V 11 - The Texas Run Read online

  THE TEXAS RUN

  Geo. W. Proctor

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Chapter 1

  A shadow moved within the shadows. At the periphery of Rick Hurley’s vision a patch of gray like a watery, blurred human form darted from the light.

  Rick snapped around. The muzzle of his Uzi leaped up, sweeping from left to right, ready to meet an attack.

  “What is it, Rick?” Michael Donovan’s head jerked to the left. The former news cameraman’s eyes narrowed as he stared at his young companion. Questioning creases furrowed his high brow.

  “Thought I saw something move over there.” Rick tilted his head toward the muted glow of hangar lights fifty yards to the south.

  Twenty pairs of eyes probed the fog blanketing John Wayne International Airport. Twenty heads cocked from side to side, listening to the night.

  “Nothing,” Donovan whispered. “There’s nothing out there, Rick, except fog.”

  “Yeah.” Rick Hurley eased aside a strand of blond hair plastered against his forehead by sweat and mist. “Must be imagining things.”

  “It’s the night.” Donovan reassuringly squeezed Rick’s shoulder and smiled in sympathy. “The fog’s getting to all of us.”

  Rick nodded in acceptance, although his right forefinger remained curled around the trigger of his machine pistol.

  The resistance leader’s gaze and those of the men and

  women in his command returned to the barely discemibie form of a Visitor squad vehicle squatted on the runway ahead of them. Bathed by mist-diffused airport lights, the alien craft’s white form appeared to glow like some phantasmic wingless insect. Beside a gaping door midway along the ship’s angular segmented body stood two red-uniformed demons—shock troopers with energy rifles clutched across their chests.

  Rick’s attention returned to the line of hangars to the left. His blue-gray eyes probed the dense fog that rolled off the Pacific Ocean to accompany the first cool breath of autumn. The hangars’ lights revealed only mist swirling and shifting in a gentle night breeze.

  The twenty-two-year-old resistance fighter silently cursed. He was certain that he had seen someone or something step from the darkness separating the second and third hangars, then dart back into the cloaking blackness. Now there was nothing.

  “Relax, Rick,” Mike Donovan whispered. “We’ve got the jump on the lizards this time. There’s no way for them to suspect anything.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Rick managed a weak, unconvincing smile for the Los Angeles resistance leader. “Like you said, it’s the fog getting to me. I’m all right.”

  “Good, because I want you to position your group among those hangars as soon as we’re through the fence,” Donovan answered.

  “Can do.” Rick’s gaze darted back to the hangars half hidden in the fog—nothing. “Just get us through the fence, give us five minutes, and we’ll be ready.” Donovan nodded and turned to his right. “Ed, Norton, cut the fence.”

  Two men separated from their companions and crawled on their bellies from the drainage ditch that concealed the resistance assault team. Their movement a soft whisper in the mist-drenched grass, they edged to the eight-foot-high chain-link fence encircling the Orange

  County airport. A dull snap touched Rick’s ears when the wire cutters bit through the first link in the mesh barrier.

  Rick’s gaze surveyed the airport once again. Except for the Visitor squad vehicle and its two human-disguised reptilian guards, it was deserted, as were all Los Angeles area airports each night. The nightly closing of airports, even John Wayne International, was but one of the numerous concessions the provisional government had made to the invaders from Sirius’ fourth planet so that Los Angeles might retain its status as a modern-day Lisbon in a world fighting tooth and claw for its very life.

  Shut down the airports and it’s easier to keep the human cattle in their pens each night, he thought bitterly.

  The aliens needed Earth for its vast water supply, having polluted the meager waters of their own world. As for the inhabitants of the planet they sought to conquer, cattle was exactly what human beings were to the Visitors. The carnivorous reptiles viewed every man, woman, and child as beef on the hoof, animals to be bred, butchered, and devoured.

  And the quislings of the provisional government are playing right into the Visitors’ hands! Hate and anger welled in Rick’s breast.

