by Steve Perry
At the meeting site, the outside heat fought against the open window in the back of the limo, but lost. The cooler kept the hot air mostly at bay.
“Call coming in from our watcher,” Lobang said. “They just passed over him.”
“He sure it’s them?”
“Kohl’s GE car, two men only, one with white hair, the other wearing the ranger’s light-colored hat.”
“Good. Tell our men in the woods to get ready.”
“They’re ready.”
“Tell them anyway.”
* * *
“Okay, go,” Cinch said.
Kohl touched a control on the flatscreen and the copter took off and spun away, rising rapidly.
“I see the ranch house,” Kohl said. He played with other controls. “I got the arc locked in. Two minutes.”
“Let’s roll.”
The two of them hopped onto the bikes and roared off.
* * *
“Call coming in from the ranch, boss.”
“Put it on the speaker.”
“M. Tuluk?” It was one of the guards he’d left behind.
“What?”
“We got a UAC on the radar. Looks like a hopper or copter.”
“Where?”
“It’s climbing through five thousand meters on the eastern edge of the property.”
“Heading toward the ranch house?”
“No, it’s veering away.”
Tuluk chewed at his lip. Was the ranger up to something? He had to know the hostages would die if he did anything stupid–
“Heads up, boss. GE car coming in.”
Tuluk glanced through the window. Yes, that was Kohl’s car and there they were inside, just the two of them. Too far away to see their faces for sure, but it looked like them.
To the guard he said, “All right, keep an eye on the flier. If it heads toward the house, call me.”
* * *
Cinch set the pace, hoping Kohl was staying with him. He didn’t dare look back. The ground was tricky and he could not afford to hit something and be thrown from the cycle, not only because it would probably break his neck, but also because it would fuck up the timing too much to recover.
The bike bounded over the dirt, the little engine quiet but working hard. The goggles kept the dust from his eyes, but the clear plastic was getting grimy. He risked a quick swipe to clear them.
Ahead, the house loomed. Only a couple of klicks now.
Cinch glanced up, looking for the copter. There, there it was, to his left. No longer climbing, it was coming down again.
It was coming down fast. Very fast.
* * *
Tuluk watched the GE car fanned to a stop. When the dust settled, the car was a hundred meters awav from the limo. Neither of the men inside made any move to exit.
“What are they waiting for?”
“Dunno, boss. Maybe they’re cautious. They got reason to be.”
“All right. Move the limo closer.”
The com chimed again. Lobang answered it. “Yeah?”
“Anjing? This is Putin. We got a situation here. That aircraft is heading for the ground about a klick out and it’s coming down like a fucking rock–holy shit!”
“Putin? What?”
Tuluk heard the explosion through the com and it was loud. It must have rattled the plastic windows half out of their frames at the ranch. Simultaneously with the noise, the guard started spewing words. “Christo, the ship crashed! It went off like a fucking bomb, Zeezus, there’s a cloud of smoke and fire like you wouldn’t believe!”
Tuluk heard a babble of other voices behind the one called Putin:
“–nobody’s walking away from that!”
“–fuck, look at that cocksucker burn!”
“–man, oh, man, lookit!”
Before Tuluk could think of what to tell the guards, Lobang said, “Uh oh.”
The ranger and Kohl had gotten out of their car and both had weapons. They were pointing them into the woods.
“What do they think they’re doing?” Tuluk said.
* * *
Cinch thumbed his com and said, “Okay, boys, make some noise. Good luck.”
“Gotcha,” the man pretending to be Cinch replied. “Good luck yourself!”
Cinch risked a look behind him. Kohl was no more than five meters back on his cycle, covered with dust, hunched low over the handlebars. Good. They were only a hundred meters from the house. The smoke from the explosives in the helicopter boiled high into the sky, easily visible even on the opposite side of the ranch house.
When he was thirty meters away, Cinch stood on the brakes. The bike slewed to the left and skidded to a stop, throwing a cloudy sheet of red-brown dirt as it stopped. Cinch dropped the bike and ran toward the rear door. He had a shaped charge ready in his hand. Slap it on the lock and it would shear the bolt like a knife through cobwebs, The noise wouldn’t matter, it was speed that counted now.
Just to be sure, Cinch grabbed the door’s handle and twisted.
The door opened. Damn. Not even locked. He grinned and tossed the charge aside, thanking Fate for small favors.
Gus Kohl was right behind him as he darted into the house.
* * *
The ranger and Kohl started shooting into the woods.
“Shit!” Tuluk yelled. “This is crazy!”
Lobang fumbled in the dashbox and carne out with a small monocular. He looked at the two men shooting. “It ain’t them,” he said.
“What?”
“Not Kohl and the ranger.”
“Give me that!”
Lobang handed Tuluk the monocular. He held it up to his left eye, waited for a second while it refocused. There were the two men blasting at the woods. Whoever they were, they were not the ranger and Kohl.
“Fuck!”
“Boss?”
