Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1) Read online

  Through the pilothouse’s front windshield, Padre Island loomed large.

  Casacampo referred to the crude, hand-drawn map that lay atop the control console. A captured resident of Browns ville had been convinced under torture to set down the major features of the island, including the hardened blaster emplacements, and the position of the harbor and the ville, neither of which could be seen from a southwesterly approach. Based on the map, the smoke had to be coming from the ville. It gave his Matachìn gunners something to aim at.

  The commander picked up a laser range-finder and took aim at the nearest point of land.

  Reading the LED display, he told Dolor, “Another three hundred yards and we’ll be well within range.”

  The commander checked the row of gauges that measured the status of the ship’s electric power, which came from solar panels on the pilothouse roof when the engines were not in use. The batteries were fully charged. He took the cigar out of the corner of his mouth, raised the microphone to his lips and pressed the transmit button on the ship-to-ship radio. “Attention,” he said. “Attention. Xibal Be and White Bone Snake. This is Ek’-Way. Take positions twelve hundred meters from target one. Prepare your mortars.”

  As he released the transmit button, waiting for acknowledgment from the other two tugs, a distant clatter from the shore rolled over them.

  “Machine gun,” Dolor said.

  “I can hear it,” the commander said, popping the stogie back into his mouth and squinting at the island’s southwestern point. “Is it shooting at us? I can’t see where the bullets are landing.”

  He picked up a pair of high-powered binocs from the console and scanned the water ahead. It took a moment for him to find them. The slugs were riffling the surface like a school of tiny bait fish some four hundred yards away. Despite coming up that short on its target, the machine gun continued to fire. Shaking his head, Casacampo passed the binocs over to his captain.

  Roberto peered through the lenses and then laughed out loud. “Pitigallos,” he said, snickering as he lowered the binocs.

  Casacampo spoke into the radio microphone again. “Xibal Be and White Bone Snake, start your engines. Advance to your attack positions at once. Await my command to begin firing.”

  Dolor cranked up the Ek’-Way’s powerful twin diesels, which set the entire ship vibrating.

  Turning the switch on the radio from ship-to-ship to loud-hailer, the commander addressed his crew through speakers mounted fore and aft. “Ship oars,” he said. “Ship oars. Break out the mortars and prepare for firing.”

  Through the pilothouse’s rear bank of windows, past the davited inflatable rafts they used as landing craft, the commander had a clear view of the aft deck. While four of his crew saw to the stowing of the oars, four others unshackled eight slaves and set them to work on the artillery. They broke out two XM252 mortars from the lockers behind the superstructure. It took two slaves to carry each set of separated launch tube, mount and aluminum base plate. And another four to carry the metal crates of stacked HE M374A3 ammunition.

  Casacampo walked around the wheelhouse windows, following as a pair of slaves headed for the bow with their disassembled mortar. There, at the direction of the Matachìn gunner, they fitted the base into one of the steel keyhole fittings inset in the foredeck. Then the mount was secured on the base and the launch tube to the mount.

  A second mortar was positioned amidships on the tug’s port side.

  As the crates of 81 mm HE shells were laid close to hand, Dolor eased back on the throttle and took the engines out of forward gear. He said, “That’s twelve hundred meters, Commander.”

  “Hold us steady.”

  The water was as flat as a pancake, not even a slight rise and fall. The breeze was a constant six knots. Perfect conditions.

  Through the loud-hailer Casacampo said, “Lorenzo, line up your shot!”

  Sighting on the MG post through the mortar’s M53 elbow telescope, the Matachìn gunner took his distance measurement, gauged the speed of the headwind, then quickly adjusted the angle of the launch tube to drop a shell on the target. When he was satisfied, he gave the pilothouse a wave.

  Back on the ship-to-ship, Casacampo said, “Xibal Be, White Bone Snake, are you ready?”

  Both tug captains reported that they were in their designated holding positions and ready to open fire.

