The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Butcher and the Black Tide, Part 4 of 13

Lucky Ford and the Gallo Rojo are under attack! The merciless forces of the dreaded Romanian have cornered them. What deadly tricks does the masked warrior have up that red sleeve?

The Butcher and the Black Tide is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

This is Part 3 of The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Butcher and the Black Tide. If you haven’t read Part 1. Part 2, or Part 3 yet, check them out before reading any further.

Content Warnings: Violence, Death, Gun Violence, Mild Swearing

MONDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 12, 1943
EL GALLO ROJO’S REFUGE
THE SIERRA ESPUÑA MOUNTAINS, SPAIN

“¡Venga, pollito!” a man called out. His voice was deep, and it rumbled down the tunnel. Emilia's grip on her bladed revolver tightened as she pressed her ear to the pipe, listening and waiting.

“Pollito, ¿no tienes qué decir acerca de lo que pasa a tu hermano?” the voice boomed again. He was so loud that the officials could hear him clearly through the wall, pipe or no pipe.

“That is Espada,” Emilia growled. Her brother's murderer, the gold-hungry captain of Hellbörg's mercenary army, an abductor and a murderer who would gladly trade their corpses for gold.

Emilia had other plans, plans based on months of tortured plotting, and without a word she kicked her heavy door open.

“Emmy,” Miller called out, smacking a thirty round magazine into his grease gun, “Wait!”

She was already out the door, her twin Webleys roaring as they sent .455-caliber rounds thundering down the tunnel. The bullets ricocheted off metal.

Miller shouted after her:

“That's what he wants!”

“I got her!” Bucket yelled. He rushed the door, only to run face-first into Emilia as she charged back into the safe room. She reacted instantly, getting low to tackle the small sergeant to the ground, knocking away his Super Colt machine pistol and Coke-bottle glasses as she brought him down. She threw one armored forearm over her face and screamed:

“¡Abajo!”

Lucky knew 'Duck!' in any language, and dropped to the floor, arms over his head and neck. Not half a second after he ate dirt, the tunnel roared with close-range heavy machine gun fire. A storm of massive rounds ripped through the earthen walls like they were wet tissue paper. Clumps of mud and Emilia's macabre collection of bolsetero masks cascaded over them. The rounds threshed through everything in their path, shattering furniture, pulverizing cases of orujo in sprays of liquor and glass, pulping poplar roots.

When the gunfire cut off, the sudden silence seemed as deafening as the explosive roar had been.

A masked bolsetero rounded the door, swinging his rifle around wildly. Lucky could see the glazed eyes behind those yellow lenses lock onto him. He struggled to bring his Colt to bear in time, but the gunman had the drop on him.

A barrage of .45 rounds whipped over Lucky's head and slammed into the mercenary, dropping him with a splat onto the tunnel's muddy floor. Back over Lucky's shoulder, gun smoke hung around Miller's head, drifting out of the stubby barrel of his brand-new M3 grease gun.

“Thanks,” Lucky said, pushing himself to his feet, adjusting his helmet after it had slipped down over his eyes. Small pebbles clinked down on him from the ceiling. He look up to see a deep crack groaning open above him, threading between poplar root joists to the ruined wall, bisected by machine gun fire.

“¡Vayan, bastardos!” Espada shouted from the tunnel again, immediately followed by the sound of a dozen charging sets of boots splashing through the mud. They were coming. Miller hauled Lucky to his feet.

“Up, Private Ford,” he grunted, “It seems Miss Emilia has plans to cover our escape.”

“A two step plan, follow close!” she yelled in reply. Emilia was already up off the ground, one of her Verey flare guns in hand. She hinged the breach open and slid in one of the inch-wide magnesium shells, then shouted back at the officials:.

“First, they burn!”

Bucket, still on the ground where Emilia had tackled him, threw an arm over his face. Emilia whipped the pistol shut and raised the gun. Lucky could hear boots sloshing as the bolseteros charged through the stinking, sticky mud. The stubby gun bucked once, and a maroon flare lanced out of the gun, through the open door, and embedded itself into the wall of the tunnel.

The flare hissed and sputtered in the wet wall for a second before it burst, showering the tunnel with clumps of steaming soil and red magnesium stars burning at thousands of degrees. The instant the sparks touched the mud it went up in a boiling, oily fireball. An orange wave of flame howled through the doorway, scorching the floor and ceiling and flash-frying Lucky's face and hands pink from fifteen feet away.

