Without warning, a tall figure clothed in black rose up about thirty feet beyond her head. She froze, lying on her back, gazing awkwardly up and back at him as he swung up a semiautomatic carbine in a smooth motion. In an instant, she identified the weapon. A Yugoslavian SKS rifle with a bayonet mount. Not a weapon Jeff or the Medusas used. And the guy obviously had a target in sight. The weapon settled against his shoulder and his right forearm tensed. He was firing!
Without hesitating, she squeezed off two shots overhead while lying on her back. The first shot caught him under the right ear. The second, she’d adjusted downward to compensate for his beginning to collapse, and it hit him square in the temple. A kill shot.
The guy dropped like a stone as crashing sounds erupted from all directions. Men shouted back and forth. They yelled in a language she didn’t know, but she didn’t need to understand. They knew they had a man down, that there was a shooter out here, and they were determined to find and kill her.
This scenario, she knew. The kill was always easy. The escape afterward was hell. She rolled fast across the remaining moss, then rose into a crouch behind a tree trunk. She glanced up. A towering black pine. Not ideal for climbing…the branches were too thin to support much weight, and closely spaced enough to make scaling the trunk a pain in the rear. But she didn’t have much choice.
She often made use of three dimensions when egressing a close-range kill. Most people only thought in two dimensions, so thinking vertically gave her a big edge. Not to mention, Hidoshi had trained her to climb like a monkey.
Not worrying about noise as the dead man’s colleagues crashed through the gully like a herd of bull elephants, she jumped for the nearest branch. The soft wood bent deeply beneath her weight, but held.
Up she went, distributing her weight as best as she could among multiple branches as she climbed the rough ladder of limbs quickly. A dark shadow moved below, and she froze, one arm around the trunk, the branch she stood on slowly flexing beneath her weight. As the angle of the limb grew steeper and steeper, she prayed silently.
Hold a few more seconds. Don’t crack.
Thankfully, the sap-filled wood remained silent, and the shadow moved on. She switched quickly to another branch and wrapped both arms around the trunk, supporting most of her weight that way.
“Where the hell are you?” Jeff murmured.
“I went vertical. One hostile just passed beneath me,” she breathed back.
Misty murmured, “I have one moving past me, away from the park entrance.”
Isabella spoke next. “I have one examining the downed man.”
Frustratingly, no one reported sighting the last man. Kat was startled when Jeff breathed, “Ops, say location of hostiles.”
A new voice came up on their frequency. “Two hostiles, immobile, sixty feet east of Cobra. One moving northwest, one-hundred-ten feet north of Sidewinder. One hostile moving west-by-southwest, approximately fifty feet from Python’s location.”
Kat mapped the locations in her head. Nobody was about to stumble across her hiding spot.
The voice continued. “A new hostile moving between Adder and Mamba’s positions. Field-of-fire conflict between Adder and Mamba. Maverick, another tango is heading toward you. Should pass twenty to twenty-five feet in front of you, moving left to right. If you have cover and hold position, you should be clear.”
Six men were out here? Those last two might have successfully ambushed the Medusas had the H.O.T. Watch combat observers not warned them. Handy, having an infrared picture from God’s-eye view like this.
Jennifer Blackfoot came up on frequency. “Visual shows one more hostile back in the parking lot. He appears to be tampering with your vehicle.”
Kat’s jaw dropped. Okay, so the H.O.T. Watch folks were more than handy. They were lifesavers.
“Copy,” Jeff murmured. “I have my man in sight.”
The woods and the radios went silent as the hostiles calmed down from their initial panic and went into hard-core hunting mode, creeping stealthily through the lush tropical foliage.
It was a deadly game of cat and mouse. For the most part, Kat, Jeff and the Medusas held their positions, hunkered down to wait out the hostiles as the H.O.T. Watch observers occasionally murmured a position update.
And then Jennifer announced, “Problem, folks. We just got a momentary visual on one of your hostiles. We enhanced the image, and he appears to be wearing night-vision goggles. We cannot confirm, but have to assume they’re infrared.”
Kat’s stomach dropped. That meant they also had to assume that their trackers could see them now, and would shoot them on sight. The rules of this game had just changed completely.
Jeff breathed into the radio. “Request permission to go full offensive.”
Chapter 15
Kat held her breath while a long pause ensued. Then Jennifer spoke crisply. “Pull out of there. Attempt not to kill them, but shoot your way out of there as necessary.”
Jeff murmured, “Copy. Medusas, rendezvous at Point Alpha.”
The Medusas always established several rendezvous points in case they got separated on an op.
Jennifer spoke again. “Cobra, if possible, please confirm your kill and search the body. Who are those guys?”
Kat shimmied down out of the tree quickly, her gloves and shoes sticky with sap. She raced for the man she’d shot. She stared when she got to his body. His pockets were already turned inside out, his left wrist flung wide-and minus a watch. His weapon was gone. He wore no ammunition belt, and she thought she remembered glimpsing the bulge of one when she’d taken the shot. But she’d been firing from a wacky angle. Maybe she was wrong.
“This guy’s been stripped of all identification,” she reported.
Jeff ordered, “Converge on me, ladies. Ops, if you’d vector them in?”
The H.O.T. Watch controllers obliged, and Kat followed their directions toward her teammates. She thought hard as she ran lightly through the trees. Her kill’s identity had been sanitized by one of his buddies. Which was pretty sophisticated behavior for common thugs. These guys were pros.
Jennifer Blackfoot came back up. “We just picked up a phone call to the Bajan police. Gunshots were reported. Time to leave the area. ETA on police-five minutes.”
Dang. The H.O.T. Watch had the capacity to monitor local phone calls, too?
Jeff started, “Raven, about our vehicles. The cops-”
Jennifer cut him off. “Carter’s calling the police now to tip them off anonymously that the cars may be rigged to blow up.”
“Thanks,” Jeff replied.
Kat was close to their rendezvous point and reached it in about a minute. She topped a steep outcropping of rock and spotted a crouching figure before her. A hand signal flashed. Jeff. She flashed back an all’s well and he waved her in. She moved to his side while they waited for the others to join them.
“You okay?” he asked quietly, off radio.
She was startled to realize that the very same question had been on the tip of her tongue to ask him. Thing was, she already knew he was uninjured. And yet, she felt a need for reassurance. Her hands wanted to run over his limbs and torso and face, to check for injuries. Weird. She answered, likewise off radio, “I’m fine. You?”
“Fine. Why’d you shoot that guy?”
It did not escape her that he was giving her the benefit of the doubt-that he was assuming she’d had a good reason to disobey his order not to shoot and giving her a chance to share it with him. “The tango stood up, took aim, and started to fire at one of you.” She shrugged. “There was no time to ask for a modification of your order.”