  “Fire away,” Casacampo told them. He leaned forward and gave his waiting crewman the hand signal to drop one on the target.

  The bow gunner slid the shell down the pipe, aluminum fins first, ducking to the side and covering his ears as the round whistled away. The tugs a half mile on either side of them fired their mortars, as well. All three rounds flew in high looping arcs toward the beach.

  The commander watched through binocs as the gunpost was bracketed, then vanished in a flare of orange and black. It took a full second for the sounds of the explosions to reach the tug.

  So much for that.

  It was impossible to tell which of the three shells hit the target. Down in the Ek’-Way’s bow, the gunner Lorenzo was thumping his chest, grinning from ear to ear, and nodding like he was the man. The nice shooting wasn’t a surprise to the commander. It wasn’t luck, either. Casacampo’s mortar crews practiced endlessly, firing ship to shore in varying seas and wind conditions.

  “Pull in closer, five hundred meters,” the commander told Dolor. Then he repeated the same order into the radio microphone.

  There was always the remote possibility that the islanders had something with more range and punch—a cannon or recoilless rifle—and they were holding it back for a surprise. If they missed with their first cannon shot, the target tug would be off and running under engine power, making an accurate second shot impossible, this while the other two stationary ships zeroed in on the gun’s location. The Matachìn had practiced that maneuver, too.

  From what he’d seen in Matamoros ville and Browns ville, Casacampo didn’t think much of the Deathlanders’ ability to mount a defense or turn back an attack. The measure of a civilization, in his opinion, was the skill and bravery of its warriors, and the fighters of Deathlands were clearly overmatched. They had no style, no technology. No prowess. No ingenuity. All their glory was in the dead past.

  It amused him that more than a century ago, El Norte had destroyed itself with its own terrible weapons, essentially committing suicide by proxy, and at the same time, by the same means it had managed to release the Lords of Death from five thousand years of limbo, of nonexistence.

  Casacampo returned to the windows overlooking the stern. Some of his Matachìn were sitting on the gun-whales, sharpening their machetes’ gut hooks with files and whetstoning the long edges. Others were in the process of putting on their body armor or setting out the weapons and ammunition for the coming assault.

  As the other two tugs approached the second firing positions, their complements of Matachìn marines were doing the same thing.

  Casacampo had a total of sixty seasoned fighters under his command. Thanks to the intercession of the Lords of Death, that was more than enough for the task at hand. The Lords’ invisible weapons were their duendes, their enanos, dwarves and goblins who took the terrible sickness with them wherever they went. An invincible strategy. It lowered the odds to insure victory, weakening the opposition to the point where it could easily be subdued by a small Matachìn landing party and the survivors then enslaved. A certain percentage of those stricken by the Xibalban disease were only mildly impaired; a smaller percentage were completely unaffected. They were the ones harvested to make up the galley crews.

  The Lords had used its goblins and its dominion over human suffering and fear to great effect over the past hundred years, building an empire of city states along the Atlantic coast of Central America. In terms of enanos, the current expedition had been costly. Between the battles for Matamoros ville and Browns ville, five of the six he had brought along on the voyage had been lost. It was only a temporary set back, though
. The Lords of Death could always make more.

  Looking down on his fighters, the commander knew he felt exactly what they felt.

  Exhilaration.

  He sensed what they sensed.

  The smell of blood.

  The Matachìn were demons in the service of greater demons. In return for their allegiance the Lords of Death promised everlasting pillage in life; in death, everlasting delight. Their savage spirits would reside among the towering pyramids and vast acropolises of Xibalba.

  “Five hundred meters, Commander,” Dolor said to his back.

  It was time to close the trap.

  “Bring us broadside to the ville,” Casacampo said.

  As the Ek’-Way came about, through the loud-hailer he ordered Lorenzo to adjust the bow gun’s launch tube ninety degrees, this to bring the mortar to bear on the new target.

  Switching over to ship-to-ship, he gave the same commands to the other captains and gun crews.

