Hopsquatch by Michael Newton

Author:Michael Newton [Newton, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781641194075
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing
Published: 2018-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

“I’m still not sure about this, Fawn,” said Mark Durrant. “Gimme a break. We’ve been all over it.”

“I know, but Jeez . . .”

“They call us terrorists,” Joan Gyger said. “It’s time we showed them what that really means.”

Fawn gave Joan a smile and said, “Exactly.”

Girl power.

“But we could kill somebody with this thing,” Mark said.

“That’s why we practiced with it,” Fawn reminded him. “We’ve got it down.”

“You can’t practice for accidents,” he groused.

“There’s no such thing,” Fawn said. “Just wimps who lose their nerve and drop the ball.”

Calling him out in front of Joan, making his masculinity the issue.

“Yeah, all right. I said I’d do it, didn’t I? I’m here, right? Just be careful with this goddamned thing.”

This goddamned thing was an Ml9 mortar, sixty-millimeter, standard U.S. military issue from the 1940s through the eighties, when a newer model made it obsolete. It was designed to launch projectiles over obstacles, including buildings, fortress walls, or hills. On paper, it could hit a target better than a mile away, but that required some kind of martial artistry that Fawn didn’t possess and, she suspected, tons of wishful thinking. Stripped down to basics, the Ml9 was a forty-five-pound stovepipe, nearly three feet long that sat atop a square detachable base weighing twenty-one pounds. The stovepipe was supported by a bipod with a hand crank to adjust its elevation between forty and eighty-five degrees. The lower its elevation, the farther projectiles went flying down range.

Those projectiles resembled small aerial bombs. Depending on their load, they might be high-explosive or incendiary, smoke for signaling or covering an infantry advance, or what the military called “illumination”—fireworks to light up a battlefield at night. The mode of firing, single-shot and muzzle-loaded, was simplicity itself. You dropped a shell butt-first into the stovepipe and it took off automatically. The operator’s only worry was correcting elevation for direct hits on the target.

And escaping afterward, of course.

Fawn had acquired the Ml9 from an acquaintance out of Sacramento, California, who peddled military hardware to consumers who were banned by law from owning it. Earth Now! or super-patriot militias, Klansmen or black militants, he didn’t give a damn, as long as everyone paid cash up front. The mortar had been sitting in a bunker somewhere, long enough to rate a mark-down on its retail price, with ammo and a thirty-minute training course included. Fawn had lobbed a dozen practice rounds, all duds, at cactuses and Joshua trees outside of Ravendale, near the Nevada border, then drove back to Evergreen and pitched her plan to Mark and Joan.

There’d been no need to trouble Otto with it. He was glum enough already, since their tussle with the Stooges at the Grubstake. Why make matters worse?

They put the disassembled Ml9 in Mark’s old van, being extra careful with the six high-explosive rounds Fawn had purchased with the mortar. They were in a wooden crate, padded with Styrofoam, another goddamn blight on the environment from Dow Chemical—but there was no point taking chances, even so.

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