28

Speed was everything. There was a window in the wall that faced them. Curtains hung in it, their patterned dark cloth long since bleached by the sun to a mottled gray-brown. Annja saw the curtains twitch. Then glass exploded outward as full-auto fire erupted through the window.

A second burst blew curtain tatters flapping out the window. Cody grunted and fell headlong to the dirt. His limbs flopped as he rolled.

A tremendous boom burst from Annja’s left. A head Annja had only just spotted fell away inside the window. Snake had paused just long enough to take quick aim before firing her shotgun.

Annja scattered shots through the window to keep the defenders’ heads down. Shooting blind might endanger Sallie. But if somebody picked her, Snake and Billy off as they covered the last few yards to the house, she was likely dead, anyway.

Half turning Annja pressed up hard against the wall between the window and the back of the house. Snake slammed up beside her.

A moment later Billy joined them, his short, bowed legs pumping determinedly if not exactly fast. Although he puffed like a steam engine he rumbled right past the women, heading for the back door. Bending low to avoid being spotted out the kitchen window Annja followed. She felt more than heard Snake come after.

Holding his carbine across his chest Bully kicked at the back door. “Damn!” he yelled as his boot rebounded.

Annja slid up to the side of the frame. Keeping the foot-thick wall at her back, she grabbed the knob and turned.

The door opened.

Billy kicked it again. It whipped inward. Annja heard an impact, a soft cry. Then Billy’s .44 Magnum roared.

Snake slipped inside. Annja came right after. As she stepped left automatically to clear the doorway’s fatal funnel a yellow light and terrible noise filled the gloomy kitchen into which they had intruded.

“Missed!” Snake shouted, racking her slide. She had shifted right on entering. She unleashed another head-burstingly loud blast into the far wall, hoping to blow through and nail the Dog who’d peeked out and then ducked to cover on the far side. But instead of lath-and-plaster or drywall the interior wall turned out to be adobe, too, when the pellets blew a divot of painted plaster off. Like the outer walls it would shrug off hits all day.

Annja slipped forward around a wooden kitchen table set against the wall. A man lay on his back in the middle of the floor with his arms raised over his head and a pair of eagle feathers splayed out on the warped floorboards. He had obviously taken Billy’s bullet through the chest.

Her head reeled. She put out an arm to steady herself against the nearest wall. Annja wasn’t squeamish. She wondered what would be making her feel so shaky.

Snake fired another shot through the open doorway that led past the hall to the living room. Annja guessed it was to make the man who’d escaped her earlier keep his head down. The brutal noise in such enclosed quarters was making her head ache.

Annja dropped the Mini-14’s magazine from the well and stuffed it in her jacket pocket. Then she jacked the action and caught the brass cartridge as it spun glittering from the receiver. She dropped that in a pants pocket. Kneeling, she set the unloaded Mini-14 down on the floor. Short and handy though it was, a handgun was even more effective in close quarters. And she was a lot more used to fighting at face-to-face range.

From the front of the house came a mutter of voices. Louder voices barked questions at each other down the hallway that led right to where the bedrooms and bathroom presumably lay. Sallie was almost certainly down there, as well—if she were indeed being held there.

A hard choice faced her would-be rescuers. They could drive straight for Sallie and get shot in the back by the men in the living room. Or they could deal with them first, putting themselves in danger from whoever was lurking down that hall, and increasing Sallie’s exposure time to lethal danger.

The plan could’ve been better, Annja thought. Then again, this wasn’t the plan. It was improvisation forced on them by the fact the Dogs were fully aware of their approach. And the original plan had been pretty ad hoc to start with, given they had no recon and no time, but had to trust the maps, their allies and their own resourcefulness to get in and save a captive child.

“Cover my back from the dudes in the hall,” she muttered to her comrades.

A shout and a shot erupted from the corridor as she raced past. Both missed. Then she burst into the living room like a hand grenade, her sword appearing in her free hand.

The two Crazy Dogs kneeling by the windows to either side of the door pulled back from the windows where they had been trading shots with the Iron Horses, stood and begun swinging around to cover their backsides with their long black rifles.

They were too late. The closer man had yellow lightning bolts painted on his cheeks. Annja launched a forehand stroke. The sword slashed across the painted face diagonally. The Crazy Dog toppled backward, clutching at a gush of blood with futile hands.

