by James Axler
The arrow struck the Panther caravan guard at the knot of muscle and bone where his neck met his shoulders. Razor-sharp steel cracked the man’s spinal column, splitting a vertebrae before the broad head slashed through the trunk of nerves that connected his body to his brain. The arrow would have gone farther, but vertebral bones were designed as thick armor to protect the spinal cord, and the shaft had already expended much of its energy shattering one half of the ring of bone.
It didn’t matter. The instantly quadriplegic man turned rag-doll limp and spilled to the ground, struck so hard and quickly he didn’t even have a lungful of air to cry out before he was facedown in the dirt. Grant pivoted, drew another arrow from his quiver, nocked it and turned toward his next opponent. In the shadows beyond, he spotted four people emerge from their hiding spots along the tree line and lunge toward four other guards. In a heartbeat, Grant pulled back, aimed and fired his second arrow of the night.
Grant’s shot met its target in the breastbone, broad head cleaving through rubbery cartilage and squelching off ribs before it shredded two ugly holes in the Mashonan’s aorta. The Panther militiaman’s only sound was a grunt of expelled breath as the impact of fifty foot-pounds of energy slammed into his chest. This arrow wasn’t stopped by the heavy bone of the man’s spinal column, and it burst out from under his left shoulder blade and continued on into the shadows.
Had the arrow stopped, the two yawning wounds in the man’s main pipeline of lifeblood would have been somewhat staunched, except where the four blades of the arrowhead had widened the wound beyond the diameter of the shaft. With the fletching gone through the blood vessel, causing more tissue disruption of already sliced tissue, the man’s chest instantly filled with high-pressure blood gushing through an entrance and exit wound. That arterial pressure pushed hard on the man’s lungs, making him unable to inhale as he knelt, eyes bulging from his horrific internal wounds.
Kane, whom Grant recognized from his location and his build, dropped the Panther he’d ambushed, and dashed with all the speed and power of the wolf he was often described as, overtaking the next of the Mashona slave masters, leaping at the last moment. Kane clamped his hand over the man’s face, and all his weight pushed the man backward to the ground. There was the ugly grind of steel on bone as Kane thrust nine inches of blade through the gunman’s sternum, slicing his heart in half.
Grant turned toward the last of his targets, drawing and nocking even as he was aware of Kane’s victory. The third of the militiamen had heard the rustle of silent, brutal combat, and he’d pulled his rifle from where it hung on its sling, swinging it into position. Grant took this into consideration for where he aimed, and he let fly.
Grant hit the would-be killer on the bridge of his nose. The arrow punched through the relatively fragile bones around the nasal cavity. That target was specific; Grant’s Magistrate training had kicked in and reminded him that an enemy with his finger on the trigger would be unstoppable with anything but a “fatal triangle” hit. The triangle formed by the eyes and the nose were not only the weakest part of the human skull, but they were also directly in front of the huge cluster of nerves and brain functions that narrowed down into the spinal cord.
The broad-head arrow destroyed that, and the third gunman was shut off instantly. His finger would never reach the trigger of his rifle; no shot would blast into the night, bringing down the rest of the slave caravan, rifles blazing. He could see Thurpa attending to a prisoner lying on the ground and Kane watching them.
“Mission accom—”
The crackle of a rifle discharging into the night sky cut Grant short.
He turned and saw that Brigid and Nathan were both atop a militiaman. Though Nathan’s target was no longer struggling, he’d still managed to fire his gun.
Yards away, the caravan quickly stirred at the burst of gunfire.
“Kane...”
“The prisoners have a chance. But we have to make it better for them,” Kane answered over the Commtact. “Get loud and get bloody!”
Chapter 4
Kane wrenched his knife from the heart of the second Panther gunman, then took a step back, looking toward Grant, who was using that weird samurai archery to dispatch yet another of the Mashonan thugs with a single shot. Kane saw the muzzle-flash and heard a Panther’s rifle. Bullets sliced into the night sky to where they wouldn’t hit anyone until they fell back to earth. Nathan had his arms wrapped around the legs of a guard, and Brigid Baptiste was on the gunman’s chest. She had her knife deep in the goon’s face, having ended his existence.
