Part 23 (1/2)
Isis led the second group. Despite her barely s.h.i.+elded enmity toward Annja, Annja had to admit she seemed quietly competent.
The chief of the strike team was named Marco. Instead of the harness the others wore, he sported a web utility belt heavily loaded-down with instruments.
Xia held up her hand. The two squads came to a halt in the midst of a particularly thick stand of underbrush. A small figure materialized soundlessly as a shadow right by her left elbow. He grinned at her with teeth bright white in a black-painted face. He was no taller than Annja's shoulder, with a bowl haircut and a skimpy loincloth. He also had a Kalashnikov a.s.sault rifle almost as long as he was tall.
Xia conversed in low, fluid syllables with the small, nearly naked man who suddenly crouched beside her. Annja couldn't understand a word. It was obviously a local Indian dialect. The crouching man answered softly, nodded, stood. Then he simply became one with the night.
Xia turned back, beckoning the others to gather near. ”We've got our allies pa.s.sing word we're coming through so they don't bushwhack us,” she told the team. ”They say the invaders are patrolling very aggressively.”
”Aren't they bushwhacking them? them?” Burt asked.
Xia nodded. ”The commander is showing the degree of regard for human life you'd expect. They care about their own troops only a little more than they do about us. The only real difference is, they actively want us dead.”
”So it is in the Third World,” Patrizinho told Annja softly. ”Life isn't cheap to the people. It's the rulers who don't value the people's lives.”
”They're getting ready to make a big push,” Isis predicted.
”At night?” Burt shook his head. ”No way.”
Xia held up a hand. ”Not our concern. We just have to be ready for anything.”
They moved on again. Twice they stopped and crouched immobile as enemy patrols crashed by. The first spoke in semim.u.f.fled Portuguese. The second was mostly being harangued in English by somebody with an unmistakable American accent. Annja wondered if it was one of Publico's mercenaries.
In both cases the patrols blundered within a few feet of Annja and her friends without showing any evidence of suspecting they were there. Annja could smell the sweat soaking their fatigues and smell the fear in that sweat, as well as traces of the alcohol and tobacco they'd recently consumed.
The noise and glare of battle increased as the team proceeded. Mortars and grenades sounded. Automatic weapons popped and snarled. Tracers arced against the sky. Annja couldn't tell how much, if any, fire came from the defenders. The invaders let off rounds in truck-loads, whether against actual targets, or to suppress suspected enemies or simply to make themselves feel better, she couldn't tell. It occurred to her that her group risked getting hit purely by accident.
Gradually they moved beyond the sound and light show of the ongoing firefight. The invaders pushed to the west-northwest, angling inland from the river. Xia had led her infiltration team north and east, swinging wide around the main thrust.
Now they turned back toward the river and the headquarters the Brazilian commander shared with Sir Iain and his men. They began to advance by impulses. One squad hunkered down, rifles ready, covering as the other moved. Then the group that had just advanced would go to cover and keep watch while their comrades leapfrogged out ahead of them.
Xia raised her hand. Her five followers sank into a stand of brush. Annja raised her rifle and snugged its padded b.u.t.t to her shoulder as Isis got her people up and led them forward.
Annja peered through her sights. She had been checked out with the weapon at the armory that afternoon. It fired semi-or full-automatic, quite silently. It reloaded from the top with blocks of fifty projectiles. The chief armorer told Annja the rifles used electromagnetism, whatever that meant in this context.
Atop her rifle, conventional night sights glowed ghostly in the darkness. With a pressure of her right thumb she was provided with infrared vision.
At once she saw big blobs of yellow so bright they were almost white, right ahead. ”Isis, get down!” she hissed, knowing the communicator woven into the fabric of her suit would transmit the warning.
The night was ripped apart by white fire and horrific noise.
Chapter 32.
Helpless, Annja watched as a pair of Isis's squad members, silhouetted against a colossal muzzle-flare, were shredded by a burst from a machine cannon. The rest of the armored car's 20-mm sh.e.l.ls cracked over the heads of Annja's squad to rake the jungle line forty yards behind them.
Lesser flashes lit the night as soldiers fired their a.s.sault rifles. A second armored car opened up from thirty yards or so to the left of the first.