  The Los Angeles resistance had led the fight to drive the Visitors from Earth and had developed the red toxin that eventually sent the aliens fleeing back into the yawning void of space. When the second alien assault came, aided by the fact that the poisonous bacteria was ineffectual in Earth’s tropical and subtropical zones, Los Angeles, rather than mounting an offensive against the unearthly invaders, had formed a provisional government to serve as a liaison between the aliens and the world’s human authorities.

  At the chain-link fence Ed lifted an arm and waved his companions forward.

  “Okay, let’s move out,” Mike Donovan said. “All of

  you know what to do. Keep low and quiet until the snakes arrive with their pigeon.”

  Without another word Donovan pushed from the ditch and crawled toward the gaping rent Ed and Norton held open in the fence. Right behind the former television cameraman, Rick Hurley moved through the fence and waited for the four men and women in his group to gather at his side.

  Still belly down in the soaked grass, Rick maneuvered his command behind a line of trash containers. A quick check assured him their movements went unnoticed. However, a hundred feet of wide-open and unprotected space separated them from the side of the first hangar. He rose in a crouch and turned to his companions.

  “We cross one at a time,” he said. “I go first. Marion follows me, then Gus and Edith. lim, you have to protect our backsides as well as your own.”

  James Leard, a senior member of a Los Angeles civil law firm before the Visitors’ invasion, nodded, accepting his role as rear guard. Rick returned the nod, doublechecked the Uzi’s safety, making certain it was off and that the machine pistol was set to automatic, then darted from the shadows of the trash containers.

  He ran without a glance to the runway and the Visitor shock troopers who stood guard there. With each long stride he expected to hear the high-pitched whine of an energy burst come in counterpoint to his wildly beating heart. The aliens’ weapons still remained silent when he reached the hangar’s veiling shadow.

  Back pressed against the cool surface of the structure’s wall, Rick drew a steadying breath before cautiously poking his head around the side of the building. The pair of shock troopers stood like statues beside the squad vehicle.

  Lifting a hand, he signaled Marion from behind the trash containers. Like a sprinter breaking out of starting blocks, the black-haired woman dashed toward his position. Seconds later she was at his side, breath coming quick and shallow. He waved Gus to him.

  While the forty-five-year-old janitor ran toward the hangar, Rick felt a familiar sensation suffuse his chest, one he had experienced on every resistance mission in which he had participated. Without shame, he gave a name to that warm sensation—pride!

  These men and women were not warriors drilled into a crack fighting unit by the military. They were simply people one would expect to find living next door, if the world had not been turned upside down by the Visitors. Everyday women and men who willingly placed their lives on the line day and night for that intangible thing human beings called freedom.

  To Rick any of the twenty who had followed Mike Donovan to John Wayne was worth more than the whole damned Los Angeles provisional government. Yet it was for a member of that cowardly group of bureaucrats that those her
e tonight risked their lives.

  Gus ducked into the shadows. Rick waved Edith after him, trying not to think about the goal of tonight’s mission. Their reason for being here would not leave his head.

  Three hours ago the resistance’s intelligence network had intercepted a Visitor communique. That message outlined plans to abduct a member of the provisional government, bring him to John Wayne International, and secrete him aboard the Visitor Mother Ship that floated above Los Angeles. There, within the aliens’ conversion chamber, the Visitors’ Scientific Commander Diana would remold his brain until he was no more than a walking zombie willing to perform any task asked of him.

  Rick grunted with disgust as he signaled James to the hangar. Saving a turncoat from a lizard brainwashing wasn’t the young man’s idea. However, Mike Donovan had explained that if they could break up tonight’s activities, the Visitors would be beaten on another front. Plus, there was always the chance of winning the governmental muckety-muck over to their side. And it never hurt to have friends in high places.

  “They still look like statues out on the runway,” James said when he joined his companions. “They haven’t moved except to circle the squad vehicle now and then.”

  “So far so good.” Rick glanced at his wristwatch. A minute remained of the five within which he had promised Donovan to have his group positioned. “Move out.”

