Could they have somehow traced the com signal after all? But that’s crazy! We put our own com satellite into orbit and bounced the first signal off of it, and that’s the best software in the galaxy. We bounced it through so many nodes God couldn’t’ve unraveled it yet. There’s no way they could have back-traced it this quickly! Unless she had a tracer on her we didn’t know about? But we checked. And even if she did—

  He shook himself. How they’d done it mattered far less than the fact that someone had done it. But if it was the SBI or the BSC, where the hell was the rest of the attack? No SBI SWAT team would have taken out one perimeter guard and then penetrated the lodge without backup! And while the BSC was capable of finesse, it also believed in overwhelming firepower delivered in a single, finely focused strike designed to paralyze its intended victims before they could even begin to think about responding. So what kind of—?

  He stabbed the all-stations button on his com.

  “Com check!” he barked, and made himself stand motionless as the startled members of his team responded.

  They came up four men short: Brandão, Mönch, Sugimoto . . . And Ardmore.

  Shit! The damned power receptor! Manischewitz thought. Whoever this bastard is, he sucked one man out to check the receptor, took him, and made him talk. And then he walked right through our perimeter, killed Riley, and—

  Then the implications of Ardmore’s silence hit him squarely between the eyes. If he’d taken out Giuseppe, then that meant he had to’ve—

  His brain was still racing after that thought, his thumb already stabbing the all-stations button again, when Kuprian Grazioli came back up on the com.

  “Tobin! Somebody’s coming back out the—!”

  Manischewitz heard a pulser whine over the com, and then Grazioli’s shout chopped off with abrupt finality.

  “Somebody’s gotten inside the lodge and the bastard is headed back out!” he barked into the com. “Whoever it is, he’s breaking for the west! Palacios, Tangevec, Mészáros—you three hold the perimeter. He may try the ravine—if he does, kill his arse! The rest of you, head for the back veranda! We’ll link up there!”

  He went on talking as he jerked open a desk drawer and snatched his own pulser out of it.

  “Whoever the bastard is, he’s already taken out four of us—five with Grazioli—so watch your arses! I’m guessing he got through to Giuseppe before Grazioli found Mönch, so he probably has the woman with him. I want her back alive if we can get her, but the main thing is to make sure this son-of-a-bitch is dead. If that means losing her, too, that’s just the way it is.”

  * * *

  Alfred swore as the man standing beside the chaise lounge tumbled backward. The Descorso’s dart had struck just above his upper lip and hydrostatic shock blasted a cloud of bone splinters, finely separated brain matter, and blood from the ruined back of his skull. But he’d been shouting into a com when Alfred fired, and Alfred’s heart turned to ice as he heard someone else shouting from the wind-tossed woods to the north.

  His only real chance had been to get in, find Allison, get her back out again, and reach the waiting taxi before the Manpower killers realized what had happened. Only he hadn’t, and he had few illusions about the kind of men he faced.

  He almost turned to make a break for the woods, but a burst of pulser fire ripped over his head in the long, rippling crack of the darts’ supersonic passage. He snarled another curse and took the only option he had, sprinting not for the woods but to the south, circling to put the power receptor’s shed between him and that rifleman to the north. It covered him for a few, precious moments; then another burst shrieked past him. He jinked and swerved as he ran, then flung himself down into the ravine.

  A third burst ripped into the inside of the ravine’s southern wall, pulverizing grass, dirt, and leaves, but the shooter could no longer see them. He had to be shooting blind, not that it was going to matter much in the end. They knew where he’d gone into the ravine, and that bastard to the north was closer to its western end than he was. They’d post that one to watch that end, send someone else to watch the eastern end, and then they’d systematically close in on him.

  He slid Allison off his left shoulder as gently as he could and snatched the captured pulse rifle off his right shoulder. At least the man he’d taken it from had been carrying three spare magazines. That meant he was unlikely to run out of ammunition before they closed in and killed both of them.

  He elbow-crawled up to the brink of the ravine and raised his head cautiously. The dry water course was almost two meters deep at this point, which was good, and he had wide fields of fire in all directions. Unfortunately, he could only cover one of them at a time, and yet another fusillade of pulser darts screamed overhead. These had come from a different direction, farther east than the other fire, and his eye caught a flicker of movement as the man who’d fired darted towards another of the lodge’s outbuildings, closer to the ravine.

  The pulse rifle was at his shoulder, like an old, familiar companion, and his right forefinger squeezed.

  The running man seemed to trip in mid-air, then went down in the bone-breaking slide of eighty kilos of dead meat, and the monster snarled inside him. That was five of them. At least they’d by God know they’d been in a fight!

  The thought flashed through him, and it was poison bitter on his tongue as he darted a glance over his shoulder at Allison before he turned back towards the enemy. It didn’t matter how many of them he killed before they killed him, for he’d failed, and she was going to die anyway.

  Stop that! Maybe you have, but she’s not dead yet, and neither are you! Keep it that way, you stupid bastard! And—

  “Alfred?”

  His eyes widened as Allison called his name weakly.

  “Yes, Allison. It’s me.” He was astounded by how gently his voice came out, but he dared not look back at her.

