"What do we do now?"
"Crawl back to the cover of the house." There was more firing, way to the left, beyond the curve of the window. An explosion followed four or five quick bursts. Vickers and Fenton eased themselves back into the shadows and waited tensely. Fenton nodded approvingly.
"You know? I like you, Vickers. You don't take any chances."
Vickers was watching the area of darkness from which the firing had come.
"When I haven't been told what I'm doing here I'm not about to stick my neck out."
Something was moving out there. Vickers braced himself and pointed his machine pistol, gripping it with both hands. There were figures coming around the front of the house. Fenton also took aim. The leading one waved its arm. "Don't anybody shoot. It's me, Streicher."
Fenton didn't lower his gun. "We could pretend that we didn't hear and blow the sucker away."
"I don't think it's quite time for that, yet." Vickers stepped forward and called out. "It's okay. It's just us, Vickers and Fenton. There's a couple of opposition bodies beside you there."
Streicher and the others halted. "That accounts for all of them. Are you two okay?"
"Sure, we're okay." Streicher sounded weary. "We took some casualties."
Vickers flicked the Yasha onto safe and walked toward Streicher and the others. There were six of them, including Gomez, Garcia, Curtis and Linda. Parkwood was bending over one of the bodies. He rolled it onto its back. "Does anyone have a flashlight?" Gomez handed him one and he inspected the face of the body. Vickers joined him.
"Somebody should go take a look at Bronce. If he's not dead, he's hurt real bad." Streicher looked at Linda. "Go check."
She hurried to where Bronce was laying. Vickers watched her go. When the alarm had sounded she'd hardly bothered to dress. Someone inside the house was turning on the exterior lights. Linda called across the patio. "Bronce is dead as far as I can tell."
"Shit." Streicher looked extremely unhappy. This was clearly the last thing that should have happened to his charges. "Who else got it?"
"Morse. It was his own fucking fault. He walked right into it."
"Who else?"
"Anna Teig. They blew her head clean off. One of them was tossing out whammies. Sammy was hit on the shoulder but he'll be okay. Ralph's looking after him. Zoe fell into a trench and broke her ankle."
"You'd better take a look at this." Parkwood was slowly straightening up from where he'd been examining the body. "You look too, Vickers. You're not going to like this."
Streicher and Vickers both peered down. Parkwood flashed the light on one of the faces. Vickers sighed. "Oh Christ."
"You know her?"
"Sure he knows her, don't you, Mort?" Parkwood seemed almost amused.
"Sure I know her."
Streicher looked angrily from Parkwood to Vickers.
"So who the hell is she?"
Vickers sighed. "Her name's Ilsa van Doren. She's a Contec corpse. She's had two tries at me already."
Stretcher's eyes were cold and hard.
"So how did she get here?"
"That's what I was wondering."
Parkwood allowed himself a thin, cool smile.
"At least you've killed her."
Streicher scowled. "That could have been very convenient."
"What are you suggesting?"
Streicher was once again the closed-up professional.
"I'm not suggesting anything. Right now I want answers." He turned to Gomez, Garcia and Curtis. "We'll do it tonight, we can't wait until morning. Collect up the opposition dead. They can go in the cold store in the basement. We'll search them and find out what we can."
"All I know is that my partner here's been shot up and someone's going to pay for it."
For almost an hour, Ralph had moved backward and forward from the edge of hysteria. It had taken that long for Streicher's boys to bring in the bodies. The Contec connection had put Vickers on the receiving end of some hostile and suspicious stares. Three of their number had been killed and two more were wounded. Some of them needed an individual to hold responsible. Apparently Vickers might do until a more complete and satisfactory explanation came along. The search of the bodies had revealed little. Three had been recognized as Las Vegas freelancers, exactly the kind you'd hire if you were going to attempt an assault mission of this kind. Except for Ilsa, the others were mysteries. They had brand new and identical sets of clothes and a selection of brand new weapons.
Streicher seemed more shaken than he ought to be by the attack. This puzzled Vickers. He'd imagined the man was far more experienced. He had the jumpy preoccupation of someone who knows that hell will fall upon him the moment that he reports to his superiors. His authority seemed to be slipping and he had to openly restrain himself from leading the move to make a scapegoat out of Vickers.
"Somebody had to tell them where we are."
Vickers was calm and patient. It wasn't so much Streicher that worried him. With Streicher, discipline would always win out in the end. It was Ralph that bothered him the most. Ralph's lover, partner, companion or whatever, was wounded. Vickers couldn't trust that his alternate ranting and brooding might not explode into a full-scale flash of get even. Nobody had yet asked Vickers to hand over his weapon and he continued to hold onto it.
"How could I have told anyone where we are? I didn't know, and if they'd planted some gizmo on me, you would have found it. You ran tests on me for twenty-seven hours."
When the dead had been brought in, Streicher had insisted that everyone follow them down to the cold-room in the cellar. The thirteen bodies had been laid side by side on the concrete floor. They looked like wax figures under the harsh, white refrigerator neon, with as little relationship to life as the sides of beef and bacon that were hung along the wall on steel hooks. The Rancho was also prepared for a siege as well as an attack. There were a pair of plain wooden coffins stacked in a corner. These somehow disturbed Vickers more than the dead on display.
Streicher paced up and down the row of bodies. Everyone else waited, chilling down in the bone-cold, metallic air and listening to the ring of his boots. After the warm desert night the freeze came fast. Ralph was the first to crack.
"What I want to know is what are we going to do about this?"
The remark was thrown directly at Vickers. Ralph, however, wasn't the only one who was cold and angry. Debbie was squatting on the floor, massaging her legs.
"This is getting ridiculous, Streicher. We're professionals and we coped with the situation. Why are you keeping us down here freezing our collective ass off? We were just in genuine combat and we don't need this shit. If you think you're going to get Vickers to confess to something, you've got to be crazy."
Vickers gave her a half smile. Ralph immediately swung at one of the side of beef. There was a hollow thud. The meat swung backwards and forwards.
"Let me have a try at him. He'll tell everything he knows."
Streicher was glowering. Vickers was trying not to shiver with the cold. He was getting tired of all this nonsense. When people started punching meat, it was time to take the offensive. His delivery was slow, fairly soft but very distinct.
"If you people didn't have shit for brains you'd realize that I couldn't-in any way-have brought this team down on us."
Ralph was advancing on Vickers.
"Don't tell me I have shit for brains, motherfucker."
Vickers took a pace back and raised the Yasha.
"One more step and I'll cut your ass in half. I swear to God."