paces toward its still-settling ruins before Marlon had jumped up and tackled her to the ground. He was lying next to her now, a consoling hand on her shoulder, talking to her.
Zula flinched, sensing movement nearby, and looked back to see that it was Csongor, approaching on hands and knees. He flopped down, pressing against her. Her body responded to the contact as if it were just him being companionable. But her mind understood that he was making himself a human shield to protect her from any shots that might come from the direction they were most concerned about.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“Ssh,” he said. “It is very logical.”
“Oh really?”
“Yes. You have to use your rifle to get the guy with the big weapon—I guess it must be rocket-propelled grenade? But you can’t do that if this asshole over here”—he waved the pistol vaguely in the direction from which they’d been hearing the bursts of the submachine gun—“is shooting at you. So I’ll take care of him.”
She was about to take issue with this when a racket sounded from above their heads. They looked up, blinking their eyes against a descending haze of wood dust, to see a ragged line of fresh bullet holes in the wall of the shed.
Zula met Olivia’s eye for a moment.
“Scatter!” Zula cried, and rolled up and ran around to the other side of the shed. She heard Olivia relay the command to Marlon and then felt and heard their footfalls and their ragged breathing as they sought other cover.
She was looking around trying to figure out where Csongor had ended up when a fusillade, the longest and the loudest yet, sounded from the driveway, up near the gate. Cringing against the shed wall, she understood that this had to be Jake and the neighbors, mounting some kind of organized assault. They’d be moving up the driveway, which meant that the remaining jihadists on this side would have to retreat toward the house.
Had Jake and his group seen the RPGs? Did they understand what they were up against?
Zula, summoning energy she had no right to have, risked getting to her feet and running several yards to the cover of the woodpile that Jake had used earlier. Throwing herself down, she raised her head cautiously and tried to scope out the scene in front of her.
In this environment, so filled with irregular natural forms, anything straight and smooth captured the eye. She saw one such thing now, projecting outward near the base of a tree. Definitely a man-made shape. But not a rifle. She suspected that it might be the stock of the RPG launcher. It was wiggling around, as if its operator were getting ready to use it.
Getting ready to fire a grenade into the middle of the group that Jake was leading up the driveway.
She was too low. She sat up, leaned against the side of the woodpile to steady her aim, and drew a bead on what she’d just been looking at.
From this higher vantage point she was clearly able to see the head and shoulders of a man, crouching against a tree with his back to her, holding a loaded RPG on his shoulder.
She got the crosshairs between his shoulder blades and took up the slack in the trigger. Then she heard a loud crack and felt something crash down on top of her head.
THE MAN WITH the submachine gun had been maddeningly elusive. When the four had scattered at Zula’s suggestion, he ought to have fired wildly in all directions, trying to hit at least one of them. This, at any rate, would have made things easier for Csongor. Instead, the jihadist had prudently held his fire, probably realizing that in such a melee he was only going to waste ammunition.
Csongor was confident that he had found reasonably secure cover. Since he was a large target with a small gun, he didn’t fancy his chances in a running-and-shooting duel with a small, elusive person carrying anything fully automatic. So, as difficult as this was, he lay very still and very quiet, and simply waited for the other guy to make a move.
Nothing happened for a minute or so, other than the sound of shots coming from the driveway.
But then the man just stood up, perhaps ten meters away, and fired a burst from his hip. He examined the results, then raised the weapon to his shoulder to fire at something with better aim.
The man was shooting at Zula.
Csongor pressed himself up to one knee, raised the pistol, and fired half a dozen rounds. By the time he was finished, the man was gone: dead or fled to cover, it was difficult to say.
ZULA HAD BEEN struck by a hunk of firewood that had been dislodged from the top of the pile by what she guessed was a poorly aimed burst of fire. It would leave a nasty bump but nothing serious.
Trying not to think about what this meant, she lined up her shot again and saw the man with the RPG, still about where he had been before, squatting on his haunches, bouncing up and down a little, pivoting and moving from time to time as he evaluated different targets.
Then a change came over him. He had been restless, nervous, but now had settled down into the attitude of a cat getting ready to pounce. Through the scope she could see his eye making itself comfortable in the weapon’s sight, his finger finding the trigger.
She pounced herself by pulling her trigger first.
Nothing happened. She understood now that her finger must have contracted against the trigger and fired a shot when the piece of wood had struck her on the head. The chamber was empty.
She pumped the weapon, chambering her last round, quickly lined up her shot again, and fired. Lifting her head from the sight she saw the man sprawling forward, and a jet of fire leaping from his shoulder as the RPG was launched. It caromed off the ground a few yards in front of him, spiraled into the air, and went screaming away.
“OKAY,” SEAMUS SAID, “I guess you can come with me. Just save the last shell for something really important, okay?” And with that he plunged forward down the slope at a run, cradling the rifle in his good arm and letting the damaged one dangle. Blood streamed down it freely and dribbled from his fingertips. He nearly tripped over the body of the man who had shot him, and who had been destroyed by Yuxia’s shotgun blast. Jones must have sent this guy back to track down the annoying sniper and kill him, which Seamus had almost made too easy by jumping up and presenting himself as a target.
Though, on the other hand, that might have saved his life. Had he stayed down, the stalker would have drawn closer before opening fire. By doing jumping jacks in plain view, Seamus had made himself irresistible, and the stalker had given way to the temptation to open fire at longer range than his pistol could really hit anything at.
“Should I take his gun?” Yuxia asked, thrashing along a few yards behind him.
“Good idea, honey,” Seamus called back. “Know that if you pull the trigger, it will fire.”
“Okay.”
“On top of it is a moving slide thingy that will jump back and bite a hunk of flesh from your hand if you keep holding it that way.”
“Mmmkay,” she said, a bit absently.
“I’m serious. Move your hand down.”
She did so, finally.
“You all right?” Seamus asked.
“We are running in the open.”
“You’re welcome to stop at any time,” Seamus pointed out, a little testily. “We are doing this because the end game of this thing is happening right now, and we are no longer near the place where it’s happening. I need an angle, and a shot.”
“You are bleeding on the ground.”
“Excellent place for it.”
They ran for a couple of hundred yards through the open space along the perimeter of the cleared compound, seeing no jihadists who were alive. Something spectacularly bad had happened to the cabin, but Seamus saw and understood it only dimly. He was, he realized, probably going into shock. And he was a little ashamed of that, since the wound on his arm ought not to have been such a big deal. His act of running down the hill and into the compound had, in a way, been a semiconscious tactic to put it out of his mind and get him focused on
