Chapter 20

Annja sensed them around her – dark presences in the cool, dark front room of the lodge. Closing in from beyond her peripheral sight.

The pistol cracked again. It sounded very loud in the living room of the lodge. Tex rocked back just slightly to the second bullet's impact. The front of his blue denim shirt blossomed with a spreading stain. He went to his knees on the plank floor with a thump. His eyes rolled up in his head and he fell forward.

Jadzia screamed.

Annja felt as if her body had turned to ash inside her skin.

Joey gaped at his fallen friend. Beyond him Annja now saw that a big single-action revolver lay on the floor by the cowhide chair, near a hand that dangled over one arm. In a flash of comprehension she realized the tycoon had been suicided – subdued, possibly drugged, hand wrapped around grip, weapon held to temple and discharged.

"You said nobody'd get hurt!" Joey shouted. He turned and started toward his uncle.

A man wearing blue jeans and a stained gray work shirt stepped out from the same hallway from which Louis Sulin had emerged. He fired a pump shotgun from the hip. The blast was horrendously loud. The charge took Joey in the left kidney. He staggered, bending backward in agony, grabbing himself with both hands. The man racked the slide, shouldered the weapon and shot him in the head.

Sulin half turned. "Who told you – ?"

Annja side-kicked him with all her strength.

She thought she felt something break, but even as she moved she had seen from the corner of her eye a man emerge from a door to her left holding a handgun. With no time to make sure of a killing blow, she had only been able to take Sulin out of the action for at least a few moments.

Crying incoherently, Jadzia launched herself at the shotgunner. Whether taken by surprise or reluctant to shoot a woman, he never brought the weapon up before she started clawing and pummeling at his face. He pushed her away. She sat down hard on the floor.

He turned toward Annja, raising the shotgun. She was on him. The sword flashed side to side. The man was dead before he could understand what had happened.

Annja kept turning. A man loomed next to her right shoulder. He had been one of an unknown number who stood in ambush flanking the front door, out of immediate sight, poised in expectation that once Joey waltzed blithely in with his cheery greeting to his uncle, the others would follow without a care.

Carelessly. Just the way they did.

He seemed thunderstruck at the sword in Annja's hand. But he had a gun in his. Annja brought the blade up and then down, slashing him diagonally from left to right. He screamed and fell back against the wall with blood spraying from his chest.

Another man lunged at her. Annja cut upward. The man uttered a bubbling bellow and went to his knees with his guts slopping out of his ripped flannel shirt. She slashed another man across the eyes. As she did so he fired a handgun. The shot missed, but the flare dazzled her eyes. Unburned propellant thrown out by the blast stung her cheek.

An assailant threw down a Taurus double-action revolver and turned to run toward what seemed like the dining room, to the left of the front door. Annja slashed him across the back without remorse. He was a killer. The man pitched forward screaming and writhing. Instead of putting him out of his misery she jumped over him. His screams would distract his fellows and drain their morale. He was vivid evidence of the cost of trifling with Annja Creed and those under her protection.

Jadzia sat on the floor with her knees up, staring at everything with wild eyes. Annja put the sword away, grabbed up the shotgun Joey's murderer had dropped when she'd struck him and jacked the pump. She confirmed at least one more shell was in the tubular under-barrel magazine, then leaned around to blast one down the hallway.

Sulin lay slumped at the far end, feeling his ribs. He held his pistol in one hand. He rolled quickly out of the way as she fired. She was pretty sure she'd missed.

She worked the pump again, trying to remember how many shells a shotgun held. If it was a combat gun, as it seemed to be, she thought she recalled it would have a capacity of seven or eight.

Somebody came through the door to what she suspected to be the kitchen, at the other end of the big front room where Uncle Amon slumped in his chair of eternal repose. Annja shouldered the weapon, flash-sighted through the ghost ring, fired as he took up an isosceles stance pointing his Model 1911 .45 at her. The gunman's face crumpled in on itself as if punched in by an invisible fist – or a sledgehammer.

She looked at Jadzia again. The girl's face went red and started to knot up to cry as the first shock subsided. "No time," Annja said roughly. "Get up."

She took the girl's arm. Jadzia scrambled to her feet quickly enough, bringing the bag full of scrolls with her. Annja was relieved to see once again that when the hammer came down, Jadzia was willing to follow the lead of somebody experienced in real-time trouble.

Belatedly Annja pumped the shotgun, then moved to the kitchen side of the front door, keeping a wary eye on the door in the back of the room. "When I give the word," she told the girl, "I want you to throw the front door open hard. Don't go out. Understand?"