  “You . . . came for me,” she said.

  “Of course I did.” He considered lying to her, telling her everything was going to be fine, but he knew she would read the lie the instant he said it, and so he shook his head. “It’s not looking too good just now, though.”

  She astonished him with a ghost of a laugh, but the laugh ended in a sob. A sob of hurt, he knew, but also of inner pain. The pain of knowing he was going to die, as well.

  “Here!” He pulled the uni-link from his pocket and tossed it to her. “Screen the cops and tell them to home on your signal. Maybe they’ll get here in time.”

  He knew there was no hope in hell of that, but he was astounded by the sudden explosion of excitement which echoed through their link as she caught it in trembling fingers. He started to say something more, then whirled as a burst of fire came from the direction of the main lodge. He returned fire and heard someone shout in alarm, although he was certain he hadn’t hit anyone. There were at least four or five of them coming from that direction, though. He was going to have to take his chances on what might still come from the woods, and he flung himself across to the south side of the ravine. He got there just in time to catch one of them rising to dart forward while the others covered him. Darts screamed everywhere, but they were firing blind, without a hard fix on his position, and he squeezed off a quick three-round burst.

  The running man went down screaming, right leg blown off at mid-thigh, and Alfred ducked back, squirming several meters to his left while a storm of darts flayed his firing position. He waited, holding his own fire until he had a target.

  “Jacques!” He heard Allison’s voice behind him.

  * * *

  Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou didn’t recognize the com combination when the caller ID came up. It wasn’t Allison’s, but perhaps the people who had her were willing to use additional coms now that they’d made their point. He stabbed at the acceptance key, but someone else spoke before he could answer.

  “Jacques!”

  “Alley?”

  He stiffened in his chair, wondering why they’d given her the com again, terrified it was so that he could listen to her scream once more. But then he heard a sound which could never be mistaken by anyone who had heard it before and bolted to his feet as the crack and scream of pulser fire came over the circuit.

  “Jacques, it’s me! Home on this com! We’re in a ditch near a lodge of some kind and they’re closing in on us! Hurry, Jacques!”

  “Alley!”

  There was no reply, but the connection was still open, and he heard more pulser fire. Lots of pulser fire.

  “Sergeant Brockmann! Saddle up! Move, damn it!” he shouted, flinging himself through the office door and racing for the waiting assault shuttle.

  * * *

  Alfred fired again—more to keep heads down than anything else—and started working his way farther to his left. They’d expect him to break back to the right . . . or he hoped so, anyway.

  Something tugged at him and he looked over his shoulder just in time to see Allison pulling the pulser which had once belonged to Giuseppe Ardmore out of his belt. He looked at her, and she managed a shaky smile.

  “You watch that side; I’ll watch the other,” she said.

  “You know how to use one of those?”

  “Not as well as you do, but my brother’s taken me to the range a time or two. Besides,” she gave him another one of those heartbreaking smiles, “I’m all the backup you’ve got.”

  “True.” He actually felt himself smiling back, then he shook his head. “Keep your head down. Just pop up, take a look, then duck back down—and never put your head up in the same place twice!”

  “Yes, Sir,” she said and crawled towards the other side of the ravine.

  It was absolutely insane, of course, but at that moment, as he watched her crawling towards a firing position with the pulser of her torturer in one hand, clutching his enormously too large windbreaker about her with the other, still shaking like a victim of old-fashioned palsy from the neural whip, he knew he’d never seen a more desirable woman in his life.

  Not the time, Alfred! Not the time! a voice in the back of his brain told him, and no doubt it was right, but that didn’t make it untrue.

  He lifted his head just far enough to get his eyes back up above the lip of the ravine, saw something move from the corner of his eye, and waited patiently. The main lodge was flanked by half a dozen topiaries in the shapes of various species of Beowulfan wildlife, and he watched the shrubbery where that movement had vanished. A moment later, the greenery stirred again. A head poked cautiously up over it, and the immaculately groomed branches exploded in a spray of red as he put a pulser burst into them.

  * * *

  Who the hell is this guy? Tobin Manischewitz thought furiously as Emiliano Min died. The corpse thudded to the ground less than three meters from Manischewitz, and his jaw clenched. The man behind that pulse rifle had already killed Gualberto Palacios and Häkon Grigoriv. With Min added, that made eight of Manischewitz’s team, and nobody had even seen the bastard yet!

  Aside from the ones he’s already killed, anyway, he corrected himself.

  He was down to eight men, including himself, and he didn’t like the situation one bit. It was obvious he’d been right, that this character was some sort of lone wolf, because otherwise the SWAT teams who’d been waiting for him to get the woman out of the lodge would be swarming all over their arses. That didn’t mean it was going to stay that way, though. The bastard had to have a com, and he had to’ve used it now that he had her out in the open. The question was how quickly he could reach someone and get them to believe him . . . and how quickly they could respond once they did. And the reason that question was important was that they’d managed to pin him down in the worst place imaginable because it gave him a direct line of fire to the vehicle park. There were three air cars and the “ambulance” in that parking area . . . and they couldn’t bug out when someone that good with a rifle was waiting to kill them the instant they tried to.

