The Scouts came closer and closer to the carcasses, moving more and more slowly, until there was a pause of several seconds between steps and a freeze every time the condors seemed to pay attention. The birds looked, ruffled their feathers and then quieted again, looked and ruffled….
“Go!” she heard Simmons whisper, when the condors didn’t seem to quiet down at all after the last advance.
He and the other Scout sprinted forward at a dead run. The birds croak-squawked their alarm, turning and running awkwardly away with their wings spread out to their full ten-foot span, trying to build up enough momentum to take a leap into the air and thrash themselves upward—condors spent most of their time soaring on thermals, and they weren’t very efficient at getting off flat ground quickly. That let the men get within casting distance; Jake let go the net at another command, and Simmons whirled it in a circle over his head before he let fly.
It glinted in the harsh sunlight as the lead weights along the edge spun it open into a perfect circle, pausing for a moment at the top of its trajectory and then dropping like a swift-stooping eagle. One of the panic-stricken condors made its escape, hoisting itself into the air with desperate strokes of its great wings and banking out over the swamp, turning and circling to gain altitude and escape. Its cries drifted down through the hot still air. The others were a heaving, squawking chaos under the net, their flapping terror serving only to tangle them more securely. Simmons and his assistant waded in, cautious of the beaks and strong snaky necks. They used the net to throw the birds down; then Jake immobilized each in turn while Simmons slid a loose sock over its head. That quieted the big scavengers enough for a swift but gentle trussing.
Adrienne smiled to herself; it was always enjoyable to watch experts at work, and Jim Simmons’s boyish pride in his skills was entertaining in its own right. She watched Kolomusnim bend to pick up the two wire cages… and then freeze and come erect slowly, his head swiveling back and forth toward the walls of tule reeds on either hand. Then everything seemed to happen at once, yet in slow motion.
An instant before the Yokut called out a warning, Simmons came erect as well, reaching for the rifle slung over his back. Jake looked at him, puzzled, and then the expression went blank. The crack of a rifle followed instantly; she could distinctly see his body jerk, then a spot on the front of his khaki jacket blow out in a shower of red.
Another rifle spoke as the Scout fell, and a horse screamed; her head whipped around to see Schalk’s mount collapsing, thrashing with a broken foreleg. Then more shots, a fast rapid crack-crack-crack: two rifles at least, and used with more skill than Indians could generally achieve with pilfered ammunition and stolen weapons they didn’t know how to maintain. Of course, the shooters could be renegades; occasionally criminals or malcontents from New Virginian settlements ran off to live with any tribe that would take them in. They usually ran farther than this, though….
The thought ran through her head as she tried to get her horse under control and the rifle off her back. Then there was a sudden shhhhhwhup—shhhhhwhup —shhhhhwhup sound, and the saddle sprouted an arrow. The head made an ugly whacking sound as it stuck in the leather and wood, standing there with the shaft humming like an angry bee. Two more went into the animal’s rump with wet, meaty sounds, and the horse went wild—screaming and squealing as it reared and then went into a twisting buck.
“That’s torn it,” she said in a snarl, then took a step back, drew her FiveseveN automatic and shot the horse three times, the last one striking right behind an ear, not without a slight wince; the poor beast hadn’t done anything but what she asked of it. It hadn’t asked to be born in the Commonwealth, either; this wasn’t its fight.
The horse fell with a limp thud and she cast herself down behind it; the little 5.7mm bullets were high-velocity and armor piercing, but composed of some dense plastic that deformed and gave up all its kinetic energy when it struck soft tissue. This one had drilled through the horse’s skull and turned its brain into jelly; she had the pistol back in its holster before her mount’s final reflex kick, and the rifle out across the flank she huddled behind for cover. The smell of blood and offal from the horses was added to the stink of the rotting camels, and the ground was turning to mud underneath her as the animal bled out, but the knot of tension under her breastbone made all those things details she could ignore easily enough.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been shot at, exactly, but it’s certainly the most serious, she thought grimly. The other occasions had all been short, for starters. This one looks like it could spoil my entire day.
