Chapter Thirteen

 

 

The bulbs of the other three security lamps were destroyed in rapid succession. Glass shattered, sparks flared, and within a heartbeat and a half, the lights were extinguished and the area was plunged into darkness.

 

Though Ryan and his people were on their feet, blasters in hand almost immediately, Hellstrom remained seated. Fleur shouted orders to the sec men as they ran to and fro across the campsite. Ryan peered into the encircling shadows, trying to force his vision to quickly adjust to the sudden darkness.

 

With a sigh of ennui, Hellstrom arose from his chair and nonchalantly ambled into the AMAC. He had just shut the door behind him when a bullet spanged off the wag's armored exterior, whining up into the night sky.

 

As Fleur shouted to the sec men to set up a fire zone inside the perimeter, Ryan and his friends took cover beneath and to the rear of the AMAC. They looked for something to shoot at and saw nothing.

 

The M-249 opened up with a staccato roar, smearing the darkness with bursts of orange flame. Fleur dashed to the sec man behind it and dealt him a fierce kick in the ribs.

 

"Head shots!" she shouted angrily. "Head shots, you piece of Farer shit!"

 

Ryan's eye grew accustomed to the gloom. The moon and the stars provided just enough light to make out the dim shapes of trees, brush and the sloping valley walls looming on either side.

 

There was another fusillade of shots from the shadows. Ryan counted at least ten rifles, firing more or less simultaneously. None of the bullets came near him or his people, but one of the sec men howled and fell in a sprawl of kicking legs and flailing arms. The sec men returned the fire with their SA-80 automatic rifles, triggering short, random bursts.

 

J.B. elbow-crawled up beside Ryan, his teeth bared in a humorless grin. "Mebbe we should have taken out Joe when we had the chance."

 

"You don't know if it's the Sioux out there," Mildred said.

 

A moment later, several undulating, high-pitched cries floated through the night sky.

 

"I guess you stand correctedfor once," J.B. told her calmly.

 

Another sec man made a run toward the closed door of the AMAC, but a storm of bullets struck sparks from its steel sheathing, and he was forced to dive beneath the chassis.

 

"If that's the war party we saw today," Ryan said curtly, "then we've got about two dozen to contend with. We're bastard outnumbered."

 

"But not outgunned. For some reason, they've got their blasters on semi," Krysty observed. "Not full-auto."

 

"Less chance waste ammo," Jak said, gesturing to the sec men raking the darkness with the SA-80s. "Not like these stupes."

 

Several full-metal-jacketed slugs ricocheted from the bodywork of the AMAC, screaming off in different directions. A sec man clutched at his leg and went down, screaming a curse. From a prone position, he squeezed the trigger of his blaster, sending streams of flame and lead into the shadows. There was no return fire until the firing pin of his SA-80 hit the empty magazine with dry, audible clicks.

 

Then a single shot cracked, a bullet zipped out of the darkness and caught him in the forehead, puncturing the X between his eyes. The impact bounced his head hard against the ground, the back of his skull breaking apart. His legs kicked, then he was still.

 

"Now that was a head shot," J.B. remarked sourly.

 

Ryan reflected that if the Sioux were looking for scalps, the shaven-headed sec men would be grave disappointments to them. On the other hand, he and his people had full heads of hair of varying colors, lengths and textures, and they might present a terrible temptation. Krysty's coppery mane in particular would be a valuable prize. He hoped that if Touch-the-Sky was with the war party, he would recognize them. An instant later he hoped the opposite. The Lakota had warned him and his people about Helskel, and he probably assumed they had thumbed their collective nose at his words of caution and, therefore, deserved everything that might come their way. Including scalping knives.

 

Hefting his SIG-Sauer in a two-handed grip, Ryan said, " 'Lay down a firing pattern. We may not know where our targets are, but we've got a pretty good idea of where they're not."

 

Krysty squeezed off several rounds from her Smith amp; Wesson 640, and the others followed suit, shooting into the gloom at different angles, trying to draw beads on shifting shadows, never knowing if they struck a target or just a piece of one. Doc's Le Mat was fairly useless as a long-range weapon, but its ear-knocking blasts provided them with a psychological edge.

 

A bullet whipped past Ryan's head, and he felt rather than heard the little slap of displaced air. It had missed him by no more than an inch, and it had come from behind.

 

Another bullet whistled past Ryan's face, splashing it with cool air, then flattened against the thick hide of the AM AC over his head. He twisted his body and blaster around, bringing the man-shape lunging from the darkness into target acquisition. Ryan and Doc fired at the same time. The Le Mat roared, spurting flame, and the rifle-toting figure back-somersaulted into the shadows.