The cacophony that the rifle produced was damage enough.
Fortunately, all eight of the gunmen assigned to the prisoners were down, snuffed out before they could shoot at any of the chained victims. That meant anyone armed and willing to harm the helpless prisoners would be coming from the caravan camp themselves.
“Kane...” Grant spoke over the Commtact.
Kane spoke up; the need for stealth was gone with the echo of gunshots in the night. “The prisoners have a chance. But we have to make it better for them. Get loud and get bloody!”
With that order, Kane reached down to his belt and unhooked a fragmentation grenade. He plucked the pin from it and hurled it toward the enemy camp as guards roused from relaxation to alertness. Some of them were fast, rushing halfway up the trail between their quarters and the prisoner area. It was these men who ran right into the flying gren, hurled by Kane with all the speed and accuracy he could muster.
The miniature bomb struck the lead militiaman in the center of his chest. The impact knocked the wind from the gunman and caused him to stop cold. One of his fellows plowed through him, tripping them both and throwing them to the ground bracketing the high explosive, just in time for them to catch a wave of extreme overpressure and flying metal shrapnel.
The surge of force slammed into the downed pair and the three men with them. The blast wave burst blood vessels in their bodies, killing them swiftly. It was a quick, merciful end for the men who’d been marching unarmed, naked prisoners across miles of the wilderness of Africa.
The exploding grenade slammed the door on that approach from the column of militiamen. They now knew that someone was covering that route, and very few people were ever armed with only one grenade. At the very least, that would mean more hand bombs or firearms covering the trail between the two locations. And these militiamen weren’t stupid. The group that Kane could see beyond the explosion skidded to a sudden halt as they realized that if they cut through the bottleneck, they’d be cut down.
As if to punctuate Kane’s unspoken point, Grant loosed an arrow, sending the high-velocity missile into one of the groups who’d stopped. The arrow sliced through a rifleman in the center of the group. The fletching disappeared into his chest before the rest of his body got the message that it had been perforated through center of mass. The man dropped an instant later, blood bursting from his lips, much to the shock of his fellow soldiers.
Because Kane and Grant were wearing the night-black shadow suits, they were invisible to their opposition, and neither had used a weapon that gave a muzzle-flash. Grenades and arrows were good at keeping their users relatively unseen in darkness.
Kane knew, though, that the Panthers hadn’t become such a feared enemy without learning common tricks such as flanking maneuvers. They would come at their former prisoners and the rescue party from another angle, and when that happened, Kane intended to meet them with every ounce of violence he could muster.
Nathan Longa decided to leave Nehushtan balanced against a tree trunk. He didn’t want to inadvertently unleash a bolt of power, and he wasn’t certain how stealthy he could be with the ancient staff. Sure, the artifact had granted him superior speed and strength in the past, but he didn’t want to produce more of a spectacle than necessary. If things came to a worst-case situation, he was only a few feet aw
ay from the propped-up staff and the battle rifle he’d shed for stealth.
Then he made a mistake as he lunged at a Mashonan gunman and clamped a hand around his mouth, stifling him swiftly. As he brought the knife around and toward the man’s heart from the front, his blade slammed into the Panther’s rifle. The thrust was a powerful one, meant to pierce his target’s breastbone and spear the heart behind it, but the frame of the gunman’s weapon deflected the force of the blow, disarming both men as they toppled to the ground.
Then came the wrestling match: Nathan pitting his might against the disarmed gunman’s. The militiaman reached for his own knife, but Nathan chopped the edge of his hand hard against his enemy’s inner elbow, striking the cluster of muscles and nerves, which left the guard’s fingers numb and unable to hold on to any tool. Nathan suddenly saw stars, and the center of his face and left eye ached from where the militiaman head-butted him. Nathan lashed out, eliciting a grunt from his foe, finger sinking into wet, ugly tissues. Whatever cry the man would have released was superseded by unintelligible choking as the man’s eyeball burst, paralyzing his throat with terror and agony.