  When he received confirmation from the other tugs that everything was ready, he ordered the mortars to drop seven rounds a minute on the target for three minutes, then hold fire and await his further orders.

  The firing began at once.

  Six rounds per volley.

  There wasn’t much to see as the shells rained down on the ville. The target was hidden behind the high dunes. As the erratic booms of the barrage rolled over the water, black smoke billowed over the crest of the ridge.

  Casacampo turned to his own preparations for combat. From a locker in a corner of the pilothouse, he took out his personal firearm. The Brazilian-made LAPA had an M-16-style carrying handle that housed its flip-type rear sight; the front sight was an elevated, protected post. Very stubby from pistol grip to muzzle, it looked like a handgun with a fixed, plastic shoulder stock. The LAPA was chambered for 9 mm Parabellum rounds and held thirty-two bullets in its curved mag. The commander checked the clip to make sure it was topped off, then reinserted it into the weapon and collected six more full mags from the locker.

  At the bottom of the cabinet was his machete, pearl-handled and scabbarded in black ballistic nylon. He unsheathed the gleaming blade, which was engraved on both sides with the hieroglyph of the Black Transformer, the symbolic gate of Xibalba. At the tip was a cruel steel horn, razor sharp on its inside edge—the Matachìns’ signature gut hook.

  Setting the machete aside, Casacampo took out his custom-fitted, black chest and back plates, and black leg and shin guards. After stepping into and lacing up his steel-toed boots, he began buckling on the ribbed body armor, all of which had been blessed by the Lords of Death.

  He was dressing for a very short, very one-sided war.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Even though the mortar shells had stopped falling, Ryan could still feel the aftereffects of the too-close explosions. The soles of his feet tingled down to the tips of his toes, there was a high-pitched ringing in his left ear, and a slight numbness to that side of his face. He ran on with grim determination, knowing there was nothing ahead for him and the companions but a bit more breathing room, mebbe some time to think, time to come up with another escape plan—if they made it to the freighter before the barrage resumed.

  He had seen the north end of the island on the way down and he knew it didn’t offer an obvious way out of their predicament. The waters were a jigsaw puzzle of shallow, sandy reefs. There was no protected moorage, so there were no boats tied up offshore. There weren’t any boats beached there, either.

  The grounded freighter above them had all the makings of a death ship. Based on what he’d seen in the ville, he figured it was likely filled with sick people and corpses. Once the companions ventured belowdecks, there was a better than even chance they would never come out. The ship was like a box canyon, only man-made and with a steel lid. The ear-splitting concussions and the flying shrap and ball bearings hadn’t offered them a choice in the matter. Even if they could have reached it, the channel separating the island from the mainland was far too wide to try to swim.

  With the Tempest cut off, there was no place else to go.

  The moment the shells started pounding the ville Ryan guessed what the pirates were up to. Their strategy was designed to drive everyone who could walk or run out of the shantytown, up the hill and into the grounded ship. Otherwise they would have shelled the shit out of it, too.

  With an effort of will, Ryan pushed a premonition of disastrous defeat out of his head. They had been in worse spots, he reasoned, or at least nearly as bad, many times before and they’d always found a way to pull through. At least this time they were still all together, they had their blasters, they had plenty of bullets, and the route to the freighter was temporarily open.

  Running behind Harmonica Tom, Ryan and the others started up the flank of the immense dune on which the vessel sat. Above them, an even steeper ramp, about ten feet wide, and sculpted of hard-packed sand, led all the way to the top deck and the gate in the freighter’s rail amidships.

  If Tom knew where he was going, he also knew the immediate danger they faced. As soon as they hit the base of the compacted ramp, he started yelling up at the ship and waving his arms, “It’s me! Don’t shoot! It’s me!”

  As Ryan started up the ramp he saw the reason for Tom’s concern: rows of irregular, vertical slits had been hacked or blowtorched into the freighter’s steel hull plates. They were maybe five inches wide and two feet high.

  Blasterports.