  God, this sucks! Somehow I don’t think he’d believe me if I told him all we want to do is leave. Hell, I wouldn’t believe it! Let somebody in an air car get high enough to fire down into that frigging ditch? No way.

  Their only hope was to take him out before anyone could respond to his call for help, and at least they could count on a little grit in the official gears. It wasn’t as if the SBI kept a SWAT team on full-time standby, and one of the reasons they’d bought the lodge in the first place was that it was outside the jurisdiction of any metro police force. The local yokels were more game wardens than cops. It was unlikely they’d be able to get themselves together in a hurry, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have the heavy weapons and training of someone like the Grendel PD or the SBI. So they still had a little time, but not much of it.

  “O’Connor, you and Schreiber cut back to the north. Get beyond his field of view, then swing across the ditch and link up with Tangevec and Mészáros. We need to rush this bastard from both directions, and we need to do it now! Zepeda, I need you, Yang, and Meakin with me. Keep your damned heads down, though!”

  Acknowledgments came back, and he made himself wait despite the desperate sense of seconds ticking away into eternity. He’d seen too many men killed by impatience, and he wasn’t going to rush himself into a fatal error against somebody who could shoot the way this son-of-a-bitch could.

  * * *

  “There’s more of them on this side than there were,” Allison said. “At least one more. Maybe two.”

  Her voice was weak, frayed around the edges, and he knew she was hanging onto consciousness only by sheer, dogged determination and guts.

  “They’ll probably try a rush,” he told her levelly. “One or two of them will get up to charge across the open space. The others will lay down covering fire. I want you to stay right where you are until you think they’re ready to come at you. Then I want you to shift to your left or your right, pop up, take your best shot, and duck back down. Don’t wait to see if you hit anyone! They’ll probably go to ground when they hear the darts, even if you don’t hit them, and you don’t stay in one place long enough for the ones laying down the covering fire to find you. Understand?”

  Allison looked over her shoulder at him, feeling the fiery concern under the icy focus of discipline and self-control. There was something else in there, too. Something that knew this was the sort of moment for which he’d been born. Something he hated. But overriding everything else was his desperate need for her to live, and she felt the strength of him flowing into her. The dark spots wavering across her vision faded, and she drew a deep breath, wondering what sort of bizarre, impossible connection let that happen.

  “I understand,” she said, and her voice was stronger, steadier than it had been a moment before.

  * * *

  “We’re in position, Tobin,” Terjo O’Connor said tautly over Manischewitz’ com.

  “Okay, he can only look one direction at a time,” Manischewitz replied. “On a three-count. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Manischewitz drew a deep breath and eased himself up onto one knee behind the concealment of the same topiary which had done such an inadequate job of covering Min. Not that Manischewitz had any intention of poking his head up where it could be shot off. He and Yang were going to provide covering fire for Rudi Zepeda and Lazare Meakin.

  At least for the first bound, he thought grimly. Then it was going to be his turn, whether he liked it or not.

  “One,” he said over the com. “Two. Three! Go!”

  He threw himself to the side, staying low, and squeezed the trigger and his pulse rifle spat death at two hundred rounds per minute.

  * * *

  Alfred saw the first movement a split second before the covering fire began. He ducked instantly, rolling to his right, then came up with the rifle already at his shoulder, and his eyes were cold.

  Pulser darts shrieked overhead, but he had a brief flicker of time before the minds behind those rifles could recognize what their eyes had seen and redirect their fire. And in that instant, Alfred Harrington found his own target, exactly where he’d expected to see it. Lazare Meakin was still straightening, still getting his feet under him, when a three-round burst ripped through his torso. He hit the ground, trying to scream with lungs which had been blown into bloody vapor, and Alfred ducked back into the ravine just as Manischewitz and Yang swung their rifle muzzles towards him.

  Rudi Zepeda took one look at what had happened to Meakin and flung himself flat in the minuscule protection provided by a dip in the ground. He’d made no more than four or five meters towards the ravine before he hit the ground, and he dragged his own pulse rifle around, hosing blind fire in Alfred’s direction.

  Ardmore’s pulser whined behind him, and Alfred felt Allison’s desperate determination. From the undertones rippling through their link, he doubted she’d hit anyone, but her stark determination to kill snarled through him, calling to his own killer side. And if it was different from the darkness inside him, it was no less strong.

  Movement stirred before him again, and he ripped off another quick burst. This time he hit nothing, and the return fire blasted grit and dirt into his face. One of the darts cracked past so close his head rang, and he dropped down, half-stunned, pawing frantically at his eyes. He blinked on cleansing tears, shaking his head and and praying none of them had guessed how close they’d come. His vision cleared—mostly—and he lifted his eyes above the lip of the ravine again. It was like looking through a sheet of wavy crystoplast, and he blinked again and again. Something moved, and he snapped off a quick burst at the motion even as Allison fired again—and again—behind him. He heard a shriek from one of her targets and felt vengeful satisfaction boiling through her, but he knew their enemies were gradually working their way closer to the ravine from both directions, and he prayed that none of them had grenades.