by Alex Archer
Lesser flashes lit the night as soldiers fired their assault rifles. A second armored car opened up from thirty yards or so to the left of the first.
"Stay down," Isis seemed to whisper in the back of Annja's skull. "They're not shooting at us."
She was right. The shots all passed over the heads of the now totally prone Promessan team. Isis's two people had been blown away by a cruel accident, by a foe who had no idea they were even there.
Diesel engines throttled up with a noise like dragons clearing their throats. The armored cars rumbled forward.
A curious buzzing sound passed over Annja from behind. A brilliant flash lit the wedge-shaped snout of the vehicle that had shot up Isis's team. The vehicle stopped. A moment later orange flame roared from the driver's and cupola hatches. A figure wrapped in flames climbed screaming from the cupola, fell to the ground and rolled. Smaller white flashes started strobing through the black smoke pouring from the stricken machine like firecracker strings as the ammo storage went up.
"Here they come," came Patrizinho's voice in Annja's skull. It soothed her back from panic's raw edge. "Stay low and don't move unless you have to."
Two vehicles rolled on, a dozen yards to either side of the wreck. In the garish light of the flames Annja saw soldiers coming toward her, heads hunched forward beneath their camo-mottled boonie hats, prodding the night before them with their rifles.
The skirmish line passed. One man came so near to Annja she might have grabbed his right ankle as he went by. Not daring to breathe, keeping her eyes slitted, she tried to remember the lessons Xia and Patrizinho had given her the past two days on stealth, among a myriad subjects. Try to think as little as possible. Envision yourself a part of the landscape – a fallen log, a bush. Breathe shallowly but remember to breathe. Never look directly at an enemy. He'll sense you.
Men she had known who had seen combat, especially special-operations troopers, had told her exactly the same thing, about trying to think like a bush and never looking straight at anyone.
The hardest part, she found, was remembering to breathe.
Then the oblivious enemy was past, shouting and shooting. But to Annja's renewed terror a fourth armored car appeared, swerving around the blazing wreck. It headed straight for her.
She stared at it. It got bigger, big as a moving mountain. Its three independently suspended right tires would all roll over her in series if she didn't move. Yet she was terrified of moving prematurely, lest the crew spot her.
The metal monster loomed above. She tried to roll left, out of its path, only to fetch against the stout central stem of a bush. Panic blasted through her. The bush refused to yield. The cleated front tire crunched toward her face. With a desperate heave she rolled to her right.
The backward-sloping lower plate of its snout brushed her shoulders. She moaned aloud in fear as the car rolled over her, blotting the stars. Its tires crunched deafeningly mere inches to either side of her.
After it passed, Annja lay quivering. She felt a touch on her shoulder and gasped. She struggled to bring up her rifle.
A strong, gentle hand caught her arm. "Easy, easy," said Patrizinho, kneeling beside her. "You're okay, yes?"
She drew in a deep breath. Then she nodded convulsively.
He touched Annja's shoulder again. "Let's go. "We're almost to the real danger."
The uproar of the Brazilian advance or patrol or whatever it was, receded as the strike team's surviving members moved on. The Indians who had ambushed the soldiers with an antitank rocket and rifle fire had long since melted into the jungle.
After the Promessans had gone twenty or so yards a pair of explosions behind them, unnoticed by anyone else in the awful night's battle sounds, marked the self-destruction of their dead friends' bodies.
As they crouched they could see the nimbus of light above the trees cast by the base camp the invaders had established near the ruined plantation house. It marked their objective. There waited Publico and the Brazilian army officer in command. And there also lay tents and trailers containing the invaders' command and communications gear, as well as stations monitoring the enemy's sensors.
If the Promessans and Annja could destroy that equipment and kill the leaders, the whole invasion would lose momentum and quickly mire down. Annja didn't believe that could win them any more than a temporary reprieve. But her friends assured her that a little breathing room was all they needed to secure the safety of their city and its tribal allies. All she could do was swallow her doubts and do her best.