The sound of the charging bolseteros' boot steps was consumed by the roar of flame. The wall of chemical fire raced down the tunnel. The mercenaries began screaming as the flames took in their cloaks and masks.

The stinking mud was another of her traps. Emilia had doused the tunnel in grease. It was cheap, flammable, and she made more every time she cooked. The whole cavern stank of pork and beef as the fire chewed through bolseteros and support beams alike. It was her escape plan: a wall of fire to give her time to get out. Lucky blinked the stars out of his eyes and looked around. Sure enough, she was on to step two.

Emilia shoved the spent flare gun back into its holster and yanked Bucket up by his collar as he gathered his glasses and pistol. Smoking dirt tumbled off him.

Once he had his feet beneath him, Emilia shoved him aside and kicked the lid off a munitions crate marked with Francoist army emblems branded over French designations. Lucky wasn't too good with French, too many X's and T's and misplaced vowels, but he knew 'Grenade á fusil, V-B' meant business.

“Heads up, Miller!” Lucky yelled.

Emilia pulled an old rifle from the crate, racked its bolt back back then slammed it forward to chamber a round. Lucky saw the grenade cup attached to its muzzle just in time to shield his eyes.

She settled her aim onto the back wall of her hideout and pulled the trigger. The grenade it launched burst on impact, blasting open a hole large enough to squeeze through. The dirt had been only a couple feet thick, just enough to disguise a wall of wooden slats that easily blew aside to reveal her escape tunnel. Emilia dropped the rifle and dashed through the new exit.

“They are burning, so now we run!” she called over her shoulder. Her coat billowed behind her and she disappeared into the smoking black hole. Lucky jammed the old Colt into its holster and, ducking falling chunks of earth, chasing after her.

He stopped at the gaping hole. Her escape tunnel was dry, too tight to sprint down, and so dark that Lucky could tell that it was long because of Emilia's diminishing footfalls.

The grease fire was spilling over into the main cavern. The bolseteros’ panicked screams had become enraged shouts. They were braving the flames. Like the officials, they could only go forward.

“I have just the thing for this,” Miller said. He began rummaging through his satchel. He emerged with a canister grenade in hand. This wasn’t some olive drab job with a white stripe, like a smoke grenade. No, this one was painted up and down with black and white zig-zags. Miller gave him a thumb’s up, saying: “A small gift, liberated from Department Three.”

Bucket shoved Lucky into the blackness and let loose a rip from his gangster-style Tommy gun. The bolseteros who’d made it to the door shouted and pulled away. With Espada and flames behind them, bullets wouldn’t hold them back for long.

“Time to move!” Bucket shouted.

Lucky didn’t dawdle. He charged into the darkness. Bucket and Miller went hot on his heels. Their little blue lights illuminated the escape route, twinkling off yards of copper wire that ran

“That what I think it is?” Bucket grunted.

“Sure looks like it,” Lucky managed to wheeze, not breaking stride. Emilia’d rigged the whole place to blow.

“Than we better get God-damn motivated, 'cause she doesn't seem like the patient type,” Bucket said. He took a second to yell over his shoulder: “Miller, move your ass or get ready to leave it here!”

“Understood, Sergeant Hall,” Miller called back. “Now is as good as ever to give these uninvited guests their party favor.”

He pulled the pin out of his canister grenade and tossed it over his shoulder while he ran. It bounced and laid still for a couple seconds, then the whole wall of the tunnel burst inward from the cavern as it popped. Lucky ducked for the boom, but only heard a hiss. The shouting behind them changed from war cries to surprise.

The officials all stopped and looked. Lucky was had his Colt in hand and was ready for any surprise but the one he found.

Miller's blue flashlight illuminated millions of translucent strands of chemically-enhanced spiderweb that choked off the entire width of the escape tunnel. He recognized the stuff; he’d been webbed up in it not two days before. German spinnennetz. Each strand was stronger than steel and stickier than gum on hot asphalt. Those bastard bolseteros couldn't get through it with anything short of a dozen blowtorches and a Sherman tank. Lucky bent over, hands on his knees in an attempt to catch his breath.

“Do not stop!” Emilia yelled from somewhere ahead. “I must collapse the tunnel while he is still inside.”

“Girl,” Bucket gasped as he leaned against the wall, “No man's getting through that web.”

“Espada,” Emilia growled, “Is no man.”

Almost as if the devil had heard his name spoken, a roar reverberated through the tunnel.