“Tell our men to return fire! Shoot them!”
Lobang reached for the com control.
Three hoppers roared into view. Tuluk stared at the new arrivals. Where the hell had they come from? What was going on here?
Men leaned from the open hopper windows and fired rifles or pistols into the woods. One of the hoppers flew toward the limo, also shooting. Something spanged against the limo’s armor, another round splashed against the AT glass windshield, leaving a gray-and-orange spatter that looked like a giant bug had hit the bulletproof material at speed.
“Goddammit! Get us out of there!”
Lobang started the engine and jerked the limo into a fast lift and turn. Tuluk was thrown back against the seat. Only then did he remember the hostages.
“Call the ranch! Tell the guards to kill the prisoners!”
“I’m kind of busy here!” The limo swerved to avoid being smashed by the incoming hopper, a vehicle full of men firing guns and obviously trying to either blast them, hit them with their vehicle, or both.
“Aahh!” Tuluk couldn’t stop the scream as the hopper shot past, missing by centimeters. More gray flowers blossomed against the limo’s windows. Tuluk hurried to power up the open window next to him, on the opposite side from the hopper.
The ranger was crazy! What did he hope to gain with this stunt?
* * *
Cinch went in low, his pistol held tightly in his right hand, a spare magazine for it clutched in his left. He ran through the kitchen and down a hallway.
A man stepped out at the other end of the hall. He had a shotgun. Before he could bring it up Cinch shot him, pointing his pistol like his finger and poking at the man’s chest. The man threw the shotgun into the air and collapsed.
“Go to the left!” Kohl yelled.
Cinch cut through the doorway Kohl indicated. Kohl knew the house; they had discussed where the hostages were likely to be kept. It was guesswork, but all t
hey could do. Since there were seven or eight of them at the least, plus maybe guards, Tuluk would probably have them in a big room.
To his left, down a second hall, another man materialized. Cinch shot him, twice. He didn’t bother to look at the man’s face. The hostages wouldn’t be running around loose, anybody else was dangerous.
While he was running, Cinch dropped the magazine from his pistol and shoved the second mag in, a tactical reload. Now he had seven rounds. He had another magazine in his belt, but he hoped he wouldn’t need it.
The rifle boomed behind him. Cinch glanced back and saw a man falling from a doorway, smoke still hanging in the air from Gus’s shot.
Ahead, a fourth man came out of a room, a carbine held at waist level. Cinch brought his pistol around, but too slow. The man fired a round before Cinch got lined up.
The round missed, but behind him, Gus grunted and swore.
Before Cinch could shoot, Pan sailed out of the doorway and into the man with the carbine. Pan’s hands were tied behind him but he smashed into the guard with his shoulder and body, knocking them both sprawling.
Cinch slid to a stop, pointed his pistol at the downed man. “Don’t fucking move!”
The man’s head had gone through the thin wallboard six centimeters off the floor. He wasn’t going to be moving any time real soon.
The ranger flicked a glance into the room and jerked his head back just as fast. No sign of a guard inside, but Baji and the others were there, alive and tied. He turned to look at Kohl, “They’re here, they’re okay!”
The older man had his left hand clamped onto his upper right arm. “Thank God.” He shook his head, looked at his arm. “Bullet went right through,” he said. “I think it clipped the bone a little, but I’m okay.”
From the floor, Pan said, “One of them’s got Wanita! I don’t know where he took her!”
“How many guards?”
“Five.”
Cinch nodded at Pan, then at Gus. “Stay here, arm yourselves. I’ll find Wanita.”
They’d already taken out four, that left one.
He didn’t have to go far.
In a bedroom around the corner, he found the last guard, half dressed, trying to hold his pants up with one hand, and a fat-bladed hunting knife to the front of Wanita’s neck with the other. Her clothes had been slit, one breast was bare, and her left eye was puffed up, a trickle of blood from the split skin next to it.
Cinch slid into a shooting crouch five meters away, his pistol locked in both hands, the sights on the guard’s forehead.
“Hold it right there!” the man said. His voice cracked. He was young, maybe twenty-four or -five, and scared.
“Put the knife down and you live.”
“I’ll cut her goddamned throat!”
“And you’ll be dead before she starts to bleed. Put the knife down.” Cinch took a deep breath, let half of it out, and held the rest of the air.
“I want a ride out of here!” He pressed the edge of the knife against Wanita’s throat.
“Fine. It’s a deal. Put the knife down and you can leave. I don’t want you, you’re a little fish–”
“Fuck you, you bastard!”
Cinch saw him tense and knew the time for talk was done. He squared his sights, put them on the man’s left eye, and fired. The guard flew backward, the knife spun away as his arms went rigid, the stronger muscles of the triceps straightening them.
Cinch ran to Wanita. “You okay?”
She took a couple of deep breaths and blew them out.
“Yeah. He was just getting warmed up when you got here. Hadn’t done anything but smack me a couple of times.”
Cinch looked at the corpse. “That was stupid. I would have let him go.”