Still running Annja brought the sword up and around, swung down and right. The second man, one half of his face painted black, the other white, was trying to bull-rush her, with his long black M-16 held transversely across his torso as if at port arms. The sword caught him at the juncture of thick neck and powerful shoulders. The blade bit at an angle deep into his chest.

As he fell Annja became aware that she’d heard the sound of the shotgun, a booming noise that seemed to rattle the abandoned but still-sturdy house to its foundations, and the crash, less loud but more eardrum-punishingly intense, of the .44 Magnum carbine. A second shot from Billy’s carbine followed. Annja returned the sword to the otherwhere.

Then Snake stood beside Annja. She held her shotgun, muzzle up. Her usually narrow eyes were wide.

“Clear,” Annja told her. The other woman nodded. She had remarkable presence of mind, Annja had to acknowledge.

“Ready?” Snake asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Annja said. “Billy?”

“Here,” he called. He was kneeling on the kitchen side of the hallway, leaning his bulky body out far enough to cover down it.

He fired again.

“Gotcha!” he grunted. “Bastard stuck his head out from the bedroom, down the hall.”

“Right,” Annja said. “Sallie’ll be at the rear of the house. Take the first door, we cover.”

She glanced back at Snake and mouthed, “Then we hit the next one.” Snake’s thin lips curved in a slight, feral smile. She nodded.

Annja moved to the opening to the hallway, standing far enough inside the living room to remain invisible from the hall. “On one,” she said aloud. She flashed a V sign with her fingers to Billy. He grinned.

“Two,” she said.

As she’d signaled him to do Billy launched himself on the second count. He caromed off the corridor’s far wall, pushing off to kick the first door on the right with the heel of his boot. Though intact, the house’s interior doors were not nearly as stout as the exterior ones. The door splintered under the impact.

Annja hit the rear corridor wall as Billy’s shotgun bellowed. A ring of gunshot echo told her he’d just cleared the bathroom. Snake knelt by the front wall of the hallway, aiming down the passage.

Billy erupted out of the bathroom and hit the closed door across the hallway with his shoulder. The door shattered. He fired through the gap, then, dropping the carbine, plucked his one-piece steel hatchet from his belt.

“Hello, boys,” he said. And vanished inside.

As screams and thumps came from the front bedroom Annja and Snake dashed down the hall. A man lay slumped in the door of the far bedroom. The back of his head was missing; Annja didn’t worry he was playing possum. The right-hand door was closed.

She stopped just shy of the open door and leaned forward over the body, covering the room with the fat white dot painted on her front sight. Nobody. If somebody was lurking out of her field of view on that quick peek she’d just have to risk it. They were out of time.

Sallie had to be behind the last door. If she was there at all.

Annja flung herself to the end of the hall, gouging her left arm on a handle of the linen cupboard set in the end wall above a set of drawers. She flattened herself as best she could. Then she caught Snake’s eye where the woman stood posed on the door’s far side.

Snake went to one knee. Luck or her subconscious had set them up perfectly—Annja was right-handed and Snake shot lefty. Annja reached down and carefully turned the knob. Then she yanked back her hand.

As she did, shots ripped through the door, knocking long thin splinters from the plywood. A second gun voice joined. At least two gunmen inside were burning up their magazines in one desperate spasm. No three-round burst regulators for these bad boys, Annja realized. No doubt SIU had gotten the federal armorers who’d provided them the automatic weapons in the first place to disable those.

A handful of hypersonic bullets all but grazed Annja’s sucked-in belly. She actually felt their passage-shock slapping the front of her Windbreaker. None of the nasty little copper-jacket needles hit her.

Sudden echoing silence broke out over the ringing in her ears. Goodbye, more of my hearing range! Annja thought. She grabbed the knob again, twisted and threw the door open.

There were two of them, crouching by the back wall. Their M-4s lay on the bare pine planks before them with charging handles locked back—empty. Their eyes gleamed crazily from faces painted black from cheeks to hairline.

One Crazy Dog held Sallie Ten Bears pinned between them by the blade of a huge Bowie knife to her throat. The other pressed a 9 mm pistol to the side of her pigtailed head.