Villain (Gone 8)

They came to the state road 593 overpass and suddenly:

Bam! Bam!

Poole dropped down into his seat as rifle rounds pinged and bounced off the JLTV’s armor.

“Take him out.”

“Roger that, sir.”

Poole peered up through the windshield and watched as his gunner’s big .50 shredded the man with the rifle.

Now it was the New York-New York casino with its half-size replica of the Statue of Liberty and its faux New York skyline. A pedestrian walkway crossed the Strip from New York-New York to the MGM Grand. Poole saw three people on the walkway. And he saw the silhouettes of guns.

“Don’t fire unless we are—” Pool ordered. At which point the three on the walkway opene

d fire with handguns and a shotgun, none of which would have any effect on the JLTV, let alone the tanks.

“Okay,” Poole said, and the .50 opened up again, showering spent brass down the windshield and killing the civilians.

If they knew what a .50 caliber does to flesh and bone . . . Poole thought.

Thirty-five miles an hour now, slowly past the Monte Carlo, slowly past the Aria. An electronic billboard advertised Celine Dion, who, Poole was pretty sure, was going to have to cancel her show.

Another pedestrian walkway. More gunmen firing. More gunmen with big holes in their bodies and chunks of themselves sent flying through the air.

Civilians. American civilians.

He would go down in history as the first commander to open fire on American civilians. He felt sick. But at another level, relieved, because so far the only firing done had been by his own JLTV. So far this hardly called for a whole tank attack force.

But then he saw the crowd. In the street, just standing there. Thousands of people, a silent mob in front of Caesars Palace. They stretched from the casino doors down the semicircular driveway, then a quarter mile of them on the Strip itself. He raised his binoculars and gazed into faces that might have been any random cross-section of American citizens, with no doubt some foreign tourists mixed in. He saw weapons—lots of weapons, including military ordnance—assault rifles, grenades, shoulder-carried missiles. Someone had broken into the National Guard arsenal. Poole could only hope no one knew how to use the anti-tank weapons, because if they did, and if they used them, then he was going to have to order a massacre.

Poole stood up in the hatch again. An observant corporal handed him a set of shooter’s earmuffs. He asked for the microphone—the JLTV had an onboard public-address system.

“Under the emergency decree passed by Congress and signed by the president, I order you to disperse immediately.”

The crowd just stared.

“We have already been forced to open fire. We do not wish to harm you, but you must disperse.”

A woman toward the front of the crowd was saying something, looking very earnest. Poole pushed his earmuffs back from one ear.

“. . . not trying to get killed but we can’t disobey!” the woman said. “Don’t you understand? We have to attack you and kill you! Without mercy!”

Lowering the bullhorn, Poole said, “If you fail to disperse we—”

And suddenly a mellifluous, compelling voice spoke into a handheld bullhorn. The voice said, “Soldiers! I order you to blow this town apart! You, boss man! Order your soldiers to annihilate this town!”

At which point Poole keyed his microphone and said, “Attention to orders. You will immediately begin firing on any and all buildings.”

One tank—the one immediately behind Poole, whose commander had heard Dillon on the loudspeaker, swiveled his cannon, aimed it at the largest target at hand: the faux Eiffel Tower of the Paris casino.

Ka-BOOM!

A round of high explosive blew up as it struck the restaurant level about a third of the way up. Bits of steel strap and rivets and a shower of glass went flying.

“Sir!” Poole’s driver yelled. Having headphones on, he had not heard Dillon’s voice.

“You heard my order!” Poole shouted.