Simmons was down on the ground, leopard-crawling toward Jake with his rifle across the crook of his elbows. Three Indians were out of the reeds, their bodies striped in horizontal bands of white, black and ochre; they were howling like wolves and loosing arrows as they ran toward Kolomusnim. The Yokut shot one in the chest with the arrow on his bow; Adrienne carefully led the last and dropped him at a hundred and twenty paces. The militia battle rifle kicked against her shoulder, a quick hard punch, and the brass of the empty .30-06 round spun off to the right, glinting in the sun and then tinkling on some metal part of the horse’s bridle. More arrows came whupp-whupp-whupp out of the reeds and she had to duck, curling under the barrel of the horse as they plunged down at her from out of the sky, dropping like mortar rounds. From that angle and past the head of her former mount she could see the third Indian and Kolomusnim go over in a tangle of brown limbs. Then the tracker rose on top, his hatchet in his hand, smashing it downward over and over again in a quick hard flurry of blows accompanied by sickening cleaving thuds.
A quick glance behind her. Schalk and Piet were alive, but their horses weren’t; one of the mules was down too, and the other had pulled the tethering stake loose and was dragging it behind as it fled westward, braying hysterically. The two Afrikaners and she formed a rough triangle about a hundred feet on a side, each crouched down behind the carcass of a dead horse.
The ambushers must have shot to kill the mounts first, which showed lamentably good tactical sense. Horses were free to whoever could catch them—there were uncounted thousands in the feral herds in the Central Valley and the foothills, and more swarmed all the way to the Mississippi these days—but saddle tack was something they’d have trouble getting their hands on, and rifles and ammunition were beyond price. Not to mention the opportunity to kill a few of the hated New Virginians, the evil wizards whose touch was death, the destroyers of worlds.
Another arrow went thunk into the body of her ex-mount. She looked around; Kolomusnim had finished off his opponent, then leaped to the back of one of the horses he’d been holding for Simmons; the other was down. He pulled its head around and raced for the open mouth of the pocket of dry land; arrows went after him, and bullets—she thought something struck him, but he might have been hugging the horse’s neck to present a smaller target. The hooves of the galloping horse went past her, throwing up clods of earth, a thudding she could feel through her belly as she lay on the hard clay ground.
“So much for the bliddy tame bushman!” Schalk yelled, and turned the muzzle of his rifle after the fleeing tracker. “Jou hol bobbejan!”
“Schalk! Eyes on the swamp!” Adrienne shouted, and the Afrikaner reluctantly obeyed.
They wouldn’t be missed for hours. The radio would have brought support in a few minutes, but it was quite thoroughly crushed under the side of Simmons’s horse that had hit the ground—even good solid-state milspec field electronics rarely survived eleven hundred pounds of horse landing on it. There were two spares, of course: one with the horse Kolomusnim had ridden out, and the third in the packsaddle of the mule that had fled westward and was probably at the Coast Range by now….
Simmons had reached his cousin. “He’s a goner!” he called, as he drew his knife and cut the sling of the dead man’s rifle so that he could drag it away.
“Covering fire!” Adrienne called.
The Scout began to crawl rapidly toward t
he dead horse that marked the spot where Kolomusnim had stood; there was a dead Indian beside it, his face chopped into red ruin by the tracker’s hatchet, and another lying where her bullet had punched through his body just above the hipbones; he was still twitching a little, but effectively dead for all that. The hollow-point rounds would have plowed a hole about the size of a child’s fist right through and out the other side.
The problem with giving Simmons covering fire was that there wasn’t much to see or shoot at. And the Indians could fire their arrows upward, from several yards within the tule reeds; they’d know the safe paths through them. She took out the monocular and scanned along the edge nearest Simmons’s crawling passage.
The rifleman in there was firing slowly; every ten seconds or so a puff of dust would pock the surface of the clay where Simmons was crawling toward cover. That shooter would have to come close to the edge of the reeds, so… a glimpse of brown skin…
“Standing figure, my left, two-fifty yards,” she called; probably the two men had seen the same thing, but someone had to coordinate for best effect. “Jim, get ready to run for it.”