“Shouldn’t have called him a little fish,” she said. “I think he was sensitive about his size.”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“Well. His mighty sword kinda wilted when I laughed at how small it was.”
Cinch smiled. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Like hell. If I’m going to be raped, I want the bastard to suffer. If he had kept it up, I was going to bite it off.” She paused for a second. “Everybody else okay?”
“Yeah.”
“What about Tuluk?”
“We’ll get to him later. He played his cards wrong and the game is all but over.”
He put an arm around her and they went to find the others.
TULUK’S FEAR filled him like the water from a broken wellhead fills the pit it lies in. “Call the ranch again!”
“They didn’t answer the last three times, why do you think they’ll answer now?”
“Just shut up and call!”
Lobang shrugged and touched a control. No answer.
“Damn them! Why don’t they respond?”
“My guess is the ranger and a bunch of Kohl’s men stormed in there and shot them all to pieces while we were waiting here with our dicks in our hands to get the drop on them.” Lobang chuckled.
“What do you have to laugh about, idiot? Your fortunes are tied to mine. If I fall, you’ll be there to cushion it when I land!”
Lobang didn’t speak to that.
“Where are you going?” Tuluk had been preoccupied. After their escape from the attack at Three Trees, he hadn’t thought a lot about where Lobang was flying, just as long as it was out of immediate danger. But now ... now he had to come up with a plan. He would have stayed and fought, hired phalanxes of lawyers to bribe and weasel through the charges–if all the rangers had was wishful thinking. But with the recordings and the witness, not to mention the kidnapping charges, things might be more than he could finesse. Maybe it was time to clean out the emergency account and take a long space voyage. He had a few million tucked away for such a contingency. He never thought he’d have to use it, but maybe this was the time. He could start over, build up another fortune. It wasn’t too late and he would have a head start this time, he’d already be rich by most standards. Fuck his dead father.
“Lobang? Where are we going? You want to answer me?”
The man remained silent, but in a moment the armortempered glass plate that sealed the passenger cab from the driver’s compartment suddenly slid up from its recess in the steel frame of the seat back. It snicked shut and locked, the thick glass polarized to a dark and opaque gray.
“Lobang you asshole! What are you doing?”
Lobang didn’t speak to that, either.
Tuluk’s pit-of-the-belly fear turned to rage, now that he had a convenient focus. He reached for the controls in his seat arm and fingered the one that dropped the glass armor plate.
The plate did not move.
“Dammit!”
Tuluk stabbed at the window, then the door controls.
Nothing. Lobang had some kind of override up front. That wasn’t supposed to be possible.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Lobang still did not answer. With the plate opaqued, they couldn’t see each other.
Tuluk drew his tangler, pointed it at the glass, then thought better of it. AT glass was supposed to be able to stop most of a tangler’s beam and enough of it might splash back on him to cause him real damage. Besides, if he did kill Lobang, the limo on manual as it was would crash. From this height and at this speed, even the best restraints would probably not spare him major injury or death. To be badly wounded and trapped in a crashed limo in the desert with people who wanted to find him would not be a good situation.
He didn’t know what the brainless thug was up to, but that didn’t look good, either.
There was a spare tangIer under a floor plate. Nobody knew about it but Tuluk, he’d installed it himself. He pulled the second tangIer out. It was a one-shot model, half the size of his regular weapon, something you could tuck in a belt
or up a sleeve and not have anybody notice right off. He put the compact weapon into his belt at the small of his back.
Lobang had left the outside windows clear. After a few minutes, the terrain began to look familiar and Tuluk knew where they were headed:
Back to the ranch.
Lobang, the son of a bitch, was selling him out!
CINCH AND the others were headed for their transportation back to Kohl’s ranch when the call came. It was direct to the ranger’s com.
“I’ve got a little present for you. We’ll be landing in about five minutes. Tell your troops not to open up on us.”
Cinch looked at Wanita. Kohl, a few meters away, was in a deep conversation with Baji. Neither of them looked happy about it, nor had Pan been pleased to hear Cinch’s conclusion regarding the young woman. He hadn’t believed it, until Baji sneered at him and called him a kid who thought with his dick. Whatever was going to happen to Baji, Cinch planned to leave to Gus. She might be technically guilty of several crimes, but Cinch didn’t think the rangers would worry about the details.
“What do you think he’s up to?” Wanita asked. “Lobang?”
“I don’t know. I have an idea, but let’s wait and see.”
Given that eight or ten of Kohl’s men were now at the ranch, well armed and ready to blast anything that moved, Cinch figured they were in good shape.
* * *
“I’m going to open the rear window on your left side,” Lobang’s voice came through the intercom. “I want you to toss your tangIer past my window where I can see it.”
“Or else what?”
“Or else I flood the compartment with emetic gas and you puke your guts out for the next hour and a half, after which I take the tangIer and shove it up your ass for making me do it. I’m not your fucking dog, Tuluk.”