15

For a moment everything stopped dead.

“Did I do right?” Two Hatchets asked, blinking, in a mosquito whine. “Did I? I’m off the hook, right? Right?”

Then all hell broke loose as someone shouted, “It’s a trap!”

Guns began to strobe in the meeting hall with a cataclysmic multivoiced roar. One of the first shots hit Two Hatchets in the left temple. The little informant fell on his face on the floor.

The sound of multiple guns firing at once reverberated between the bare concrete floors and ceiling. Annja saw a bullet explode a lantern on a table. Liquid fuel sprayed over a man standing nearby, probably a Dog Soldier by his placement. Hideous light flared as he tottered, blazing, out of Annja’s view, waving his arms and shrieking.

Men were struggling. Bright gun flashes made the hellish scene more so. The smell of burning hair and skin made Annja’s eyes water, stung her nose and made her stomach churn.

It all happened in a matter of seconds. She heard the Latino leader hollering about betrayal in Spanish. He was suddenly cut off.

Time to go, Annja thought.

As she turned, rough hands clamped on her arms. Two huge men loomed right behind her. The light of various fires glistened on the paint that obscured their faces, and gleamed on the enamel of teeth bared in feral smiles.

“Oh, no!” she gasped, as melodramatically as possible. She slumped dead weight toward the floor.

The Dog soldiers were strong men with strong hands. But they weren’t prepared for Annja’s sudden boneless, sobbing, whimpering slump. She pulled free and dropped to her knees on the coldly merciless concrete.

“Please,” she whined. “Please don’t kill me! I’m a journalist! Please.”

The men hesitated for just a moment, then one said, “We plan to make an example of you.”

Annja concentrated hard as she summoned the sword. As the closer man lunged for her she slashed his legs.

He reared back, flinched and toppled sideways against his partner. The other man yelped like a dog with its tail stepped on and pushed him away as his legs gushed blood across the jumbled furniture, the floor, even the wall.

The other Dog turned back toward Annja, legs braced, raising a hatchet over his head. “I’ll fix you,” he shouted.

“I think not,” Annja said, and thrust the sword into his chest.

She released the hilt. The sword vanished.

The Dog Soldier uttered a gurgling scream and collapsed.

She looked back to the big room. The men were all fighting one another.

All around her men shouted in fury, fear and pain. Whether any or all of the Dog Soldiers’ invited guests had believed they’d been lured into a trap, once guns came out it was every radical for himself.

Annja ran. Wheeling right she darted down the corridor. Ahead of her the passageway ended in a space expanding to her left, with a large plywood-covered window beyond. She cut left at an angle across the open space, the size of a largish room, to a corridor she thought led toward an exit from the rear of the central building.

As she passed the black mouth of another cross-corridor to her left, a white light speared from the direction of the exit and nailed her. Her eyes dazzled; she hurled herself left, letting herself leave her feet. A dive into the dark unknown was preferable to what she knew she was otherwise about to receive.

From the corner of her eye she saw the blue-white spot illuminating the red-bearded white radical. He was supporting his taller dreadlocked comrade, who appeared to be wearing a red Raggedy Ann wig over a bloody mask. Then Annja was out of the line of fire, as shatteringly loud gunshots erupted from down the hallway.

She landed hard, cracked her chin, slid along the floor with bright lights flashing through her brain that had nothing to do with the full-auto muzzle flashes dancing at her back. That brilliant beam, she’d instantly known, came from a ballistic flashlight clamped to the barrel of an assault rifle—a CAR-4, judging by the horrific racket it made. The shooter had presumably illuminated his target as much to make sure he wasn’t about to light up some of his own guys as for help aiming. The fractional-second pause as he processed what he saw had given Annja her life.

At least for the present. Despite the pain hammering through jaw and head she forced herself to snap back to her feet and drive on. Behind her, somebody seemed to be shooting back at the man with the CAR, presumably a Dog Soldier, guarding the exit.

