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  “How about you?” G.W. asked. “Have you deluded yourself into thinkin’ that you’re an honorable man?”

  That brought another laugh from Grayson. He said, “I’m a man who gets things done. That’s all. And I’m getting you off that ranch.”

  “Not alive, you’re not.”

  “So be it, then,” Grayson said with a shrug. He turned and walked at an easy, deliberate pace back toward the Chinese lines. As he went, he raised his right hand above his head and revolved it in a slow, “wind ’em up” motion.

  The engines of the Chinese armored fighting vehicles rumbled to life.

  Kyle took a deep breath. His heart slugged heavily in his chest. He was scared, no doubt about that. He didn’t want to die, and that seemed inevitable.

  Yet at the same time a great calmness spread through him. He knew he was exactly where he was meant to be, doing exactly what he was meant to be doing. There really was such a thing as destiny, after all, and this was his.

  Still, there was a part of him that wished he could see Miranda one more time, take her into his arms and kiss her and tell her just how much she had come to mean to him over the past couple of weeks. Could people really fall in love that fast?

  Damn right they could, he thought.

  He turned to look at G.W., grinned, and said, “Here they come.”

  “Yep.” G.W. raised his rifle to his shoulder. “They may take this ranch, but they’re not gonna steal it. They’re gonna pay for it . . . in blood.”

  Red-gold sunlight burst over the land.

  A thunderous, earthshaking roar of gunfire shattered the early morning quiet.

  Chapter 60

  A volley of rifle fire crashed out from the Chinese forces in the front ranks. That deadly storm of lead raked the vehicles that the ranch’s defenders had arranged in a skirmish line. Kyle and the other men got off a few shots in return, but for the most part the barrage forced them to duck for cover.

  As they did that, the Chinese vehicles surged forward through gaps in the line of troops and roared across the highway toward the fence. They would batter through the wire with no trouble at all.

  Kyle crouched at the front of the pickup where he had taken cover and fired past its grille at one of the armored vehicles. He aimed at the tires, knowing the rifle slugs would bounce off the armor plating. The windshield was probably bulletproof, too.

  Unfortunately, his shots didn’t seem to have any effect on the tires. They were probably solid rubber, unable to go flat.

  Machine guns mounted on the vehicles opened up, tongues of flame flickering from their muzzles. These weapons were firing armor-piercing rounds, and they ripped through the pickups, SUVs, and jeeps the defenders were using for shelter. Several men were thrown off their feet as those rounds shredded them into bloody husks.

  Just before the first of the armored vehicles struck the fence, a high-pitched whine sounded. Something streaked through the air, and the Chinese vehicle exploded in a huge ball of fire. More streaks flashed in, and eye-searing blasts engulfed another pair of attackers. Explosions threw dirt and gravel high in the air and knocked over two more of the vehicles. That left just one of them untouched, and it slewed to a halt as its driver didn’t know what to do.

  Three helicopter gunships swooped over the highway. Their missile racks were empty now, but they were still armed with automatic weapons that scythed lead through the Chinese ground troops. With an ear-pounding whup-whup-whup, a pair of Hueys appeared and lowered toward the highway. Before they ever touched down, armored and helmeted men were leaping through open doors and charging into the fight with automatic weapons blazing.

  Behind the bullet-battered pickup, Kyle and G.W. watched in stunned astonishment as the reinforcements took the fight to the enemy. Kyle’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times before he was able to say, “Who . . . who . . .”

  “Look there,” G.W. said, pointing.

  Kyle looked where his grandfather indicated and saw the flag painted on the side of the nearest Huey.

  It was the familiar red, white, and blue Lone Star flag.

  The flag of the state of Texas.

  “The governor must have sent those fellas,” G.W. said over the cacophony of battle.

  “I’ll bet Miranda had something to do with this,” Kyle said.

  “I wouldn’t doubt it a bit.”

  The gunships had done an effective job of softening up the Chinese position, but the Texan troops were still outnumbered. G.W. finished thumbing fresh rounds through his Winchester’s loading gate, then stood up and waved the rifle over his head.

