The ambushers must have shot to kill the mounts first, which showed lamentably good tactical sense. Horses were free to whoever could catch them—there were uncounted thousands in the feral herds in the Central Valley and the foothills, and more swarmed all the way to the Mississippi these days—but saddle tack was something they’d have trouble getting their hands on, and rifles and ammunition were beyond price. Not to mention the opportunity to kill a few of the hated New Virginians, the evil wizards whose touch was death, the destroyers of worlds.
Another arrow went thunk into the body of her ex-mount. She looked around; Kolomusnim had finished off his opponent, then leaped to the back of one of the horses he’d been holding for Simmons; the other was down. He pulled its head around and raced for the open mouth of the pocket of dry land; arrows went after him, and bullets—she thought something struck him, but he might have been hugging the horse’s neck to present a smaller target. The hooves of the galloping horse went past her, throwing up clods of earth, a thudding she could feel through her belly as she lay on the hard clay ground.
“So much for the bliddy tame bushman!” Schalk yelled, and turned the muzzle of his rifle after the fleeing tracker. “Jou hol bobbejan!”
“Schalk! Eyes on the swamp!” Adrienne shouted, and the Afrikaner reluctantly obeyed.
They wouldn’t be missed for hours. The radio would have brought support in a few minutes, but it was quite thoroughly crushed under the side of Simmons’s horse that had hit the ground—even good solid-state milspec field electronics rarely survived eleven hundred pounds of horse landing on it. There were two spares, of course: one with the horse Kolomusnim had ridden out, and the third in the pack-saddle of the mule that had fled westward and was probably at the Coast Range by now….
Simmons had reached his cousin. “He’s a goner!” he called, as he drew his knife and cut the sling of the dead man’s rifle so that he could drag it away.
“Covering fire!” Adrienne called.
The Scout began to crawl rapidly toward the dead horse that marked the spot where Kolomusnim had stood; there was a dead Indian beside it, his face chopped into red ruin by the tracker’s hatchet, and another lying where her bullet had punched through his body just above the hipbones; he was still twitching a little, but effectively dead for all that. The hollow-point rounds would have plowed a hole about the size of a child’s fist right through and out the other side.
The problem with giving Simmons covering fire was that there wasn’t much to see or shoot at. And the Indians could fire their arrows upward, from several yards within the tule reeds; they’d know the safe paths through them. She took out the monocular and scanned along the edge nearest Simmons’s crawling passage.
The rifleman in there was firing slowly; every ten seconds or so a puff of dust would pock the surface of the clay where Simmons was crawling toward cover. That shooter would have to come close to the edge of the reeds, so… a glimpse of brown skin…
“Standing figure, my left, two-fifty yards,” she called; probably the two men had seen the same thing, but someone had to coordinate for best effect. “Jim, get ready to run for it.”
All three rifles shifted; there was a moment’s hesitation as the men picked out the target, or what they thought might be it. Adrienne breathed out slowly, letting her finger tighten gradually on the trigger in a gentle stroking motion, the way Uncle Andy had taught her….
Crack, and another ting of cartridge on metal. The shadowy glimpse of the target vanished, if it had been anything more than a trick of the light in the reeds. She squeezed off half a dozen rounds into the same patch of reeds, and the two men did the same.
“Run for it, Jim!” Adrienne shouted.
The Scout didn’t need any prompting. At the first shot he was up and dashing toward the horse. Reckless of the other rifleman hidden in the reeds, she came up on one knee and fired off the rest of the magazine. A bullet made an ugly wiizzztft! sound past her ear, and more arrows came arching out of the reeds, seeming to start slowly and then accelerate as they slid down the arch toward her—no less disconcerting for being an optical illusion. She dropped flat again to eject the empty magazine and slap in another; there were ten in the bandolier across the dead horse’s neck, and another two hundred rounds boxed in the saddlebags, and she spared some brief flicker of consciousness to thank the God of Regulations for that.
Jim Simmons staggered and cried out as he ran for the scant cover of the fallen horse. An arrow had gone through his leg above the knee, and it buckled under him as he moved. That sent him to his hands and knees. Another shaft plunged down and took him in the back below the left shoulder, and he collapsed flat with another cry.
“Oh, hell,” Adrienne said in a snarl, profoundly unhappy at what happened next. “Give me a hand!” she shouted, and came up from behind the body of the horse, running forward crab-wise and shooting at the reeds as she went, trying to find the bowmen by backtracking the shafts.
Behind her, Schalk van der Merwe gave an inarticulate cry of rage and ran forward as well, bellowing his anger at what the crazy Rolfe woman had gotten him into now. They ran zigzag, with arrows and an occasional bullet whipping past them. Simmons was alive; she could tell by the trembling jerks that ran through the shaft sticking up out of his back—it must have stuck in the shoulder blade, though only time would tell whether it had penetrated past that shield of bone into the lung.
“Take him!” Adrienne said.
Schalk fired off the rest of his magazine at the reeds and the half-seen figures dodging about in the fringe of the swamp, then gripped the back of Simmons’s jacket in his left hand and hauled him up like a suitcase before he slung him over his shoulder, ignoring the hundred and seventy solid pounds the smaller man weighed. His sprint back toward cover showed no effect from the weight, either; van der Merwe was nearly as tough as he thought he was. He dropped the Scout behind Adrienne’s barricade of horseflesh, then did another jinking dash back to his own.
Adrienne slung her rifle and scooped up Simmons’s weapon. It had a cut-down forestock, a glass-bedded barrel, an adjustable cheekpiece and a sniper’s telescopic sight. Her run back to the shelter of her dead mare turned into an undignified tumble as an arrow plowed a shallow furrow across the outside of her right buttock, the sharp steel head slicing the fabric of her trousers like a pair of scissors in the hands of a tailor.
“Goddamned ass cutters!” she shouted in frustration.
Simmons was conscious, but sweating with pain and shock; he couldn’t move his left arm, and cried out through clenched teeth when it was bumped. His skin wasn’t gray, and his pulse was thready but regular; the arrow wounds were bleeding, but not in pulsing jets; and there was no blood on his lips—hopefully the point in the back hadn’t penetrated the lung. The Lord alone knew what was going on inside, but for the present it was better to leave the natural tourniquets of the wooden shafts in place. Blessing the God of Regulations once more, she got the medical kit out of its boiled-leather case on the saddle, pulled out a hypo of morphine, stripped off the cover on the needle with her teeth and stuck it into the back of his thigh, pressing the plunger with her thumb. After a moment he sighed and closed his eyes.
“Lucky bastard,” she mumbled, and stole a glance at her watch. Ten minutes? Nine and a half, to be strict. That’s ridiculous; it must have been longer. A glance at the sun told her that it was correct: still not quite noon.