To Annja's surprise the invaders had not occupied the plantation buildings. The main house she could understand – it was a wreck. But surely with all that manpower they could have cleaned out the largely intact chapel?
"They fear ghosts," Julia matter-of-factly said when they halted in the scrub near the empty buildings, still a hundred yards from the enemy perimeter, when Annja voiced the question in her mind.
She was a bit surprised at the Promessans' seeming cold-bloodedness. They had just seen two of their comrades torn apart. Yet no one showed any reaction.
"Remember," Xia said softly to her, crouching down at her side, "we have fought for centuries for everything we have – starting with our lives and freedom. There'll be forever to mourn afterward. For those who make it back."
****
"I tell you," the Brazilian commander said, "we should wait until the assistance promised us by the North Americans gets here." He was a tall, fat, sweating man.
"Surely your men can handle a few naked natives, Colonel Amaral," Publico said.
"These natives whom you call 'naked' have modern antitank and antiaircraft missiles, as well as automatic weapons and apparently endless supplies of ammunition. Savages they are, but naked they are not!"
The billionaire rock star half turned toward Amaral. "You command a regiment. That should be ample to crush any resistance you're likely to face."
"Only half of my troops are on the ground," Amaral reminded him. "And we are far, far up the Amazon. It will be days before my regiment is up to strength. That being the case, why not wait for the Americans?"
Publico slowly smiled. "Because an unimaginable treasure awaits us up ahead, Colonel. You know that."
Chapter 33
Annja crouched beside the fence encircling the invaders' base. Within no searchlights moved; the banks of generator-fed lights, though bright, were spottily placed, leaving plentiful shadow pools for them to skulk through. Once they got inside.
"What about this fence?" she asked Patrizinho, who squatted beside her. "You forgot to teach me to levitate."
"That's an advanced course," he said, and laughed. "But we don't go over. We go through."
He reached behind himself and withdrew wire cutters from his pack. With little musical pings the wires parted in a line four feet from its top to the ground. Patrizinho made two cuts outward from the slit, each about a yard long. Then he pushed the wire open. "After you," he said. "We'll fold it back in place when we're through."
Annja nodded. Bent over she slipped through the instant gateway in the chain link. She kept her weapon at the ready, scanning back and forth as she slipped right, toward the cover of a tent obviously protecting a stack of supplies.
She had no qualms about using her sword. Not tactical, moral or even in terms of letting out her great and dangerous secret – any survivors of tonight's bloody work would have memories so confused and chaotic that any interrogator would simply dismiss out of hand any wild tales about a tall white woman wielding a broadsword like an avenging angel. It was one factor she had found worked consistently in her favor – the natural conservatism of the human mind, that saw mainly what it expected to see, and overlooked or edited out what didn't fit.
But the sword was a weapon for face-to-face combat. If she had to engage any guards at a distance she wanted to be able to just shoot them. And hope she shot well enough that they died as silently as her Promessan weapon fired.
The team had coale
sced and then split into two groups different from the initial squads. Nobody spoke of it and Annja didn't see fit to question. Xia had taken Burt and a woman named Reed and gone off circling the wire perimeter to the left, to infiltrate closer to the river. The compound had grown up inland of the beachhead, not on the Amazon bank. Someone had been cagey enough to worry about enemies infiltrating by water, as well as the possibility of the river's unexpected rise. The ground inland was clearly not subject to regular flooding or the plantation would never have been built where it was, and where it had obviously ruled for decades before its abandonment and decline.
The landing area had been transformed into a separate compound ablaze with light day and night to unload supplies from relatively fast diesel riverboats. Likewise the bigger airstrip was blasted from the jungle and improved with perforated steel plating to allow cargo planes to fly in and out.
