Guiding the horse at a slight angle so that she could get a clear shot, she fired three times at the window. The first shot cannoned off the outside brickwork. The second shot went through and hit someone, as she heard a scream of pain. The third shot was the most deadly, as she heard it ricochet off the metal of the refinery pipes. A fraction of a second later she was thrown from her mount as the night erupted into light. The ricochet had hit the plas-ex that the saboteur was planting and had ignited it. The refinery building was ripped apart by the explosion, the wall nearest Krysty being blown out and scattering debris across the immediate area. She was thankful that her horse had thrown her, for the animal acted as a shield, taking hits from several chunks of brickwork that would otherwise have chilled her.
The explosion startled Mildred, but not as much as it startled the two saboteurs who were working inside the building just in front of her. Scared and thinking only of getting the hell out, the two men rushed from the doorway of the building, presenting Mildred with the easiest of moving targets.
She sighted with her Czech-made ZKR, the very model of target pistol she had used in competition.
She very rarely missed, and never at such a range as this.
The first shot caught her target between the eyes, puncturing his forehead with a neat, precise hole that dribbled blood as the slug pierced his frontal lobes. Before he had even begun to fall, she had sighted and fired on the second man, who took his bullet in the chest, shattering his breastbone and stopping his heart while bone shards ripped into his lungs. He hit the ground a fraction of a second after his companion, and Mildred waited a few seconds for anyone else to emerge from the building before leaving her cover to check it out. She then moved over to join Doc, who had run to Krysty’s aid when the explosion sounded. Fortunately, her horse had taken the brunt of the blast, and the woman had only a few contusions to show for her part in the explosion.
And so it was over. The saboteurs were routed, and only one of the attempts to destroy parts of the well and refinery had succeeded—albeit by accident.
But still it gave no clue as to why or who.
Chapter Seventeen
It took several hours for Ryan and his people to gather their surviving horses and the chilled corpses of the saboteurs before they were ready to travel back to the sec camp. By that time it was daylight, and as the procession made its way across the empty desert between the camp and the works complex, it encountered the party of workers, tramping across the dusty earth to the well and refinery. The sight of the companions, Mildred and Dean on foot, Doc and J.B. leading horses loaded with corpses, and Jak, Ryan and Krysty still on horseback, caused the line—and the sec men guarding them— to come to a straggling halt. Ryan’s chest had been bandaged by Mildred, and although the bullet wound had been no more than a scratch, now that he was tired and the adrenaline had worn off, it felt sore and stiff beneath his arm. So the one-eyed man wasn’t in the best of moods when one of the sec guards approached him.
“Heard the commotion last night,” he said flatly.
Mildred grimaced. “Give that boy a medal for understatement.”
“Reckon you could hear that all the way back to Salvation,” Ryan replied. “Didn’t get any backup,” he added pointedly.
The sec man shook his head. “Myall had us all out at the camp. All these fuckers thought each other was responsible and damn near tried to chill each other. If we get a decent day’s work out of them it’ll be a miracle.”
Ryan nodded. “Well, let’s see if we can get a reaction from them now,” he said, moving his horse toward the crowd.
“Gather around,” he yelled at the workers, beckoning them forth. As they started to move, he gestured for Doc and J.B. to unload the corpses from the backs of the horses. Dean and Mildred stepped forward to assist, and soon the chilled corpses of the six saboteurs—there being nothing left of two after the explosions—were laid out on the ground. Two of them were mangled and mutilated beyond any real recognition, but the others were still recognizable.