“¡Pollito!” Espada howled, grating and echoing in the small tunnel, “¡Esto no me detendrá, pollito!”

As he yelled, sharp twangs resounded in the web-choked darkness, like bass strings snapping on an old guitar. Whatever the murderous Spaniard was, he was working his way through the unbreakable spiderwebs one-by-one.

“I got nothing for that! Haul ass, boys!” Bucket yelled, loosing a stream of Tommy gun slugs into the dense mass of webbing. Lucky followed suit with a couple rounds from his Colt, but Bucket had a point: anyone who could tear through that stuff was not someone they wanted to meet in a dark tunnel. Lucky turned tail and chased after Emilia’s echo as fast as he could.

In the chaos Lucky lost track of the tunnel around him. He had been focusing on the whip-snap of the strands breaking, and the frantic boot steps of Miller and Bucket right behind him.

Then his foot missed the ground.

Lucky didn't have time to react before he plunged into a dark hole, tumbling against the dirt wall and skidding to a halt as the sheer drop leveled out after a ten-foot fall. Miller and Bucket were as surprised as Lucky was, piling up behind him in a tangle of gear, arms, legs, and some of the dirtiest curses he'd ever heard.

Lucky shook the dirt off his face and looked up to the pale gray sky. Vesuvius' ash storm was in a lull, with only faint wisps of gray filtering the orange afternoon sun into a translucent pallor the color of corpse skin. Emilia stood above him with an old dynamite plunger in her gloved hands.

Behind Lucky, Bucket had untangled himself from Miller and was looking up the hole they had fallen from. It was obviously painstakingly dug out by hand, dropping out beneath a sandstone outcropping into a deep, brush-concealed culvert. In the dim light, Lucky could see Emilia's bright green eyes sparkle behind the dark eye slits of her pointed helmet. She tightened her grip on the business end of the plunger.

“Fire on the hole,” she said quietly.

“Actually,” Bucket started, spitting grit before he grabbed a fresh cigarette from his soft pack and settled it between his lips, “It's fire in - !”

Emilia rammed the plunger home, blasting the tunnel, the cavern, and all of its contents into dust. A concussive wave of hot dirt roared out of the tunnel's hidden exit, nearly bowling the four of them over and stealing the words right out of Bucket’s mouth.

The ground collapsed where her hideout had been, swallowing a score of old poplars like the blast had axed them through the roots. A cloud of sulfur-poisoned leaves and unsettled volcanic ash floated skyward, above the steaming, hungry sinkhole.

Bucket carefully removed his thick glasses and blew gently on the Coke-bottle lenses to remove the film of dirt and soot that coated them. He spit out his ruined cigarette and fished out a fresh one.

“In the hole, on the hole,” he said, “Same difference, I guess.”

MONDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 12, 1943
EL GALLO ROJO’S REFUGE
THE SIERRA ESPUÑA MOUNTAINS, SPAIN

Dozens of bolseteros swarmed the crater that had once been Emilia's home like ants on a dying bird. Some were digging for their buried comrades, others were burying those they had already pulled out. Still others were desperately trying to find Espada, though more were searching for the valuables they correctly believed to be hidden in the Gallo Rojo's stronghold.

The officials and Emilia stayed for a while, hidden and observing. The low light, thick brush, and oppressive ashfall helped to conceal them. So far the bolseteros hadn't found anything but burned corpses and crushed antiques, but there were so many of them working that they'd reach Espada in the escape tunnel soon enough, where the path of destruction would lead them straight to the tunnel.

A few engines sputtered and popped somewhere out in the gray.

“Six-cylinder trucks, old, Italian, and shitty,” Bucket said. His hearing was fine-tuned to the rumble of any engine. “Sucking in all this soot ain't doing them any favors either.”

“It is reinforcements,” Emilia replied, her voice monotonous and menacing through her helmet. “We must move quickly to be ready.”

“Ready for what, Emilia?” Miller asked. He was busy taping a slice from his silk parachute over what looked like an air intake on one of the large pouches on the back of his harness. From far away, Miller's gear all looked standard issue, from his ammo boots to his steel battle bowler helmet. Up close, little oddities told a different story.