  “Let’s go give those boys a hand!” he shouted to his allies.

  Yelling at the top of their lungs, the surviving defenders charged out from behind the vehicles and ran to the gate. They didn’t bother unlocking the chain holding it closed. They just swarmed over, leaped to the ground, and raced across the highway to join the battle.

  The Chinese discipline had evaporated in the face of the sudden, unexpected attack. Now it was a wild melee that spread across the mesquite-dotted landscape, scores of individual battles or clashes between small groups. The chatter of gunfire, the bursts of explosions, the screams of dying men, all blended together in a nightmarish melody of war.

  Kyle was in the middle of it, blasting away at the Chinese troops. Those bright blue helmets made it easy to find targets. He aimed not for the helmets themselves but for the visors of hard, clear plastic covering the faces of the men who wore them. If struck at an angle, those visors would cause a bullet to glance off, but a direct hit would sometimes shatter them and plow into the face behind them.

  Kyle felt a moment’s sympathy for the men who were dying here, but no more than that. It was entirely possible their communist masters had forced them to come over here, but they and their countrymen had embraced that destructive, insidious, blood-drenched philosophy in the first place.

  Kyle was going to kill as many of them as he could.

  In the chaos, he lost track of his grandfather. G.W. was somewhere in the ruckus, Kyle knew, but he didn’t have time to look for him. Instead, he reloaded until he ran out of ammunition, and then he used the rifle as a club, wading in and downing one of the Chinese soldiers with a butt stroke that knocked the man’s helmet off. Kyle kicked him in the head and rendered him unconscious, then moved on in search of another enemy to fight.

  He had barely started looking when someone came out of the confusion and tackled him from the side. Kyle and his attacker both sprawled on the ground and rolled over a couple of times. Kyle found himself on the bottom, with Slade Grayson looming over him. Grayson’s face was twisted in lines of hate as he locked his hands around Kyle’s throat.

  Kyle knew he had only seconds to act before Grayson’s powerful thumbs crushed his windpipe. He bucked up off the ground and swung his right hand in a brutal chop against the side of Grayson’s neck. That loosened the government man’s grip, but didn’t knock it loose.

  Kyle splayed his left hand over Grayson’s face and tried to dig his fingers into the man’s eyes. Grayson jerked his head back. Kyle shot a short punch into his solar plexus that made Grayson gasp for breath.

  Kyle was a lot shorter on air than Grayson was, though. His head spun crazily, and a red haze was beginning to drip down over his vision. He arched his back again and swung both open hands against Grayson’s ears.

  That finally did it. Grayson’s fingers spasmed and came open. Kyle bucked like a bronco for the third time, and Grayson toppled off to the side. Kyle rolled the other way to put some distance between them as he dragged in desperate lungfuls of air—mixed, of course, with a considerable amount of dust since a huge cloud of it hung over the battlefield.

  Elsewhere, not far away, guns continued to chatter and roar. Explosions threw even more dirt and grit into the air.

  None of that mattered to Kyle and Grayson. To the two of them, the whole world had narrowed down to the few square yards where they staggered to their feet a
nd resumed their battle.

  Elemental, primitive fury gripped both men now as they stood toe-to-toe and slugged at each other. No fancy martial arts moves, no jumping and whirling and spinning, just brute strength and determination as they tried to batter each other into submission.

  Grayson was taller and heavier, but Kyle was a little quicker. He landed three punches for every two of Grayson’s. And slowly but surely, he began to force Grayson back. The government man gave ground grudgingly, but the tide had turned against him and both of them knew it.

  Kyle sank a left to the wrist in Grayson’s belly. As Grayson started to double over, Kyle’s right first was there to meet his jaw. The blow landed solidly, with a sound like an ax cleaving a block of wood. Grayson’s head slewed to the side, and his knees buckled.

  He went down on those knees and stayed there as Kyle backed off a step. Slowly, Grayson shook his head as he tried to gather his wits. Kyle expected him to collapse the rest of the way.

  Somehow, Grayson stayed upright. He wobbled and swayed to his feet. Fists ready, Kyle moved in to finish him off.

