Rob’s assault rifle chattered as he sighted another hostile, and then there was a pause, the attackers’ guns having fallen silent.
“What do you think?” Rob called to her in a stage whisper.
“Shhh.”
It was hard to make out anything over the hissing of the rain, but she sensed that there was more danger lurking in the brush. She crawled over to where a piece of broken pottery lay near a corner of the room and picked it up, then moved to the far window and tossed it into the encroaching jungle.
A hail of bullets found it two seconds later, from off to the left. She sighted carefully down her Beretta and squeezed off three shots, spacing them a foot apart to allow for some decay over the sixty yards of distance. The Beretta’s maximum effective range was fifty yards, but she’d worked wonders with one at up to eighty. Not stellar, but still effective enough to be deadly.
“You see anything on your side?” she whispered to Rob.
“Negative.”
“Want to switch weapons for a few minutes? I want to try to get up onto the roof.”
“Sure. I feel like I’m outgunning the poor slobs at this point with an M4 against some Chinese pop guns, anyway.”
She sidled next to him and ejected the magazine from the M4, replacing Rob’s half-full one with the last full clip.
“There can’t be too many left,” she reasoned. “They seem to have lost their stomach for a fight.”
“Let’s hope so. Go do your worst,” Rob said, then returned to scrutinizing the periphery. “It’ll be dark within another fifteen minutes. At that point, if we can reach the saddlebags, we’ll have night vision, and then we can go rabbit hunting.”
“Good point. But by then they’ll be dead.”
“Big talker.”
She eyed the area of the roof near the far wall; a section of it had caved in long ago, bird droppings and decay surrounded the base, with rainwater streaming in from above. If the lateral supports on the walls were still good, she might be able to make it…
Jet slung the M4 strap over her shoulder and started climbing, using the same techniques she did when rock climbing. Her fingers reached and found a hold, then she pulled herself higher, the other hand and her feet probing for a new cranny.
She poked her head above the roof and then pulled herself up and out, praying that the structure wouldn’t collapse beneath her. Tree branches weaved across most of the gap, and she used their cover to camouflage her position.
The M4’s flash suppressor and silencer were good, but not magic, and the little rifle still made considerable noise, so once she started shooting, she could expect to draw fire to her position. She looked at the entangled branches, calculating whether they appeared to be able to hold her weight, and thought that they would.
Rob was right. It would be dark in no time. She could use that to her advantage.
Sounds of motion caught her attention from the game trail at the farthest reach of the temple’s grounds, and she squinted, barely able to make out two men trotting away, rifles held to their chests like newborn babies.
She held her breath, waiting for signs of any more gunmen, but that was it.
Reaching out, she gripped the branches and pulled herself towards the tree’s trunk, the roof dropping away beneath her in jumbled fragments as it disintegrated. She found herself suspended in mid-air, the branches now her sole support in the gloom, and she steadily inched to the trunk before lowering her feet to the next tier of branches.
The two surviving men’s eyes were adjusting to the darkness when the first groaned and stumbled forward, tumbling into his companion before hitting the ground, a knife handle jutting from between his shoulder blades. His partner froze and then spun, to be confronted by a black-faced ghost pointing a wicked-looking barrel at him from twenty feet away.
Jet could see the second of hesitation in his eyes before he brought his weapon up, and had already pulled the trigger and loosed three rounds by the time the impulse to shoot her had travelled from his brain to his hands. His chest exploded, and he dropped his rifle as he flew backwards. She was already lowering herself to one knee, anticipating further attacks, but the night was still.
She crawled to the first dead man and retrieved her throwing knife, wiping it clean on his filthy shirt before rolling him out of the way and scooping up his AK-47. She moved to the other man and quickly searched him and found another full clip, which she slid into her back pocket before edging back into the brush.
A gunshot echoed through the trees, and she pirouetted to face the temple just in time to see another tribesman collapse twenty yards from the front entrance.
She waited, listening, but the jungle had fallen silent except for the soft sibilance of rainfall.
~ ~ ~
“Do you think we got them all?” Rob’s voice was weak and cracked at the end of the question.
“I’m pretty sure of it,” she replied, swabbing Rob’s wound before applying the pressure dressing. There was a lot of blood pooled around him. An awful lot of blood, and his shirt was soaked. She bound the dressing in place with gauze, then stood, inspecting him.
“You going to make it?”
He nodded, but his normally tanned skin looked peaked.
“We’re going to have to get you out of here. Can you walk?”
“Sure. At least for a while. But I’m not going to be much help with Pu or the target.”
“That’s okay. You were just slowing me down, anyway. Now I can get something done.”
“Ten to one is hardly a fair fight.”
“I’ll say. Poor bastards.”
“You really think you can take them?”
She smiled, the black smeared across her face making her profile appear ghoulish in the darkening temple. He could hardly make her out, but she was wearing her night vision goggles to attend to him, so she could see everything. Which is why she thought his chances of living another twenty-four hours were slim, based on the amount of blood on the temple floor.
