One paused a few feet away from her, and this one had a militia rifle. He squeezed the trigger… and the pin clicked on an empty chamber.
The Indian shrieked with frustration and sprang at her, the rifle reversed and swinging in a wide circle; the man was two inches shorter than the New Virginian, but he had shoulders like a bull, and the butt would smash any bone it struck. Adrienne did the only thing possible; she threw herself to the rear and down, landing on her back with stunning force. The hostile recovered from his swing and brought the rifle up over his head, his face a contorted mass of teeth and eyes and paint. Her hand scrabbled at the holster of her FiveseveN automatic, fighting the winded paralysis of the fall, and managed to get the weapon free. It snapped once, and the bullet smashed her enemy’s knee by sheer blind chance, the heavy plastic sawing through tendon and cartilage like an edged steel blade. She forced herself back to her feet, skipped nimbly forward while he thrashed and ululated his pain and kicked him in the head—not too hard, so that he could answer questions later. He didn’t look quite like a typical Indian from this area; for one thing he was too well fed, and for another his hair was short on top and very short on the sides, like a FirstSider military cut.
Then she stood erect, her rifle held up horizontally over her head; Schalk and Piet were doing likewise, driven by a similar desire to make absolutely certain that there were no mistakes about who should be shot from the air.
The Black Hawk sat five hundred feet above their heads, raising dust with the prop wash. The pilot aimed by a method that was simplicity itself; he pointed the prow of the helicopter down at the fleeing Indians and the edge of the swamp, jammed his thumb on the firing button of the minigun and swiveled the aircraft in place through a hundred-degree arc. The long roaring braaaappppppp of the weapon’s six thousand rounds per minute overrode even the shriek of the turbines, and Adrienne had to lean over Simmons to protect him from the sparkling shower of empty brass cartridges that poured down from above. They were hot, too, painfully so.
The fleeing mob disappeared in a cloud of dust as the hail of bullets chewed at the surface of the ground; clods of earth, bits of cut reed and body parts spurted up out of it. The dust was less as the finger of red fire speared into the edge of the swamp, but the fourteen-foot-high wall of reeds shook and toppled as if God were running a Weedwacker across them. When the gun fell silent her eyes were ringing, and a huge, shallow, irregular bite had been taken out of the tule swamp. It was covered with a thick mat of bullet-cut reeds, with here and there an arm or torso or head protruding.
Adrienne prudently went down on one knee as the helicopter slowly moved out over the swamp, the reeds bowing away from its prop wash in rippling waves. It was moving slowly for an aircraft, but faster than a man could run. Much faster than a man could run on foot along narrow paths through a bog. Occasionally it would stop to fire the minigun, or let the door gunners lash the swamp with the .50-caliber Brownings mounted on each side; once it made a curving run at almost reed-top level and ripple-fired the rocket pods, probably at some clump of hostiles, or an island with the round huts of a ranchería. Flame bellowed skyward, crimson and orange against black smoke; that spread as the reeds themselves caught fire. Their roots were in the damp mud, but the stems and feathery tops were dry with summer, and the flames danced through them.
She sighed, and let the tension drain out of her. And to think this morning I was in a good mood, she thought sourly; even the smell of the place came back, when mortal fear left.
She propped her rifle and Simmons’s against the dead horse, checked the semiconscious man once more—no change that she could see—and looked out toward the mouth of the clearing. Plumes of dust were approaching across the flat valley floor, Land Rovers and the armored car; they rolled into the pocket with a whine of heavy tires on clay. Soldiers jumped down, and others manned the pintle-mounted heavy machine guns and belt-fed grenade launchers, scanning the reeds. A medic and stretcher party ran over to her; a man with a red cross on his arm bent to check Simmons while others hurried past to collect the other Scout’s body, zipping it into a plastic body bag.
“He’s stable,” the medic said after a moment; he quickly rigged a plasma drip and hung the bag up on a collapsible stand to let gravity take the liquid into the wounded man’s veins. “How much morphine did you give him, Miss Rolfe?”
“One full shot from the field kit, Corporal.”
“That ought to hold him; I wouldn’t like to use too much when there’s danger of shock. Better leave this one in the leg for them to deal with at Rolfeston Hospital, but this…”
He took an odd-looking instrument out of his satchel, something between a pair of scissors and a narrow spoon, stripped the covering off it, and slipped it down the shaft of the arrow to the tear in the victim’s flesh. Then a quick push…
Jim Simmons quivered back to full consciousness, his eyes opening wide. “Bloody hell!” He gasped, straining rigid.
The medic plucked the arrow free, looked at the head—it was stamped out of cheap sheet metal, of the type used for trade across the frontier—and flipped it away; the wound bled freely until he swabbed it clean with something that stung, from Simmons’s quiet swearing, and bandaged it.
“They’ll stitch that in the hospital, sir,” he said cheerfully. “And get the other one out. I’ve given you a broad-spectrum…. You’ve had your tetanus boosters? Good, good; this one just nicked the shoulder blade, and with any luck you’ll be walking again in a couple of months.”
“Kolo,” Simmons said. “My tracker?”
“Oh, the Indian?” the medic said. “No problem. An in-and-out bullet hole; I sewed it up and put him out. He’ll be fine. And you have to rest, sir.”
Simmons managed a slight smile as the stretcher bearers lifted him. “Now you’ll have to cage those condors, Adri,” he said.
Heinrich von Traupitz was riding in a Hummer in the lead of the convoy; he leaped down almost before it stopped, snapped a few orders to his sergeant, and then strode over to her. He was livid with anger as he watched the body bag and the injured man pass by. Literally livid, his pale face splotched with patches of red on the cheeks. He tore his militia cap off, crumpling it in his hand.
“Bastard acorn eaters,” he swore softly. “We’ll show these filth the price of a white man’s head! Clean them out once and for all! The Old Man has ordered all the Bay Area Families to call up a militia platoon from their affiliates, and three more from Rolfeston; and there are aircraft coming, and a recon drone—the biggest mobilization in ten years. ”
A sharp cry brought her head around. Schalk had locked the head of the Indian she’d shot in the crook of his elbow, and another hand clamped on the back of his head. As she opened her mouth to snap an order he made a quick wrenching motion, and there was a snap like a green branch breaking. The Indian’s body jerked once and went limp. As if prompted, the militia soldiers began finishing off the other wounded Indians with bayonets or shots to the head, and von Traupitz nodded approval.
Adrienne opened her mouth in sheer inertia, closed it, and shrugged, coughing in the bitter reek of the burning reeds. Schalk simply liked killing people—black people by preference, but anyone would do at a pinch—and the young militia officer wasn’t in a taking-prisoners state of mind. He’d probably ignore her if she tried to interfere in his chain of command, too. The last thing they needed now was another inter-Family head-butting match.