Part 24 (1/2)

Fifteen yards away a huge Hummer was going up in flames. A big pintle-mounted machine gun sprouted from its roof. Fire jetted straight up through the mount. Men bailed out the doors, screaming, shrouded in flames.

Annja dropped to her belly, stuck her rifle out with her left hand, fired two quick bursts. The screams cut off. The men dropped. She wasn't sure whether it was an act of mercy or to ensure they didn't somehow extinguish themselves and come after the infiltrators again.

She ducked back and looked at Xingu.

He patted his rifle. ”Selective load,” he said, almost apologetically. ”Explosive sh.e.l.ls.”

She started to demand to know why she hadn't been told about that feature. She stopped herself before wasting the time and breath. She had gotten the basics she needed to fight. It was for the best and she knew it, no matter how badly she wanted to resent the fact.

She got up on her haunches, transferring the rifle back to her right hand. She looked down at Isis. The woman seemed at peace. She had fought her best and died the death she had chosen. She might even be envied.

She had also displayed inhuman fort.i.tude to be able to so much as talk. The Hummer had mounted a.50-caliber machine gun. The special suit was no protection it was probably all that kept her being blown to pieces.

Annja reached down her left hand and closed the staring eyes with a quick motion of her first two fingers. ”We have to go,” she told Xingu. He nodded.

The camp was alive with shouting, shooting men. They all seemed to be blazing away at random. Looking back across the compound, Annja saw two men go down, apparently hit by friendly fire.

By unspoken consent she and Xingu both took off around the latrine shack's far end, ran between it and the burning Hummer despite the big machine-gun cartridges cooking off inside the inferno. There was no point in any fancy bounding overwatch now. Their only hope of reaching their goal was speed.

Once inside well, they had to get there first.

They almost made that final dash. Then a burst of gunfire, from what direction Annja couldn't even tell in the pandemonium, raked Xingu's torso from the left. He sprawled on his face.

Annja glanced back in an agony of indecision. She burned with desire to go back to help her wounded comrade. But that would doom her and the mission. She could not let herself die and fail.

Xingu heaved himself up. The grin he showed her from his dark, handsome face would have carried more rea.s.surance had it not been crimson with his own blood.

A single shot punched through his temples left to right. He fell on his face in the dirt.

Annja turned and sprinted for Publico's tent. Letting her rifle hang by its sling, she summoned the sword.

Chapter 34.

Inside the big tent Sir Iain smiled as he heard sirens howl and guns speak.

”Annja, dearest girl,” he said. ”I've been waiting.”

He reached into an interior pocket of his linen jacket, produced a small object. It was blue plastic and s.h.i.+ny metal and resembled an asthma inhaler.

”What's that? Drugs?” Colonel Amaral demanded from across the tent. The color had dropped from his plump, dark-olive face, leaving it ashen behind his beard and moustache.

”Transformation,” Publico breathed as power rushed through veins and nerves like a shock wave from a bomb.

A flap at the tent's rear flew open. Eight men charged into the room. They were tall men, wide men. They were made even wider by the bulky olive-and-earth-tone-painted suits of bullet-resistant polycarbonate armor they wore. They carried curved polycarbonate s.h.i.+elds on their arms, and held yard-long shock batons in gauntleted hands.

”Who are they?” Amaral demanded, gaping in amazement.

”My bodyguards.”

Fat jiggling above his too-tight web belt, the colonel tried to force his way into the protective circle the armored men formed around Publico. They thrust him rudely back.

”Sorry, Colonel,” Publico said. ”They're for me, not thee.”

Amaral's dark eyes bulged. Publico laughed, a huge roaring laugh that rattled the tent walls. The drugs always had that effect on him filled him with the sense of invincibility.

And why not, he thought, when my enemies are bringing everything I desire right to me?

A ripping sound from the weatherproofed fabric behind Amaral made him turn. His right hand clawed at his holster flap.

Something silvery flashed in out of the humid night. There came another sound like tearing cloth. He felt a burning sensation at his throat.

Amaral spun back to face Publico, visible past the armored shoulders of his guards. Then he dropped to his knees and pitched onto his belly, as blood drained from his gaping wound.

A young man, at least six-four and built like a greyhound, stepped into the tent. His midnight-blue body-suit fit his muscle-rippling torso like skin. Chestnut dreadlocks hung about his shoulders. He held a j.a.panese-style short sword naked in his hand.

He stepped over the colonel's shapeless lump of body. Ignoring the huge armored guards, his eyes fixed like golden spotlights on Publico's blue ones.

”Welcome, my friend,” Publico called to him as a slender blue-eyed blond woman stepped in quickly to the young man's left.

Moran held up a huge hand and beckoned. ”Come on and die.”

Annja sliced a six-foot vertical cut in the tent and stepped through.

The pavilion's main room was a good ten yards long and six or seven wide. Despite its size it was crowded.

In the center of a circle of enormous men in bizarre plastic armor carapaces painted in camouflage patterns, Patrizinho was slas.h.i.+ng at Sir Iain Moran with his sword. The big Irishman was easily dodging the serpent-fast sword cuts and laughing uproariously, as if he were having the time of his life.

Annja's eyes narrowed. No normal human could have evaded Patrizinho's attacks so fearlessly. Sir Iain was into his chemicals again.

On the far side of the wall of goons Annja glimpsed blond hair. She heard a hailstorm sound. Lys was shooting her noiseless electromagnetic rifle, trying either to chop a path clear or drop Sir Iain, their most vital target. But the big men just held up their Roman-style s.h.i.+elds. The projectiles rattled off them as harmlessly as Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s.

Three of the thick men charged Lys. She let go her rifle and whipped out her sword. She uttered a falcon scream of challenge.

Publico darted in to rock Patrizinho's head back with a fast straight right. The Promessan staggered back. Blood streamed from his nose.

Annja charged. s.h.i.+eld to s.h.i.+eld, two of the bulkily armored men advanced to meet her. She swung the sword overhand at the one on her right, figuring to break or even sever the man's s.h.i.+eld arm.

The blade bit right through the upper rim of the s.h.i.+eld, cut deep. But after a bit more than a foot the blade stopped.

Grinning behind the faceplate of his helmet, the man on her left jabbed his stick toward Annja's ribs. He had a big brutal face. She thought to recognize either Goran or Mladko.

She pulled on the hilt of her sword to yank it free of the s.h.i.+eld. It stuck fast. Belatedly she realized why the cut had stopped it wasn't that the tough polymer material of the s.h.i.+eld defeated the sword's edge. It was because the plastic sides of the cut had gripped the flat of her blade tightly as a vise.