The Dying Time (Book 2): After The Dying Time (51 page)

Adam sent Bob on up the canyon with four hundred men to prepare a hand-dug defensive breastwork above Wildwood, where Bear Canyon joined Provo Canyon. It wouldn’t hold the enemy for long, might not stop them at all, but if it even slowed them a little bit it would give his men a chance to stop and catch their breath and might, therefore, keep some of them alive. He also instructed Bob to plant charges along the canyon walls that they could blow during their retreat to slow the enemy advance. Far from worrying about retreating too slowly the concern now was to avoid being overrun.

*

Five miles up the canyon, Jim Cantrell’s men tried to ignore the echoes of shots that bounced back and forth along the cliffs as their friends died to buy them time. They dug like furies. Dirt was ingrained in every line and wrinkle. The callused skin of their hands cracked and bled. Their fingernails were torn, chipped and split. Their backs ached horribly as they strained with the effort of removing tons of material. They hacked and coughed in the dust of drilling and blasting and died when the shoring failed to hold.

The agony of their labors was revealed in their eyes, as well as unintended groans that accompanied their every movement. And in that sea of men, no one drove himself harder than Jim Cantrell. He was well aware that theirs was a superhuman task and he knew beyond a doubt they had mere hours remaining to accomplish it. He had been too late to die with his first wife and too late to warn the Freeholds about the raid. He’d be damned if he’d be too late this time.

*

In the heights above the south side of the canyon, above where Michael and Daniel fought, Lieutenant Dan Osaka and Lady Di led five hundred men in an effort to keep the Prince’s army from scaling the cliffs and flanking the men below. It was a classic case of two or three men being able to stymie hundreds. Their sniping attacks on the Prince’s army not only kept John’s troops from gaining the heights, but also slowed their advance. In fact, it had been Lady Di’s squad who poured death down onto a swarming enemy and allowed Michael and Daniel to escape.

On the north side of the canyon, Captain Parsons and Susan Redfeather headed up a similar detachment. Parsons shot a man off the face of a cliff that a company of King’s Rangers was trying to climb. With an offhand shot, Susan Redfeather sent another Ranger bouncing down the cliff. So far Parson’s company and Redfeather’s had been able to hold the heights, but when the next retreat came, it would be all but impossible.

*

The Prince stepped out of his APC and raised the loudspeaker to his lips. He had been using it all day long to exhort his men to greater efforts. He turned it on, then dove for cover as a bullet spanged off the bullhorn from above. A volley of shots blasted upward from his men, but he couldn’t see if they hit anything or not.

Dammit! My Rangers have to gain that high ground. That was his third near miss this morning and Prince John wondered briefly if Michael Whitebear was up there trying to get a bead on him. Somehow though he didn’t think Michael would have missed. He also didn’t think that Whitebear would shoot him from cover. What was between them was too personal for that. With no further shots coming from the heights, John stood in the APC and waved his men on. Faster, he wanted them to charge harder and faster. Speed was the essence of his battle plan now. Nothing else mattered. Victory was close...so close!

*

Dan Osaka cursed as he wiped blood from his cheek. A rock chip from a near miss had sliced him, nearly taking his remaining eye. He was mad at himself for missing the shot. He knew he should have waited to get his breathing under control. He had run hard to get to a vantage point from which he could shoot at the man who climbed out of the APC, knowing instinctively that whoever was inside was important. He cursed again as he realized how much his impatience had cost the Allies. He had never seen Prince John, but he knew there could only be one man in the enemy camp who was both that big and important enough to rate a ride.

Dan made his way through the trees and rocks to the rest of his squad. He had split his two hundred men up into five and ten man units, assigning them to different portions of the canyon in order to control the heights along the entire rim. A disgusted shake of his head was enough to let them know he’d missed. They sympathized even as they shouldered their packs and continued to patrol their sector.

*

All morning long, the Allies held the blood-drenched line at Vivian Park. Prince John threw wave after wave of men at them, his homicidal fury growing each time his men failed. Finally, he could contain himself no longer. He gathered his officers at his APC.

“You cowardly, incompetent, fools!” The force of his rage flung spittle from his mouth. “If we don’t crush them before dark, they’ll melt away up these canyon walls and we’ll spend the next five years fighting guerrillas. It’ll be Washington all over again and I won’t have it. During the next attack you will take up positions behind your men and you will kill anyone who turns back. Do I make myself clear?”

Quick, frightened nods of assent mingled in with the chorus of “Yes, Sire,” that greeted his final statement.

John took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It seemed to calm him a bit.

“Good, because I will be right behind you.”

He let that sink in for a moment, then spoke again. “Inform your men that this time we will succeed or die. And tell them I will be with them.”

*

The growing roar from the enemy lines told the Allies this was the big charge they’d been expecting. Adam took one look and knew there would be no stopping this one. He ordered the retreat to begin.

Across the river, Michael’s eyebrows arched as he caught a glimpse of Prince John striding among the enemy. Michael’s rifle nested comfortably against his shoulder and cheek and for a brief instant, John was framed in his sights. Mariko’s scalp, which Michael had tucked inside his shirt for safekeeping, formed a slight lump on which he lay as he squeezed the trigger. His bullet blew apart the head of a man who, at the last instant, ran between Michael and his intended victim. Michael swore viciously as he heard the bugle sounding retreat.

Prince John was wrong when he assumed that Michael would not kill him from a distance. Michael was no fool. Prince Anthony had nearly killed him and he, in turn, would kill John by any means, however and whenever he could. He snapped one last futile shot at the Prince, then turned to run with the others.

