“I know where he’s hiding,” Clarissa’s sister, Melanie, said. “There’s a bunker at the end of this hallway. I heard someone go down that way a few hours ago. It has to be him.”
“Take me there,” Jak said.
The other women suddenly began moving in the other direction, not wanting any part of the baron, not even to see him get chilled.
“Follow me,” Melanie said.
Chapter Forty-Two
Ryan and Mildred jumped the fence and were on the raiders’ trail, but weren’t any closer to rescuing Krysty.
Every mile or so, a straggler would fall behind the main group, fire several shots in their general direction and then disappear into the underbrush. The guerrilla tactics didn’t give Ryan and Mildred the time or chance to fight, but were slowing their progress enough to let the group, and Krysty, slip farther and farther away.
Currently they were pinned down behind an outcrop between two stands of trees. The trail wound to the left slightly, and the shots were coming from somewhere to the right.
Ryan took his brass naval telescope from his coat and scanned the terrain in front of him, but he couldn’t pick the shooter out of the shadows.
“We know his general area,” Mildred stated. “Let me see if I can come around from behind and flush him out.”
“Have to hurry,” Ryan said.
Mildred started to move, but Ryan held her back.
“No, I’m going,” he said. “You stay here and try to keep him pinned down.”
Mildred nodded.
Ryan left without another word.
He moved quickly through the trees and waist high weeds, making sure to keep some cover between himself and the direction the shots had come from, while always on the lookout for movement in the surrounding underbrush.
Ryan raised the SIG-Sauer as he neared the spot where he judged the shots to be coming from.
Mildred had been firing, as well, throwing a well spaced sequence of rounds at the shooter to keep him from moving off.
When Mildred had fired her last shot and had to reload, Ryan focused on the forest before him, looking for any movement.
As he’d expected, the shooter used the respite to return fire in Mildred’s direction, and the blast from the muzzle of his weapon allowed Ryan to spot him. It was a young man, a kid really, not much older than Jak. It was a shame to chill the teenager, but Ryan had no choice. The shooter was keeping him from rescuing Krysty and had to be eliminated.
Ryan squeezed off two shots from the SIG-Sauer, the first shot hitting the shooter in the shoulder, the second putting a tiny black spot in his left ear and blowing out a huge hole on the right side of his head.
After several minutes of blasterfire, the area was filled with an odd silence. Mildred came over the top of the outcrop and approached Ryan in a more direct route than the one he’d taken to get to the shooter.
“We’ve lost a few minutes,” Ryan said.
“Then let’s not lose any more.”
They turned and ran along the trail. Ryan wasn’t as good a tracker as Jak, but there seemed to be enough freshly trampled grass and weeds to indicate that the raiders had been through here recently.
He hoped he was right.
“THIS DOOR LEADS into the bunker,” Melanie said.
Clarissa checked it. “Locked.”
“Stand back,” Jak told them.
As the women complied, the albino teenager raised the guard’s pump-action blaster and leveled it on the door’s locking mechanism.
The first shot mangled the door’s handle.
Jak pumped another round into the blaster’s chamber and fired again. This time the lock was pushed inward, twisting it inside the door and away from the frame. Jak lowered the blaster and gave the door a push with his finger.
It opened.
He shouldered the longblaster and led the two women inside, his Colt Python at the ready.
Stairs led down to a second, much heavier, door. They tried this one, and it was unlocked.
Opening the door slowly, and silently, they stepped into a dimly lit room.
The baron was in the room at the bottom of the stairs, lying on a satin-covered bed, in the company of two women. He was bound to the bed with lengths of nylon around his ankles and wrists. One of the women was sucking the baron’s cock while the other one was straddling his head.