She swung round to see the Old One’s hands empty and her wrinkled face wet with the splash that had resulted. Her hands were trembling.
“They have come,” she said.
“What are you talking about?” the commando leader demanded, storming toward Johnny.
“Act before it is too late!”
“My men would have signaled, I tell you. We’re prepared. If I pull them out now …”
The leader stopped when a soft splash split the other sounds of the night. A few seconds passed, then a single gunshot rang out.
“My God,” Joseph muttered.
“How?” the leader wondered, as he tried in vain to make his men respond to his contact signal.
“The water,” Wareagle had just finished saying when a black figure that was one with the night sprang out of the thick ooze and underbrush rimming the shore of the bayou. There was a dull flash of metal, and the commando leader gasped.
Johnny recorded the action in slow motion within his mind’s eye. But even that was barely sufficient to show him that the killer’s hands weren’t wielding the weapon; they were the weapon. The killer had driven them straight through the Israeli leader’s torso. Johnny saw them emerge through the man’s back like spikes as his ears recorded the tearing, wrenching sounds. The leader started to fall.
Johnny fired his rifle.
The Splat bullet struck the dark killer squarely in the chest and blew him backward into the water. A shower of gore sprayed in all directions. Johnny spun in time to see Joseph firing a burst into a second figure as a third took the big Israeli from behind with its hands closing on his throat. Before Wareagle could aim, the dark hands had torn Joseph’s head clean off. A fountain of blood shot upward, and Joseph’s body spasmed horribly before crumpling. Johnny fired a Splat into the killer’s head, and it ruptured with a fiery poof.
Whatever they were, they could be killed….
Wareagle took some comfort in that, although not a lot. He leaned over and checked the headless body of the second figure he had shot. It was a man, all right, everywhere except …
Johnny checked his hands. They weren’t hands at all, but molded gloves formed of steel that was honed razor-sharp all the way down the fingers. The method of Joe Rainwater’s and all the other deaths was clear to him now. The victims had been blinded first and then killed in awful fashion up close, unable to see and thus unable to defend themselves. The killers were out to achieve more than effectiveness. There was a ritual element to this, almost like the fanaticism of a cult. Johnny’s eyes shifted quickly to the house. The sounds he had heard prior to the appearance of these now-dead killers confirmed that there were more of them out there. They would now be heading toward the woman they had come for.
Wareagle waded into the muck of the swamp. His feet again sunk into the soft bottom, and the dense undergrowth tried in vain to hold him. He was waist-deep when the bottom firmed out. The water glistened instead of oozed. Johnny pushed himself in and began swimming the last stretch to the house that rose out of the bayou.
At the sound of the explosions, Heydan Larroux lunged from her chair and moved for the front room, where a pair of guards stood as her final line of defense. She knew already that all the other men she had posted were dead. The explosions she had just heard might have been a last-ditch effort by the few that had managed to take action.
“He is out there,” the Old One rasped from her unyielding perch over the water bowl.
“I haven’t got time for—”
“The warrior!” the Old One continued. “He is out there!”
Heydan was already into the living room, and the words barely reached her. Her last two guards held their machine guns at the ready, poised before either window. Heydan moved to the one that provided the clearest view of the walkway leading out from the shore, the only way to reach the house from land. In her hand was a detonator. Not hesitating at all, she pressed it.
Instantly a pair of blasts sounded, and the walkway collapsed into the swamp, sinking slowly. She discarded the detonator and pulled a 9mm Beretta pistol from the belt of her jeans. Whoever was out there would have to approach by water now. And it was deep this far out, ten feet where the house’s supports had been planted.
Heydan left her two guards at their vigil and returned to the first floor’s back room. She closed and locked the door behind her. An attack from beyond via the rear was much less likely, given the logistics of the house’s construction. The windows were seven feet above the water here, instead of four in the front, an impossible lunge for anyone. As for the upstairs, well, that seemed an unlikely route of entry at best.
Heydan Larroux steadied herself by one window and then shifted to the other. The Old One remained in the floor’s center, seeing without eyes. The longest two minutes of Heydan’s life had passed when a blast rang out in the front room. She heard her men yelling at each other, followed by the distinctive clacking of automatic-rifle fire. They continued shouting as they fired, but their words were indecipherable to her.
“My God,” Heydan muttered, staring at the door before her. “My God …”
Her men were shrieking now, ear-piercing screams that grabbed her gut and twisted. The pistol trembled in her hand. Heavy footsteps thumped toward the door leading into the back room. Heydan backpedaled and tried to steady her pistol.
Something cold grasped her arm.
“The warrior is coming,” the Old One said, suddenly by her side.
“What?”
The Old One looked at the door as if she could see through it. “No. He is here.”
The Old One moved away from Heydan just before an explosion sounded that blew the door inward. Something crashed into Larroux and flung her backward. Impact against the wall stole all of her wind and a measure of her consciousness. She was pinned down by something as black and heavy as the night, as death itself.
Johnny Wareagle had made the night his ally in swimming his way through the bayou’s black water toward the house. The water would not give him up to his enemies, because it, too, was part of nature. Existing in harmony with its heavy currents made for the best camouflage of all.
He swam like a great fish just below the surface, stealing only what little air he needed to make his way forward in the night. He was a hundred yards from Heydan Larroux’s bayou house when the explosion disturbed the smooth flow of the thick water. The ripple effect disrupted his stroke, and his head cleared the surface to see the last of the smoldering walkway disappearing into the bayou.
The woman inside the house was better than he had thought. Johnny turned that way and stopped dead in the water.
A trio of the blackened figures were climbing up from the black water directly under the house. Ropes dangled down from its front to the water’s surface, affixed to pylons that must have been shot into place by the same kind of pistollike device that Johnny had used plenty of times himself.
The need for subtlety was finished. Wareagle pulled himself through the currents in quick bursts of incredible power. He had covered more than half the distance when he saw the figures reach the door. They jammed something on its center and it blew inward, half-torn from its hinges.
The water hid the screams that followed from Johnny’s ears, but he heard them clearly enough in his mind and imagined that they were Joe Rainwater’s. He shot through the final stretch of water without slowing for air. The killers had left their ropes dangling, and he grasped one to pull himself upward.