A shout went up among the King’s men when they saw the Allies fleeing. Prince John urged his men after the retreating soldiers, but he scarcely needed to. They had all lost friends to the Allies and now victory was in the air. Like a jolt of adrenaline, the scent of victory swept through their ranks like wildfire. At first a few, then hundreds and then thousands of the Prince’s troops rushed headlong after the Allies. John, tempted to charge to the front, held back toward the rear, lest the Allies have another beehive projectile. He knew there was one more huge embankment for his enemies to hide behind and he wanted to crush them before they could get that far. This was it! He sensed it.

Bitter was the retreat from Vivian Park. Here and there, Allied soldiers, exhausted by days of ceaseless effort and realizing they could run no farther, simply stopped, turned around to face their enemies and killed as many as they could before death claimed them. They were lonely and courageous acts of defiance, by men and women whose endurance had been stretched past the breaking point.

Not even the sniper fire from above could slow the enemy advance. Bob Young’s men hadn’t had time to finish laying the charges before the first wave of Allied troops retreated through their line. Only four explosive charges were in place before they had to abandon the effort.

Michael flopped over the edge of the embankment and lay there, gasping. Daniel, who had arrived several minutes earlier, walked up to him.

“Adam says we have to slow them here.” Michael raised an eyebrow and Daniel shrugged. “Jim’s not ready yet.”

Michael looked around. All along the line, the only men who weren’t gasping like fish out of water were the ones who’d come back with Bob earlier, or who, like Daniel, were so fit they recovered quickly. The men needed ten or twenty minutes just to get in shape for the retreat to the big bunker.

As the last of the Allied soldiers straggled over the mound of dirt and rocks that formed their new barricade, Adam gave the word and Sergeant Buell blew the charges. Tons of rock rained down on the advancing horde of enemy troops, choking the canyon at one of its narrowest points.

Allied sniper fire from the canyon rim was now sufficient to break the flow of the enemy attack, but only because the enemy soldiers were having to scramble over a jumbled pile of rocks that ranged from twelve to twenty feet high.

Adam clapped Sergeant Buell on the back in appreciation. It would take awhile for the Prince to get his main force through that gap, so Adam decided to move back to Jim Cantrell’s bunker now, rather than retreating under fire. At least his men would get a chance to rest up a bit, maybe grab a bite to eat, once they were at the big bunker. He signaled his bugler and flag bearers. All along the line men planted booby traps and fell back.

*

Inside the relative safety of his APC, Prince John swore at Colonel Orlov, the man in command of his Rangers. “You asshole. If you’d taken the rim, like I told you, they couldn’t have blown the walls. We’d have caught them and it’d be over by now.”

“Sire,” Orlov responded. “We’ve established a foothold on the north side down by Vivian Park and are pushing hard along that rim, but it’s straight up and straight down, terrain that favors our enemies. On the south side we’re losing twenty or thirty men for every one of those snipers we pick off.”

John stepped close, looming over Orlov. His voice was low and ominous. “You have two hours to take the North rim and cut off their retreat. If you don’t, I’ll string your guts from here to Nephi. Understood?”

Orlov’s eyes flashed dangerously, but he swallowed his anger and snapped a crisp salute. “Yes, Sire.”

John was in no mood for even the appearance of insubordination. “You have something else you’d like to say?”

The Colonel cleared his throat. He’d lost hundreds of men to the Prince’s need for haste and the thought kept going through his mind: don’t ask me, if you don’t want to know. If it meant his life, it was suddenly important for his own pride to have his say. He opened his mouth.

“Sire!” A messenger yelled as he pounded on the door to the APC.

“Enter,” Prince John barked. Colonel Orlov closed his mouth and moved out of the way as the messenger ducked through the door.

The man came to attention and gasped, “The enemy has abandoned the barricade, Sire. They’re fleeing!”

John barged out of the APC yelling, “After them, after them!” With luck he could catch them before they made it to the redoubt at the back of the canyon.

*

Michael and dozens of other fighters, ended up carrying wounded comrades back toward Jim Cantrell. Every foot of the way cost them in sweat and blood, but at long last the huge embankment towered over them. They staggered up and over the bunker and flopped down to rest. This was it--the last stop. There would be no orderly retreating from this place. If the enemy got through here, the Allies knew their wounded, their women and children, were but a few miles away. Their backs were quite literally to the wall. The monstrous mass of rock that dammed Lake Zion loomed up behind them like a black cloud.

Daniel Windwalker trudged up the slope to where Michael lay, accompanied by Jim Cantrell. Michael nodded to Daniel then turned to Jim and asked, “How’s it going, Robin?”

It was an old, intensely personal joke. Back when they were ten, they had feuded fiercely over who would get to be Batman and who would get stuck being his sidekick Robin when they grew up. Bringing it up now made Jim smile.

Michael looked his friend over. Jim had aged several years. His normally thin frame was now gaunt. His eyes at first appeared coal black, staring, as if from some deep dark pit, but they warmed to bloodshot brown at Michael’s concern. Dirt was ingrained in every pore and Jim’s hair hung in matted lumps. His hands were raw bloody things, covered with scabs and broken fingernails. His clothing was torn. His sense of humor was intact, though, as he responded to Michael’s look of appraisal.

“I just made the ten best-dressed for the third year in a row.” He gave a small laugh, then turned serious. “We need at least another couple of hours. We’ve hit some of the hardest rock this side of hell and if past experience holds true, when we get through it the shaft will flood. And as if that’s not enough,” he said with another smile, “now I’ve got to look out for your miserable hide.”

Michael smiled back and held up his hand. Jim grasped it and pulled him to his feet. The two men held the handclasp firmly and looked deep into each other’s eyes. They saw over thirty years of friendship and trust. They were closer than brothers. In some ways they were closer to each other than to their own wives, for they had grown up together and shared many of the experiences that formed their fundamental characters.