She ran into the front-to-rear corridor on the wing’s far side. Instantly a couple of male bodies jostled her. Somebody cursed. There was a flash so close she felt the hot slap of the blast. Tiny fragments of unburned propellant stung her neck.

The muzzle flame illuminated the upper torso and strained dark face of a man in a dark quasi uniform. She was sure it wasn’t one of the three radicals who’d been negotiating with the Dogs. Probably a bodyguard.

He had opened fire on her. She made the sword appear in her hand, hacked compactly left and right. She felt the steel bite. Heard screams.

As bodies thudded against either wall of the passageway Annja ran on. In a few steps a plywood-covered floor-to-ceiling window loomed on her left.

Annja pulled up short. Turning, she slashed a quick X through the wet, resistant wood. As she’d feared, it made a loud squealing noise. But at this point a little more noise seemed unlikely to make a bit of difference. She could barely hear it for the ringing in her ears.

Shoulder first she threw herself at the thin wooden sheet. It gave way, though it grasped at her with jagged damp claws. She stumbled out into bracingly cold, blessedly clean-smelling air.

Sword still in hand, she took quick stock of her situation. She stood on a patch of grass in a recess between the central wing and the northernmost one. Hugging the main building’s wall she crouched. It was scarcely less black outside than inside; she had a good chance of escaping detection even if somebody outside the recess looked directly at her.

From the tumult of screams and shooting the mobile melee seemed to be rolling north toward where the visitors, and maybe the Dog Soldiers themselves, had presumably parked their vehicles. Shouts drew her attention back to the opening east of her. Two men appeared, running from the south. As one raced onward with the flopping high-swinging gait of sheer panic, the other, a tall, spare man with a bandanna tied around his forehead, stopped, turned and opened fire with a handgun.

A moment later a pair of unmistakable Dog Soldiers dashed out in pursuit.

Annja stayed hunkered down where she was. The commotion continued to the north of her. She heard shots that clearly came from outside on the far side of the buildings, the west. She guessed the delegates to the abortive war conference had more guards stationed out by their cars. They were now presumably shooting it out with their hosts.

After five deep deliberate breaths she decided to make a break.

Quickly she duckwalked to the corner, did three-second looks left and right. No one. As she started forward, she saw a revolver, a Smith & Wesson N-frame, on the ground.

Without hesitation or pause she bent to scoop it up as she ran for the rolling terrain east of the training center. The big Magnum might not be an ideal choice for follow-up shots, but Annja had no fear of its noise or recoil. If she found herself having to shoot, she’d get to cover or drop to the ground, aim and make the last rounds count.

If there are any rounds, she thought. She wasn’t about to stop and swing open the cylinder to check, either. Nor was she going to crack the piece open on the run and risk the low-comedy catastrophe of spilling out however many live cartridges remained.

Instead, she pelted flat out across the pavement, vaulted the drainage ditch and was gone with the wind.

Ranging wide to the east before turning north to where her rental car waited, she hoped, undiscovered and unmolested at the rear of the dead mall, Annja had plenty of time to consider what had just happened—and to parse through her options.

She had witnessed an abortive attempt at coordinating terror strikes by terrorist groups from across the U.S. That these particular bands, or their survivors back at their home bases, weren’t likely to want to collaborate with the Dog Soldiers did not mean that other groups hadn’t already met and made terms. And that familiar voice had made clear that the Dog Society plotted something big—and soon.

Try as she could Annja could not dredge up a face or name to go with that voice. She gave up the effort quickly; she had too much else to think about.

It was cold. Indeed, the wind literally seemed to be sucking the very life from her out through her jacket. She was coming down from an adrenaline jag, which made her knees wobbly and set nausea seething in her stomach. But that was nothing she wasn’t used to. She kept her legs moving by force of will, as she allocated at least some of her attention to negotiating the rolling prairie by light of a partial moon.

