She fired again, this time into the meat of Plath’s arm.
“Oh, did I get the bone on that one? Ouch, yeah? I have doctors, I have morphine, I can help, but first—”
This crash was not nearly as loud as the gunfire. Just the crump! sound of a bourbon bottle hitting a skull.
Lear fell sideways, and Bug Man kicked her in the stomach, then grabbed the gun from her hand.
“Shoot her,” Plath cried through waves of agony and terror.
“Can’t. She’s got me. Biots. Some kind of dead man’s switch. She dies, I lose it. So you don’t kill her, either, Plath.”
“My biots never got to her brain. They’re only halfway up her neck.”
“Hah! You bluffed the crazy bitch?”
A loud, imperious banging at the front door. Bug Man fired through it. “They won’t shoot back,” he said, voice high with stress. “They might kill their boss.” Then he yelled, “You come in here, I shoot her! I shoot her right between the eyes!”
“That was gunfire,” Tanner said. “We go in.”
O’Dell threw a quick salute and ran for his sleigh. But Babbington had run off, and O’Dell had never been any sort of pilot.
“With me, Sergeant!”
Tanner fired the engine as, down below, the helicopter’s rotors began to turn.
THIRTY-TWO
Suarez did not hear the gunfire in her underground position, but on the monitor she did see men rushing, guns drawn.
“Something just hit the fan,” she muttered.
She had located her own sleigh. It was parked behind one of the dormitories, not hard to get to so long as no one was shooting at you.
“Hope to hell they fueled the damn thing up,” she said. She grabbed the guns from the dead guards, stuck them in her waistband feeling weighed down and a little ridiculous, and raced from the room.
The dungeon theme was over, now it was bright-lit hallway, white on white. Ahead, footsteps running. A man and a woman. It took her three shots to kill them.
The hallway dead-ended, and she had to double back to find an exit. She opened it quietly, glanced around to see the warehouse she expected, and ran toward concealment behind stacked plastic crates.
“Who is that?” a voice yelled.
“The prisoner got loose!” she yelled, waited until a worried face appeared, and put a bullet through its mouth.
Running, running, one of her extra guns clattered to the floor, but she kept running. Running through her mind was that whatever had sent armed men rushing around, it wasn’t her. They’d been headed somewhere else, after someone else.
Bless whoever the poor fool was, but that was not her problem.
Probably.
The sleigh came slipping and sliding, hard to control, very hard to control as Tanner raced it down the ramp. First things first: kill that chopper.
Small-arms fire popped off to his left, chipping stone from the wall to his right.
“RPG at your six!” O’Dell yelled.
The wobbly rocket arced toward them, fired from behind and below. It missed by inches and blew up against the stone wall. The sleigh was blown clear of the ramp, still a hundred feet up from the bottom of the valley.
But then the computer kicked in—roared the engines to push a tornado of air beneath the hovercraft—which slowed the descent so that rather than being fatal it was merely bone-jarring as it slammed down onto gravel.
“RPG!” O’Dell yelled again, but this time Tanner had seen it coming even before O’Dell and pushed the throttle forward. The sleigh bucked, kicked up a storm of gravel, and blew past the missile, which detonated fifty feet away.
“On that building!” O’Dell pointed and there, sure enough, were two men manhandling yet another round into the missile launcher.
“Like hell,” Tanner yelled, swung the nose of the sleigh around and fired blind at the building with one of his own missiles. It struck a second-floor window and blew a hole. It did not kill the men with the RPG, but the concussion knocked them onto their backs.
“The house!” Tanner yelled. He aimed the sleigh toward it and then, at the last second, sank the brakes into gravel and the sleigh skidded sideways into a stop. O’Dell had already opened the canopy and now leapt, pistol in hand, to rush the door.
The sniper fired once, and O’Dell slammed onto his face and did not move. At the same moment the door of the house flew open and a young black kid in a bathrobe appeared, dragging Sadie by one arm.
The sniper fired and missed.
Tanner spotted the muzzle flash, and thanked whatever God watched over him that the sleigh had skidded sideways, because his weapons were pointed in the right direction. He launched a missile that blew a hole in this second structure, and while the sniper was recovering Tanner emptied his pistol at the roofline.
“Get in! Get in!”
The boy climbed in, hauling a nearly helpless Plath after him. The canopy would not close with Plath’s legs sticking out, but Tanner wasn’t waiting. He gunned the engine and roared away toward the ramp, firing his thirty-mil cannon continuously, causing bright-red flowers to bloom on walls, empty ground, and a couple of men.
“Get her in, get her in!”
“Can’t, there’s no room!” Bug Man cried, but nevertheless he hauled a screaming, bloody Plath the rest of the way into the cockpit, a tumble of limbs and hair on Bug Man’s lap.
“Who are you?” Tanner demanded.
“They call me Bug Man.”
“Yeah, well, listen up, Bug Man. See this? That’s the throttle. That’s the brake. This is the yoke. The computer will help.”