 

Then the campsite was filled with running, shooting, half-naked men, shrieking out of the darkness from two directions. Not only did they carry automatic rifles, they carried tomahawks, knives and even a few feathered lances. Their faces were painted with ferocious designs. They bounded and leapt too quickly for Ryan to get an accurate count of their number.

 

The defense put up by Helskel's sec men was disorganized and sporadic. They retreated toward the wag, halfheartedly fighting a rearguard action without watching one another's backs or even taking the time to aim their blasters properly. They were in great danger of catching each other in a cross fire.

 

Ryan and his friends were veterans of dozens of battles, and they rushed out into the campsite in a wedge formation. J.B. took the point of the V, the rapid drumming of his Uzi clearing a path. Mildred, Krysty and Jak waited until their targets were clearly framed in their weapons' sights. When they fired, it was without haste and without mistake. At every shot, a painted warrior either tumbled limply to the ground or spun, grabbing at a wound.

 

Ryan had hung back to cover Doc while he adjusted the position of the Le Mat's firing hammer. The double-barreled weapon could be fired like a shotgun, or once the hammer was repositioned to fall on the revolver chamber, to fire nine .44-caliber rounds.

 

While Ryan waited, he watched several scenes at once Fleur drilled one of the Sioux through the back of the head with her Beretta. She whirled on Krysty as the titian-haired woman put a .38-caliber slug in the center of a warrior's chest.

 

"Goddammit," she yelled. "I said head shots!"

 

Krysty didn't even glance her way as she said, "You don't tell me to do anything."

 

At about the same time, a sec man screamed as the flat razor point of a lance pierced his throat. The grinning Sioux withdrew it, and the sec man dropped to his knees, trying to stem the geyser of blood fountaining from a severed jugular.

 

Doc snapped shut the Le Mat and announced, "Ready and able, though not particularly willing."

 

He followed Ryan out into the battlefield. At such close quarters, the Indians were using their rifles as bludgeons and fighting hand-to-hand, uttering strident cries as they closed with their opponents. Ryan, trying to join his people's wedge, saw one of the warriors rush toward Krysty. He fired the SIG-Sauer point-blank, and the attacker dropped with a deep bloody cavity punched in his side.

 

Before he could shout for her to watch her back, a rush of bodies knocked him sprawling, and a heavy weight dropped directly onto his back, driving him face first to the ground. Knees pressed into his buttocks and a pair of large hands closed about his neck and squeezed.

 

Spitting out grit, Ryan heaved, bucked and twisted. He managed to roll over onto his back and look up at the hate-twisted, paint-distorted face bobbing over him. The Indian was by far the stronger, and he resisted each of the white man's efforts to throw him off. Then he thrust a knife blade for his adversary's throat.

 

Ryan wrenched himself aside, and the edge of the blade skimmed the side of his neck, drawing a thread of blood. He fired his blaster at the Sioux, and a crimson spray erupted from the bridge of the warrior's nose. His grip loosened and he slowly fell forward. Elbowing the deadweight from his body, Ryan rolled to one side and got to his knees.

 

A bullet plucked at his hair. He lurched forward, facedown, and felt the cool passage of another slug against his cheek. He sighted a feather-bedecked man leveling a rifle at him. The one-eyed man rested his pistol on his wrist and sent a 9 mm wad of lead into the Sioux's chest.

 

The campsite was screaming, bloody chaos. Blasters blasted, lances lanced, knives sank into flesh and skulls were split with gun butts. The sec men were finally fighting back now that they were overrun, and they shot, slashed and clubbed.

 

He saw Jak use a snapping right-arm toss to bury one of his leaf-bladed throwing knives into the breastbone of a Sioux, before smoothly pivoting on one heel. With a blade held in his left hand, he expertly slashed the throat of another attacker.

 

Doc shot a warrior who was drawing a bead on Mildred, and the big .44-caliber round knocked the man backward into the side of the AMAC, splashing the armor plating with a wet scarlet pattern.

 

J.B. let loose with the Uzi, the rapid-fire slugs smashing the faces and upper bodies of two Indians, twisting them off their feet, their arms waving in crazy floppings.

 

Mildred picked and chose her targets methodically, aiming for an extremity whenever possible. At one juncture, her ZKR target revolver shot the rifle out of a warrior's hands, causing no more damage than temporarily numbing his fingers. Of course, an instant later her humanitarian impulse was ruined by a sec man who blew the Sioux's chest out with a controlled burst from an SA-80.

