Helpless.
There were polished boots an inch from his nose, giving Jeff a sudden frisson of remembered excitement. Nanci wouldn’t have blundered heavy eyed into a trap.
But Nanci was dead.
The cold tip of a rifle barrel poked him in the back of the neck. “You got some nice hardware, boy. Port Royale, and that looks like a big old S&W there. Why don’t you stand up slow and easy and let the guns drop on the highway.”
The butt of a rifle grated by his face. Jeff had no expertise with weaponry and he had no idea what sort of gun it was. But he could see that someone had taken the trouble to mark the wooden butt with a sort of brand, neatly burned in the shape of a circle pierced with an arrow.
IT TOOK FIVE ROUNDS from the Heckler & Koch to kill the Good Samaritans, making Nanci even more aware of how kitten-weak she was from loss of blood.
It was difficult to even hold the P-111 9 mm automatic steady and a struggle to squeeze the narrow trigger.
The first bullet had been aimed at Sister Stephanie’s midriff, intended to put her down and out of the action and to give time for Nanci to turn her attention to the unarmed man.
But the bullet had struck the stock of the shotgun, tearing it apart into splinters of white wood. The full-metal-jacket round, mangled and distorted, had angled off and clipped the woman on the outer edge of her right hip, snapping a sliver of bone from the pelvis. The force had spun her around, and she’d dropped the ruined gun.
The indrawn breath hadn’t yet released her scream before Nanci fired a second round, this time at the paralyzed Brother Edward.
The shot had completely missed him, and the spent round howled off into the blackness.
Then the scream was out and running.
“Shit,” Nanci Simms had hissed through clenched teeth, gasping with the cramping pain that was burning at her stomach.
“Die, satanic bitch,” Brother Edward had proclaimed in his rich, preacher’s voice as he’d pulled a little .32-caliber hideaway from the sleeve of his gray parka.
Nanci had fired the Heckler & Koch a third time, whooping in exultation as she saw the bullet hit the man through the left cheek, blowing away most of the back of his skull, spilling his brains into the dry sand.
Stephanie had tried to run away, one hand holding the bleeding wound on her hip. The fourth round had only nipped at her, taking a strip of bloodied skin delicately away under her ribs on the left side.
It had made her stagger, but she’d kept running, barely visible in the watery moonlight. In another few paces she’d be out of sight.
“Gently, Miss Simms, gently.” Nanci had sighted along the barrel at the fleeing figure. “Imagine the trigger is your own clitoris, Miss Simms.” She’d remembered the leering grin on the face of the armed-combat instructor at the large complex of buildings in rural Virginia.
She’d squeezed the trigger.
She hadn’t risked going for a kill shot. Safety first. Center of the back, presenting the broadest target with the biggest margin for error. High and you hit the head. Low and you still hit the spine. Left or right and there was heart and liver and kidneys and lungs.
It was dead center.
Dead in the center.
Dead.
THERE WERE a number of ringbolts welded to the sides of the open truck. Jeff Thomas was handcuffed to one of them, trying to keep his balance as the vehicle roared along a dirt road, bouncing over ruts, occasionally hitting patches of rippled sand, hard as concrete. The old-fashioned chromed-steel cuffs were so tight that his fingers had gone numb, and he could see a thread of blood, black in the fading moonlight, leaking from beneath the nails.
He’d already learned that there wasn’t much use in protesting to the man who called himself Sergeant Sullivan or to any of the taciturn men with him. They all wore dark blue pants and jackets, with the insignia of the silver sun pierced with a golden arrow.