Xia's group went to destroy generators and the trailers where sensor inputs and communications were processed. Marco hung back by the chapel, his wonders to perform. The other six survivors had been split into two fire teams of three each. They would aim to hit the command tent, right in the middle of the several-acre compound, from two directions simultaneously.
Up against the intimidatingly large compound it all seemed hopelessly ambitious. But Annja was determined to try. And die, if necessary. The thought of what Publico would do if he succeeded was all she needed to keep her going.
She reached the supply tent and squatted. A moment later her fire team's other members joined her – Xingu and Isis. As promised Patrizinho had smoothed the slashed wire back into place, so deftly Annja couldn't see the cut from a few yards away. He took Lys and Julia and vanished into shadows to the left.
Isis clearly commanded this team. She acknowledged Annja with a simple nod. Whatever Isis harbored in her heart toward her, Annja felt confident it would in no way affect what she did here inside the wire. The life the Maroons had chosen to live was quite Darwinian, for better or worse. Those who indulged their emotions at the wrong time died.
Annja didn't know what criteria had been used to select the team. She didn't even know who did the deciding, since Promessa had no visible government, and seemed more a tribal collection of clans than anything else. But she had no doubt her comrades would be professional in action.
They slipped to the tent's far end. Isis did a three-second lookout, then gestured for Xingu and Annja to advance while she covered.
With Xingu on her right Annja moved into the open. There was still shadow, thanks to the haphazard placement of the lights. But she felt naked anyway. Worse, they would have to transit a good ten yards of brightly lit open space to reach the huge multiroom tent where Publico, according to their Indian spies, held court.
From the right came voices. Male, young, full of boisterous energy, although held fairly low to keep from attracting the ire of their superiors. They spoke Spanish. Xingu held up his hand. Annja froze, wondering if stopping in the open was a really good idea.
Xingu carried two projectile weapons. Slung behind his back, barrel down for ready access, rode his compact electromagnetic rifle. He held a second weapon, about half its size and with a single pistol grip, in both hands. It had a bulbous body and a long narrow barrel. He snugged it to its shoulder and aimed it toward the voices.
Two men in cammies strolled out from around the corner of another tent ten yards away. They were so engrossed in their clowning that neither so much as glanced toward the two people crouched in plain view.
Not until it was too late, anyway.
Xingu shot the man on the right in the throat. His weapon made no sound. The merc dropped instantly. The other faltered in midstep. Annja could see the look of baffled surprise come onto his lean young features.
He started to turn, reaching clumsily for the M-16 slung over his own shoulder. But Xingu calmly shot him under the right ear. He folded like an empty raincoat.
"Curare-derived toxin," Xingu told her as they scuttled for the cover of the tent the two had emerged from behind. "Rapid propagation. Death instant." They were the first words she had heard the young man say.
Once at the tent they covered as Isis joined them. "Why don't we just use that, then?" Annja asked.
"Clothing stops projectiles. Have to hit skin," he said.
They held position as Isis ghosted on right and inward, to a pile of crates covered with olive-drab tarpaulins. They kept working their way toward the command pavilion from its end. Such action as was visible was all going on to the river side of the camp, where a stream of trucks came through the gate and off-loaded. As Annja and Xingu darted around the end of a darkened tent from which snoring emerged in several keys, Annja dared hope they'd make it undetected.
Then the door to a latrine to their right opened and a geeky guy with glasses came out fiddling with the fly of his camo pants. His eyes and mouth flew wide.
"Alarme! Alarme! Alarme!" he shrilly screamed.
Xingu shot him twice through the open mouth with two curare darts from his high-tech blowgun. By then it was too late, of course. The soldier got what his last words called for – alarms fired up all over the camp. It flashed through Annja's mind how all her special-war-fare buddies would sagely nod their heads – another flawless op ruined by a totally random event.
She darted for the cover of the latrine, a long shack walled with what looked suspiciously like prefab fence sections from Home Depot, with a slanting roof of corrugated tin. A heavy weight hit her from behind.
