other all the promises we need.” She took a pair of pistols and climbed to the walk along the top of the wall, found her way to a spot where the wall had crumbled a bit and left a small dip, then rose enough to survey the strip of land the men were approaching.
Sam watched her bring her arm up to rest in the chink in the wall and begin to think through aiming her pistol. He had seen her do that before at competitions. Sam had been a respectable shot since the days when a member of a highly secret force had spent a month at a covert base instructing him in close-range shooting and sniper techniques. But Remi was in a different league. She had been shooting competitively since she was twelve, a champion for whom the term “nail driving” was not a figure of speech.
Sam stood below her and spoke quietly. “Get down, and stay there until you hear shooting.”
Sam moved to the entryway, climbed over the barrier he’d built, sidestepped along the ten-foot overlap in the walls, and ran to the nearest stand of trees. He moved through the trees beside the level strip, getting closer to the space where the men would pass if they approached the walled pool. As he went, he studied the places he passed, aware that soon he would be running past them in the other direction. He took a position in the thick brush within an arm’s length of the strip but outside the causeway, where the plants had grown in fully.
The men came at a run, carrying their rifles across their chests. They ran like they were chasing game, not like men who were about to meet an armed adversary.
Sam crouched and waited. He had estimated fifteen men, but he could see only twelve. They wore khaki pants and short-sleeved civilian shirts and T-shirts. A few of them carried bolt-action hunting rifles with scopes — probably 4 power, because, in these thick jungles, long shots across open space had to be rare. There were two men carrying shotguns, a weapon that probably put food in their bellies. Two had pistols in holsters, and the others carried assault rifles that Sam identified as American AR-15s, probably weapons that had found their way here during the civil war.
The man closest to Sam carried a hunting rifle. He raised it and took aim at the top of the wall around the pool. Sam was sure the man couldn’t see Remi, but he was getting ready for her to stick her head up.
A man who carried only a pistol stood by a tree and shouted in English, “We know you’re in there. Come out now and we’ll make it easier for you.”
Sam turned his head away from the men and called into the hills, “We mean you no harm. Go away.”
Three of the men half turned to see if someone had gotten behind them, and one turned around entirely, his gun ready.
The spokesman said, “We’ll never go away. Come out and we’ll let
Sam could hear the bad news in the man’s voice. These men thought they had found very easy prey, an American couple, undoubtedly unarmed and helpless. They were probably already estimating the ransom money. And even if they got it, they’d kill them both.
Sam aimed his pistol at the nearest one, the man pointing his rifle at the top of the wall, waiting for a target to appear. The spokesman waved an arm, and the men moved forward toward the wall. Sam began to move with them to avoid being cut off from the entrance.
The man near him sensed something and swung his rifle toward Sam and Sam shot him in the chest, then dove into the low area beyond the brush. The man fell down, unconscious and gravely wounded. The others had seen him fall, and each fired in the direction he guessed the shot might have come from. Only two of them guessed right, and Sam’s thicket was peppered with bullets.
When Sam looked up, he saw that another man had fallen, one of the few carrying AR-15s. Remi must have shot him while the others were firing wildly, having picked him out as a high priority.
The leader trotted over to the man’s body, took the rifle and the man’s pack. He aimed the rifle at the top of the wall, but Remi kept down, knowing the men all expected her to pop up and fire again.
But Sam had a new problem. A man with a rifle was walking toward his thicket to see if Sam’s body was lying there or if he needed to be finished off. Now the man’s feet were breaking sticks in the thicket. Sam located the sound and fired three times. The man’s rifle went off, and Sam heard him fall. Sam crawled to him, his pistol ready, and found him lying, with an entry wound in his forehead. Sam took the rifle, cycled the bolt, pulled himself to the edge of the thicket, and pushed the brush aside with the barrel.
A man with a shotgun was moving along the foot of the wall. Sam aimed and fired, and the man fell dead. Sam cycled the bolt again and searched for another target. There was a man with a scoped rifle on a sling, climbing a tree so he could get a vantage into the walled enclosure. Sam aimed and fired, and the man went limp and fell ten or twelve feet to the ground. He wasn’t moving.
Sam cycled the bolt again and realized that after one more shot he would be out of ammunition. He crawled toward the body of the man he’d taken the rifle from. But, as he did, another man spotted him and cried out to the others. Sam was out of time. He fired, took the rifle with him, and ran into the jungle. He didn’t stop, circling toward the walled enclosure around the pool. He couldn’t hear any running footsteps behind him. As he ran, he removed the bolt from the rifle and tossed it into an impenetrable patch of low plants. A hundred feet on, he threw the rifle into another patch, and kept moving.
He came around behind the enclosure far from the entryway and carefully stalked around the wall. As he came to the overlap, he saw a man crawling into it with a shotgun slung over his back. Sam fired a pistol round into the back of his head, knelt to take the shotgun, then heard a shot ricochet off the wall inches from his head. He leapt into the entryway just as a burst from an AR-15 turned the space he’d just occupied into exploding stone chips. He clambered over the stones piled in the passage, and inside the wall.
“Honey, I’m home,” he called.
“It’s about time,” she said. “I was worried sick.”
Sam climbed the steps, carrying the pump shotgun. “I counted them. There were twelve to start with and now there are six.”
“I know,” she said. “At least we made it cost them something.”
“We did better than that. I’d say at the moment we’re winning.”
She slowly shook her head. “There were more at first. At least two of them ran off into the woods about the time you did. I thought they might be after you, but then I saw them going back up the slope where they’d come from. They must be going for help.”
“Maybe now is our best chance to get out of here,” said Sam. “Let’s pack what we need in our backpacks, leave the rest, and make a run for it.”
“That’s all we can do,” she said. “Let’s hope their main camp is far away.”
He set the shotgun down beside her. “You keep watch. Use this if one comes in range.” He left the scuba gear, the tent, and most of the supplies. He packed the extra ammunition, the machetes, and the artifacts from the pool in his pack and left Remi’s. He climbed up to the wall and picked up the shotgun. “All right. Slip off into the woods and wait for me. I’ll take one last look and see if I can…” He paused, looking at the expression on Remi’s face. “What?”
She pointed in the direction of the hillside. In the waning light, they could see a long line of men walking single file down the trail toward them. “It’s not six men anymore. It’s thirty-six. They must have heard all the gunshots and started this way to see what was up. Or maybe we’re so far from civilization that they can use radios without being overheard.”
“I’m sorry, Remi,” he said. “I really thought we had a good chance.”
She kissed his cheek. “You know, there’s a lot to be said for bees. When somebody comes to wreck their hive to take their honey, the bees generally lose. But they make it as unpleasant and painful for him as possible. I respect that.”
“It’s hard not to.”
“Let’s get every magazine loaded while we can still see. And don’t forget the shotgun.”
“Right,” said Sam. He went down the steps, crawled to the body of the man he had shot, took the man’s day pack, and crawled back with it. There was a box with a dozen shells for the shotgun, but the rest was useless — a canteen, a hat, spare clothes, most of a fifth of whiskey. Sam gathered more stones from the crumbled area at the end of the pool and piled them in the passage, then carefully piled up their supply of firewood in case they needed to start a fire.
He took the powerful flashlights they had brought for diving in the cenote, then climbed to the wall where Remi waited. He checked his pistols and hers to be sure they were fully loaded, then checked the ten spare
