“This is bad. This is very bad,” she mumbled as she checked over the Scout’s rifle and adjusted the cheekpiece and shoulder buffer for her size. “This is very, very goddamned bad.”
From the volume of fire, there must be at least two rifles and maybe twenty bows among the Indians, and they’d killed only three or four of them all told. There could be a hundred of them waiting to attack.
“I’d better use this fine product of O’Brien engineering to buy us some time,” she muttered. “All right…”
The sight had adjustments for ranges from x3 to x10. You could estimate the range yourself, or just point it at a target and look. The scope showed crosshairs, and upper and lower stadia on the vertical line. Turning the adjusting knob so that they rested on the head and belt of a man moved a cam to zero the crosshairs for that range.
She wrapped a turn of the sling around her left hand, rested the stock on the barrel of her dead horse, and brought the scope to her eye. The edge of the reeds leaped to arm’s length through the scope, and she gave a hiss of satisfaction as she saw an archer a yard inside the tules drawing a shaft, his teeth bared in effort as he bent the short thick bow staff—she could see sweat glisten, and the whites of his eyes against the band of black paint over his upper face. The stadia marks fitted neatly over his head and belt, which put the crosshairs precisely on his breastbone….
Crack.
The archer fell backward, chest-punched by the bullet. A spray of bone and blood and shreds of flesh erupted from his back where the mushrooming hollow-point round blasted out a hole the size of a small plate. The arrow wobbled up and fell to stand in the ground thirty yards beyond the edge of the marsh.
Ouch. Unfortunately, the scope also let you see the expression on the man’s face when the bullet hit. Granted he was trying to kill me, that’s still something I would rather not have seen.
She panned the scope down the edge of the tule reeds closest to the New Virginians’ position, methodically shooting as targets presented themselves. Barring rescue, their only real chance of survival was to kill so many Indians that the rest were sickened with the business and ran.
Silence fell, save for the buzzing of the insects, something of which she was suddenly conscious again. An occasional arrow came out of the swamp, but the Indians had backed farther in and were shooting more or less blind.
“Good shooting, miss!” Piet Botha called. “They may give up.”
Cautiously, Adrienne raised her head. A bullet cracked by overhead, another kicked up a puff of dust fifty yards to her front, and a third struck the horse.
“Shit!” she said with quiet viciousness, dropping down behind the protective barrier of flesh. Then louder: “I don’t think so, Piet. I don’t think they like us, somehow.”
“Ja,” the Afrikaner said ruefully. “They have us pinned down.” A hesitation. “If we kept them pinned down with some rapid fire, miss, you might be able to get out into the open and make it back to camp, get a rescue party here.”
Adrienne turned on her back, thinking carefully as she scanned the way they’d come. There was no point in heroic gestures. If running gave them all a chance, then she’d run; Adrienne didn’t have testosterone poisoning to cloud her mind. She would be the logical choice; all three of them were in top condition, but while the men could lift a lot more weight, she could run faster than either of them over any distance longer than a sprint. And she could keep going a lot longer, too; she had ten years on Schalk, and fifteen on Piet.
On the other hand, they were about halfway into the embayment in the swamp, a little closer to the north edge than the south. The entrance narrowed several hundred yards behind them, and anyone running out would have to pass through a bottleneck between two and three hundred yards across. After running a five-hundred-yard gauntlet… with only two shooters to suppress the hostiles…
“I don’t think so,” she called back to Piet. “Neither of those two riflemen are very good shots, and I think they’re short of ammo, but they’d get anyone who tried to run. And there are probably somewhere between twenty and a hundred bowmen, too. Tell me you don’t think they’ve got some of them back there where the swamp edges pinch in toward each other at the edge, waiting to rush anyone who tries to get out. If either of you want to try it, I’ll give a written authorization.”
A pause. “You’re probably right, miss,” Piet said; there was a sigh in his shout. “Bliddy hell.”
The Indians didn’t want to pay the butcher’s bill that rushing three rifles firing from behind cover would exact, but it was going to get dark eventually, and then… On the third hand…
“There’s a good chance Heinrich will get suspicious and come investigate before sundown,” she said. “If he’s not here by seven, we’ll reconsider.”
“Ja, that’s our best chance,” Piet said. “Alles in sy maai.” Which meant, roughly, that everything was really screwed up. Adrienne wished she didn’t agree.
She took a swig from the canvas waterbag, then ate a handful of raisins and chewed on a strip of jerky. Now and then she took a cautious peek over her dead-horse sangar, careful not to do it twice in the same place. One of the Indian riflemen shot at her about every second time, usually not coming very close, but if she didn’t pop up occasionally the bowmen would creep right to the edge of the reeds and start dropping arrows accurately again. The horse was beginning to bloat and stink even worse in the clammy heat, adding postmortem flatulence to the general unpleasantness; it struck her that this would be a very bad place to die.
Of course, is there a good place? Well, in bed, asleep, at 101 years of age, surrounded by great-grandchildren, maybe…
“Water,” Jim Simmons whispered.
She put the nozzle of the waterbag to his mouth; it took considerable squirming around to do it without exposing herself to fire from the reed beds, and most of it dribbled down his chin—it wasn’t easy to drink lying flat on your stomach and unable to move without pain.
“Hope this was worth it,” he said, a little stronger.
“I still can’t tell you, Jim, but yes, this is really important. Sorry about your cousin.”
The man sighed and closed his eyes again.
I am going to find out who was responsible for all this, Adrienne thought with cold rage. She didn’t believe this ambush was a coincidence. Someone was violating the Gate Control Commission’s edicts, either for profit or for power, and using murder to cover things up. And I am going to see them die.
A sound caught at the edge of her consciousness, far and faint, but growing louder. A knot between her shoulder blades loosened. That was a helicopter, and it was coming her way. Which meant that Simmons’s tracker hadn’t just lit out for home; it also meant—
“Look sharp!” she called. “They may try to—”
The sound was louder now, unmistakable even to ears that didn’t have much experience with aircraft; the thupa-thupa-thupa of a helicopter. Craning her neck around she could see the Black Hawk coming, like a deadly raven-colored wasp sliding through the blue heat-shimmer of the cloudless summer sky.
“—rush us,” she went on.
Less than three seconds later, fifty Indians left the shelter of the reeds and charged, screaming. Adrienne fought an almost irresistible impulse to curl up behind the dead horse and hope none of the sudden storm of arrows hit her. Instead she made herself switch from one target to another, squeezing steadily and unhurriedly. As she fired the last round and let the scope-sighted rifle drop—a hell of a way to treat a precision instrument, but needs must—the helicopter arrived overhead. Most of the Indians still on their feet fled. They were still screaming, but with despair now.