“I can let you in on a little secret, since we’re such good friends now. I’ve done far more difficult jobs with way tougher adversaries than a bunch of natives with pea shooters. This will be a cakewalk. I just hope that Hawker’s still there. Even ten miles away, they might have heard the gunshots.”
“The rain would muffle a lot of it. That’s a fair distance.”
“Yeah, but luck hasn’t exactly been on our side today, has it?”
She reached out a hand and helped him up, then supported him with her shoulder as they limped to the temple door.
“What happened to the tracking chip?” Rob asked.
“It shows as being here. So one of the gunmen had it. This was a setup. They were on to us.”
“Which points to someone in the agency helping Hawker.”
“Yes. But that’s not my problem. I’m sure Edgar can sort it out. Right now I need to concentrate on getting across the finish line.”
Shots thudded into Rob’s torso as they negotiated the four stairs from the temple entrance. Jet dropped to the ground, clawing her Beretta free of its holster as his body absorbed round after round. She could see the shooter with her night vision goggles, but sighting the pistol with them on was a more difficult proposition. She erred on the side of caution and fired six shots, four of which missed their mark.
The final two punched into the gunman’s chest, and he spun giddily in a spray of crimson before slumping into a heap. Jet rolled away from Rob and reached over to check for a pulse. Nothing. She closed his sightless eyes with a steady hand and then bolted up, racing for her horse’s inert form, where she’d left the P90 when she’d gotten the first aid kit.
When she reached the dead animal, she emptied out the saddlebag, then slapped a new clip into the weapon, slid the other magazine into the pocket of her cargo pants, and shouldered her backpack and the rectangular nylon case before running into the night, her boots thumping against the wet clay as the rain slanted into her.
&nbs
p; Chapter 23
A cruel wind blew sheets of rain across the clearing, lashing the treetops with a sullen fury. The brooding clouds denied the twilight glow of the hunter’s moon to the huddle of guards, on alert after their compatriots failed to check in or return from their ambush at the abandoned temple high on the distant mountain.
“Take two men and do a patrol. Come on. I have a bad feeling about this,” Thet, the leader of the tribesmen, ordered the guard sitting by the struggling flames of the fire, which had a piece of sheet metal suspended over it to deflect the rain.
“Come on. It’s pouring. Don’t make me go out in this,” the younger man whined, clutching a tarp over his head in an effort to stay dry, as he eyed the older man with cautious fear mixed with annoyance.
“It’s not a request. Do it. Now. Take Maung and Htet and check the perimeter.” Thet’s voice had an edge. He wasn’t used to having his instructions questioned.
“Fine. I’ll go get them. But everything’s probably okay. What do you want to bet that their radio got soaked in this, and that’s why they didn’t check in? It’s happened before…”
“Thanks for the theories. I’ll have to remember that when I’m getting ready to retire to Bangkok with a harem of bar girls. You’re a deep thinker, wasted on this kind of duty.” Thet cuffed him gruffly. “Now get your ass on patrol. I don’t want to say it again.”
The young man stood and tried to take the tarp, but Thet shook his head. “Grab slickers. That’s why the boss brought them for us.”
The guards had yet to become accustomed to some of the technological advances that the crazy farang had introduced into their simple lives. Rain gear, flashlights, solar panels, all unimaginable luxuries that had been foreign to them until he’d arrived and assembled a small private army. Every man had grown up in the surrounding hill villages and had earned their livings in the harsh environment, either farming or working for the drug syndicates that effectively ruled the region.
They had all learned to field strip a Kalashnikov before they’d hit puberty, and had killed before their voices had changed. It was a brutal life in Myanmar: a poor country with a totalitarian military dictatorship that treated its population like subjects, and in which meager hierarchy the Shan hill tribes comprised the bottom rung – lower than human. There were no schools, no hospitals, no power plants or telephone lines. Only the hills and whatever they could coax from the ground – usually opium or food crops.
Before the white devil had arrived, Thet had made thirty dollars a month working as protection for a drug trafficking group. Now he made a hundred and fifty. The prospect of a wild increase in fortune made it easy to recruit the most aggressive and deadly of his brethren, who had literally fought over the right to work the security detail for a hundred dollars a month. He’d limited the group to twenty hardened fellow Shan fighters, and whenever they lost one to disease or a skirmish with one of the roaming groups of traffickers, he had ten begging to take the fallen man’s place.
The seven men he had sent to Bangkok to help the sex slaver with his problem had been his best, and he would miss them. Pu had brought news of their passing along with a warning to expect another attack – the third in the last month and a half. Thet had lost a total of twelve fighters since he had started working for the farang, but didn’t question it. Life was uncertain at the best of times, and a big payday carried with it certain risks. The average male lived sixty-seven years in Myanmar, but in the Shan region it dropped to fifty-five, and that didn’t take into account the far lower expectancy of those working for the drug runners. But as a farmer, he might make fifteen dollars a month, twenty if he was lucky, and the syndicates paid thirty for a much easier day’s work. When he’d been offered the princely sum by the round eye, he’d thought the man insane, but he had come to appreciate that he was not only shrewd, but also skilled in the ways of the world.
