“Ammo?” Pendergast asked.
He swiftly checked his magazine. “Christ, only one left. You?”
“One also. But the gate is clear.”
Just as he spoke, Coldmoon heard the crackle of a walkie-talkie on the far side of the gate. Shit. And behind them, he could see the soldiers in the parking lot moving toward them, spread out, darting from cover to cover.
“We’re surrounded,” Coldmoon said. “Only two rounds, and the bastards aren’t likely to let us surrender.”
“They’re going to kill us?” Alves-Vettoretto asked.
“What do you think?” said Coldmoon sarcastically.
There was brief moment of silence, a pause, as they stared at each other.
“Well,” said Pendergast, extending his hand. “You’ve been a fine partner.”
“You weren’t half-bad, either.”
They shook hands.
“You won’t tell anyone I said that, I presume?” Pendergast asked.
Despite their situation, Coldmoon laughed. “You wouldn’t have told me that if you thought I’d have a chance to repeat it.”
Another burst of fire tore into the truck they were crouching behind as the soldiers in the parking lot made a coordinated rush. Pendergast said, “Get ready,” and aimed his rifle, not at the approaching soldiers, but at the truck’s gas tank. He fired a round into it.
“What the—?” Coldmoon scrambled back as the truck erupted in fire, ready to blow. Pendergast grabbed Alves-Vettoretto and ran past the smoke and flame through the gate, Coldmoon following, firing his last round into the darkness ahead. As they came out the other side, into the old courtyard, a voice rang out.
“Drop your weapons! Hands up! Now!”
They had practically run into a squad of soldiers stationed just outside the gate, arranged in a semicircle, their weapons aimed squarely at the little group of three. Coldmoon looked around in a panic for a way to escape. Broken walls of weathered stone rose on two sides amid pallets of bricks, long forgotten and covered with kudzu. The gleam of the searchlight cast a ghostly pallor over everything. They were trapped.
“Drop your weapons!” barked the voice. “I won’t ask again!”
Pendergast and Coldmoon placed their now-empty weapons on the ground. Then they raised their hands over their heads. Behind them, Coldmoon could hear soldiers from the first squad coming through the parking lot and past the gate.
They were surrounded, with approximately twenty weapons pointed at them.
The figure that had spoken stepped forward. He was tall and muscular, with an acne-pitted face. Unlike most of the other soldiers, he wore the markings of a full-bird colonel, along with a name tag: Kormann.
He looked from Pendergast, to Coldmoon, to Alves-Vettoretto, with a mixture of disdain and hatred. “Which one of you shot Harrigan?” he asked, jerking one thumb toward a prone figure directly behind him. Coldmoon noticed the colonel’s boots were freshly splattered with what must have been the dead man’s blood.
“I had that privilege,” Coldmoon said.
The man named Kormann stepped up to Coldmoon. He smiled lazily. Coldmoon smiled back.
Kormann lashed out with a fist, catching Coldmoon on the jaw. Coldmoon staggered under the blow but didn’t fall. As he raised himself back to full height, the colonel spat in his face, then buried the fist in Coldmoon’s gut. He doubled over, groaning, and Kormann connected with a wicked haymaker that knocked him prone.
Pendergast must have made some attempt to intercede, because Coldmoon, as if from far away, heard the clatter of weapons and an order from Kormann: “As you were.”
There was a brief silence. Then Kormann laughed. “You’re the one called Pendergast, aren’t you? Well, look at you now.”
Coldmoon, full consciousness returning, saw Kormann turn to one of his men. “Let’s take them back to the barracks — and have some fun.”
Coldmoon grabbed a stone from the rubble-strewn ground and, half rising, tried to smash Kormann with it. But the colonel dodged the blow easily, kicked him brutally back onto the ground, and then — with a brief laugh — began to close in.
68
Coldmoon — dazed and bleeding — could only turn his face from the crushing blow he knew was coming. But there was nothing. Instead, a strange silence fell, a hush, like a collective intake of breath.
“Well,” he heard Kormann say. “And just what the fuck do we have here?”
The hush was broken by a low murmuring among some of the soldiers. Everyone had turned to look at a curious figure standing in the ruined archway at the far end of the courtyard.
Coldmoon blinked the blood out of his eyes and tried to focus. He wondered if he was seeing things. It looked like some woodland elf, petite, girlish, smeared with mud. Bits of leaves and plant fronds were plastered here and there, one fern flapping back and forth in the wind. The figure itself remained motionless, in a posture that seemed easy and confident, even relaxed. It held a dagger in one hand.
“Who’s this?” Kormann said. “Catwoman to the rescue?”
One soldier laughed. The rest remained tense, on guard.
The figure had been looking around the courtyard, as if memorizing it. Now it stared directly at the colonel and spoke. Coldmoon wasn’t sure what he recognized first — the violet eyes or the voice: calm and unusually deep for such a small frame.
Constance Greene.
“Let them go,” she said.
This was so ludicrous a demand, so unexpected, that several soldiers laughed this time.
Kormann issued a sarcastic laugh of his own. “Is that all?”
Constance remained impassive.
“Is there anyone with you? Batman, perhaps, or a squad of SEALs?”
Constance shook her head.
“In that case, I’d be happy to release them,” Kormann went on. “There’s just one thing.”
“Yes?”
“You forgot to say ‘please.’”
More snickers from the soldiers. Coldmoon used the moment to rise to his feet. This unexpected interruption, he noticed, had diffused a little of the tension and perhaps lessened their own immediate danger. As astonished as he was to see her, it was still a futile and almost ridiculous situation, surrounded by twenty soldiers, with more surely on the way. He looked at Pendergast to see his reaction, but his face was, as usual, unreadable.
Still, she just stood there. Constance... He had no idea what she might do next, armed with only a thin-bladed knife. What the hell was going through her mind? All she could do was provide a little sport for the soldiers before dying. But there was something catlike about her, an apex predator.
“I don’t beg from cowards like you,” she said. “Men who are all swagger and tough talk — all very easy when backed up by thugs with automatic weapons.”
Nettled, Kormann said: “Why don’t you come in and join your friends for their final, painful moments on earth?”
“Not quite yet,” she said — and then, with a sudden flash of movement, she disappeared.
This caused almost as much consternation as her initial appearance. Except for a few soldiers, who kept their weapons trained on Pendergast and Coldmoon, everyone was staring out through the broken archway, now empty.
And then, abruptly, Constance reappeared. Only this time she was lugging something heavy across her shoulders, and also awkwardly carrying two ammo boxes. Coldmoon looked on, incredulous.
A murmur, like a rustling of grass, swept through the platoon.
With a grunt of effort, Constance put down the two ammunition boxes — green, with the standard yellow stenciling — and shrugged what was obviously a weapon off her shoulders, staggering as it slipped from her grasp and fell to the ground.
At the appearance of the gun, the soldiers instinctively trained their weapons on her, and one fired a shot that whined past Constance. Coldmoon stared; he recognized the thing she’d dropped as a military machine gun, an M240 hybrid with an integrated bipod assembly. One of the cartridge boxes was open, its belt already fed into the M240.