A woman, singing, froze them all in their places. It was a mournful tune, about someone called Adelita. Her voice was high and pure, like Sierra ice.
Ryan beckoned J.B. to his side. As an afterthought, he called up Sleeps In Day.
“No other way in. We passed no side turnings or doors that I saw.”
“Nor me,” the Armorer agreed, taking the chance to peek around the corner.
“We should go straight in,” the Navaho urged. “If we lose, then it will be with honor.”
“Rather win without honor,” Ryan said. “Staying alive and winning come to the same thing.”
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed. “When you said that you sounded just like Trader.”
“That a compliment?”
The armorer hesitated a few heartbeats. “Well, yeah, I guess it is.”
“What do you reckon the old bastard would do if he was here now?” Ryan asked.
“Go straight in, with all blasters firing.”
“Probably would. Then again, Trader had the armaments and the number of trained shootists to take out most baron’s sec forces. We don’t have that.”
“So?”
“So, we go in, all right. But a mite more careful than Trader would’ve been.”
Time before they were discovered was measured, at best, in minutes.
“CAN’T WE STOP and eat?” Mildred asked. “This is sort of recent canned food.”
“You sound like Dean,” Ryan replied. “Do the business first, then think about eating.”
The woman’s singing had stopped, somewhere ahead of them. The large room had obviously once been a meeting of three main passages. One had a rusting door locked across it, with a notice warning of unsurveyed caves. The second one was dark, while the third one, on the right, was brightly lighted and seemed to lead in the direction of the caverns’ rear.
“That one,” Ryan said.
The tunnel curved a little, and Ryan again hesitated. There was the sound of footfalls coming toward them. He held up the SIG-Sauer and turned to face the rest of the group.
“Wait,” he whispered.
Thomas Firemaker and Two Dogs Fighting glanced at each other, holding their blasters at the hip.
Krysty sensed it first. She opened her mouth, her eyes wide with alarm. “No,” she began. “Don’t do-”
Too slow and too late.
The two warriors charged forward, beginning to whoop at the tops of their voices, brushing past Ryan’s belated attempt to stop them.
They were momentarily out of sight, but there was the sound of their yelling, and their ancient guns being fired, more shouting and a burst of automatic fire.
They heard a single choking scream, then a moment of silence.
“Fireblast!” Ryan said. “Come on!”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ryan didn’t go rushing toward the skirmish. He simply walked quickly the few paces that brought him around the bend in the vaulted passage and saw almost precisely what he’d expectedthe bodies of the two Native Americans, blood-sodden, one of them still kicking his feet in his death throes. Ryan couldn’t recognize which one it was, as their faces had been torn away by the bullets from the Kalashnikov assault rifles held by the three men standing in the center of the tunnel.
There was a fourth man, kneeling, hand pressed to a bloody wound in his left shoulder.
All of them looked as though they had their origins south of the Grandee, and all wore the black uniforms of the General’s men. A red stripe down the pant leg was the only splash of color, from the black berets to the black steel-tipped boots.
Part of Ryan’s combat mind analyzed the fact that the quartet had done extremely well to chill the two Navaho as quickly and efficiently as they had, since the attack must have come as a total surprise.
But the main part of his brain was concerned with taking out the armed men as fast as possible.
The passage wasn’t all that wide, and J. B. Dix, at his heels with the Uzi, wasn’t able to open fire immediately.
The AKs began to swivel toward Ryan as soon as he appeared, and he dropped to one knee, firing with the SIG-Sauer, seeing two of the General’s men go spinning away, dropping their blasters.
But the third dived to one side, trying for the cover of a pile of old packing cases, firing as he went down. The fourth wounded man was no immediate threat and didn’t enter into the mathematical equations of lethal fighting.
Ryan winced as a stream of 7.62 mm rounds poured from the full-auto Kalashnikov, ricocheting and sparking from the stone walls.
But the gunner had already used some of the 3o-round mag on the two dead Navaho, and the hammer quickly clicked on an empty chamber.