The lack of seams or breaks in his fatigues were obvious. His trousers were sewn into his boots and his collar formed an airtight seal over his British gaspirator. Miller never removed the mask, and when a break in the suit ever opened, freezing cold air escaped. Eduardo Rosales had managed to create a self-powered, self-cooling mobile environment for Miller with all the machinery disguised and miniaturized to appear as the standard load-out of a typical foot-slogger. Not even Rosales could have predicted the suit would be subjected to conditions such as these, however. Whatever piece of technology Miller was modifying with a handmade filter, Lucky could tell that he was worried the fine volcanic grit might clog it.

Emilia watched him working on her father's invention for a long moment before speaking. She had her helmet hinged open to show her face. Her skin was gray, stained with sweat and fine soot, but even then Lucky couldn't take his eyes off of her.

“There is a small bridge, less than two kilometers from here. It is the only safe way for the bolseteros’ trucks to return to la batería,” Emilia told them. She sighed, then checked her holsters: her twin Webley revolvers were still there. “That is where we will attack them.”

“We cannot rush into anything,” Miller responded. “We are low on supplies, have no information, and are tired. This is not the time for an attack.”

“Now is the only time!” Emilia snapped, managing to exude every ounce of rage she could without yelling. “They are hurt, they are leaderless, they are demoralized, and they will be vulnerable. We will kill them, capture their vehicles and weapons, and attack their undefended home. That is the way of the guerillero.”

“What the hell is a guerillero?” Bucket asked as he chewed on his cigarette.

“A hero of España. My father was very adamant I learn the history of my land, and the people who changed it: warriors like el Empecinado, Espoz y Mina, and la Galana.” she answered.

“Los guerrillos were also equipped, informed, supported, and had a plan. Four advantages that we lack,” Miller pointed out.

“Is that road the only way to the battery?” Lucky interrupted. The bullets, fire, and explosions had distracted him for a second, but he was there for Grease and Emilia knew where the Romanian was holding him.

“The road is the only safe way.” she answered.

“Private Ford, before the war, the Germans used Spain as a proving ground for their armaments,” Miller noted. “It is likely that some of these weapons have had a much more extended effect than was originally intended.”

“Like what?” Bucket asked. His hand unconsciously inched toward the Super Colt pistol on his hip.

“Department Three used areas of this valley to test chemical and biological weapons,” Miller answered. He pulled a small map from his breast pocket and unfolded it, pointing out several areas marked in red. “If this land were hospitable, I suspect the Romanian would not be allowed to have it, despite his wealth and connections. Even today, some areas may be unsafe for travel.”

“The land has not yet healed,” Emilia added. “Tierra muerta. We cannot go there.”

Tierra muerta. Dead land. Lucky didn't want to consider what the Nazis had done to this valley that would make even Emilia avoid it.

“So that road is the safest way for us way to get to the Romanian.” Lucky concluded aloud.

“It will be, once we have disposed of the murderers would walk it,” Emilia whispered. She snapped her helmet shut and began picking her way through the underbrush, careful to not alert the digging bolseteros to her presence.

Lucky patted himself down to make sure he had all his gear. His Colt was in its holster, fully loaded with three extra mags in their pouches. He had two pineapple grenades clipped to his webbing, with his knife secure in its shoulder sheath. Not much to take on a column of soldiers-for-hire, but battles were won with less.

“Looks like we're all going the same way,” he said.

“It seems so,” Miller replied, and he hefted his M3 grease gun, ready to follow them into the sulfurous fog.

“I'm with you, just don't say it so ominous next time,” Bucket said. He pulled his Tommy gun to his shoulder.

These two men were willing to jump into darkness to save a man they'd never met, just because he was a friend of Lucky's. The iron vice that twisted inside Lucky’s chest cinched a bit tighter. He hoped that camaraderie wouldn't lead them to the same fate as the others who'd stood by his side.

Emilia slunk into the sunken underbrush, disappearing into the gray like the specters haunting Lucky. He readied his pistol and pushed those ghosts out of his mind. There was no time for those already gone.

“Let's go,” he whispered.

Lucky followed in Emilia’s bootprints, careful to emulate her same precise, stealthy movements as she made her way away from the crater and back down into the culvert. He didn't have to look back to know Bucket and Miller were close behind.

They walked for close to an hour, slow and methodical. The culvert opened up into a tight gully, with severe bluffs on either side. The dirt road the bolseteros would follow meandered down its middle alongside an ash-clogged stream for a while, until it had to cross. This was Emilia’s bridge.