”Stay down,” Isis seemed to whisper in the back of Annja's skull. ”They're not shooting at us.”
She was right. The shots all pa.s.sed over the heads of the now totally p.r.o.ne Promessan team. Isis's two people had been blown away by a cruel accident, by a foe who had no idea they were even there.
Diesel engines throttled up with a noise like dragons clearing their throats. The armored cars rumbled forward.
A curious buzzing sound pa.s.sed over Annja from behind. A brilliant flash lit the wedge-shaped snout of the vehicle that had shot up Isis's team. The vehicle stopped. A moment later orange flame roared from the driver's and cupola hatches. A figure wrapped in flames climbed screaming from the cupola, fell to the ground and rolled. Smaller white flashes started strobing through the black smoke pouring from the stricken machine like firecracker strings as the ammo storage went up.
”Here they come,” came Patrizinho's voice in Annja's skull. It soothed her back from panic's raw edge. ”Stay low and don't move unless you have to.”
Two vehicles rolled on, a dozen yards to either side of the wreck. In the garish light of the flames Annja saw soldiers coming toward her, heads hunched forward beneath their camo-mottled boonie hats, prodding the night before them with their rifles.
The skirmish line pa.s.sed. One man came so near to Annja she might have grabbed his right ankle as he went by. Not daring to breathe, keeping her eyes slitted, she tried to remember the lessons Xia and Patrizinho had given her the past two days on stealth, among a myriad subjects. Try to think as little as possible. Envision yourself a part of the landscape a fallen log, a bush. Breathe shallowly but remember to breathe. Never look directly at an enemy. He'll sense you.
Men she had known who had seen combat, especially special-operations troopers, had told her exactly the same thing, about trying to think like a bush and never looking straight at anyone.
The hardest part, she found, was remembering to breathe.
Then the oblivious enemy was past, shouting and shooting. But to Annja's renewed terror a fourth armored car appeared, swerving around the blazing wreck. It headed straight for her.
She stared at it. It got bigger, big as a moving mountain. Its three independently suspended right tires would all roll over her in series if she didn't move. Yet she was terrified of moving prematurely, lest the crew spot her.
The metal monster loomed above. She tried to roll left, out of its path, only to fetch against the stout central stem of a bush. Panic blasted through her. The bush refused to yield. The cleated front tire crunched toward her face. With a desperate heave she rolled to her right.
The backward-sloping lower plate of its snout brushed her shoulders. She moaned aloud in fear as the car rolled over her, blotting the stars. Its tires crunched deafeningly mere inches to either side of her.
After it pa.s.sed, Annja lay quivering. She felt a touch on her shoulder and gasped. She struggled to bring up her rifle.
A strong, gentle hand caught her arm. ”Easy, easy,” said Patrizinho, kneeling beside her. ”You're okay, yes?”
She drew in a deep breath. Then she nodded convulsively.
He touched Annja's shoulder again. ”Let's go. ”We're almost to the real danger.”
The uproar of the Brazilian advance or patrol or whatever it was, receded as the strike team's surviving members moved on. The Indians who had ambushed the soldiers with an ant.i.tank rocket and rifle fire had long since melted into the jungle.
After the Promessans had gone twenty or so yards a pair of explosions behind them, unnoticed by anyone else in the awful night's battle sounds, marked the self-destruction of their dead friends' bodies.
As they crouched they could see the nimbus of light above the trees cast by the base camp the invaders had established near the ruined plantation house. It marked their objective. There waited Publico and the Brazilian army officer in command. And there also lay tents and trailers containing the invaders' command and communications gear, as well as stations monitoring the enemy's sensors.
If the Promessans and Annja could destroy that equipment and kill the leaders, the whole invasion would lose momentum and quickly mire down. Annja didn't believe that could win them any more than a temporary reprieve. But her friends a.s.sured her that a little breathing room was all they needed to secure the safety of their city and its tribal allies. All she could do was swallow her doubts and do her best.
To Annja's surprise the invaders had not occupied the plantation buildings. The main house she could understand it was a wreck. But surely with all that manpower they could have cleaned out the largely intact chapel?
”They fear ghosts,” Julia matter-of-factly said when they halted in the scrub near the empty buildings, still a hundred yards from the enemy perimeter, when Annja voiced the question in her mind.