Jadzia nodded. Annja moved to the window. Some chintz curtains framed it, and a gauzy hanging masked the outdoors from clear view from inside – and vice versa.

Annja caught Jadzia's eye. The girl was weeping and biting her lip but seemed in control. "Now!"

Jadzia grabbed the latch, yanked the door open and gave the screen a kick. A startled exclamation rang out from just outside.

Shotgun in hand, holding her left arm protectively bent in front of her eyes, Annja jumped through the front window. The wood frame screeched and gave way. Glass exploded around her. She felt it clawing her like a bagful of angry wildcats.

She had no time to think about it. A man with a Mini-14 carbine stood with his back toward her. She summoned the sword and cut him down.

Another man had an assault rifle pointed into the open front door. Fortunately Jadzia had had the sense to jump aside after booting open the door. The man gaped at Annja and swung the rifle at her with the speed of pure adrenaline.

She lunged, thrust. The sword punched through his sternum, through his heart and lungs. His eyes went wide.

"Come on!" she shouted in the door. She heard voices from inside, as well as from around to the rear of the house.

Jadzia stumbled out carrying the scrolls. She was full-on crying, with great whooping sobs. "Tex," she moaned. "They killed him!"

"They'll kill us, too, if we don't move." Putting the sword away, Annja seized Jadzia's arm and led her half stumbling toward the airboat.

"Do you know how to drive this?" Jadzia asked, scrambling in. She seemed not so much to have stopped her crying fit as put it on hold as curiosity got the better of her.

"Not yet," Annja said. "Hold this."

She handed the shotgun to the girl, hoping it would distract her, hoping she'd have the sense not to shoot Annja, herself or the engine by accident.

A red button by the high driver's seat started the engine with a cough and a snarl when Annja stabbed it with her thumb. Evidently Joey had felt confident about leaving it unlocked in front of his uncle's grand hunting lodge. Joey had been confident about a lot of things that hadn't turned out so well.

She guessed the tiller worked in a fairly intuitive way. Push it left to go right, but no reverse lest the huge fan blow driver and passengers right out of the shallow skiff hull. She pushed the stick forward. The engine noise rose in pitch and the boat commenced to move.

She powered it around in a semicircle. That seemed to be the plan anyway, and it moved readily enough with the long moist grass as a sort of lubrication. Nothing ripped the bottom out of the airboat as it slewed about. The engine and fan were unbelievably loud in the driver's seat. Annja was suddenly much aware of the chopping power of those blades spinning a few feet behind her. The craft reached the water. Annja's heart almost stopped as the bow pushed down into it as if to break the surface and head straight to the bottom. Instead it bounced back and obediently lit out across the water.

She steered it back the way they had come. "Why are we going this way?" Jadzia yelled at her.

"We know there's a ride this way," she shouted. She didn't see any point in trying to lead the inevitable pursuit on a wild goose chase. She was willing to gamble Sulin would not yet have bothered sending men to secure Joey's Grand Cherokee. They had other priorities.

"Do you think they'll chase us?" Jadzia asked. Again she showed a tendency to snap out of it in actual danger, and lapse back into hysterics when things calmed down. While Annja could have done without any hysteria whatsoever, she was grateful it only came out when it did.

"I'd be amazed if they didn't," she replied.

"Here they come!" Jadzia screamed, pointing past the starboard edge of the fan cage.

The airboat swerved slightly as Annja turned her head. A big boat came powering around a bend in the bayou beyond the lodge. It pushed a big foam-edged wave of tea-colored water before it. Its wake threw dirty water across the dock.

A man in the powerboat's prow shouldered an M-16 and fired. She didn't see where the bullets went, wasn't sure if she'd even hear the cracks of their supersonic passage above her engine's howl. Two other men hung on the rail behind him holding long guns. Sulin wasn't there. Annja guessed she had busted some ribs for him.

Another burst ripped a line of miniature waterspouts past them on the right. Jadzia cried. Annja veered the boat starboard through the falling spray of the last one. A plan formed in her mind.

As she suspected, the next burst tore the water more or less along the line she had followed a moment before. She felt her gut tighten. The mass of the automobile-style engine would easily absorb the needle-like bullets – protecting her body. The engine would likely suck in a lot of them before it stopped running. But she feared a hit on one of the propeller blades would leave them literally dead in the water.

And shortly after that, just plain dead.

She began to weave the little craft back and forth across the bayou, which ran relatively broad. The powerboat's engine roared, audible above the airboat's own motor, surging in predatory pounce-reflex as its crew sensed vulnerable prey.

