Okie raised her gun to shoulder level, bracing it, squinting down the barrel. She tightened her finger on the trigger.
The explosion woke the night. The M-16 spat out death, empty cartridge cases tinkling on the stones. She saw the bursting sparks as the 5.56 mm bullets bounced off the rocks and the iron, screeching into the dark valley. Two of the four strangers went down under the first hail of lead. The third dived sideways, snapping off shots from a Kalashnikov AKM, the heavy 7.62 mm bullets whining high over Okie's head, dashing splinters of rock around her.
The fourth figure vanished into the maze of twisted metal. Okie's guess was that the fourth man who had been, crouched over the girders, was an explosives expert. If she was right, then he was the prime target. She waited, knowing that the third blaster was likely to try for better cover.
He did.
She bowled him over in a jumble of kicking legs and scrabbling hands.
There was no need for her to warn Ryan and the others. At the first echo of the hammering carbine, they were awake. Within seconds they were beside her, holding their weapons. Lori and Doc were the last to show.
'Cover me!' yelled Okie, making her move — a dodging, crouched run toward the spot where the fourth man had disappeared.
Ryan and J.B. both gave scattering fire, raking the hillside to right and left of the darting girl. Hennings and Finnegan were behind them, taking shelter behind an overturned water tank. The four men hadn't come raiding alone. Already there was spasmodic fire from farther down the trail, but it was poorly aimed.
The big man who'd gone into hiding was Grom; nicknamed Thunder, he was the expert in the gang on all manner of bombs, mines and explosives. Uchitel had sent him in with a small support party to try to bring the sluice down on the sleeping Americans. Nobody had seen Okie, patrolling like a panther in the shadows.
Grom was deaf and hadn't heard the opening burst of fire, but he'd seen his friends falling. Now he was on his own, with the long-haired woman after him. He held a parcel of plastic explosives, primed and attached to a timer. But there was a manual override on the bomb. He saw that he was trapped, but he grinned; he could still set off his bomb and take these Americans with him in death. With Uchitel as his leader, he feared failure much more than mere death.
Someone farther down the trail fired a phos gren, flooding the whole area with a stark white light. It flushed the lurking Russian from his hiding place, sending him scampering toward the blind corner of the trail. He clutched the bomb to his chest like an undelivered birthday present. Okie spotted him and fired from the hip, the bullets lancing through the dirt all round the Russian. Miraculously Grom wasn't hit, though he stumbled and fell, nearly dropping the bomb.
Okie, lusting to kill, dropped the empty M-16. Not bothering to draw her machine pistol from its holster, she went for the cowering man with only her long-bladed Italian stiletto.
Ryan was about to shoot at the Russian, when he saw the danger of hitting the girl. Also, as clear as day in the light of the phos gren, he saw the man fumbling with the parcel.
'Fireblast!' he spat. 'He's primin' a fuckin' bomb.' He raised his voice to warn Okie. 'Watch it! He's got a bastard bomb!'
If the blaster heard him, she gave no sign of it. Never deviating from her attack, she launched herself at the Russian like an arrow. Grom saw her coming and held up the package of explosives as though it were some holy relic that warded off evil. 'So long,' said J.B. Dix quietly, so that only Ryan heard him.
As usual, the little man was right. Grom's intention had been to throw the bomb toward Ryan and the others, but Okie's unexpected attack thwarted that. He was taken so much by surprise that he was still holding the ticking bomb as she landed on him.
The knife struck with practiced, lethal accuracy high at the side of the deaf man's neck, just below his right ear, opening the carotid artery in a spouting gush of crimson. Grom was dying as he fell. His last act was to grab the girl's green sweater, clutching her to him in his death spasm.
Before she could free herself, the bomb exploded.
The heavy sound was muffled by the two bodies. Ryan ducked, feeling the shock wave tug his dark hair. The booming noise echoed across the valley, bouncing flatly off the dam. When he stood up, his face was wet with gore, and he felt sickened at the sound of human flesh landing all around him. A thin pall of smoke blew across the plateau by the ghost town, then was gone. The rising wind carried with it all trace of the woman whose name had been Okie.
Uchitel signaled the rest of the attacking party to retreat. With the element of surprise gone and his party whittled down to only nineteen men and four women, he couldn't risk a frontal assault and an all-out firefight farther up the hillside where the massive dam loomed over them, dominating the valley. They assembled at a spot where the river ran fast and narrow, barely fifteen feet wide, with a thin veil of gray ice growing at its edges.
'What now?' asked Urach.
'They can go nowhere. There is the one road, and we control that here by the river. We have them trapped, my brother. Let us wait and they will come to us and beg us for mercy.' His comrades bellowed with laughter.
'Short an' curlies, Ryan,' said J.B.
'What?' said Finnegan.
'Those bastards got us by the short and curlies. No other road out or in. We go down, and they pick us off like flies in molasses.'
'Mebbe not,' said Ryan.
'I have never ceased to wonder at the enigmatic nature of your discourse in moments of dire stress,' Doc said, sitting against a stone wall that still carried a faded advertisement for a canned beer.
'What's the idea, Ryan?' asked J.B.
Lori moved beside Ryan, staring wonderingly into his face. 'We live?' she asked.
'Sure. We live right up to the moment that we start dyin',' he replied. Turning to the Armorer, he said, 'This missile you found...'
The launcher was like a sledge. The red-and-white missile rested on the sledge, with torn strips of tarpaulin swaddling it like a baby. J.B. and Finn peeled away the covering, revealing the sleek, elegant shape. It was about the length of a tall man and had four triangular fins at the rear.
There were letters and numbers stenciled on the casing, black on white, and white on red: USAF A/T/M SD4 TRD/C 24942 1/1/00. And in a circle, with arrows pointing to it, there was the single word Active.
'There's another one without
'But it's not a lot of good against the scattering of Russians down by the river. It's not antipersonnel, is it?'
They all stood around the launching cradle. Ryan noticed that someone — now long dead and turned to dust — had scrawled the girl's name, Cathy, on the live missile in green paint. For a moment he wondered who she'd been.
It was tempting to do it in the dark. The effect would be more terrifying, the shock more total. But in the end J.B. agreed with Ryan that it would be best to wait until first light.
The party split up. J.B. stayed in the narrow valley with Doc and Lori. Ryan, Henn, Finn and Krysty moved carefully down the track, stopping about one hundred and fifty feet above where Uchitel and the Narodniki commanded the river crossing.
'Could hit their horses there,' whispered Finnegan, pointing to the shifting blur of the Russians' animals.
'Tell 'em we're here? No. No fuckin' way. We just stop here and wait and watch. We move when the time comes.'
Major Zimyanin was also watching the river crossing. His cavalry unit was a scant couple of miles off on the
