The Vengeance of the Tau (29 page)

Tessen opened fire an instant ahead of McCracken.

“Head shots!” Blaine screamed his way as the Nazi’s first three shots plunked into the bulletproof vests that the invaders wore.

Blaine had no sooner shouted the words than he got off a trio of bullets into the lagging figure’s face. The third bullet snapped his head back, and then he went limp. Tessen’s misjudgment had cost him the luxury of space and surprise; the killer was almost upon him when he at last put a bullet dead center in his forehead.

Blaine and the Nazi met halfway across the floor and slid toward the doorway. McCracken reached it first. The house beyond had grown deadly quiet. How many more of them might there be in the house? Whatever the number, they would have heard the gunshots and might be approaching even now.

“Scream!” Blaine said loudly through his gas mask back to Tessen.

“What?”

“You heard me. Scream. Like they were killing us now.” His eyes fell on one of the corpses, at the deadly black weapons that had been pulled over their hands.
“Scream!”

Tessen lifted his mask up to expose his mouth and screamed. Blaine followed, joining him. When they finished, a deathly quiet returned to the house. The overpowering scent of gunpowder had made its way to the second floor. McCracken peered outside into the hallway.

“Empty,” he whispered.

“Not for long,” Tessen warned. “They’ll be coming.”

“I think if we—”

“Not ‘we,’ McCracken. I don’t matter anymore. It is only you.” He pointed to the opposite end of the hallway. “You can get out through that window. Climb down and escape while their forces are still concentrated in the front.”

“While you …”

“Hold them off for as long as I can.”

“Might not be long enough, Tessen.”

“You will make it long enough. Once you are over the wall, you will be safe.”

“Unless they see me.”

“The mask will still protect you. Go!
Now!
Before it is too late!”

Blaine handed his gun to Tessen. “Thank you,” he said, and started off.

“It is I who must thank you, for what you are doing for us. Get out. Hurry. Stop them.
Destroy
them.”

McCracken charged off. He had to swing right at the end of the corridor to find the window that held his route of escape. He had it up and was halfway outside when the horrible screams reached him from well back down the hall, real screams this time.

Tessen …

From the window, Blaine dropped onto a branch and then climbed down the tree adjacent to the window as quickly as he could. He hit the ground running. Footsteps thumped behind him, closing the gap. He didn’t bother looking back. A pair, a trio perhaps, of the killers were giving pursuit, and more were sure to join them.

Blaine could see the brick wall enclosing the grounds just ahead. Ten feet high and nearly impossible to scale, unless he could grasp one of the vines wrapped upon it and pull himself up. He hit the wall climbing, razor-sharp death about to swipe at his heels. He grasped a vine and propelled himself upward, not stopping when he reached the top. He let himself tumble over and dropped onto a thick bush that cushioned his drop, but tore off his gas mask in the process. Impact on the ground was soft enough to let him have his feet back instantly.

McCracken was dazed, though, and the utter blackness of the night added to his disorientation. He could hear the pursuers behind him scaling the wall. More dark figures poured out from the mansion’s gate and charged toward him like a storm in the night.

A car was speeding down Schwogenstrasse. McCracken bolted into the street directly into the spill of its headlights. He intended to make the vehicle stop so that he might commandeer it. The car skidded to a halt just in front of him.

“Get in!” a woman’s voice ordered through the driver’s window, rear door thrown open.

Blaine stood there for a long moment.

“For God’s sake, do as I say.
Now!
”

McCracken lunged into the back seat, struggling to get the door closed as the car tore away.

Chapter 27

“
I UNDERSTAND NOW
,” said Wareagle after the Israeli commando leader had completed his explanation of what they were facing.

He tightened the strap of the goggles that had been handed to him behind his head. They had been fitted with infrared lenses, but donning them had reduced even further a view that was already restricted thanks to the black bayou night. He was alone now in the shielded clearing with the leader and the burly man named Joseph. The others had silently retaken their positions, eight commandos in all.

“And these will protect us?” he asked.