  But before Kyle could reach him, Grayson reached under his suit jacket and brought out a small, flat automatic pistol. Through broken teeth and swollen, bloody lips, he rasped, “I wanted to . . . finish you off . . . with my bare hands . . . but you’ll be just as dead . . . if I kill you this way.”

  From behind Kyle, G.W. said, “Go to hell,” and a rifle blasted. Kyle felt the hot wind-rip of the bullet as it whipped past his ear. The slug struck Grayson in the center of the forehead and jolted his head back as his skull exploded outward in a grisly spray of blood and bone fragments and diseased brain matter.

  This time when Grayson thudded to the ground with the pistol still unfired in his hand, there would be no getting up.

  Kyle turned to see his grandfather limping toward him, old lever-action Winchester in hand. Crimson stains dotted G.W.’s work clothes here and there, but he didn’t seem to be seriously injured. In fact, there was a big grin on the rancher’s rugged face.

  Behind G.W. came a tall, equally tough-looking man in some sort of fatigue uniform, flanked by several more soldiers. The patch on the tall man’s uniform was a Lone Star flag.

  Kyle realized that except for sporadic shots, the battlefield had fallen silent. He looked around and saw that the Chinese troops who were still alive had withdrawn a couple of hundred yards and formed up again, but they weren’t attacking, just waiting to see what was going to happen. Kyle estimated that there were fifty or sixty of them left.

  The tall man came up to Kyle and said, “I’m Colonel Thomas Atkinson. The governor sent me to give you folks a hand. It took some fancy work from our pilots to get through that no-fly zone, but I’m glad to see that we got here in time.”

  Kyle was still having a little trouble catching his breath. He said, “Me, too . . . colonel. But isn’t the governor . . . gonna get in a lot of trouble . . . over this?”

  Atkinson grinned and said, “The mood we’re all in, I don’t think any of us particularly care right now.”

  Kyle looked around at the bodies littering the field, the burning Chinese assault vehicles, the gunships hovering not far away, the men who had come to defend the ranch standing ready along the highway, and knew that if the UN forces wanted to resume the battle, they would have one hell of a fight on their hands.

  “By the way,” Atkinson said, “a certain blond lawyer sends her regards.”

  “Miranda?” Kyle asked, then realized a second later what a stupid question that was.

  “That’s right,” Atkinson responded with a grin. “She’s a pretty determined lady. It was all we could do to make her stay in Austin with the governor.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said with a smile of his own. “I can see that.” He grew more serious. “What made the governor decide to send in troops? And . . . who are you guys?”

  “Just some fellas ready to stand up for Texas, and for what’s right. Maria’s been putting together a force for emergencies such as this, when somebody has to stop the federal government from running roughshod over the people’s rights.”

  “But you’re not fightin’ just the federal government,” G.W. pointed out. He nodded toward the Chinese forces. “You’re takin’ on the UN. The whole dang world, in other words.”

  “Texas versus the world,” Atkinson said. He took an unlit stub of a cigar from the pocket of his fatigues, stuck it in his mouth, and clamped his teeth down it. “Sounds like pretty fair odds to me!”

  Washington, D.C.

  Angela Jessup hated to go into the Oval Office right now. The President had been getting reports from Texas all morning, and he was upset.

  That was putting it mildly. He was on the verge of a stroke, or declaring martial law, whichever came first.

  He wouldn’t like hearing what Jessup had to tell him. Earlier, it had seemed impossible that the news could get any worse, but then other bulletins had started breaking. So far, only on the one cable news network the White House couldn’t control, but those bastards at the other networks, in their never-ending quest for ratings, would soon start nipping at the story as well. Corporate greed would trump partisanship, at least for a little while.

  Jessup took a deep breath and went in.

  The President was pacing back and forth, hands behind his back, face mottled with fury. He swung toward her and snapped, “What is it? Have the UN forces wiped out those traitors yet?”

  “Not exactly, sir,” Jessup replied. “The Secretary-General has ordered General Ling to hold his position.”

