A bullet whipped past Ryan’s head, and he felt rather than heard the little slap of displaced air. It had missed him by no more than an inch, and it had come from behind.
Another bullet whistled past Ryan’s face, splashing it with cool air, then flattened against the thick hide of the AM AC over his head. He twisted his body and blaster around, bringing the man-shape lunging from the darkness into target acquisition. Ryan and Doc fired at the same time. The Le Mat roared, spurting flame, and the rifle-toting figure back-somersaulted into the shadows.
Then the campsite was filled with running, shooting, half-naked men, shrieking out of the darkness from two directions. Not only did they carry automatic rifles, they carried tomahawks, knives and even a few feathered lances. Their faces were painted with ferocious designs. They bounded and leapt too quickly for Ryan to get an accurate count of their number.
The defense put up by Helskel’s sec men was disorganized and sporadic. They retreated toward the wag, halfheartedly fighting a rearguard action without watching one another’s backs or even taking the time to aim their blasters properly. They were in great danger of catching each other in a cross fire.
Ryan and his friends were veterans of dozens of battles, and they rushed out into the campsite in a wedge formation. J.B. took the point of the V, the rapid drumming of his Uzi clearing a path. Mildred, Krysty and Jak waited until their targets were clearly framed in their weapons’ sights. When they fired, it was without haste and without mistake. At every shot, a painted warrior either tumbled limply to the ground or spun, grabbing at a wound.
Ryan had hung back to cover Doc while he adjusted the position of the Le Mat’s firing hammer. The double-barreled weapon could be fired like a shotgun, or once the hammer was repositioned to fall on the revolver chamber, to fire nine .44-caliber rounds.
While Ryan waited, he watched several scenes at once Fleur drilled one of the Sioux through the back of the head with her Beretta. She whirled on Krysty as the titian-haired woman put a .38-caliber slug in the center of a warrior’s chest.
“Goddammit,” she yelled. “I said head shots!”
Krysty didn’t even glance her way as she said, “You don’t tell me to do anything.”
At about the same time, a sec man screamed as the flat razor point of a lance pierced his throat. The grinning Sioux withdrew it, and the sec man dropped to his knees, trying to stem the geyser of blood fountaining from a severed jugular.
Doc snapped shut the Le Mat and announced, “Ready and able, though not particularly willing.”
He followed Ryan out into the battlefield. At such close quarters, the Indians were using their rifles as bludgeons and fighting hand-to-hand, uttering strident cries as they closed with their opponents. Ryan, trying to join his people’s wedge, saw one of the warriors rush toward Krysty. He fired the SIG-Sauer point-blank, and the attacker dropped with a deep bloody cavity punched in his side.
Before he could shout for her to watch her back, a rush of bodies knocked him sprawling, and a heavy weight dropped directly onto his back, driving him face first to the ground. Knees pressed into his buttocks and a pair of large hands closed about his neck and squeezed.
Spitting out grit, Ryan heaved, bucked and twisted. He managed to roll over onto his back and look up at the hate-twisted, paint-distorted face bobbing over him. The Indian was by far the stronger, and he resisted each of the white man’s efforts to throw him off. Then he thrust a knife blade for his adversary’s throat.
Ryan wrenched himself aside, and the edge of the blade skimmed the side of his neck, drawing a thread of blood. He fired his blaster at the Sioux, and a crimson spray erupted from the bridge of the warrior’s nose. His grip loosened and he slowly fell forward. Elbowing the deadweight from his body, Ryan rolled to one side and got to his knees.
A bullet plucked at his hair. He lurched forward, facedown, and felt the cool passage of another slug against his cheek. He sighted a feather-bedecked man leveling a rifle at him. The one-eyed man rested his pistol on his wrist and sent a 9 mm wad of lead into the Sioux’s chest.
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