Lucky understood why the ambush had to be there. It was a single-lane road, a natural bottleneck in the terrain. Imposing bluffs overlooked either side. Four shooters could take down a whole convoy in this place. The group split into pairs and took up positions on either small ridge, creating a deadly crossfire. Once the bolseteros were in their sights, they would have nowhere to run.

It was dead dark before they heard the trucks again. Bucket's watch said it was barely seven in the evening, but the freakish weather had its own say in the matter.

They’d been laying in wait for over an hour by then, letting a couple inches of ash had silently accumulate on their backs. Bucket had wrapped his Thompson in his uniform jacket to prevent any ash from clogging its action, letting cinders melt into his sweaty undershirt. Across the stream valley, so much ash had piled over Miller and Emilia that Lucky couldn't tell them apart from the terrain anymore.

Emilia's plan depended on a single, lightning-fast precision attack on the column of trucks, followed by an even faster retreat. Classic guerrillero tactics, she had said. Hit hard and move on, let attrition take care of the rest.

She and Miller would let the bolseteros start crossing the bridge before they lit them up. The first truck in the convoy would catch rounds through the gas tank and driver, while Bucket and Lucky would open up on the rear truck. Everyone in the middle would panic, and that's when when a magnesium flare would light up the draining gasoline. During that chaos, concealed by fire, smoke, terror, and blood, the officials would bolt.

That was the plan, at least.

Lucky eased back the hammer on his Colt. The old, beat-up pistol had been with him since Sicily, and with his sergeant from the 82nd before that. Its old slide was scratched and dinged from years of battle and training; shining steel scars glowed where the parkerization had scraped away; the double-diamond wooden grip was bleached and barked up from sun and mud; the barrel, no matter how clean, would always smell like it had just been fired.

Unlike Bucket's Tommy gun, there was no need to cover a Colt 1911's firing mechanism against grit. The gun could fire through a sandstorm all day, be used to hammer nails all night, and still ping bull's eyes at breakfast. The rounds it fired were huge: .45's could punch through a man as easily as a plywood target. The bolseteros' truck doors were thirty years old and rusted paper-thin: against a cannon like the Colt 1911 they'd be about as protective as a hand-knit sweater.

Out in the gray, Lucky heard a truck backfire. The weight of eight copper-jacketed rounds, each ready to roar forth from the pistol, and the steady, assured breathing of the official next to him were all Lucky needed to know that he was ready. He had to be.

The lead truck's flickering headlights didn't cut through the ash until the convoy was almost on top of the ambush zone. It approached the rickety bridge at a crawl, its rusting suspension groaning as its dry-rotting tires eased onto the wooden slats. The driver seemed hesitant, but that was just Lucky's nerves putting him on edge.

The old truck coughed, choking on the gray air. Lucky held his breath, watching, finger on the trigger. The truck bed was wrapped in patchy canvas which shielded the bolseteros within from the ashfall. This point vehicle was a third of the way across the bridge before the four following trucks arrived. It was almost time. The convoy rolled forward by the inch. Finally, the first truck reached the end of the bridge as the last settled onto it. All five trucks had entered the firing zone.

The distinctive bark of one of Emilia's Webleys was accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. In an instant, the quiet gray night shattered.

To Lucky's right, Bucket opened up with his Chicago typewriter, peppering the last truck’s cab with a dozen rounds. Lucky steadied his aim on a log and punched hole after hole through its fuel tank, spilling gas all over the bridge.

Across the gully, Miller was doing the same with his grease gun, spilling the lead truck's petrol by the gallon. The trucks screeched to a halt under the barrage, their drivers shredded and their fuel bleeding onto the bridge's wooden planks.

Across the stream valley, Emilia stood, lit by Miller's blazing muzzle flashes. The ash from her coat fell around her like a gray avalanche. She raised one of her flare pistols and pulled the trigger. A crimson comet lanced from its bucking barrel into the cascading gasoline. The instant it touched, the whole bridge went up. All five trucks and the men within were consumed in a blinding fireball that rose high above Lucky’s position at the top of the bluff.

Lucky paused to reload, surveying the chaos below.

The smoke was there, the fire was there, but something was missing.

“Where are they?” Bucket whispered. He was right.

There was no screaming, no terror. There was no one running, no one firing back at them. No one there at all. Aside from the drivers, the trucks had been empty.

Bucket rose to a knee. He looked cock-eyed at the burning bridge, then brought the gun to his shoulder. He loosed a quick burst of hot lead down into the back of the closest burning truck. The canvas bed cover collapsed, revealing it to be empty.