  “Hold his position!” The President stared at her. “That’s insane! The damn Chinaman still has enough troops to wipe out Brannock and his friends and the rebels that Mexican bitch sent in!”

  “That’s just it. The Secretary-General says that the actions by Governor Delgado this morning place this incident in the category of an internal problem for the United States and plans to tell the UN forces to withdraw.” Jessup grimaced as the President stared at her. “To put it bluntly, sir, things have gone too far and he’s hanging you out to dry.” She paused, then added, “He wasn’t too happy about the UN being dragged into a situation caused by a phony land grant and a deal with the Chinese government that stinks of graft and corruption, not to mention posing a grave threat to the health and well-being of American citizens.”

  The President bared his teeth and said, “What. The. Hell. Are. You. Talking. About?”

  “The land grant was a fake,” Jessup said softly. “You must have known that. And you and Senator Rutland are in bed with the Chinese to the tune of billions of dollars and millions of tons of toxic radioactive waste. I don’t really care about any of that, Mr. President . . . but you could have told me about it so I wouldn’t be operating in the dark.”

  The President’s breath panted between his teeth. He asked, “How did you hear about any of that?”

  “The story is breaking on TV. Our friends at the networks will sweep it under the rug as much as possible, of course, but it’s out on the Internet, too. Something like that . . . it never goes away. Some people will never look at you the same way again.”

  His lip curled in a sneer as he said, “Our supporters won’t care. Not enough of them, anyway. As long as we keep giving them what they want, they’ll keep voting for us. Hell, we’re above the law, Angela! You know that.”

  “Today we are,” Jessup said quietly. “What about tomorrow?”

  The President clenched a hand into a fist and said, “Tomorrow people will believe what we tell them to believe. They’ll do what we tell them to do. They’ll blame the goddamn Republicans for anything and everything that’s wrong in their lives! Just like we tell them. . . .”

  Silence hung in the Oval Office air for a moment, silence broken only by the President’s harsh breathing. Finally, Jessup asked, “What are you going to do about the situation in Texas?”

  “The UN is definitely withdrawing?”

  “Yes, sir. The Secre
tary-General said something about not doing your dirty work for you.”

  “Well, then, I guess that the army—”

  “With all due respect, sir, if you force your military commanders to give the order to kill American civilians, you run the risk of the front-line troops turning around and firing in the other direction. You don’t want to take even the slightest chance of that happening. Once it did . . .”

  The President blanched. He knew exactly what his chief of staff meant.

  Visions of soldiers bursting into this very office played out in his head. Visions of him being dragged out of the White House, hauled over to one of the trees on the lawn outside, a tree with a rope thrown over a branch, and then...

  Jessup knew what he was thinking as she saw the fight go out of him. Power meant everything to him—except when it came to saving his own skin.

  He said, “It’s over, Angela. We made a bet, and we lost. Simple as that.” He shook his head. “Lost to a damned old codger and a kid. Who would have thought it?”

  “Strange things happen in this country, sir. They always have.” She hesitated. “What about Governor Delgado?”

  The President’s eyes narrowed as hatred blazed in them. He said, “She’s drawn the battle lines. We’ll let this mess fade for a while. But one of these days soon . . . Texas is going to find out what it’s like to go to war against the United States.”

  West Texas

  The bodies, the burned-out assault vehicles, most of the signs of battle were gone by the time the sun set that evening, along with the surviving Chinese troops. The bullet-riddled pickups and SUVs by the fence had been towed away. Wounded men were in the hospital. The ones who had been killed were in the morgue. In the days to come, there would be heroes’ burials for them.

  The country was deeply shaken. The problems here in West Texas in the past had been characterized by the news media as terrorist attacks or blamed on the Mexican drug cartels or a combination of both. That wasn’t the case this time. No matter how much the media tried to shield the Democrat politicians involved, people were starting to talk about how maybe what the President had done wasn’t right. He had been mixed up in a clandestine deal with the Chinese that could have done major damage to the country, and he had manipulated events so that troops of a foreign nation had ventured onto American soil and killed American citizens, all with the administration’s blessing.