Thet watched as the bedraggled patrol trudged to the edge of the clearing and entered the jungle, a flashlight illuminating their way. This was only one of the white man’s camps, and they moved every two weeks, melting into the jungle only to reappear elsewhere the next day. Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia…the geography made no difference to him. It was all jungle and hills. But he was becoming a rich man as the farang’s security chief, so he was fiercely loyal to him, lest his meal ticket disappear, forcing him to go back to risking his life every day with a drug network, or have to be a protection worker for the slavers that routinely bought the more attractive children from the impoverished locals.
Whatever his benefactor had done to require this level of protection didn’t matter to Thet, nor to his men. Nobody knew, although there were constant rumors and speculation – that he had murdered his family, or was running from a rival criminal syndicate, or had deserted from some army and was a wanted man. Whatever the case, he was Pu’s friend, and Pu had been doing business in the region forever. That was good enough for Thet.
He hugged his rifle closer as he eyed the rain distrustfully.
There was evil afoot in the night. He could feel it.
~ ~ ~
The men swept the jungle in front of them with their weapons, the bravado they had displayed back in the camp now faded into a dull acceptance of getting soaked while their peers slept. But they weren’t paid to be comfortable. They collected their money to keep the white man safe, and that is what they would do, even in the middle of a torrential downpour. The rain pelted their unfamiliar rain gear with wet thwacks as they edged along the trail that ran in a rough oval around the clearing.
“Ack–”
The man bringing up the rear pitched forward face-first into the mud, a bloody shaft protruding from his chest. By the time the other two had registered that he hadn’t tripped, the guard in front of him had been similarly impaled and dropped his rifle, clawing at the razor-sharp point that had appeared as if by magic from his sternum. The third man was raising his rifle defensively when an arrow skewered him through his left eye, and he collapsed without getting a single shot off, having never seen his killer or heard anything besides the briefest of whistling as the arrow sliced the air on its trajectory to his brain.
Jet stepped cautiously towards the corpses, another arrow notched, and kicked the flashlight into the underbrush before melting back into the brush, her night vision goggles and black face paint lending her the appearance of a nightmare demon with attitude.
Three down. That left seven or so to go.
She had considered letting the rest of the gunmen come to her and picking them off in the jungle, but didn’t want to alert the target that he was under attack. If he disappeared, she might never find him again. This was her only chance, so she had decided to bring the battle into the camp before the remainder of his entourage knew what hit them.
She adjusted the black leather quiver, still full of arrows, so that it wouldn’t impair her ability to get the P90 into play and then turned towards the camp, the sleeping men’s fates all but sealed.
~ ~ ~
Thet was restless. The men had been gone for too long. The buzz of anxiety that roiled in his gut was growing, and his survival instinct was warning him to wake the men.
He was preparing to rise and walk to the first hut when a blinding shriek of pain shot through his right lung, and he found himself gasping for breath as he fumbled with his rifle. A second silver shaft caught a stray bit of light from the flickering fire before slicing through his throat. Thet keeled backwards off the rock he was seated on, dead before he hit the ground.
Jet crept towards the dark buildings, their outlines glowing in her goggles, and then froze when she heard the tarp draped across one of the doorways crackle and an arm emerged. She pulled the bowstring back to her ear and waited for the man to show himself, and watched as a guard exited, scratching himself, and then darted through the rain for the latrine.
The arrow caught him mid-stride ten feet from the building, and he gurgled as he fell, then moaned before laying still. She hoped that
nobody had heard him, but then saw the tarp pull back again, and another figure exited, holding a rifle.
In a fluid motion she pulled another arrow from the quiver, notched it, and sent it whistling towards his head. The arrow caught him in the jaw and stabbed through his mouth, protruding through the back of his head and imbedding itself in the wooden wall behind him. He screamed, a jarring, raw sound, prompting Jet to launch another shaft at him, this one piercing his heart.
But the damage had been done. The scream had alerted the other fighters. After a brief pause, two more came barreling through the door, and the tarp on the building next to it flew aside, and a rifle barrel poked out. Instantly weighing her options, she retreated, gliding into the shadows at the jungle’s edge. The smudge of the fire provided dim illumination, but it was a scant flicker within the heart of the downpour and not enough to give her away.
Jet watched as four remaining guards moved out of the buildings in a huddle that bristled with gun barrels. She notched another arrow. They were really making it almost too easy.
By the time any of the men could react, two were dead or dying. The remaining two fired blindly in a panic, desperately sweeping the jungle around them with their weapons, but Jet was already on the move and was sliding behind their huts even as they emptied their guns in vain.
The smaller of the pair realized his mistake as his weapon clicked empty – in their haste to take on their attackers they hadn’t thought to bring spare clips.
JET II - Betrayal (JET #2) Page 16