  From all the bullet impact dimples and spawled paint around them, this wasn’t the first time Padre Island had come under attack.

  Ryan couldn’t see a rifle muzzle behind every slit, and most of the muzzles he did see weren’t tracking them as they climbed. They were stationary. That all the blasters weren’t manned didn’t matter. More than enough moved to do the job. Once an enemy boarding party started up the ramp, there was no escape, nowhere to jump, nowhere to hide. The entire length of the ramp was a kill zone.

  Tom still was yelling and waving his arms as he cleared the gate at the top of the ramp. Ryan stepped onto the ship beside the skipper. Looking back, he watched as the others rushed through the gate, one by one.

  Only after Mildred reached the deck did he realize they’d picked up some unwanted baggage.

  “I thought I told you to jump back down that radblasted hole,” he said to the Fire Talker.

  The tagalong was out of breath—or pretended to be—and didn’t respond. He shuffled to the far side of Doc, as far away from Ryan as he could get and still remain under the companions’ protection.

  “Where is everybody?” Krysty said as she looked up and down the vast, 250-yard-long top deck.

  There was no movement anywhere, but the line of sight was blocked by rows of rusting cargo containers stacked three high in places. Crude ladders made of lashed-together iron pipe leaned against the open doors of some of the topmost boxes. As the vessel’s cargo booms had been torn away, there was no way to lower any of the massive containers to the deck to get at the contents. The islanders had to climb up to them using the ladders and carry or rope-lower the goods.

  Ryan looked down a long, canyon-like aisle between the stacks to the stern. Looming over everything, still flying the tattered Lone Star flag, was the bridge tower. It had looked more or less intact from the water; up close it was an absolute ruin. The six-story structure was laced with a million rust holes. Ryan could see light all the way through it, front to back. Every window frame was empty of glass. It had taken a terrible beating on nukeday, and the beating had continued for a century after.

  “We need to do a quick recce of the situation,” Tom said, waving the others after him as he headed for the bow, which rested on the peak of the dune and stuck up higher than the stern.

  Ryan kicked through ankle-deep piles of rubbish: discarded packaging from the contents of the containers, and dunnage from the holds: plastic, cardboard, pieces of broken wooden pallets, foam pellets. The trash collected in drifts along the scuppers and around bases o
f the lowermost containers.

  Some of the bottom container doors were open.

  There were no bodies evident, outside or inside the boxes.

  From the ship’s bow, they looked almost straight down on the ville. Black smoke poured off the flattened ruins. Low fires still burned. Ryan guessed that more than a hundred mortar rounds had been dropped on it. Between that and the Claymores, there wasn’t much left.

  Tom directed their attention in the opposite direction, to the sailboats scooting northeast, past the island on the Gulf side. “The bastards are heading for Aransas Pass,” he said. “They’re going to circle around the line of reefs and come down the waterway to the harbor, same way we did.”

  “That’s bad?” Mildred said.

  “Good and bad,” Tom replied. “Good because it gives us more time to reach the Tempest. They’ve got to beat against the wind to make the pass. Bad because they’re going to have the wind at their backs once they one-eighty and bear down on us. If we don’t have a big head start, we’re in trouble.”

  Much closer in, the trio of tugs was moving north under engine power, to about a half mile off the beach, directly opposite the stranded freighter.

  “They’re tightening the noose, dammit,” J.B. said.

  “Can we fight them off?” Krysty asked. “Do we have a chance?”

  “Depends on what they do next,” Ryan said.

  “Do you not mean what they value?” Doc said. “If these brigands intend to take whatever’s in all these containers as spoils of war, they’re unlikely to turn their mortars on the ship.”

  “If they don’t want what the islanders have,” J.B. said, “this is going to be a piss poor place to mount a defense.”

  “We need to find out where the other islanders are and how many are in shape to help us fight,” Ryan said.

  “This way…” Tom told them, turning back for the stern.

  “Keep your blasters holstered,” Ryan warned the others. “Let’s not give these island folks the wrong idea.”