"He's getting away," Allen said, his voice flat.
She turned and saw Litt crossing in front of a hangar. She squeezed off three rapid shots. Small explosions erupted in the dirt around him. He jerked to a stop, turned, and fell. He scooped the case up and disappeared into the space between two hangars.
"Slowed him down," Allen rasped.
"We have to move faster."
"Go on ahead of me. I'll catch up."
But before she could stop herself, she glanced back. Her blood congealed. Stephen was on his knees. An Atropos was holding each of his arms straight out from his body, crosslike. Another Atropos stood behind him, raising a gauntleted fist, focused on the back of Stephen's head. Her heart kicked against her breastbone. She swung the pistol around, but too late. The gauntlet came down, firm and straight as a piston.
Stephen crumbled. The two holding him let go, and he felclass="underline" no resistance, no spasms, no life.
Julia let loose an animal roar that rubbed her throat raw and rose to the pitch of the siren so that it seemed to go on and on long after she closed her mouth. The Atroposes, standing around their downed foe, rotated their heads to peer at her. It was one thing to accept death, quite another to see it. She tried to steady the heavy weapon it held and pulled the trigger. Again. And again. After five wild shots, she forced her finger to stop. Her shots had not stirred the Atroposes at all; they stood like wax figures, staring.
She spun away from them. She caught up with Allen, who was stumbling and falling, loping across the field. She was nearly panting, afraid she'd never draw enough air again.
"Is he—?" he asked.
"Don't look back." She hitched in a breath. Ten rounds, she thought, her mind flailing for something sturdy. No, eleven. The first took out the light above Atropos's head. Then two as she ran from Atropos, three at Litt, and five more at Stephen's killers. Eleven. The Sig held thirteen rounds, plus one in the chamber. She had three left. Enough to turn Litt inside out.
She bolted for the gap between the hangars.
ninety-seven
Karl Litt loped behind the hangars. Off in the jungle, not far from the last hangar, was a shed that housed his Hummer. He could feel the heat of the burning hangars and smell the smoke. Flecks of ash fluttered in his eyes, and he brushed them away. The perimeter fence was a mere thirty yards to his right, and just beyond he could see trees ablaze like pillars of fire. If he had gauged the air strikes correctly, Kendrick's screaming war machine had completed phase two, the tomography bombs. Somewhere overhead, a plane's radar was reading the results and constructing a map of the underground complex. It wouldn't be long before the last and most destructive attack would begin.
He felt the sting before he heard the shot. Then the fire—his ear was on fire! He dropped his briefcase and grabbed his ear. Felt blood and the ragged, tingling edge where the top of his ear was gone.
I shot his ear off, she thought.
Julia stood watching Litt over the sights of her pistol. Delicate tendrils of smoke seeped from the barrel and the notch of the ejection port. He was touching the wound and probably had no idea what had just happened. She had aimed for the center of his back, and he was only forty yards away; she'd won an Academy tournament on a range ten yards longer. But she was using her injured hand. Extending out the broken middle and ring fingers instead of wrapping them around the grip made for shaky shooting. She bent her elbows and drew the pistol closer to her face. With her left hand supporting her shooting hand, she centered her sights between his shoulder blades.
He turned and raised his hands in surrender.
Her finger tightened on the trigger. She imagined the bullet striking the lapel over his heart. She had the shot.
She let her grip relax, and the barrel dipped. She couldn't do it. She could not shoot an unarmed man in the act of surrendering. Even soldiers took prisoners on the battlefield, didn't they? Wasn't it part of the Geneva Convention? But what would she do with him? If she tied him up or knocked him out or disabled him somehow, he'd die in the air strike. That would be no better than shooting him now. If she took his case and let him escape, would he find a way to continue killing, to perhaps even duplicate the work he'd done here? How would she live with herself then? And if she actually took him in custody, how far would they get—she and the gravely ill Allen—before he got the upper hand and murdered them both?
"You have no choice. Do it."
At first she thought the words were her own, so persuasive as to sound like whispers in her ear. Then she realized they'd come from Allen, who was slowly, painfully moving up behind her. He came into her peripheral vision on her left, scraping along the wall of the hangar, sucking in wet breaths.
"Julia," he groaned. "Think of . . . the deaths . . . he's responsible for. Think of . . . your partner. Think of Ste . . . Ste . . ."
He sobbed then—or coughed; she couldn't tell. But it didn't matter, because she was thinking of Donnelley, she was thinking of Stephen. She braced herself, feeling the muscles in her face, especially around her mouth and brow, pinch tight. She brought the barrel back in line with Litt's chest.
"You'd only be killing yourselves!" Litt called.
She held her position. "Meaning?"
"Meaning—"
His left hand moved—he was holding something. How could she not have noticed? In the moment between seeing the movement and deciding to shoot, she heard a machine kick into gear: clack-clack-clack-clack-clack . . . Fast, like an anchor chain reeling out to the ocean floor. She shifted her vision to see a contraption on the jungle side of the chain-link fence spin around. A Gatling-style cluster of barrels jutting from its body now pointed not out toward the jungle but inward toward them. When it stopped, she continued hearing the sound for a second longer. She turned to see another of these weapons— Tate had called them Deadeyes—pointing its barrels almost directly at her. She remembered Tate saying soldiers controlled them with remotes, and they could be programmed to monitor certain regions around them. She had just witnessed the redirecting of these two, from outward, where a sniper would fire into the compound, to the compound itself, where she and Allen stood. She had no doubt that either Deadeye was capable of blowing them away, regardless of where along this strip between the hangars and the jungle they were.
"Meaning, if you fire your weapon, my mechanical friends will annihilate you both." He smiled and lowered his arms.
Had Tate not warned them of these anti-sniper weapons, she probably would have called his bluff.
He continued: "Their response is instantaneous—"
Three seconds, she remembered.
"—and their field of fire is quite broad. You can't elude them. I've seen people try." As he spoke, he squatted and picked up the silver briefcase. Then he took a tentative step back.
"Just . . . stop!" she screamed through gritted teeth. He did. She took a step forward. He stepped back. Another step for each of them. Her mind had told her she could not shoot him, and she held to that mandate. But she nearly forgot why he was off-limits, and she came within a half pound of trigger pressure of squeezing off a warning round. She pushed the back of her finger against the trigger guard to keep it ready but safe.