Betrayal

Chapter 22

“Shit. He’s moving,” Jet muttered, forcing herself to stand. The rain was still pelting them whenever a gust blew a sheet into the meager shelter of the cave, and it was coming down in torrents, limiting visibility and making for a miserable afternoon. She stared at the blip on her screen, now crawling steadily away from their position. They had been planning to get under way in another hour, but Pu heading out changed everything.

“We have to go after him. What if he’s with the target?” Rob whispered, frustration evident in his tone.

“Looks like they’re moving east now.”

“On horseback?”

“Hard to tell. But I think we have to assume so. Let’s get going. Mount up.”

They hurriedly repacked their saddlebags, Jet processing furiously. This was the last thing she wanted — a moving target, no time to formulate a plan, and nightfall rapidly approaching. If the stakes had been anything besides her daughter, she would have aborted the operation at this point and simply watched and waited for a good opportunity. Unfortunately, she didn’t have that luxury, so instead she brushed water from her horse’s face and patted his neck. “Come on, boy. Time to put you to work again.”

She swung herself into the saddle and waited for Rob, whose horse was less cooperative. After another minute of struggling with the reluctant beast, he was ready. Jet pulled the rein to the right and nudged her horse into motion, and soon they were trotting down the path, checking the tracking screen every few minutes.

“We need to pick up the pace. They’re heading at a right angle from the camp. Let’s hope that we can find a route that parallels their path, or we’re screwed,” she said, eyeing the vegetation for any promising signs.

Ten minutes later, they came across a game trail that led off in the rough direction of their quarry. Jet ducked and urged her steed forward. Branches scratched at them as they fought their way through the brush, and then the undergrowth became sparser, and they could move more easily. A brook burbled just ahead of them, and they saw another trail paralleling it. Jet was operating purely on instinct now, trying to close the distance so they could engage. It hadn’t looked like the camp was getting ready to move, so this was probably only a portion of the gunmen accompanying Pu, and possibly, the target. That was the only good news in all of this.

“How far now?” Rob whispered, pulling alongside her as the horses instinctively followed the creek.

“Less than half a mile.”

“Then what?”

“If Hawker’s with Pu, then obviously we take him alive. The rest of them I don’t care about.”

“So shoot first and ask questions later?”

“But spare Hawker. He’s the priority.”

A bird took flight from a tree ahead of them, flapping its wings noisily. Jet stopped and held up a hand, head cocked to the side, listening. She craned her neck, trying to see ahead of them, but the rain made it almost impossible. After checking the screen again, she turned to face Rob.

“Dismount,” she hissed, already in motion.

“Why?” Rob whispered, dropping to the ground.

“Something’s wrong. I don’t like this.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” She clutched the P90 in her right hand as she held the reins with her left. “Follow me.”

They inched forward through the tangle of vegetation, Jet’s senses tingling, her horse’s hooves squishing in the mud behind her. The stream veered to the left, and they crept along it, the water bubbling as it passed over the smooth round rocks beneath.

The trees parted, and the outline of a building shrouded in mist loomed in the near distance, its roof curved at the corners in a highly stylized fashion. They could see that the structure was an old Buddhist temple, now fallen on hard times and in an obvious state of neglect. The disrepair became obvious as they approached it; what must have been, at one time, a remote outpost for the devout long abandoned to the elements, the faithful having moved on to less ethereal pursuits.

Rob’s horse snorted, a percussive sound that broke the eerie silence. Jet’s gelding pulled against the reins, stopping her, and then gunfire shattered the dusk.

Bullets tore into the frenzied animal, narrowly missing her. She loosed the reins and returned fire at the surrounding trees. The horse stumbled a few paces before going down hard, mortally wounded. Jet sprinted to the temple, firing as she ran. She heard Rob’s distinctive M4 belching burst after burst as she threw herself through the temple doorway, rolling as slugs pounded into the floor next to her.

Rob’s form lunged into the safety of the temple just as a round tore through his upper left shoulder, eliciting a grunt, but he still clenched the rifle in his right hand. He spun and fired at the muzzle flashes of the un-silenced Kalashnikovs and was rewarded by several cries of wounded men.

Jet emptied her magazine in a sweeping arc at the attackers and then jettisoned the clip, slapping a new one home and firing again.

“I’m hit,” Rob hissed through clenched teeth. “I could use some help with a new magazine.”

“How bad is it?” she asked, not taking her eyes off the scene outside, then taking careful aim and squeezing off another burst. She heard a crash in the bushes. A body falling.

“I’m still here. Can you change me out?” he asked, thumbing the clip release.

She edged towards him and pulled one of the three remaining magazines from his cargo pants pocket and slipped it into his rifle with a snick, then returned her attention to the attackers.

“How many do you make?” she whispered.

“My guess? No more than ten. Problem is they’re on both sides. Were on both sides. I think we may have gotten at least four of them, so the odds are looking better. Shit. I wish we had a field first aid kit in here. I’m losing blood.”

“We have one in my saddlebag. Let’s just mop these clowns up, and I’ll get you taken care of.” Jet shot at an area where the vegetation was moving as a gunman tried to edge closer. Her volley hit him, and he reflexively gripped the trigger on his rifle as he fell, sending rounds whizzing overhead into the trees.

A shower of wood shards fell into the temple from where slugs pounded the window opening she’d just vacated, the shots revealing another shooter sixty yards away. Rob let loose two bursts in the attacker’s direction and heard a cry.

“If they’re smart, they’ll try to circle around and get us from behind. You got this side?” she asked, squinting outside in the rapidly dwindling light.

“Sure. Pull one more magazine out and put it by my side. I can manage it one-handed once it’s out.”

She slid over and did as he asked, then pulled his pistol free of his belt holster. “If you run low on ammo, let them get into range and give them a taste of this.”

He nodded and tried a grin, then coughed, blood streaming down his arm. “Go get ’em,” he said, squeezing off another few rounds with the M4.

Jet crawled to the back of the temple and peered through the slits in the walls, patiently waiting for a tell from the jungle beyond. She didn’t have to wait long. A rustling of bodies moving through the brush drew six more rounds from her weapon, and then more inbound fire assailed her from a dozen yards farther away. She emptied the rest of her clip at the area and then drew her pistol, carefully unscrewing the silencer to get maximum accuracy at the limits of its range. The remainder of her P90 clips were in the saddlebags. But with only two or three gunmen left, it wouldn’t matter.

Rob’s assault rifle chattered as he sighted another hostile, and then there was a pause, the attackers’ guns having fallen silent.

“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.