 

A series of fat pops ! reverberated through the air. Four cylinders spewing plumes of white smoke sprang from the launch tubes atop the AMAC and bounced across the battleground. The cylinders rolled and hissed, and almost immediately the campsite was engulfed by blinding clouds of vapor. Shrieks of surprise came in the wake of the grenades.

 

War cries, yells of pain and shouted obscenities became incomprehensible as the gas was inhaled by the combatants. The smoke seared eyes, lungs, nostrils and bare flesh, and the warring parties staggered around the killing ground, groping for whiffs of fresh air, not for each other.

 

Ryan crouched, trying to get beneath the clouds of gas. He inhaled some of it, and for a moment he gagged himself blind. Through the jiggling, burning water in his eye, he caught glimpses of shapes moving through the billowing chemical vapors.

 

The Indians seemed to be engaged in a slow, stubborn retreat back toward the shadows, hoping to melt into the night. They were obviously unwilling to give up the struggle despite the heavy losses they had incurred and the fact that they were all but incapacitated by the gas. Almost everyone was coughing, weeping and gagging. Here and there came the choking gasps of people vomiting.

 

Ryan heard a female cry of pain from behind him and the thud of a body hitting the ground. He feared opening his mouth to call out for Krysty, so he moved as quickly as he dared in the direction of the cry. Blinking hard, trying to focus through the fiery blur of his vision, through a part in the swirling vapors, he saw two figures at the far edge of the campsite.

 

For a heart-stopping instant, he thought it was Krysty facedown on the ground, but after he knuckled his eye, he saw a thin Sioux warrior kneeling on Fleur's back. One hand was tangled in the long mahogany fall of her hair. He was pulling her head up and back, exposing the white column of her throat to the knife he gripped in one fist.

 

Ryan sprinted toward them, firing the SIG-Sauer's remaining four rounds so rapidly the shots were a single solid sound. The warrior sprang from the woman's body and into the shadows. Because his eye was blurry and leaking tears, Ryan wasn't sure if the Indian had been knocked away by the 9 mm slugs or if he'd simply jumped.

 

Standing over Fleur, he reached down to help her up by one arm. She raked the hair out of her dirt-streaked face and looked up at him in astonishment.

 

"You helped me?" Her voice held an incredulous note.

 

"Actually I saved you," Ryan said. He sucked in a lungful of untainted air. "Are you all right?"

 

Before she could answer, a bare arm darted from the darkness, hooked around Ryan's neck and jerked him backward. Instead of resisting the force, Ryan kicked himself off the ground, throwing his full weight against the body behind him.

 

He and the warrior fell and rolled clear of the brush, down a slight incline and onto soft grass at the bank of the creek. The Sioux had lost his knife, and his right arm locked in a death grip around Ryan's neck, while the fingers of his free hand were pressing viciously against his larynx.

 

Ryan broke the hold by driving a powerful blow into the Indian's midriff with his elbow. The warrior grunted, and Ryan squirmed free and struggled to his feet. He clubbed down with the barrel of his blaster, striking the man between the shoulder blades.

 

From a kneeling position, the Sioux lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Ryan's legs. The one-eyed man fell forward, dropping the SIG-Sauer and toppling over the warrior. He managed to grasp the Indian by the hair and haul him into the stream with him. Both of them pitched into the water with a great splash.

 

The creek was shallow, barely waist deep, and the water was shockingly cold, but it flushed the burning effects of the gas from Ryan's eye and nostrils. The two men surfaced at the same time, gasping and blowing like whales. Ryan's closed left hand slammed into his adversary's jaw and knocked him off balance. He fell, disappearing beneath the surface.

 

The Indian clawed his way along the pebble-strewn bottom of the creek, using the gentle current as impetus to push him out of harm's way, but Ryan grabbed the Sioux by the back of the neck. He tried to rise, but Ryan held him down, using all of his upper body strength. The warrior heaved and kicked, thrashing the water into white froth.

 

Finally his struggles ceased. Ryan raised the man's head clear of the water and saw that his war paint had been washed from his face. He recognized the sharp, angular features of Touch-the-Sky, aka Joe. The lean-muscled Indian wasn't dead, though he was three-quarters drowned, his hair plastered flat to his head and shoulders, eagle feathers drooping and bedraggled.

 

Ryan allowed him to cough the water from his lungs and sneeze it from his sinus passages. The Sioux was in no shape to continue fighting. Ryan slogged up the creek bank, hauling Joe with him. He dumped the coughing man onto the grass, noticing as he did so that Joe bore two superficial bullet wounds, a blood-oozing hole in the upper thigh and a red-edged furrow across the small of his back.