“What the hell?” Bucket growled, spitting his soaked cigarette into an ash drift. “Where are they?”

A poplar trunk behind them burst like it had been struck by lightning, showering them both in hot splinters. They flopped to the ground just as the broken tree’s canopy collapsed over them.

Dozens of soldiers began yelling in the darkness.

A battle line of bolseteros appeared out of nowhere, forming up amongst the trees on Miller and Emilia's side of the small valley. Their rusted rifles were hoisted in the air as they advanced, with the largest of them all at the head of their formation. He was wrapped in the form-concealing cloak they all wore, but was clearly at least a foot taller than the other Portuguese mercenaries, and twice as wide. He held up a single fist, halting and silencing the entire line of bolseteros.

“¡Pollito!” he called mockingly, “Eres previsible.”

“Espada!” Emilia screamed. Her helmet masked everything but the unchecked rage in her voice. She filled her hands and fired a barrage into the cloaked man. Lucky could hear each metallic ping as the bullets hit the Spanish captain. His stomach dropped: he'd heard that sound before.

Espada tossed his bullet-perforated cloak aside with a matador's flourish. In the orange glow of the blazing gasoline, Lucky could see him clearly. He wore the massive powered armor of the Panzerritter Korps. The armor, layers of steel plate, leather, rubber, and chain mail over a hydraulic inner structure, made Espada impervious to small arms fire and many times stronger than a normal man. While Lucky took him in, Espada brought his massive weapon to bear on Emilia.

“Holy hell!” Bucket yelled as he pressed himself flat against the dirt.

Espada's machine gun was even larger than a Browning. It looked like it weighed damn-near a hundred pounds and was almost six feet long, all pressed steel and armor-piercing rounds, and when he let it loose, it howled.

Lucky belly-crawled from beneath the fallen limbs, doing his best imitation of a snake.

Espada fired from the hip, sending his furious stream of high-caliber rounds crashing through the hilltop, each burst shattering scores of poplars like they were carved from crystal. He was a one-man logging crew.

Emilia ducked out of sight, but with an incoming fusillade like that, she couldn’t go far.

“That's a damn aircraft cannon!” Bucket shouted through the din, racking back the charging handle on his Thompson.

Lucky peeked up for a second. Espada's weapon was never meant be carried by a man. It was bulky and mechanical, with exposed mechanisms and churning gears that fed a disintegrating chain of rounds, each as large as Lucky's thumb. It was only a matter of seconds before the Spaniard would tear through Miller and Emilia's meager cover and grind them into casserole.

“We have to do something!” Lucky hollered over the din. Bucket nodded, took a deep breath, pushed his glasses up off his nose, and nodded again. It only took a quick look at the marauding panzerritter for him to come up with a plan.

“How’s your throwing arm?” Bucket asked, pointing to one of the grenade’s dangling off Lucky’s webbing. Lucky nodded, and Bucket smiled wide, saying: “Then let’s give him a shove!”

They popped to their feet. Lucky pulled the pin and heaved that grenade like he was trying to get a runner out at the plate from deep center. It flew in a high arc over the stream, the gully, the burning trucks.

Bucket let loose with his Thompson, pounding forty-fives into the side of Espada's steel faceplate. He knew the pinging rounds had no chance of doing anything beyond getting the Spaniard's goat, but that was the whole point: when Espada had lead dinging off his face, it was easy for him to miss the pineapple grenade that plopped down at his feet.

Espada reacted to Bucket's firestorm like it was more drudgery than danger. The armor creaked and groaned as he plodded around to face this new annoyance. The blazing trucks lit him head-on, giving Lucky and Bucket their best view yet of what they were dealing with.

This panzerritter armor was bigger than those the Nazis had worn in Vesuvius; thicker, heavier, and more powerful. Espada had replaced the faceplate with one from a set of medieval Spanish battle armor. A sculpted mask in the shape of a screaming man stared out with hollow round eyes, its ghastly visage frozen in an eternal grimace. Rust stains leaked down from the eyes like bloody tears. His left arm bore a painted crest of arrows and an ox yoke. He carried a butcher's cleaver sheathed across his chest plate: the blade was the same size as the hole in Berto's armor.

Espada's empty eye sockets locked onto Lucky and Bucket's position and he brought his roaring cannon up and around to lay down fire on them. He never took his finger off the trigger while he came around, and the inch-wide rounds scythed through trees like wheat.

