“What do you think?” Rob called to her in a stage whisper.
“Shhh.”
It was hard to make out anything over the hissing of the rain, but she sensed that there was more danger lurking in the brush. She crawled over to where a piece of broken pottery lay near a corner of the room and picked it up, then moved to the far window and tossed it into the encroaching jungle.
A hail of bullets found it two seconds later, from off to the left. She sighted carefully down her Beretta and squeezed off three shots, spacing them a foot apart to allow for some decay over the sixty yards of distance. The Beretta’s maximum effective range was fifty yards, but she’d worked wonders with one at up to eighty. Not stellar, but still effective enough to be deadly.
“You see anything on your side?” she whispered to Rob.
“Negative.”
“Want to switch weapons for a few minutes? I want to try to get up onto the roof.”
“Sure. I feel like I’m outgunning the poor slobs at this point with an M4 against some Chinese pop guns, anyway.”
She sidled next to him and ejected the magazine from the M4, replacing Rob’s half-full one with the last full clip.
“There can’t be too many left,” she reasoned. “They seem to have lost their stomach for a fight.”
“Let’s hope so. Go do your worst,” Rob said, then returned to scrutinizing the periphery. “It’ll be dark within another fifteen minutes. At that point, if we can reach the saddlebags, we’ll have night vision, and then we can go rabbit hunting.”
“Good point. But by then they’ll be dead.”
“Big talker.”
She eyed the area of the roof near the far wall; a section of it had caved in long ago, bird droppings and decay surrounded the base, with rainwater streaming in from above. If the lateral supports on the walls were still good, she might be able to make it…
Jet slung the M4 strap over her shoulder and started climbing, using the same techniques she did when rock climbing. Her fingers reached and found a hold, then she pulled herself higher, the other hand and her feet probing for a new cranny.
She poked her head above the roof and then pulled herself up and out, praying that the structure wouldn’t collapse beneath her. Tree branches weaved across most of the gap, and she used their cover to camouflage her position.
The M4’s flash suppressor and silencer were good, but not magic, and the little rifle still made considerable noise, so once she started shooting, she could expect to draw fire to her position. She looked at the entangled branches, calculating whether they appeared to be able to hold her weight, and thought that they would.
Rob was right. It would be dark in no time. She could use that to her advantage.
Sounds of motion caught her attention from the game trail at the farthest reach of the temple’s grounds, and she squinted, barely able to make out two men trotting away, rifles held to their chests like newborn babies.
She held her breath, waiting for signs of any more gunmen, but that was it.
Reaching out, she gripped the branches and pulled herself towards the tree’s trunk, the roof dropping away beneath her in jumbled fragments as it disintegrated. She found herself suspended in mid-air, the branches now her sole support in the gloom, and she steadily inched to the trunk before lowering her feet to the next tier of branches.
The two surviving men’s eyes were adjusting to the darkness when the first groaned and stumbled forward, tumbling into his companion before hitting the ground, a knife handle jutting from between his shoulder blades. His partner froze and then spun, to be confronted by a black-faced ghost pointing a wicked-looking barrel at him from twenty feet away.
Jet could see the second of hesitation in his eyes before he brought his weapon up, and had already pulled the trigger and loosed three rounds by the time the impulse to shoot her had travelled from his brain to his hands. His chest exploded, and he dropped his rifle as he flew backwards. She was already lowering herself to one knee, anticipating further attacks, but the night was still.
She crawled to the first dead man and retrieved her throwing knife, wiping it clean on his filthy shirt before rolling him out of the way and scooping up his AK-47. She moved to the other man and quickly searched him and found another full clip, which she slid into her back pocket before edging back into the brush.
A gunshot echoed through the trees, and she pirouetted to face the temple just in time to see another tribesman collapse twenty yards from the front entrance.
She waited, listening, but the jungle had fallen silent except for the soft sibilance of rainfall.
~ ~ ~
“Do you think we got them all?” Rob’s voice was weak and cracked at the end of the question.
“I’m pretty sure of it,” she replied, swabbing Rob’s wound before applying the pressure dressing. There was a lot of blood pooled around him. An awful lot of blood, and his shirt was soaked. She bound the dressing in place with gauze, then stood, inspecting him.
“You going to make it?”
He nodded, but his normally tanned skin looked peaked.
“We’re going to have to get you out of here. Can you walk?”
“Sure. At least for a while. But I’m not going to be much help with Pu or the target.”
“That’s okay. You were just slowing me down, anyway. Now I can get something done.”
“Ten to one is hardly a fair fight.”
“I’ll say. Poor bastards.”
“You really think you can take them?”
She smiled, the black smeared across her face making her profile appear ghoulish in the darkening temple. He could hardly make her out, but she was wearing her night vision goggles to attend to him, so she could see everything. Which is why she thought his chances of living another twenty-four hours were slim, based on the amount of blood on the temple floor.
“I can let you in on a little secret, since we’re such good friends now. I’ve done far more difficult jobs with way tougher adversaries than a bunch of natives with pea shooters. This will be a cakewalk. I just hope that Hawker’s still there. Even ten miles away, they might have heard the gunshots.”
“The rain would muffle a lot of it. That’s a fair distance.”
“Yeah, but luck hasn’t exactly been on our side today, has it?”
She reached out a hand and helped him up, then supported him with her shoulder as they limped to the temple door.
“What happened to the tracking chip?” Rob asked.
“It shows as being here. So one of the gunmen had it. This was a setup. They were on to us.”
“Which points to someone in the agency helping Hawker.”
“Yes. But that’s not my problem. I’m sure Edgar can sort it out. Right now I need to concentrate on getting across the finish line.”
Shots thudded into Rob’s torso as they negotiated the four stairs from the temple entrance. Jet dropped to the ground, clawing her Beretta free of its holster as his body absorbed round after round. She could see the shooter with her night vision goggles, but sighting the pistol with them on was a more difficult proposition. She erred on the side of caution and fired six shots, four of which missed their mark.
The final two punched into the gunman’s chest, and he spun giddily in a spray of crimson before slumping into a heap. Jet rolled away from Rob and reached over to check for a pulse. Nothing. She closed his sightless eyes with a steady hand and then bolted up, racing for her horse’s inert form, where she’d left the P90 when she’d gotten the first aid kit.
When she reached the dead animal, she emptied out the saddlebag, then slapped a new clip into the weapon, slid the other magazine into the pocket of her cargo pants, and shouldered her backpack and the rectangular nylon case before running into the night, her boots thumping against the wet clay as the rain slanted into her.