The world exploded in flame and noise from scarcely fifteen yards away.
Even as she was falling she felt impacts, heard grunts. But the impacts weren't on her. Rather they were transmitted through the lithe, strong body that had hit her in a flying tackle. They landed. Isis's forehead slammed hard against the hard-packed earth beside Annja's face.
Annja rolled the woman off her. She was limp. She was surprisingly heavy for one so lean. Like Annja herself, she apparently packed lots of muscle on a rangy frame.
The anthracite eyes focused on Annja's face. "Do what you must," Isis said.
Annja's heart fell into her stomach. Life fled the Promessan warrior woman's eyes. Her head lolled to the side.
Looking up through tears that threatened to blind her, Annja saw Xingu running to her, firing his electronic rifle toward where the terrific light and noise had come from. From beyond the latrine came more bright flashes and crackling explosions, full of supersonics that seemed to go through her skull like needles despite the sound dampers in her ears. She expected to see the man shot down.
Instead he dived down beside her, intact and breathing hard. Annja low-crawled to the corner of the latrine to risk a look around.
Fifteen yards away a huge Hummer was going up in flames. A big pintle-mounted machine gun sprouted from its roof. Fire jetted straight up through the mount. Men bailed out the doors, screaming, shrouded in flames.
Annja dropped to her belly, stuck her rifle out with her left hand, fired two quick bursts. The screams cut off. The men dropped. She wasn't sure whether it was an act of mercy or to ensure they didn't somehow extinguish themselves and come after the infiltrators again.
She ducked back and looked at Xingu.
He patted his rifle. "Selective load," he said, almost apologetically. "Explosive shells."
She started to demand to know why she hadn't been told about that feature. She stopped herself before wasting the time and breath. She had gotten the basics she needed to fight. It was for the best and she knew it, no matter how badly she wanted to resent the fact.
She got up on her haunches, transferring the rifle back to her right hand. She looked down at Isis. The woman seemed at peace. She had fought her best and died the death she had chosen. She might even be envied.
She had also displayed inhuman fortitude to be able to so much as talk. The Hummer had mounted a.50-caliber machine gun. The special suit was no protection – it was probably all that kept her being blown to piece
s.
Annja reached down her left hand and closed the staring eyes with a quick motion of her first two fingers. "We have to go," she told Xingu. He nodded.
The camp was alive with shouting, shooting men. They all seemed to be blazing away at random. Looking back across the compound, Annja saw two men go down, apparently hit by friendly fire.
By unspoken consent she and Xingu both took off around the latrine shack's far end, ran between it and the burning Hummer despite the big machine-gun cartridges cooking off inside the inferno. There was no point in any fancy bounding overwatch now. Their only hope of reaching their goal was speed.
Once inside – well, they had to get there first.
They almost made that final dash. Then a burst of gunfire, from what direction Annja couldn't even tell in the pandemonium, raked Xingu's torso from the left. He sprawled on his face.
Annja glanced back in an agony of indecision. She burned with desire to go back to help her wounded comrade. But that would doom her and the mission. She could not let herself die and fail.
Xingu heaved himself up. The grin he showed her from his dark, handsome face would have carried more reassurance had it not been crimson with his own blood.
A single shot punched through his temples left to right. He fell on his face in the dirt.
Annja turned and sprinted for Publico's tent. Letting her rifle hang by its sling, she summoned the sword.
Chapter 34
Inside the big tent Sir Iain smiled as he heard sirens howl and guns speak.
"Annja, dearest girl," he said. "I've been waiting."
He reached into an interior pocket of his linen jacket, produced a small object. It was blue plastic and shiny metal and resembled an asthma inhaler.
"What's that? Drugs?" Colonel Amaral demanded from across the tent. The color had dropped from his plump, dark-olive face, leaving it ashen behind his beard and moustache.
"Transformation," Publico breathed as power rushed through veins and nerves like a shock wave from a bomb.