Then Lucky's grenade went off. Shrapnel and force washed away the bolseteros in the front line, leaving only Espada there alone. He hefted his cannon and zeroed in on Bucket’s muzzle flashes.

It wasn't the shrapnel that did him in, or the concussion, but it wasn't meant to be. The blast had gouged a small crater into the ground near Espada's right foot, making him miss a step as he turned that threw him off-balance. It was the same way the officials escaped the panzerritters in Vesuvius. His bulk dragged him down, and the Spaniard dropped his cannon as he fell to one knee.

A pair of bolseteros jumped over their shrapnel-perforated comrades and rushed to Espada’s side. They tried to lift him to his feet only for him to swat them away. It was a mere flick of the wrist for him, but it was a hydraulic sledgehammer to the Portuguese mercenaries, shattering ribs and arms in a quick, disdainful swipe. They collapsed among the dead and dying that they’d rushed past.

Emilia and the officials took advantage of the second's reprieve. From their two positions, all four of them stood at once and began pounding rounds into the bolsetero line, Miller's M3 and Bucket's Thompson chattering death into the jittery mercenaries, while Lucky popped off rounds with his Colt. The bullets forced them back until a roar from Espada and a punch that splattered one of their number forced them into a headlong charge, if not after the Gallo Rojo than away from their murderous commander.

Dozens of masked men tore through the fallen ash, crazed and kicking up gray rooster tails as they fired their rifles with abandon. Their twitching aim was terrible under ideal conditions, but in the volcanic darkness, running at full speed, the chances that a single shot could connect was insignificant at most. But there wasn't just a single shot. There were eight dozen screaming, smoke-crazy mercenaries bearing down, firing as fast as they could rack their bolt-action rifles, and their cracked, corroded slugs were hitting awfully close. Espada staggered behind, still trying to regain his equilibrium after taking his tumble.

Another flare burst among the bolseteros, green instead of her usual red. It still burned just as hot, and it still meant the same thing to a bolsetero: fiery death. To Lucky, green meant 'go.'

Lucky pulled the pin from his last grenade and heaved it, planting it in the deep ash ahead of the charging mercenaries. A half-dozen masked men dropped as it blasted a cover of soot into the air. The rest of the line continued its charge, hardly slowing as they stomped over their fallen comrades.

Bucket tapped Lucky on the shoulder and took off up and over the gully's low ridge to the south. Lucky followed close, firing his Colt to keep the bolseteros' heads down. Bucket covered him with a quick rip from his Thompson.

Lucky chanced a look back: Miller and Emilia had taken off up the opposite opposite slope.

The darkness and falling soot soon covered their trail, and it wasn't long before Bucket and Lucky lost their pursuers. The bolseteros and Espada were still out there, turning over logs and kicking at high ash drifts, but the spider hole Emilia had directed them to wasn't going to be found before daylight. Its entrance, a long sandstone slab on rollers, blended into the ash so well that Lucky and Bucket nearly missed it despite knowing exactly where it was and what to look for.

The plan had always been to hit the bolseteros hard, split up and hide, then wait for the Romanian's men to fall back to collect their dead. Once the action had quieted down, they would reconnoiter.

Emilia had given them directions to a small village in the southeastern branch of the mountains, a town where the Gallo Rojo had saved several families from the bolseteros. They would rendezvous there, and Emilia promised them shelter, warm food, and a cache of weapons and ammunition.

The weak glow of ash-diffused moonlight leaked into the spider hole's ventilation shaft and glowed softly off Bucket's dark face, which was stained even darker by soot sticking to his sweat. His thick glasses caught the moon when he leaned his head back to sip from his canteen. An errant trickle ran over his chin. He sputtered and chuckled. then wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. His grin twisted into a scowl the instant he tasted the grit on his ash-soiled uniform.

Lucky couldn't help but chuckle. Bucket grinned and handed off the canteen. Lucky took it and listened carefully to the forest. Far off, he thought he could still hear the mercenaries scouring the woods. He took a sip of the lukewarm water, then passed it back to Bucket.

They stayed quiet and listened after that, for men, or trucks, or gunshots. Somewhere out there, Emilia and Miller were doing the same. And past them, beyond the mountains and the sea and the Romanian, the Colonel was planning his retaliation against the Germans. He would be setting out in two days, and if Lucky hadn't found Grease and returned to the Saint George by then, his stay in Spain would be a lot longer than he had planned on.

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres. Spanish translations by Caitlin Gilmore.