 

After a few moments of groping, Ryan retrieved his blaster, ejected the spent clip and reloaded with bullets taken from his cartridge belt. By the time he had accomplished that, Joe was sitting up, inhaling shuddery breaths, his jet black eyes narrowed and seething with hatred.

 

"Kill me, wasicun ," he hissed, sounding half-strangled. "I deserve it for failing to kill you when I first saw you."

 

"Someone has already expressed the same opinion about you," Ryan said. "I'm not going to chill you unless you force me."

 

There was a sudden, surprised intake of breath, and Joe demanded, "Aren't you with Hellstrom and his psychotics?"

 

"We're with them, but we're not of them. Get me?"

 

Joe opened his mouth to answer, but Krysty's voice, shouting Ryan's name, cut him off. She sounded very worried and hoarse, and her next call terminated in a coughing spasm.

 

Gesturing with the pistol, Ryan said, "Take off."

 

"What will you tell the others?"

 

"That you got away from me. That's the truth, isn't it?"

 

Joe didn't respond. He rose to a crouch and soundlessly merged with the darkness. Ryan climbed back up the slope and called to Krysty. She ran to him, green eyes clouded by worry and gas-induced tears. She squeezed his arms and touched his face. Fleur marched close behind her.

 

"You're wet," Krysty said. "You're not hurt, not wounded?"

 

"No. The Indian got away when we hit the creek. He swam underwater, I think."

 

"You think?" Fleur repeated suspiciously. "That was Touch-the-Sky himself! You didn't make sure?"

 

Ryan stared at her stonily. "Normally I would have, except that I emptied my blaster saving your life."

 

Fleur scowled, then wheeled away, taking long strides back to the campsite. Krysty and Ryan followed her. The area looked like an open-air charnel house, given an added unearthly atmosphere by the planes of drifting chemical fog. The gas had dissipated to some extent, but the survivors of the battle all looked and sounded miserable.

 

They stepped over the bodies of the slain and called to their friends. None of them bore injuries, beyond a few cuts and contusions, except for J.B., whose fedora sported a fresh bullet hole. He was angry about it, since he held one of the incompetent sec men responsible. Doc was suffering the worst from the effects of the gas, and Mildred tended to him as he gagged, wept and dry-heaved.

 

Ryan did an automatic body count. There were fourteen dead Sioux warriors sprawled on the ground, leaking fluids from a variety of wounds in a variety of places.

 

Out of the ten sec men he spotted only three were ambulatory, and one was cradling an obviously broken arm.

 

"Looks like we got big-time skunked," Ryan said.

 

"If not for the six of us," J.B. said, "this skirmish would've been a massacre."

 

The door of the wag banged open and Hellstrom stepped out with a grand, long-legged flourish. He held a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Fleur quickly approached him, saying, "We have six dead, four wounded. Zezo won't last through the night, so he doesn't count."

 

"The opposition?" Hellstrom's voice was muffled and nasal, as if he were holding his nose behind the handkerchief.

 

"Fourteen, but only nine are worth salvaging."

 

"And the value of our people?"

 

Fleur made an exasperated gesture. "Four, if you include Zezo."

 

"A baker's dozen. Get to it. We'll attend to our own back home."

 

Fleur snapped her fingers toward the standing sec men, and they bent over and began arranging the bodies of the slain.

 

Hellstrom nodded in the direction of Ryan and his friends. "You and your group turned the tide, Cawdor. My thanks."

 

The white-suited man eased himself down in his chair and fluttered the handkerchief before his face. "Whew! Pungent, isn't it?"

 

Ryan strode over to him, put a boot against the support pedestal of the chair and shoved with all of his strength. The chair overturned, and Hellstrom was dumped unceremoniously to the ground, uttering a wordless cry of outrage and surprise.

 

The move had been performed on impulse, so Hellstrom had no opportunity to sense Ryan's intentions. As he gathered a handful of white jacket and yanked the my man to his feet, Ryan heard the clickings of rounds jacking into cylinders and hammers thumbed back. His people were covering Fleur and the surviving sec men.

 

Holding Hellstrom almost clear of the ground, Ryan shook him savagely. He weighed no more than a suit of clothes. "You son of a bitch, you knew this would happen. You wanted it to happen!"

 

There was a shadow of fear darkening Hellstrom's eyes, but there was also a monstrous anger. "You one-eyed prick, do you know how close to death you are?"

