Free Skyfire by Mack Maloney Page B

keeper of all this gas.
    A man of ruddy Irish complexion and a shock of gray-white hair that went well with his last name, Stallion was in charge of the small army that guarded the fuel-tank storage
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    area of the refinery. More than a hundred men were under his command, and their weaponry-ranging from NightScope-equipped M-16's to TOW antitank rockets, and even some small surface-to-air missiles-was judged to be more than enough to discourage any troublemakers from nosing around the sprawling hundred-fifty-acre waterfront facility.
    Now, on this night, as Stallion looked out of the tower at the full moon rising above his little protectorate, he knew it was time to begin his quarter-hourly security check.
    "Station One?" he routinely called into the microphone of his elaborate radio setup. "Report . . ."
    "Station One, OK. . ." came the reply.
    "Station Two?"
    "Deuce is OK. . ."
    "Station Three?"
    "Trips is OK. . ."
    On and on it went, each of the three-man outposts around the perimeter of the facility calling in that everything was quiet.
    But still, Stallion felt uneasy. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but something in his craw was telling him everything wasn't as it should be.
    Acting purely on instinct, Stallion quickly completed the security check and then sent out a general order for his troops to go up to a Yellow Alert, the middle stage of readiness.
    His troopers - mostly veterans of the Big War as well as the more recent civil wars-knew better than to question their commander's order. Instead, reacting like a well-oiled machine, each outpost went to Yellow. All weapons were checked for ammunition load and all safeties were turned off. Each NightScope operator widened his range of field, and the reserve force of troopers back in the barracks quickly suited up and reenforced their assigned stations.
    As it turned out, Stallion's action would be responsible for saving the lives of many of his soldiers.
    The first sign of trouble appeared ten minutes later. The NightScope operator at Station Twenty-two was scan-76
    ning a section of oily beach about an eighth of a mile from his position when he got a reading of two figures walking up from the water's edge. He immediately alerted the two other troopers in his pillbox, and one of them in turn radioed a quick report back to Stallion's tower command post.
    As luck would have it, Station Twenty-two was the most isolated position on the facility's perimeter. Stuck out on the far eastern edge of the storage area, it looked out on a little-used shipping channel that at one time handled sizable oil tankers arriving from overseas. Now the channel was collared with tall bullrushes that somehow managed to live along the heavily polluted shoreline. It was in these weeds that the NightScope operator first saw the intruders.
    No sooner had the warning call gone out to Stallion and the rest of the security force when the number of mysterious figures on NightScope increased to six, then eight, then twelve, then twenty. Stallion immediately bumped the whole facility up to Red Alert. Already a small force of twenty reserve troops were quietly making their way to the area, but Station Twenty-two's isolated location being what it was, they would not arrive for several minutes.
    By that time, it would be too late.
    The voice of the radio operator in Twenty-two took on an ever-increasing anxious tone as he radioed the situation back to Stallion.
    "We have a reading on as many as thirty-six individuals approaching our position," Stallion heard the man say in a controlled but undeniably nervous whisper. "They are definitely armed."
    Stallion had turned his own NightScope on the area by this time and he, too, could see the faint images of a crowd of figures walking up from the water's edge. Because of the volatility of their surroundings, the rules of engagement around the storage facility were stridently low-key and by the book. No one wanted any panic firing when just one or two