"Don't be stupid!" Jadzia screamed. "Quit swerving! It's catching us!"

"It's faster anyway," Annja called back grimly. Their only advantage was maneuverability – and with a drowned forest coming up even that would shortly be restricted. "Anyway, we can't outrun bullets."

To Annja's horror the girl stood up, pale legs braced, and fired the shotgun from the hip. She had presence of mind – or luck – enough to shoot on a turn so that the shot charge cleared Annja and even the wide sweep of the prop. But she hadn't anticipated the savage 12-gauge recoil, which Annja's old combat-shooting instructor had confided was almost impossible even for a strong, trained man to control effectively in rapid fire. The single blast was enough to tear the gun out of Jadzia's hands and knock her on her rump in the bilge. The shotgun fell overboard to vanish with a splash.

Annja hoped Jadzia hadn't hurt herself too badly. The girl seemed mostly stunned. As for the shotgun, it had formed no part of the plan flash-formed in Annja's mind anyway.

She heard the powerboat's roar grow louder. She threw the airboat broadside across its path. She chopped the throttle and let the engine die.

Annja could hear Jadzia's despairing wail as the airboat wallowed and stopped. It rode up on the great swell pushed before the onrushing powerboat's bow. Annja saw the men on deck, taken as fully by surprise as she had hoped, jostling to try to get to the port rail to shoot as the boat's driver swerved alongside the airboat.

As it did, Annja sprang. Time seemed to slow as she hung suspended in air between the craft. Then she caught the chromed rail with her left hand.

The impact almost wrenched the shoulder out of its socket. She twisted. Her hip slammed against the slick white hull. The sun-heated metal rail seared her palm.

A face stared over the rail at her, a comic mask of surprise, eyebrows arched, eyes and mouth ovals of astonishment. The man was holding a CAR-4 automatic carbine. Annja summoned the sword and thrust it up through the open mouth.

She felt a moment of resistance, a squishy sensation. He collapsed instantly to the deck as she pithed him like a frog. Six inches of blade protruded from the back of the man's head. The sword shone pristine, as if its metal refused to be sullied.

She got the soles of her shoes against the hull, using her legs, as well as her grip on the rail to vault onto the deck, which now ran pink. Her motion yanked the sword free on its own.

The other man who had stood behind the bow gunner swung his full-size M-16 in a clumsy attempt to club her. She easily fended off the lightweight weapon with her left hand. She slashed him diagonally across the chest, high right, down left, then took a return backhand cut across his belly.

As he fell screaming, the man in the bow aimed his long black rifle at Annja from his shoulder. She raced toward him, sword raised. As he fired she veered right, hacked across her body. The blade sliced through the M-16's receiver.

The shooter screamed as a cartridge, severed in midignition, vented furnace-hot gases into his face. She brought a short chopping stroke down on the left side of his forehead. His shrieking stopped. He toppled backward. She wrenched the sword free and he flopped backward over the rail like a fish released to the waters of the bayou.

The big powerboat coasted to a stop. The engine idled beneath her feet. She felt a crawling sensation between her shoulder blades. The immediacies of survival – as in, fending off certain death – had forced her to expose herself to the boat's pilot, in his cockpit aft. She expected to hear the shattering crack of a shot, feel a bullet lance her back.

She wheeled around, sword ready, gleaming like a ray of light in the brilliant sun. The pilot sat with his hands up and his eyes, staring at her in almost mindless horror. She might have been some kind of movie monster emerged from the swamp to kill his mates.

It was, she reflected, no less likely than what he had just seen happen.

Sword in hand she stalked toward him. He got up and turned as if to flee straight astern. There was nothing back there but the aft rail and black water. She darted forward, grabbed him by the back of his green polyester shirt, spun him to face her.

He gibbered. She didn't need him intelligible anyway.

"Listen," she said, grabbing him by the shirt-front so that his terrified face was looking down at hers. "You're dealing with things you can't handle here. You realize that, don't you?"

He just stared at her. He was a young man, maybe early twenties, and seemed fit. But his muscles were as slack as his lips in his fear.

She shook him until his head nodded.

"Fine," she said. "Make sure you tell your bosses that. Do you understand?"

This time he nodded in pathetic haste.

"Great. And tell Sulin the next time I see him he's a dead man. Got that?"

He nodded again. "What are you going to do with me?" he asked.

She frowned. "This," she said, and threw him over the stern.

He landed with a great splash. In a moment his head bobbed up. He flailed furiously with his arms.

"I can't swim!" he screamed at her.

"Learn," she said. She sat down behind the wheel to take the boat back to pick up Jadzia and the scrolls.