 

Snarling out a laugh, Ryan jammed the bore of the sound suppressor of the SIG-Sauer against Hellstrom's underjaw and cruelly forced his head back. "Nowhere near as close as you, you scrawny bastard."

 

He heard the snapping crack of Mildred's ZKR and then a sec man yelping in pain. "Just pierced his ear for him," Mildred called. "He makes another move, and I'll pierce his testicles."

 

Forcing a laugh, Hellstrom spread solicitous hands. "Okay, Cawdor. You're annoyed. I don't blame you. I understand it. But there was a reason."

 

Ryan stared at the man for another handful of seconds, then released him. He stepped back, lowering the blaster but not leathering it. Hellstrom rearranged his clothing, uprighted his chair and sank into its seat.

 

To Fleur, he said, "Get on with it. We don't have all night."

 

"All right, Cawdor. I apologize."

 

"It'll take more than that, Lars."

 

"And I'll offer more than that. Normally you would be put to a slow death for laying hands on me, or at the very least, scourged until you were crippled. However, I must make allowances for this circumstance. Yes, I expected the attack, and to some extent I needed it."

 

"Why?"

 

"Two reasons. Firstly I was curious to see how you people handled yourselves in a crisis. Very impressive, very professional. All of you kept your heads, which is more than I can say for my own people."

 

"Is that why you waited so long to use the gas, because you were testing us?"

 

"Yes."

 

"You sacrificed an entire sec squad for a test?"

 

"That's what they're here for," Hellstrom replied.

 

"What's the second reason?"

 

Hellstrom hooked a thumb in the general direction of Mount Rushmore. "You heard me tell the beetle that the harvest was delayed?"

 

"Yeah. So?"

 

With a hand wave, Hellstrom indicated the corpses spread out around the campsite. "Behold the harvest."

 

Ryan's face twisted. "The organs. That's why Fleur had such a hair up her ass about head shots."

 

"Exactly. We need hearts, livers, lungs and the occasional pancreas. Since I spared you people from the harvester's knives, I had to arrange a new crop from someplace."

 

"You lured the Indians to you. How could you be so sure they wouldn't have harvested all of our scalps?"

 

"I wasn't. Hence the gas attack."

 

Ryan sighed, shook his head and said, "You know what's really sick about this, Lars? It makes sense."

 

"I hoped you'd see it my way."

 

Doc, who had managed to regain most of his breath, husked out, "In the land of the ghoul, whoever has the most viscera wins."

 

A smile creased Hellstrom's lips. "Something like that, yes."

 

"You're overlooking one thing," Ryan said. "We now outnumber you. There's nothing to stop us from boosting your wag, dumping you here for the Sioux to find among the mutilated bodies of their friends and relatives and continuing on our journey."

 

Hellstrom shook an admonishing finger. "I'm surprised at you, Cawdor. You're overlooking one thing. A very obvious thing. Only someone who knows the correct sequence can start up the AMAC. If you fumble around, you'll blow it and yourselves to atoms. Besides, there's just enough fuel to return to Helskel."

 

"Lame bluff," Jak commented.

 

"Hardly. It's a standard security procedure to wire an antipersonnel device to the engine of a sec wag to keep thieves at bay. I'm sure your precious Land Rover is equipped with something similar. Am I right?"

 

He was, and it grated on Ryan's nerves to acknowledge it. The Helskel chieftain had them exactly where he wanted them. Different strategies cartwheeled through Ryan's mind. Even hijacking the wag once it was underway would be a pointless exercise, since they would be forced to go in the opposite direction of Helskel. And with a limited quantity of fuel and no idea where to obtain more, they would be stranded and vulnerable to the Sioux. He couldn't count on the sparing of Joe's life to save them from warriors seeking to avenge this night's chillfest.

 

Nor could they rely on J.B.'s expertise to deactivate whatever explosive device might be wired to the AMAC's innards. As the weaponsmith had mentioned more than once, it was quite possible to construct a bomb that would detonate no matter what you did to disarm it.

 

"You're right," Ryan admitted. "So what's the plan?"

 

"We'll harvest our crop and return to Helskel at daybreak." Hellstrom frowned as he looked over the bodies of his sec squad. "It appears that a few of our novitiates will have to be promoted sooner than expected."

 

"I'm surprised you don't want us to fill the vacancies," Ryan said sarcastically.

 

"Oh, by no means," Hellstrom replied cheerfully. "I have far greater ambitions in mind for you, Cawdor. Believe me."

 

Ryan believed him.