Nathan heard footsteps, a solitary figure racing toward him and the Mashonan soldier, and he expected to catch a back full of lead. When no bullets came, he glanced up and saw the lithe silhouette of Brigid Baptiste rushing to his aid, knife in hand. Nathan’s distraction caused an awful turn of events. The Panther punched Nathan hard in the chest, bowling him back just enough that the thug could crawl toward his rifle.
Nathan threw himself atop the gunman, grabbing his legs, even as Brigid Baptiste came down. The militiaman had a handful of his rifle, and he swung it upward; the stock of the weapon struck Brigid in the ribs. Her shadow suit redistributed the impact, but it slowed her, delaying her knife strike long enough for him to wriggle his finger into the trigger guard.
Nathan tugged the man’s legs hard, jolting the muzzle of the gun away from Brigid’s body. Despite the shadow suit, at this range, with the heavy slugs in the rifle, the Cerberus archivist would have been blown to pieces by a contact gunshot.
Nathan saved the woman’s life, but gunshots ripped into the night sky.
“Dammit,” Nathan swore. He heard the scrape of knife on bone, Brigid ripping her blade free and plunging it down again.
By the third time, Nathan was on all fours, grabbing at her wrist. The militiaman was dead already, but Brigid’s frustration was such that she nearly broke Nathan’s grasp.
“I’m sorry,” Nathan whispered.
Brigid shook her head. “I couldn’t keep his arm pinned. It was my—”
She was cut off by the boom of an explosion in the distance.
Kane was throwing grenades, which meant the enemy camp was up and active.
“I can make up for my fumble,” Nathan muttered.
He turned back to his tree and retrieved the artifact staff and the rifle he’d left behind. Brigid returned to her original hiding place to get her heavier weapons, as well.
Kane’s Commtact reached Nathan’s radio earpiece. “Nate, I’m going to need you at the bottleneck here. We’ve got the enemy force delayed, but you’ll work as the bar. You’ve got your grens, right?”
“Yes,” Nathan answered. “It’s because I screwed up?”
“No prisoners died. You kept the guard from harming them. You succeeded,” Kane countered. “I need a big, powerful rifle. Thurpa, you back up Nathan.”
Nathan nodded; then he noticed Thurpa jogging alongside him, holding his mouth. The captive Africans were already conversing among themselves as they reached the path between the two encampments.
“What’s wrong with your mouth?” Nathan asked.
“I pulled a muscle,” Thurpa returned. “The guy twisted once I bit him, and that flexed my fangs the way that they shouldn’t have.”
“Oh,” Nathan replied.
“This shit is not going as easily as we thought,” Thurpa muttered. “I ended up talking to one girl who seemed awake, but she was scared out of her wits.”
“She didn’t scream,” Nathan noted.
“No. I put my hand over her mouth, but gently. I told her we were rescuing them, but right now we need them to stay down and out of our way,” Thurpa responded.
The two men set up at bracketing sides of the path entering the prisoners’ clearing.
“Stuck on defense again,” Thurpa murmured.
“We do what we can, Thur,” Nathan answered.
The young cobra man nodded.
“Look at it this way—at least you’ll have grateful new friends,” Nathan added.
Thurpa managed a smile.
The two young men lapsed into silence, their eyes and ears peeled for signs of enemy movement down the path.
Brigid Baptiste linked up with Kane and Grant as they cut through the woods that separated the Panthers’ encampment and their line of prisoners. She had her suppressed Copperhead in hand now, firmly gripping it and keeping its stock against her shoulder, finger off the trigger and against the frame so as not to accidentally loose a shot and perhaps hit her companions. Though all three were in the darkened shadows of the copse of trees, they could see clearly, thanks to their shadow suit hoods, and were able to pick up the movement of Mashona troopers away from the path.
