“You believe all that?” she whispered to Professor.
“The Norfolk Group? A bunch of rich men trying to protect their wealth by destroying anything that might upset the apple cart? Sounds pretty plausible to me. The thing is, a lot of regular people probably feel the same way; people like Brian who lost loved ones in the attacks. They’d do anything to keep it from happening again.”
“That’s insane. The truth doesn’t go away just because you cover it up.”
Professor simply inclined his head in agreement. “You ready?”
“What are our chances of making it through this?”
He regarded her with a sardonic grin. “You want the truth?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Ok. Get ready.” He aimed the pistol down the slope in the general direction of the mercenaries and fired two shots into the trees. The noise seemed deafening after the brief lull in the fight. It would have taken a miracle for him to score a hit, but Jade knew that wasn’t his intention. “Wait for it.”
There were shouts and then Jade saw movement as the mercenaries started advancing in quick bursts, moving from one tree to the next. The terrain forced them to move almost single file, which was one of the reasons Professor had chosen the top of the hill for their first fighting position.
The first man in the line pulled up short when he spied the covering of leaves Jade had laid. “¡Ten cuidado!” he shouted. “¡Creo que es una trampa!” Be careful. I think there’s a trap. Then, heeding his own advice, he cautiously started up the slope.
“Now?” whispered Dorion.
“Not yet.”
A second man emerged, sweeping the barrel of his rifle toward the hilltop, but keeping one eye on the leafy camouflage, clearly wary of a concealed pitfall or some other snare.
“They fell for it,” she whispered back. “Two coming up.”
“Let’s try for a triple-play,” Professor answered back.
A third man stepped out from cover. It was Hodges, and like the others, he was dividing his attention between the hilltop and the narrow strip of ground where it was, presumably, safe to walk.
“Now,” Professor whispered.
Dorion pushed on the handle of the entrenching tool they had wedged under the stone sphere, levering it into motion. It smashed through the screen of fig leaves, and started rolling down the slope, gathering momentum as it went.
The first man spotted it and froze in place. His eyes darted to the side, perhaps weighing the threat of whatever lay beneath the leaf cover against the small boulder rolling toward him. His hesitancy cost him the opportunity to make the choice. The sphere may have looked like an over-sized beach ball, but it hit the man’s legs like a pile driver, knocking him back and continuing over him like he was nothing but a speed bump. The second man, his view blocked by his comrade, never saw it coming.
Hodges, forewarned by the cries of the two men and the crunch of the stone ball breaking their bones, reflexively threw himself to the side, right into the leaf cover. The sphere clipped his foot as it rolled past and then crashed into the trees where it continued to carom noisily down the hillside. Hodges lay motionless for a moment atop the leaf cover, as if hardly able to believe that he was alive.
There was no trap, at least not of the sort the attackers were expecting. There hadn’t been time to dig a pit or create spring-tension spear traps with tree branches. “It would take us a couple days to set up all that Rambo stuff,” Professor had said. “That’s time we don’t have. But they won’t know that.”
Instead, he and Dorion had undertaken the tricky and somewhat Sisyphusian task of rolling the stone sphere they had discovered out of its hole and up to the perch on the hilltop, while Jade had gathered leaves to create the illusion of a concealed pit trap. And it had worked beautifully. Mostly.
Well, two out of three ain’t bad, Jade thought.
Professor however, wasn’t ready to call it a failure. He rose up from cover and started firing down at Hodges, but right away, the mercenaries spread out below started firing back. The tree line erupted with muzzle flashes and veritable wave of lead rolled up the slope. Jade caught a glimpse of Hodges scrambling for cover and then was herself driven back as tree branches began splintering all around her.
“Go!” Professor shouted.
They had known, even as they labored to set up their hilltop defense, that it would be only a temporary position. They had hoped for nothing more than to slow their attackers down a little, break their spirit, and if they were lucky, thin the ranks a little. They had succeeded in the last at least, but the odds were still stacked high against them. Their plan then had been to accomplish what they could at the hilltop, and then make a desperate retreat for the east side of the island. They had not discussed what would happen then; Jade knew they would have to make a last stand, go out in a blaze of a glory, but saying it aloud would have been too much to bear.
They ran and slid down the back slope, plowing headlong into the jungle thicket. When possible, Jade tried to duck under or sidestep around branches and vines, but more often than not, they appeared so suddenly, there wasn’t time for evasive maneuvers. Their escape sounded like a stampede of elephants trampling through the forest.
Much sooner than Jade would have thought possible, the jungle ended at a precipice, and she found herself staring out at the blue-gray water of the Pacific Ocean. She lowered her gaze and saw the whitecaps of surf breaking against the face of the cliff, at least forty feet below. There was a boat out on the water, a big motor yacht, maybe two hundred yards out to sea; it might as well have been two hundred miles.
Dorion broke out of the trees behind her and would have charged right off the edge if Jade had not tackled him.
Professor called out to them. “This way!”
He was waving frantically, about twenty yards to the south. Jade got up and, half-dragged Dorion along behind her. She got about halfway to him when the sound of a helicopter filled her ears.
There wasn’t even time to hide. The aircraft appeared suddenly, moving out from behind the rocky promontory that had muted its approach, pouncing on them like lion leaping out of the tall grass.
The rhythmic beat of rotor blades was abruptly punctuated by the staccato roar of a machine gun. Jade threw herself flat as the hillside all around her exploded in a cloud of brown and green. She thought she could feel the heat of the rounds sizzling through the air, striking the ground mere inches from where she lay.
The gunner was firing in bursts, three to five seconds of fire, and maybe as many seconds of letting the gun cool while he assessed the results. She didn’t know if the others had been hit, didn’t dare raise her head to look, and yet she couldn’t stay where she was. She bit her lip, playing possum, and waited for the next burst. If it didn’t kill her, she would make a run for the tree line.
The helicopter continued to beat the air, hovering about fifty feet above and perhaps twice that far beyond the edge of the cliff directly, but the gun was silent. Jade counted the seconds — ten, twenty… an excruciating half minute, before she realized why. The helicopter wasn’t hunting them any longer; it was keeping them pinned down. She lifted her head up, and scanned the trees.
Professor must have realized it too, because even as Jade was drawing her pistol, she heard the report of his, and then the roar of answering fire — not just one, but a dozen guns — from out of the jungle.
Damn it! There’s no way out of this.
Jade could not recall ever feeling so helpless, so hopeless. It was not just that she would probably be dead in a minute or two; it was the sense of absolute futility, of seeing the danger coming, but having no way at all to avoid it.