“Any explosives left?” Blaine whispered to Johnny as machine-gun fire whizzed over their heads.
“Two thermolites.”
“Give me one. You take the right. I’ll take the left. We’ve got to reach that boat.”
Wareagle nodded his acknowledgment. More machine-gun fire coughed up snow into their faces. The pounding steps behind them sounded closer.
“Go!” Blaine signaled.
And in unison they rose and sprinted parallel to the shore in opposite directions. Snow spit everywhere around him as Blaine ran. The storm and the darkness were confusing the troops’ aim, but they were sure to lock on to him before long. Blaine estimated there were at least fifteen soldiers facing him, perhaps as many as twenty, most concentrated in the area fronting the pier. He ripped the tab from his thermolite bomb and hurled it at them. Wareagle did the same on his side.
Blaine then circled back for the boat and timed his entry into the open for the moment the explosives would ignite on the beach. His blast came an instant prior to Wareagle’s, and, again, as if on cue, they started moving inward in an attempt to catch as many of the now defensive troops in their crossfire. He rushed right at them, machine-gun hot in his hands.
Then it jammed and he knew he was dead. But he caught the flash of motion at the far edge of the dock, coming from behind the enemy troops’ line. As if in answer to a prayer, a figure covered with snow rose from the white blanket with a rifle in his hands, cutting Wells’s men down as if they were bowling pins falling to a perfect strike. A few turned to offer resistance, but Wareagle, coming fast from the right, used his final burst to kill them. In seconds the bodies were strewn everywhere, warm blood cutting scars in the deep snow.
Blaine discarded his jammed gun and sprinted toward the snowcrusted wielder of the rifle, fully expecting it to be the sharpshooter Nightbird, but this figure looked taller, and as Blaine got closer he saw why.
It was the boatman!
“Never did fancy these things much,” he said, and tossed the rifle to the snow. “If I was you, friend, I’d want to make it off this island real fast.”
The snow stirred below him and Sandy Lister rose to her feet, brushing the white powder from her clothes and coughing it free of her mouth. She was about to speak, when more shots split the air, coming from the woods.
“Get to the boat!” Blaine shouted.
Wareagle was already halfway there, the boatman well on his way. Sandy stumbled and Blaine reached to aid her. Together they started to cover the twenty yards of beach and pier that separated them from the small craft.
“Hurry, Blainey!” Wareagle called out as he untied the ropes from the pilings.
McCracken trudged faster through the thick snow. Sandy slipped and he yanked her back to her feet. Behind him a new series of bullets had begun to sound, smooth and even. The last of the enemy troops had finally come within Nightbird’s patient range and were paying for it. But even Nightbird couldn’t shoot down all of Wells’s men. A stray bullet caught Sandy in the leg and pitched her forward. Blaine knelt to pick up her unconscious frame.
The black shape hurled itself at him through the darkness. A scream punctured the night and Blaine knew before a set of massive hands had closed around him that it was Wells, far from dead, with fury lending him more strength than ever. They rolled in the snow, the scarred man’s hands searching for a grip on his throat. The good side of his face was bruised and bloodied, but his remaining eye still focused well enough to land a fist against Blaine’s jaw, stunning him.
They rolled again, and McCracken ended up on top, cracking the scarred man’s teeth with an elbow and then struggling to regain his feet. Wells reached out when he had almost made it and tripped him up.
A knife flashed in the scarred man’s hand.
It came down swift and sure, and only Blaine’s sudden move to the right stopped it from splitting his throat in two. Wells slashed again, and this time McCracken dodged to the left, at the same time jamming a hand up under the scarred man’s chin.
Wells seemed not to feel it. He plunged the knife down a third time and McCracken caught his wrist early and high, pinning it in the air. Wells’s teeth bared like an animal’s, and he screamed again as his free hand shot down for Blaine’s throat.
McCracken felt the fingers digging into his flesh, trying to tear through. His eyes bulged with fear. He fought futilely to pry the fingers off, the last of his breath choked off and his strength starting to give.
Wells tensed suddenly. The hand locked on Blaine’s throat spasmed, then let go. Wells spilled over backward, an arrow embedded a third of the way up its shaft through his good eye.
Dead this time.
Blaine looked up to see Wareagle kneeling on the dock above the boat, sliding another arrow into place to deal with a guard rushing from the woods, gun clacking. More men followed behind him.
“Come on!” Johnny shouted.
Blaine picked up the unconscious Sandy and ran toward the boat with bullets scorching the air around him. He kept his frame as low as he could and lowered Sandy’s body to Johnny as soon as he reached the boat. The boatman had begun to inch it away from the dock and Blaine jumped to the deck. The bullets followed them from the shore but they kept low and soon gained the full protection of darkness and snow.
“The souls of Bin Su can rest now, Blainey,” Wareagle said softly.
“Twenty years too late,” McCracken replied.
“How is she?” Blaine asked Johnny after the boatman had steered them safely through the rocks.
“The bullet passed through,” the Indian reported. “The spirits deflected it. The woman was not meant to die tonight, Blainey. She is strong, just as I told you this afternoon.”
“She’ll need a doctor.”
“Nightbird will arrange for one.”
“Nightbird’s still on the island.”
“With the spirits guiding his bullets. He will stop them from pursuing us in boats and then he will steal a boat for himself and return to the dock where we started.” Wareagle’s eyes looked up at the boatman. “She will be safe with him until Nightbird returns.”
Blaine accepted because he had to. “I’m sorry about your men, Indian,” he offered lamely.
“They have made their peace with the spirits, Blainey. They are better off than you and I.” He paused. “The spirits laughed when you spoke of going to Florida. I heard them. We must not tempt their good graces. They have helped us get this far. To ask for more would be to mock that favor. Ask for too much and you receive nothing.”
“Then we’ll have to help ourselves, Indian. Cape Canaveral’s our next stop, and we’ve got to get there by late tomorrow morning.”
“What lies there for us, Blainey?”
“Our only remaining means to stop that satellite from activating Omega: an armed space shuttle called Pegasus. It’s scheduled to launch on Friday with a practice run-through tomorrow. We’re going to pay the shuttle a Christmas visit, Johnny.”
“To help it on its way?”
“To hijack it.”
Chapter 32
For Nathan Jamrock it had already been a ten-Rolaids day, and he had stored an extra pack in his pocket in anticipation of things getting even worse.
“Say again, Paul,” he said into his headset from his position in the control room of the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“I said, screw all the other preparations tests,” came back the voice of Pegasus commander Paul Petersen from the cabin of the shuttle seven hundred miles away in Florida. “Just make sure you get the crappers workin’ this time. Plumbers charge a hell of a price for a house call in outer space.” Petersen was a cornbread southerner from Alabama who’d dreamed of being an astronaut ever since John Glenn orbited the Earth in Friendship 7. Taking care of bodily needs and functions in outer space hadn’t occurred to him much in those days.