“Stay down, Ryan,” J.B. snapped, able now to bring the Uzi into play. The powerful submachine gun had a fire rate of six hundred and fifty rounds per minute at a muzzle velocity of around four hundred meters per second.
The Armorer poured half a mag into the pile of boxes, a spray of white splinters erupting into the cavern. There was a single short cry of pain from the man who had used the crates for cover. As the boxes fell, the body flopped lifelessly to the side, the Kalashnikov clattering on the stone floor.
Ryan put a single full-metal-jacket round through the head of the helpless, kneeling man, the tumbling bullet exploding his skull like a smashed melon.
Nobody else had a chance to fire. The remaining six Navaho stood in the stillness, looking in disbelief at their two dead comrades and the four corpses of the General’s men. The air was smoky, tasting of cordite.
“They died well and very bravely,” said Sleeps In Day. “Four of the enemy to accompany them into the dark beyond.”
Ryan turned on the Navaho. “You stupe bastard! They died pointlessly and could have gotten us all chilled. They might as well have swallowed their own blasters for all the good they did. I took out three and J.B. wasted the other one. Your people died for fucking nothing.”
Sleeps In Day drew a broad-bladed knife from his belt and thrust it toward the white man’s stomach. But Ryan had seen the attack coming and taken a step back, shooting him once through the center of the chest.
The powerful handblaster kicked him three staggering paces backward, until he tripped over his own feet and went down, dropping his own gun.
“Shit,” Mildred breathed.
The other five Navaho stood paralyzed at the shockingly sudden burst of violence upon violence.
“Don’t,” Ryan warned, covering them with the SIG-Sauer. “Don’t make it worse.”
“No time for talk,” J.B. said. “Shooting’ll bring men like blowflies to fresh horse shit.” He paused, staring straight at Ryan. “Might have to”
Young Pony Runs started to lift his single-shot musket. “It was badly done to” he began.
“Yes!” Ryan said.
He, J.B. and Jak were ready and opened fire almost ‘together in a devastating explosion of death, delivered at point-blank range.
Jak’s Magnum boomed and blew away two of the Navaho. The Uzi, set now for single-shot, ripped into two more while Ryan’s SIG-Sauer put down Young Pony Runs.
The bodies were still falling, the echoes of the shots rolling around the cavern, when Jak called a warning. “Someone coming this way, fast!”
Doc stood motionless, his jaw gaping, the ponderous Le Mat drooping in his right hand, pointing toward the crimsoned floor,
“That was most thoroughly damnable, Master Cawdor,” he whispered.
“Later,” Ryan said, already halfway through reloading the automatic.
“Jesus, that” But Mildred was also ignored.
The far end of the killing ground was obscured by a tall metal cabinet. A figure appeared around it, then vanished before anyone could get off a shot. Ryan had a snatched image of blond hair and very pink cheeks, but the woman’s reflexes were in good shape and she escaped.
“That’s it,” Jak said. “Now know here. Shit and fan together.”
They could hear the woman screaming out a warning at the top of her voice. Ryan vaguely wondered whether it was the same voice that had been singing Adelita so sweetly.
“Ryan, that was simply murder to shoot down those poor devils like that.” Krysty was as pale as ivory, her green eyes narrowed in anger.
“Stupe.” J.B. threw the epithet over his shoulder as he ran forward, pausing by the cabinet at the angle of the passage. “No choice, Krysty.”
“No choice! Gaia, there’s always a choice.”
Ryan was following the Armorer, but he snatched a moment to talk to the woman. “Chief tried to stab me. Chilled him. General’s men were seconds away. Figured that Young Pony Runs and others might slap metal. They did. Rest was”
“Silence,” Doc offered.
IT WAS A STANDOFF.
Around the corner was an open area that looked like it might have been one of the service personnel’s garages. The floor was stained with grease, and there was an inspection pit to one side and an overhead system of chains and pulleys.