  Reaching the back side of the wail, Rick glanced behind the hangars. Only darkness and night greeted him. Edging around the comer of the building, he stepped toward the second hangar, pausing only to assure himself no Visitors lay hidden between the structures before hastening toward the third of the massive buildings.

  He approached the opening between the second and third hangars with greater caution. Ready to jerk back immediately, he looked down the alleylike space between the two buildings. An overheld breath softly escaped his lips. The passage between the hangars was empty except for two garbage cans.

  He shook his head. This was the very spot that he had thought he had seen movement earlier. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me.

  “Gus, Edith, in here and keep low.” Rick motioned the man and woman between the hangars.

  He and his two remaining companions stepped onto the area between the third and fourth hangars. Again no waiting snakes in human disguise were discovered. The trio worked through the shadows toward the glow coming from the front of the structures. Three feet from the front of the hangars, Rick halted his friends and inched forward.

  The squad vehicle with its two Visitor guards sat directly between their position and the airport’s terminal. He tried to locate the rest of the resistance team, but saw nothing. All else was fog and night. That was good. The last thing they needed was to be sighted before the Visitors arrived with their prisoner.

  Rick looked back at Marion and James. “Now we make ourselves comfortable and wait.”

  The three squatted on their heels, eyes focused on the squad vehicle.

  For the thousandth time in the past five minutes, Rick stared at the face of his watch. Two o’clock. At least two lifetimes had passed while the minute hand made one complete circuit. The blond resistance fighter bit dubiously at his lower lip.

  “Maybe the snakes changed airports on us?” James’ question echoed Rick’s own unspoken thought.

  “Or maybe they got wind that we were onto them,” Rick suggested with a shrug.

  “Want me to find Mike and see if he knows what’s going—”

  “Lights!” Marion interrupted, pointing across the runway. “There—to the left of the terminal.”

  Rick saw them now. A single pair of automobile headlights glowed like dull luminous eyes in the mist. The spots of light vanished when the car wheeled around the terminal. Tnen they were back, growing larger and brighter as they moved directly for the Visitor craft.

  “This is it.” Rick stood, checking the 9mm machine pistol one last time. He patted the pockets of his blue jeans and jacket, pleased by the solid weight of ten additional twenty-round clips of Teflon personal-armor-piercing bullets. “As soon as the car stops by the squad vehicle, go for it.”

  The distinctive form of a Lincoln Continental slid beneath the airport’s lights. The sedan’s sleek body style, complete with decorative exhaust slots located on each side just behind the front wheels, and its silver-gray body aglisten with the mist’s moisture all gave the vehicle the appearance of a blunt-nosed shark slicing through the fog. The image evoked an involuntary shiver that worked up Rick’s spine when the car slowed and stopped beside the squad vehicle.

  “Let’s go!” Rick raised the compact Israeli-made Uzi and ran into the light with his four companions right behind him.

  Abandoning their hiding places, the remaining fifteen members of the resistance force pushed through the fog, surrounding the Visitor craft in a circle. The ship’s two guards came to life. In confusion they jerked from one side to another as though uncertain how to meet the advancing ring of human fighters.

  “Throw down your weapons!” Mike Donovan’s voice rang out, echoing across the deserted airport. “All we want is the man you’re holding in the car.”

  The muzzles of the guards’ energy rifles dipped. Hesitantly, the aliens’ fingers unwrapped from the weapons. The blue-black rifles fell to the tarmac with ringing metallic clanks.

  Tension tautened every muscle of Rick’s body. Doubt gnawed at his mind. What was going on? Snakes didn’t surrender! Still the resistance’s circle tightened.

  In the next moment the answer to Rick’s question became all too obvious.

  Simultaneously, beams of glaring white light from the bellies of two squad vehicles hidden in the dense fog overhead bathed the runway from above, the doors to the sedan swung open, and six red-uniformed shock troopers leaped from the vehicle. A split second later a line of Visitor soldiers piled from the interior of the squad vehicle on the ground.

