The left side of the soldier’s head caved in and the hooks of the gauntlet caught in the broken bones of his skull. The intruder held him upright for a moment, flopping uselessly like a speared fish. But it was all nervous reaction, for the blow must have killed him instantly. Then the man from the Gate snarled and jerked his hand back, freeing it, and at the same time shouldered his victim from the walkway. The soldier’s body toppled out of sight.
The second soldier paused and looked back, his face bloodless where the camera caught his indecision. His comrades were hot on his heels, outraged, eager to bring this unknown warrior down. Made brave by their numbers, he faced the intruder again and swung his rifle butt-first toward his face. The man grinned like a wolf and ducked easily under the blow, at the same time swinging his gauntlet in a deadly arc. It tore out the soldier’s throat in a scarlet welter and knocked him sideways. He went sprawling, got to his knees – and the intruder brought his weapon down on top of his head, caving in his fur hat, skull and all!
Then the rest of the combat-suited figures were surging all around the warrior, clubbing with their rifles and kicking at him with booted feet. He slipped and went down under their massed weight, howling his hatred and fury. The yelling of the soldiers was an uproar, over which Jazz had recognized Khuv’s voice shouting: ‘Hold him down but don’t kill him! We want him alive – alive, do you hear?’
Then Khuv himself had come into view, advancing onto the walkway and waving his arms frantically over his head. ‘Pin him down,’ he yelled, ‘but don’t beat him to a pulp! We want him … in one piece?’ The final three words were an expression of Khuv’s astonishment, his disbelief. And watching the film Jazz had been able to see why, had understood the change in Khuv’s voice, had almost been able to sympathize with him.
For the strange warrior had quite genuinely slipped when he went down – possibly in blood – and that was the only reason he’d gone down. The five or six soldiers where they crowded him, hampered by their weapons and desperate not to come in range of that terrible mincing-machine he wore on his right hand, weren’t even a match for him! One by one they’d rear up and back, clutching at torn throats or mangled faces; two of them went flying over the rim of the walkway, plunging sixty-odd feet to the basin-like magmass floor; another, hamstrung as he turned away, was kicked almost contemptuously into empty air by the warrior – who finally stood gory and unfettered, and alone, on the red-slimed boards of the walkway. And then he had seen Khuv, and nothing between them but four or five swift paces across the planking.
‘Flame-thrower squad!’ Khuv’s voice was hoarse, almost a whisper in the sudden, awed silence of the place. To me – quickly!” He hadn’t looked back, dared not for a moment take his eyes off the menacing man from the sphere.
But the warrior had heard him speak. He cocked his head on one side, narrowed his red eyes at Khuv. Perhaps he took the KGB Major’s words for a challenge. He answered: a short, harshly barked sentence – probably a question – in a language which once again Jazz had felt he should understand, a question which ended in the word ‘Wamphyri?’ He took two paces forward, repeated the enigmatic, vaguely familiar words of the sentence. And this time the last word, ‘Wamphyri?’, was spoken with more emphasis, threateningly and with something of fierce pride.
Khuv went down on one knee and cocked an ugly, long-barrelled automatic pistol. He pointed it waveringly at the warrior, used his free hand to beckon men urgently forward from behind him. ‘Flame-thrower squad!’ he croaked. There had been no spittle in his throat, nor in Jazz’s throat, by the time the film had reached this point.
And then the warrior had loped forward again, only this time he hadn’t looked like stopping; and the look on his face and the way he held his deadly gauntlet at the ready spoke volumes for his intentions. The clatter of booted feet sounded and figures darkened the sides of the screen where men hurried forward, but Khuv wasn’t waiting. His own orders about the use of weapons were forgotten now, so much hot air. He held his automatic in both trembling hands, fired point-blank, twice, at the menacing human death-machine from the other side.