All three rifles shifted; there was a moment’s hesitation as the men picked out the target, or what they thought might be it. Adrienne breathed out slowly, letting her finger tighten gradually on the trigger in a gentle stroking motion, the way Uncle Andy had taught her….
Crack, and another ting of cartridge on metal. The shadowy glimpse of the target vanished, if it had been anything more than a trick of the light in the reeds. She squeezed off half a dozen rounds into the same patch of reeds, and the two men did the same.
“Run for it, Jim!” Adrienne shouted.
The Scout didn’t need any prompting. At the first shot he was up and dashing toward the horse. Reckless of the other rifleman hidden in the reeds, she came up on one knee and fired off the rest of the magazine. A bullet made an ugly wiizzztft! sound past her ear, and more arrows came arching out of the reeds, seeming to start slowly and then accelerate as they slid down the arch toward her—no less disconcerting for being an optical illusion. She dropped flat again to eject the empty magazine and slap in another; there were ten in the bandolier across the dead horse’s neck, and another two hundred rounds boxed in the saddlebags, and she spared some brief flicker of consciousness to thank the God of Regulations for that.
Jim Simmons staggered and cried out as he ran for the scant cover of the fallen horse. An arrow had gone through his leg above the knee, and it buckled under him as he moved. That sent him to his hands and knees. Another shaft plunged down and took him in the back below the left shoulder, and he collapsed flat with another cry.
“Oh, hell,” Adrienne said in a snarl, profoundly unhappy at what happened next. “Give me a hand!” she shouted, and came up from behind the body of the horse, running forward crab-wise and shooting at the reeds as she went, trying to find the bowmen by backtracking the shafts.
Behind her, Schalk van der Merwe gave an inarticulate cry of rage and ran forward as well, bellowing his anger at what the crazy Rolfe woman had gotten him into now. They ran zigzag, with arrows and an occasional bullet whipping past them. Simmons was alive; she could tell by the trembling jerks that ran through the shaft sticking up out of his back—it must have stuck in the shoulder blade, though only time would tell whether it had penetrated past that shield of bone into the lung.
“Take him!” Adrienne said.
Schalk fired off the rest of his magazine at the reeds and the half-seen figures dodging about in the fringe of the swamp, then gripped the back of Simmons’s jacket in his left hand and hauled him up like a suitcase before he slung him over his shoulder, ignoring the hundred and seventy solid pounds the smaller man weighed. His sprint back toward cover showed no effect from the weight, either; van der Merwe was nearly as tough as he thought he was. He dropped the Scout behind Adrienne’s barricade of horseflesh, then did another jinking dash back to his own.
Adrienne slung her rifle and scooped up Simmons’s weapon. It had a cut-down forestock, a glass-bedded barrel, an adjustable cheekpiece and a sniper’s telescopic sight. Her run back to the shelter of her dead mare turned into an undignified tumble as an arrow plowed a shallow furrow across the outside of her right buttock, the sharp steel head slicing the fabric of her trousers like a pair of scissors in the hands of a tailor.
“Goddamned ass cutters!” she shouted in frustration.
Simmons was conscious, but sweating with pain and shock; he couldn’t move his left arm, and cried out through clenched teeth when it was bumped. His skin wasn’t gray, and his pulse was thready but regular; the arrow wounds were bleeding, but not in pulsing jets; and there was no blood on his lips—hopefully the point in the back hadn’t penetrated the lung. The Lord alone knew what was going on inside, but for the present it was better to leave the natural tourniquets of the wooden shafts in place. Blessing the God of Regulations once more, she got the medical kit out of its boiled-leather case on the saddle, pulled out a hypo of morphine, stripped off the cover on the needle with her teeth and stuck it into the back of his thigh, pressing the plunger with her thumb. After a moment he sighed and closed his eyes.