“They should,” the leader told him. “They haven’t been tested.”

Johnny’s mind strayed briefly to Joe Rainwater. He had died horribly, unable to even see his killers, much less fight them. The dishonor of it sickened him. The soul and spirit of his warrior friend had been done a terrible disservice. Johnny tightened his grip on the Splat-loaded Sterling SMG.

“You don’t know who those in possession of this weapon are,” he said, feeling his own warrior blood heating up against his flesh.

“Only that this is a return engagement for them. We knock out what we can here and hope for clues that lead us back to the nest.”

Wareagle tensed suddenly, the spirits alive in his ears. The night had turned rancid, ranker than even the hellfire’s. He moved forward until he was dangerously close to being visible.

“What are you doing?” the leader barked, as the man named Joseph started after Wareagle.

Johnny stood there motionless, his spine arched and whole body rigid. Joseph touched his shoulder and pulled his hand away instantly, a feeling like heat and an electric shock surging through it.

“What is it?” the Israeli asked.

“Pull your men back,” Wareagle told the leader.

“What?”

“Get your men out of here, Commander, get them out now!”

Inside the house Heydan Larroux sat in a chair facing a window with drawn blinds. Beyond them the night sounds spoke to her, and she tried to listen for their message. She heard the Old One ruffling stones through her aged hands, the sound curiously like that of a shooter at a craps table. The thought had her almost smiling until the familiar sound of a stone hitting water came, louder and flatter than normal.

She swung round to see the Old One’s hands empty and her wrinkled face wet with the splash that had resulted. Her hands were trembling.

“They have come,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” the commando leader demanded, storming toward Johnny.

“Act before it is too late!”

“My men would have signaled, I tell you. We’re prepared. If I pull them out now …”

The leader stopped when a soft splash split the other sounds of the night. A few seconds passed, then a single gunshot rang out.

“My God,” Joseph muttered.

“How?” the leader wondered, as he tried in vain to make his men respond to his contact signal.

“The water,” Wareagle had just finished saying when a black figure that was one with the night sprang out of the thick ooze and underbrush rimming the shore of the bayou. There was a dull flash of metal, and the commando leader gasped.

Johnny recorded the action in slow motion within his mind’s eye. But even that was barely sufficient to show him that the killer’s hands weren’t wielding the weapon; they
were
the weapon. The killer had driven them straight through the Israeli leader’s torso. Johnny saw them emerge through the man’s back like spikes as his ears recorded the tearing, wrenching sounds. The leader started to fall.

Johnny fired his rifle.

The Splat bullet struck the dark killer squarely in the chest and blew him backward into the water. A shower of gore sprayed in all directions. Johnny spun in time to see Joseph firing a burst into a second figure as a third took the big Israeli from behind with its hands closing on his throat. Before Wareagle could aim, the dark hands had torn Joseph’s head clean off. A fountain of blood shot upward, and Joseph’s body spasmed horribly before crumpling. Johnny fired a Splat into the killer’s head, and it ruptured with a fiery
poof.

Whatever they were, they could be killed. …

Wareagle took some comfort in that, although not a lot. He leaned over and checked the headless body of the second figure he had shot. It was a man, all right, everywhere except …

Johnny checked his hands. They weren’t hands at all, but molded gloves formed of steel that was honed razor-sharp all the way down the fingers. The method of Joe Rainwater’s and all the other deaths was clear to him now. The victims had been blinded first and then killed in awful fashion up close, unable to see and thus unable to defend themselves. The killers were out to achieve more than effectiveness. There was a ritual element to this, almost like the fanaticism of a cult. Johnny’s eyes shifted quickly to the house. The sounds he had heard prior to the appearance of these now-dead killers confirmed that there were more of them out there. They would now be heading toward the woman they had come for.

Wareagle waded into the muck of the swamp. His feet again sunk into the soft bottom, and the dense undergrowth tried in vain to hold him. He was waist-deep when the bottom firmed out. The water glistened instead of oozed. Johnny pushed himself in and began swimming the last stretch to the house that rose out of the bayou.

