Immediately Wareagle darted back into the darkness, skirting the spill of the choppers’ floodlights. The ravaged guard tower rose before him and he charged up its steps to the highest point on Masada. A trio of soldiers had lost their lives trying to defend it at the battle’s outset, and Johnny added one of their Galil machine guns to his own M-16. Crouching low until the last, he waited for the sound of rocks crunching to tell him the troops were close enough.
McCracken’s call had come seconds before and left Johnny no time to explain. He simply rose in the darkness, unknown and unseen, and began firing away at the charge against the northern strongholds of the fortress.
He felt no kick of the rifles as he fired, nor did he hear the screams of the men he was killing. Their bodies dropped in waves between the officers’ family quarters and the stone quarry. It was several seconds before the return fire started, and by then the first of his clips was exhausted. Wareagle plunged downward to await the siege.
“No!” Lace screamed to the eight men who had survived the barrage. “Leave him! Follow me!”
Her eyes searched frantically for Tilly, finding her with a relieved smile propped behind a built-up storage hold in the ground. She rushed over and touched the smaller woman’s hair gratefully, then raised her scimitar overhead to lead what remained of the soldiers toward the battle in the storehouses.
She wanted to believe the gunman on the guard tower was McCracken. Not only had the person riddled their numbers, he had also denied them position on Masada’s most strategic point, from which the invaders could be cut down at will. That was his style, after all. But her feelings told her otherwise. This was someone else, equally dangerous to be sure. She would still have to find McCracken.
Hiroshi was ready when the fresh wave of Rasin’s soldiers reached the storehouses. Wareagle’s fire from the guard tower had bought him time as well as reducing the enemy’s number and alerting his men to their presence.
One of them leaped atop the jagged wall the old warrior had crouched behind. As soon as the man began to fire controlled bursts toward areas his samurai were rushing from, Hiroshi rose and, wielding his sword in a great arc, sliced through the man’s legs below the knees, toppling him over. Another soldier lunged rifle-first toward the wall, but Hiroshi extended his sword, and the man impaled himself on the blade.
A burst fired reflexively from the dead man’s gun caught the old sensei in the side and spun him. Hot pain flooded his midsection, and Hiroshi felt the spill of warm blood. The wound wasn’t mortal, but the blood loss would weaken him and make him a burden to his men. He had never lost grip on his sword’s hilt. With an effort he yanked it free of the dead man’s midsection and moved back down the corridor, using the wall for support.
“Hiroshi, what’s going on?” came McCracken’s desperate call.
“All under control, Fudo-san. Not to worry.”
This was spoken into a chorus of screams and machine gun fire as the remainder of Rasin’s men engaged Hiroshi’s samurai as best they could. The sudden influx of enemy troops had moved several of his men to switch from swords back to rifles. Some of them were being killed and this pained him, but they were dying the death of warriors, a most honorable passing that defined the very essence of their lives.
Hiroshi moaned into the microphone.
“You’re hurt!” McCracken cried. “Jesus Christ, where are you? Stay where you are!”
“Not to worry, Fudo-san. I can walk. That’s all I need for now.”
“I’m on the way. Just hold on,” Blaine answered sensing the sensei’s wounds were more serious than he would let on.
“Yes,” Hiroshi said, turning just in time to see a figure in black leather surge toward him.
He spun, leading with the sword. But his wounded side slowed his reaction, and even as his katana lashed out at the black figure he felt the strangely shaped blade he was powerless to block slice down at him. In the end he tried desperately to rotate his sword back to deflect the blow, but again his side betrayed him and his legs crumbled even before the scimitar sliced on a diagonal through his collar bone all the way to his heart. A bright flash of light followed and Hiroshi heard his ancestors calling as he spilled over.
Before Lace could move off, the muted voice of Blaine McCracken reached her ear, coming from the corpse’s wireless transmitter which had spilled from his head when he fell.
“I’m almost to the upper terrace, Hiroshi. Be with you before you know it.”
Lace smiled and sped off in that direction.
McCracken cursed himself as he rushed up the last of the steps that would bring him back to the upper terrace of Herod’s palace and then into the battle. The straight abutment of the northern palace had seemed the perfect place for Rasin to launch his vaccine into the air over Israel. Placing himself in the fanatic’s mind, he was sure of it. His mistake had been to forget that someone else was directing Rasin’s strategems up here for him, someone who would never have permitted such an obvious move. Damn! He had committed the cardinal flaw, that of underestimating his enemy.
If that was his first mistake, his second was to dwell on it and to let his fear for the life of Hiroshi blot out his normal alertness. He sped heedlessly up the final steps onto the semicircular terrace that looked down over the remainder of the mountain. A sudden burst of automatic gunfire clanged off the steel support rail. His hand was stung and he was reaching for his Uzi when another spray sliced through the darkness and banged against the gun, ricocheting madly and stripping it from his grasp.
McCracken reeled sideways and grasped for the railing as the tracing fire searched for his shape in the blackness. His hands found the rail but, still numb, they slid off. His last measure of balance was lost and he pitched over the side of Masada to the dark abyss at the bottom.
Chapter 28
Feeling himself airborne, Blaine had flailed desperately for a hold as he began to drop, but he brushed the steel rail with his fingers and that was all. Arms extended, he slid for a brief time straight down the rock-face side before his legs slowed his pace and then caught on a narrow ridge extending out from the mountain. He gathered his breath and checked his extremities. Miraculously nothing was broken. His hands and arms were scraped but functional. His thick pants had been torn and he could feel blood from the lacerations trickling down his legs. No broken bones, though, nothing to stop him from going on.
He inspected the area in the darkness around him. He had gone over the rail on the side of the northern terrace, leaving a straight drop of nearly a hundred yards if his perch gave way. His eyes probed above him in search of handholds in the rock face to take him back up. He could conceivably manage it, but the time it would take would be prohibitively long.
He then looked downward and spotted beneath him the set of steps winding from one terrace level to another. He could not hope to drop onto it, but he could ease himself down, a difficult and dangerous task but one requiring far less time. At once he began to lower his legs over the ridge that had saved him, shifting his weight to make him top-heavy as his hands replaced his legs on the ridge. He found a foothold firm enough for one foot but not two, and eased his bulk onto it as he began to dangle his left leg in search of another makeshift step. As he was feeling around blindly, his right foot slipped and he came close to falling again. Only his firm grip on the rocks prevented a disaster, and he hung there in space briefly to recover his bearings.