She glanced at Kane, and he held up his fist for a hold position. Brigid knew that Kane had a plan to intercept the force that was rapidly trying to flank Thurpa and Nathan. Whatever he had in mind, it was going to be simple but devastating.
Simple but devastating could have been the mantra of the Cerberus warriors as they often had to “wing it.” Even when working around their more familiar areas, such as the Tartarus Pits, flexibility was of the essence. As such, improvisation and tactics gained from observation of the terrain and evaluation of the enemy troops were applied.
So far, it had carried the day for them across dozens of adventures. Brigid anticipated that the Panthers of Mashona were a trained, disciplined force, despite the horrors they wrought. They had been well organized back at the power station assault, but the Mashonan militia hadn’t counted on fast-firing, quick-reloading grenade launchers and sniper rifles to flank them, surround them and hammer them with two dozen explosions and precision gunfire to slice through their ranks. The guards of this caravan moved on a schedule that gave the Cerberus explorers perfect placing to ambush them. There was a route—a slender game trail through the trees—that the Panthers were aware of and savvy enough to leave lightly attended.
Unfortunately for the Panthers, Kane’s woodcraft and stealth had allowed him to penetrate the forest between the two camps and stumble on the trail. He’d seen the sentry at that position, unobtrusive and mirroring the one on the other side, the one he’d ambushed immediately.
Brigid noticed movement on the game trail ahead, and she braced herself, waiting for Kane to give the hand signal to open fire. Grant drew back on his bow and took aim. Kane nodded, and the big archer loosed his arrow, putting it through the ear of the lead gunman on the trail. For a man who was a relatively new student to archery, Grant was proving to be quite lethal; Brigid marked that up to natural marksmanship training and his phenomenal strength. At six foot four, he was larger than most of his fellow Magistrates, and was much faster and smarter than he appeared.
Brigid had formerly had a low opinion of the Magistrate Division, seeing them as faceless ciphers, right down to the deletion of their “given” names and the fact they existed as surnames in service to the hybrid barons. Then she’d worked with Kane and Grant and discovered that they had a sense of duty, quick wit and humor, and were far more observant and resourceful than she’d imagined.
She remembered the Thunder Isle incident, before Grant had become lost in time. He’d used his kyudo lessons back then to deadly effect, alongside his lover and teacher, the samurai Shizuka.
Now Grant was comfortable enough with the bow to bring it on their mission, meaning that he’d all but mastered the ancient combat art.
Kane gestured toward Brigid, and she swung her Copperhead up and targeted the heads of the next few gunmen, tapping off short bursts from the submachine gun. The bullets made soft popping sounds, like the flutter of a large bird’s wings, but when her bullets struck flesh and bone, the result was no less bloody and damaging. Unfortunately, the loss of three of their number sent the rest of the Panthers to cover on the far side of the game trail, seeking the protection of tree trunks and the concealment of foliage.
Kane motioned, and both Grant and Brigid hit the dirt, ducking below the inevitable stream of enemy gunfire in response to their ambush. Whatever Kane had planned became apparent when she saw him make two throwing motions. Two more grenades sailed through the night, going past the game trail and landing behind the line of Panthers. They exploded in quick succession, and Kane rose to his knees, watching stunned and wounded militia bandits stagger into the open.
Kane popped his Sin Eater and opened fire on the dazed survivors, chugging short bursts from the compact folding machine pistol. He tore through them, using the high-density slugs of his gun as a chainsaw, ripping open chests and bellies in a grisly display of vulgar firepower. Grant had set his bow aside and cut loose with his own Copperhead. Brigid joined in the grim and brutal slaughter.
She didn’t enjoy this butcher’s work, but she knew that there were dozens of helpless people on the other end of the game trail who needed protection. If she didn’t help to destroy this spearhead flanking maneuver by the Panthers of Mashona, they would burst in on the unarmed, naked prisoners and either retake or coldly slaughter them.
