions. As small as he was, he still presented a target for the enemy, and bullets began to slant down toward him from the foothills.

“Hurry!” Hawkins called out to the boy as he rose and fired back at the enemy. One of his rounds found its mark and a would-be sniper sprawled forward, dropping his rifle. His beret snagged on the lower branches of a nearby shrub and came off as the man hit the ground and rolled a few yards before coming to a rest. Hawkins didn’t waste any time admiring his handiwork. He reached out and grabbed the boy’s right arm, helping him into the ditch.

“Stay low, amigo,” Hawkins told him.

The youth was still crying, but his expression had turned from fear to anger. He crawled lower into the ditch, but stayed put only for a moment. Once Hawkins had turned his attention back to the gunmen in the hills, the boy rose to crouch and raised his rifle into firing position. He quickly took aim and fired off a single shot.

“Hey!” Hawkins cried out. “I told you to stay down!”

The boy ignored Hawkins and fired off another shot. Hawkins look toward the foothills and saw, to his amazement, that the boy had connected with both shots, dropping two men who’d been making their way toward the stone hut.

“I’ll be damned,” Hawkins murmured under his breath.

He turned to grudgingly compliment the boy’s shooting, but the youth had broken into a run, bent over as he followed the ditch’s meandering course toward the distant hut. Enemy gunfire slammed into the earth around him, but he refused to stop, much less turn back.

“That kid’s trying to get himself killed!” Hawkins called out to James. But James didn’t hear him; he was already on the move himself, zigzagging through the grass, sidestepping several of the startled sheep.

Behind him, as promised, Encizo covered James’s advance by firing the first of his 40 mm grenades. He’d followed James’s warning and aimed away from the ATV, targeting instead a group of gunmen firing from positions among the heaviest concentration of boulders in the foothills. The strategy paid off. The grenade’s initial blast quickly took out one gunman, and two others were brought down soon after by a combination of shrapnel and flying rock.

“Way to go, Rafe,” Hawkins called out to him.

“We’ve still got our work cut out for us,” James shouted back. As he readied another grenade, he glanced back at the trailhead by which the terrorists had entered the meadow. The driver of the ATV shut off the engine and joined the men who’d been escorting the wooden crate. All five of them huddled on the far side of the vehicle, using it for cover. A stand of chestnut trees blocked their view of James and the young shepherd, so they directed their fire at Hawkins and Encizo.

James put on a burst of speed and was about to catch up with the boy when spotted two guerrillas scaling the retaining wall behind the stone hut. They boy saw them, too, and he cried out in horror as they circled the hut and disappeared behind the structure.

“Papa!”