“Lucky bastard,” she mumbled, and stole a glance at her watch. Ten minutes? Nine and a half, to be strict. That’s ridiculous; it must have been longer. A glance at the sun told her that it was correct: still not quite noon.
“This is bad. This is very bad,” she mumbled as she checked over the Scout’s rifle and adjusted the cheekpiece and shoulder buffer for her size. “This is very, very goddamned bad.”
From the volume of fire, there must be at least two rifles and maybe twenty bows among the Indians, and they’d killed only three or four of them all told. There could be a hundred of them waiting to attack.
“I’d better use this fine product of O’Brien engineering to buy us some time,” she muttered. “All right…”
The sight had adjustments for ranges from x3 to x10. You could estimate the range yourself, or just point it at a target and look. The scope showed crosshairs, and upper and lower stadia on the vertical line. Turning the adjusting knob so that they rested on the head and belt of a man moved a cam to zero the crosshairs for that range.
She wrapped a turn of the sling around her left hand, rested the stock on the barrel of her dead horse, and brought the scope to her eye. The edge of the reeds leaped to arm’s length through the scope, and she gave a hiss of satisfaction as she saw an archer a yard inside the tules drawing a shaft, his teeth bared in effort as he bent the short thick bow staff—she could see sweat glisten, and the whites of his eyes against the band of black paint over his upper face. The stadia marks fitted neatly over his head and belt, which put the crosshairs precisely on his breastbone….
Crack.
The archer fell backward, chest-punched by the bullet. A spray of bone and blood and shreds of flesh erupted from his back where the mushrooming hollow-point round blasted out a hole the size of a small plate. The arrow wobbled up and fell to stand in the ground thirty yards beyond the edge of the marsh.
Ouch. Unfortunately, the scope also let you see the expression on the man’s face when the bullet hit. Granted he was trying to kill me, that’s still something I would rather not have seen.
She panned the scope down the edge of the tule reeds closest to the New Virginians’ position, methodically shooting as targets presented themselves. Barring rescue, their only real chance of survival was to kill so many Indians that the rest were sickened with the business and ran.
Silence fell, save for the buzzing of the insects, something of which she was suddenly conscious again. An occasional arrow came out of the swamp, but the Indians had backed farther in and were shooting more or less blind.
“Good shooting, miss!” Piet Botha called. “They may give up.”
Cautiously, Adrienne raised her head. A bullet cracked by overhead, another kicked up a puff of dust fifty yards to her front, and a third struck the horse.
“Shit!” she said with quiet viciousness, dropping down behind the protective barrier of flesh. Then louder: “I don’t think so, Piet. I don’t think they like us, somehow.”
“Ja,” the Afrikaner said ruefully. “They have us pinned down.” A hesitation. “If we kept them pinned down with some rapid fire, miss, you might be able to get out into the open and make it back to camp, get a rescue party here.”
Adrienne turned on her back, thinking carefully as she scanned the way they’d come. There was no point in heroic gestures. If running gave them all a chance, then she’d run; Adrienne didn’t have testosterone poisoning to cloud her mind. She would be the logical choice; all three of them were in top condition, but while the men could lift a lot more weight, she could run faster than either of them over any distance longer than a sprint. And she could keep going a lot longer, too; she had ten years on Schalk, and fifteen on Piet.
On the other hand, they were about halfway into the embayment in the swamp, a little closer to the north edge than the south. The entrance narrowed several hundred yards behind them, and anyone running out would have to pass through a bottleneck between two and three hundred yards across. After running a five-hundred-yard gauntlet… with only two shooters to suppress the hostiles…
“I don’t think so,” she called back to Piet. “Neither of those two riflemen are very good shots, and I think they’re short of ammo, but they’d get anyone who tried to run. And there are probably somewhere between twenty and a hundred bowmen, too. Tell me you don’t think they’ve got some of them back there where the swamp edges pinch in toward each other at the edge, waiting to rush anyone who tries to get out. If either of you want to try it, I’ll give a written authorization.”
Conquistador Page 15