  Chaos reigned!

  The instant it took Rick’s mind to accept what his eyes saw and comprehend the trap they had blindly walked into, the shock troopers opened fire. Sizzling beams of blue-white energy seared the night.

  A woman screamed.

  From the comer of his eye, Rick saw an actinic burst slice into the chest of Lea Beeman. Flames flared on the blue Dodgers’ baseball jacket the young woman wore as she crumpled and collapsed to the runway.

  A piteous cry of horror and pain tore from the young man’s throat. Lea had been a fellow student at UCLA and had recruited him into the resistance.

  Rick reacted rather than thought. His finger tightened around the Uzi’s trigger and squeezed. Yellow and blue flames burst from the machine pistol’s muzzle. A deadly accurate spray of twenty 9mm slugs spat at knee level cut into the small army of shock troopers charging from the alien craft.

  “Back!” Rick shouted to the men and women under his command while he jerked a fresh clip from a back pocket and slammed it into the Uzi. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Neither of the four protested. Squeezing off short bursts of cover fire from their own weapons, they retreated into the protective shadows of the hangars.

  The staccato barking of machine pistols drowned the hissing whine of energy weapons when Rick’s eyes lifted to the mass of Visitor warriors again. Teflon-coated bullets ripped through the black flak-jacket-like personal armor the shock troopers wore over their chests. They fell, unearthly reptilian death cries yowling from throats bom on a world more than eight light-years from the planet they sought to conquer.

  A humorless smile lifted the comers of Rick’s mouth when he unleashed another twenty-round burst into Visitor soldiers. The trap the aliens sought to spring had a bottleneck—the door on the side of the squad vehicle.

  The shock troopers couldn’t get through it quickly enough to disperse and attack effectively.

  Ejecting the empty clip, Rick pulled another from his jeans and slipped it into the machine pistol. While he backstepped toward the hangars, he turned his attention to the
overhead lights, which transformed night into day.

  The two additional Visitor squad vehicles still hovered twenty-five feet above the runway. Searchlights glared from their undersides, illuminating the battle below. Rick lifted the Uzi, sighted on the nearest of the shuttles, and opened fire.

  Glass shattered, and for an instant fire flared. Then night returned—or at least a portion of the darkness. The second Visitor ship still spilled a flood of light over the scene beneath it.

  Intent on blinding the remaining squad vehicle, Rick once more ejected his gun’s empty clip and dug into a jacket pocket for another twenty rounds. A whining blast of heat and light tore into the tarmac at his feet. All thought of shooting out searchlights was fogotten.

  Five shock troopers broke from their companions and charged him with rifles spitting streams of pulse-beam energy. Unwilling to risk the possibility that the shock troopers’ armor might deflect his bullets, Rick once again aimed at knee level and squeezed the Uzi’s trigger. In this case, an immobile lizard, legs shot out from under him, was just as good as a dead one.

  Three of the shock troopers dropped, sprawling facedown on the runway with rifles careening from their hands. A fourth staggered, then fell clutching his left knee. The fifth, however, kept coming, his energy rifle spraying bursts of deadly blue-white beams into the night.

  With the machine pistol empty and no time to load another clip to meet the attack, Rick took the only option open to him. He turned and ran, zigzagging toward the protection of the hangars. At the same time he managed to empty the spent clip, extract another from his jacket, and slip it into the Uzi.

  Reaching the opening between two of the massive structures, he darted into the veiling shadows, turned, fired a short burst at his pursuer, then continued his flight. The effort was wasted energy. Beams from the Visitor’s rifle sizzled down the corridor between the hangars, seeking an elusive target that dodged back and forth between the walls.

  The weaving race was little more than a waltz with death, and Rick knew it. What he had hoped would be protection had turned into a murderous alley with no apparent escape. It was only a matter of time until the random bursts the shock trooper fired down the passage struck home. Accidentally or not, the results would be the same—death.