The night man at the Transpan armory was a blond guy named Schlenker who spoke English with a German accent. He wore rimless glasses when he read, and he was reading a copy of something in German with his feet up on the counter when I hit him behind the ear with the government issue sap that Ives had given us. He slid sideways out of the chair and his glasses fell off as he hit the floor.
I squatted beside him and fished the keys out of his right-hand pants pocket. I opened the door to the gun room and the sound of a siren exploded into the quiet night.
Behind me Hawk said something in Vietnamese.
A single line of Vietnamese men filed into the gun room. Each grabbed an M16 rifle and a clip of ammunition and moved back out of the armory. Every fourth man took an ammunition box.
Ky stood beside Hawk speaking softly to the men in Vietnamese. Hawk said something to him in French. Ky nodded.
The siren screamed and a series of spotlights glared suddenly throughout the compound. I went out the side window headfirst and landed and rolled and got up running. Behind me I heard the first chatter of automatic fire. Then more of it. I was behind the nearest Quonset now, and behind me I heard soft footfalls. I turned with my gun out and it was Hawk.
“So there was an alarm,” I said.
“Don’t matter,” Hawk said. “They got the guns.”
I nodded toward the far side of the compound and we headed for it on the run. No one was worried about us. They still thought we were on their side and, like the rest of the forces, were running around wondering what the hell happened.
Behind us there was a sudden great whoosh, a giant thud, and the armory burst into a mass of immediate flame.
“Gasoline do work nice, don’t it,” Hawk said. We paused in shadow along the perimeter fence. “Lead free,” he said. The fire modified the harsh white glow of the spotlights and gave a bronze cast to everything and the men running across the open space became shadowed and distorted as the flames surged and wavered. The automatic fire echoed in short rippling bursts and then the ammunition left in the armory began to explode in festival bursts.
We edged our way along the fence toward Costigan’s compound. Something big went off in the armory and sent a volcanic spurt a hundred feet in the air. The gunfire had spread and came from everywhere, or seemed to. Someone had set off a fire alarm and the bell clanged steadily in counter-point to the siren.
“Lucky they’re ringing that bell,” I said. “Never know otherwise there was a fire.”
“Alert,” Hawk said.
At the edge of the fire’s roar and the siren’s shriek and the bell’s clang and the gunfire and exploding ammunition I could hear small sounds of human yells, but only bare wisps of sound, almost illusory, the cries of the men overwhelmed by pyrotechnics. Only when I saw the black shadowy distorted elongated forms flit briefly in front of the flames were the cries audible, as if it required the sight of near human form to connect sound with source. Around the mercenary barracks there was no sign of activity. Most of them had been in combat and most of them knew when to stay low and when to fight. When they had guns and you didn’t was the time to stay low.