Two Hatchets had clearly been sent by the Dogs to lure her in. Most likely for capture, interrogation and eventual disposal. That meant the Dog Society had well and truly targeted Annja Creed for death.

They certainly showed signs of arrogance to a near-suicidal degree. But she found it hard to imagine they’d actually told their snitch to lure her into the middle of their big top-secret confab. She guessed her actual reception committee had either been waiting for her in another part of the training center, or perhaps were still waiting futilely somewhere else entirely.

As for why Two Hatchets had done what he had, she guessed he’d either misheard his instructions and screwed up, or had decided to get clever, improvise, presumably impress his masters with his zeal and resourcefulness.

And screwed up. Fatally. From her brief acquaintance with the man that seemed about right.

Annja thought about calling Tom Ten Bears and tipping him off that the Dog Society was cooking up a big steaming cauldron of evil. There was no guarantee he’d believe her. Even if the highway patrol turned out and found signs of a battle royal, it wouldn’t necessarily substantiate any wild-eyed claims of a conspiracy to mount a nationwide insurrection. They’d probably think more in terms of some kind of major drug deal gone way off the rails. If the Dogs picked up their casualties before clearing out—and she knew they would—there wouldn’t necessarily be any evidence tying them to the massacre at all.

Am I just rationalizing the fact that I really do not want to get hauled in for questioning on this, much less implicated in the bloodshed? she wondered. But no, she told herself, her reasoning was sound, as far as it went.

Besides, what she had witnessed was the sort of massive bloodletting that didn’t happen in well-mannered First World countries. Especially the U.S. And when it did, she knew, the authorities clamped an iron lid on tight. So that nothing really happened, after all—as far as the public ever knew.

There was an even more compelling reason not to call the cops, she knew. But her mind shied away from dealing with it. Get warm first, she decided.

Feeling half past dead from cold and exhaustion, she finally dragged her way back to her car. She made herself scope the scene from the night. She saw nothing threatening. When she came up to the car she found no sign the doors had been jimmied, nor were people waiting in the foot wells of the backseat to ambush her.

Annja got in and drove. She knew there was a danger that the GPS record from her phone would clearly show her route to the training center, not to mention her escape. So would the pings from the phone to the relay towers, if anybody bothered to check either. She knew every cell phone sold contained built-in spy and tracking devices for law enforcement. So she paused, regretfully, to delete the memory of her expensive third-generation phone, throw its shell in the Dumpster of one closed-for-the-night business in a not-well-trafficked part of Lawton, and the SIM card, stamped into pieces, in another. She didn’t dare use it again, nor allow it to record any more of her progress.

Her real reason for not calling the police, and the biggest reason for not wanting to be tracked, was the sizzling and nasty suspicion that law enforcement in the region was itself infiltrated by the Dog Society. Part of it was hunch. Part of it was knowing more about how law enforcement actually worked than most members of the ever-trusting public.

She was as sure that Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears was clean as she was that the sun would rise in the east in too few more hours. But it didn’t mean everybody else in Troop G was. And thanks to the war on terror, there was way too much interconnectivity between forces, departments and agencies for anything resembling real security. It could be someone connected with the Lawton cops, or the Comanche County Sheriff’s Department, or even the Feds who used the information she provided to set the death squads on her trail.

It wouldn’t even take an actual traitor or a mole to betray her to torture and death, she realized. Tom and Johnny Ten Bears had both told her there were no secrets in Indian country. Especially when information was so widely disseminated, there was no telling who might brag, or blurt, or wonder aloud—or even make some kind of seemingly harmless comment on what he or she had done at work that day to the family. All it took was for someone to overhear and innocently tell the wrong other someone. And Annja would be dead.

Forty-five minutes after leaving the mall parking lot she walked through the door of the Bad Medicine.

“I need a place to hide out,” she told the curious Iron Horse People gathered there. “The Dogs are on my trail.”