At the sound of the explosions, Heydan Larroux lunged from her chair and moved for the front room, where a pair of guards stood as her final line of defense. She knew already that all the other men she had posted were dead. The explosions she had just heard might have been a last-ditch effort by the few that had managed to take action.

“He is out there,” the Old One rasped from her unyielding perch over the water bowl.

“I haven’t got time for—”

“The warrior!” the Old One continued. “He is out there!”

Heydan was already into the living room, and the words barely reached her. Her last two guards held their machine guns at the ready, poised before either window. Heydan moved to the one that provided the clearest view of the walkway leading out from the shore, the only way to reach the house from land. In her hand was a detonator. Not hesitating at all, she pressed it.

Instantly a pair of blasts sounded, and the walkway collapsed into the swamp, sinking slowly. She discarded the detonator and pulled a 9mm Beretta pistol from the belt of her jeans. Whoever was out there would have to approach by water now. And it was deep this far out, ten feet where the house’s supports had been planted.

Heydan left her two guards at their vigil and returned to the first floor’s back room. She closed and locked the door behind her. An attack from beyond via the rear was much less likely, given the logistics of the house’s construction. The windows were seven feet above the water here, instead of four in the front, an impossible lunge for anyone. As for the upstairs, well, that seemed an unlikely route of entry at best.

Heydan Larroux steadied herself by one window and then shifted to the other. The Old One remained in the floor’s center, seeing without eyes. The longest two minutes of Heydan’s life had passed when a blast rang out in the front room. She heard her men yelling at each other, followed by the distinctive clacking of automatic-rifle fire. They continued shouting as they fired, but their words were indecipherable to her.

“My God,” Heydan muttered, staring at the door before her. “My God …”

Her men were shrieking now, ear-piercing screams that grabbed her gut and twisted. The pistol trembled in her hand. Heavy footsteps thumped toward the door leading into the back room. Heydan backpedaled and tried to steady her pistol.

Something cold grasped her arm.

“The warrior is coming,” the Old One said, suddenly by her side.

“What?”

The Old One looked at the door as if she could see through it. “No. He is here.”

The Old One moved away from Heydan just before an explosion sounded that blew the door inward. Something crashed into Larroux and flung her backward. Impact against the wall stole all of her wind and a measure of her consciousness. She was pinned down by something as black and heavy as the night, as death itself.

Johnny Wareagle had made the night his ally in swimming his way through the bayou’s black water toward the house. The water would not give him up to his enemies, because it, too, was part of nature. Existing in harmony with its heavy currents made for the best camouflage of all.

He swam like a great fish just below the surface, stealing only what little air he needed to make his way forward in the night. He was a hundred yards from Heydan Larroux’s bayou house when the explosion disturbed the smooth flow of the thick water. The ripple effect disrupted his stroke, and his head cleared the surface to see the last of the smoldering walkway disappearing into the bayou.

The woman inside the house was better than he had thought. Johnny turned that way and stopped dead in the water.

A trio of the blackened figures were climbing up from the black water directly under the house. Ropes dangled down from its front to the water’s surface, affixed to pylons that must have been shot into place by the same kind of pistollike device that Johnny had used plenty of times himself.

The need for subtlety was finished. Wareagle pulled himself through the currents in quick bursts of incredible power. He had covered more than half the distance when he saw the figures reach the door. They jammed something on its center and it blew inward, half-torn from its hinges.

The water hid the screams that followed from Johnny’s ears, but he heard them clearly enough in his mind and imagined that they were Joe Rainwater’s. He shot through the final stretch of water without slowing for air. The killers had left their ropes dangling, and he grasped one to pull himself upward.

Special goggles donned, Wareagle threw himself over the threshold and brought his Sterling SMG upward. One of the black figures was laying another explosive charge against an inner door when Johnny pulled the trigger. The Splat blew out his midsection and rocketed him against the door just as his charge detonated. Airborne, he crashed through the door’s remnants and into a woman who seemed to be poised to make a defense.