Flight (10 page)

Another shot hit the dirt behind
her, then one hit the concrete.

She lay behind the barrier,
hugging as close to it as possible, trying to figure out her
options. She didn’t know what had happened to Dornbush or the jeep,
and the MP23 lay twenty feet behind her on the ground.

She looked up and down the barrier
she hid behind, and there were small cracks between each section.
Maybe she could see Mark through one of those. She crawled to the
nearest one. Two more shots hit the dirt past her. Whoever was
shooting at her knew where she was, but couldn’t hit her.
Fortunately he or she didn’t have any micro grenade shells. Eva’d
be toast if the shooter had an MP23.

She got to a seam in the barrier,
but it was tight. No way to see through it. She crawled to the next
one. Her MP23 was now thirty feet behind her.

The barrier bent as the on-ramp
turned, leaving a tiny crack she could just peek through. She saw
the jeep up on its side, having spun ninety degrees. Mark was still
in it, hanging limply from his seat belt. The sniper probably got
him while she was settling into the cargo area. Stupid.

Another shot hit the dirt about
ten feet behind her and about ten feet back from the barrier. The
shooter had a good view of the barrier but didn’t know exactly
where Eva was now, and didn’t have the angle or the right kind of
ammunition to hit her behind it.

She had to get to her
MP23.

Eva crawled slowly along the
barrier, heading back the way she came, trying not to kick up any
dust that would give her location away. Another shot hit the
concrete. Then it dawned on her that the shooter was mostly trying
to keep her head down, which meant a second shooter would try to
outflank her. The second shooter would be able to dispatch her
without breaking a sweat.

If she could just get to her
carbine first, she’d show them a world of hurt instead.

But she didn’t feel the confidence
she should have from the words she told herself. She was pretty
sure now that a second shooter existed, and if she didn’t get some
serious firepower soon, she’d be as dead as her partner. All she
had was the Glock.

She hadn’t been afraid of Shay,
the border guard. He’d been unpleasant, he’d hurt her, but she
hadn’t been afraid of him.

She was afraid now. Whoever was
behind this ambush wasn’t messing around.

Eva got to where the barrier
opened up, staying back from the edge in case the shooter had a
little angle on the end.

She waited for two more shots,
trying to estimate roughly where they were coming from. She double
checked the Glock, put it up over the barrier, and emptied the
magazine in the most likely direction while she scrambled to her
feet, bent low, and raced for the MP23.

She dove for it, rolling over it,
and picking it up, trying to move constantly. Her empty Glock went
flying and she didn’t know where it ended up, but the pistol was
nothing compared to the carbine.

Miraculously, she had the weapon
in her hands and she hadn’t been hit. She started firing it
immediately, blindly, in the direction the shots had been coming
from.

She had a moment to look as she
ran back for the cover of the concrete barrier. There were tennis
courts on the other side of the on-ramp and a set of low buildings
beyond them. Nothing taller than two stories. The shooter was
trying to hit her from about three hundred yards. That was a tough
shot even for someone with training. She felt a little
better.

Safely behind the barrier, she
tried to picture the jeep. It was up on its side and perpendicular
to the road. She hadn’t heard anything from Mark.

She checked the pockets of her
pants and she had several more magazines. She reloaded.

She had a lot of ammunition, but
not if she were firing blindly, the way she had been. It would go
fast.

Her pulse raced, she sweated, and
she was gulping air. She told herself to calm down. She’d trained a
lot, but this was the first firefight she’d ever been in. Agents
could go their entire careers without ever shooting at someone or
being shot at, but they still trained intensely.

She was grateful for that
training. She just needed put herself into fight mode.

She pictured her face looking hard
as steel, she told herself she was going to take out whoever was
hunting her, and she took a deep breath.

A shot weakly hit the other side
of the concrete barrier and she popped over the top. She thought
she saw movement on a balcony and she sprayed it. Crouching back
down, she switched magazines, loading micro grenade shells. She
only had two magazines of those.

Micro grenade shells were a deadly
invention.

Someone holed up behind a barrier,
like she was, could hold off an entire squad if they had enough
ammunition. Micro grenade shells solved that problem. They exploded
on impact or at a set range. If a soldier knew the range of a
barrier, he or she could fire just over the top of it and the shell
would detonate, killing or injuring anyone behind it. Eva would be
dead already if her attacker had had those kind of shells.
Fortunately, the military controlled them tightly.

She set the range on her magazine
and popped up again, firing three of the micro grenade bullets into
the balcony she thought the shooter was firing at her
from.

She got back into cover
again.

“Good shot. I think you got him,”
she heard from behind the weird sculpture. She fired a burst of
three rounds into it, the shells exploding against the side, pieces
of sculpture raining around.

“I’m on your side,” a whining male
voice called out when the dust settled.

Eva didn’t want to waste any more
of the precious micro grenade ammunition, so she changed magazines
back to regular shells. If the guy behind the sculpture had wanted
to shoot her, he’d have done it already.

“How do I know that?” she yelled
back while she worked.

“There’s a second guy on your
left. When you’re facing them. Behind the bus shelter.”

She took a quick peek over the
concrete. There was indeed a bus shelter where he said and no
return fire from the shooter with the small caliber
rifle.

“He’s trying to sneak up around
the side of you,” the voice called out. “He’ll probably think twice
now.”

“You move and I’ll kill you,” she
shouted back. She switched the weapon to the grenade launcher, the
real grenades, the ones that made every infantryman his own
artillery support. She only had three with her, but one should do
the job. She popped up and fired it into the shelter, then ducked
back down again, trying to see where the guy behind the weird
sculpture was. There were a dozen spots where someone could shoot
out from behind the stupid thing.

She heard a satisfying
explosion.

“He’s running!”

Eva didn’t ask questions. She
popped up again, led the guy like she had been taught, and fired a
burst. He went down. She ducked back behind the barrier and trained
her weapon on the sculpture.

There was a moment of silence,
broken only by the sound of the small fire set by the grenade she
had fired and the ringing in her ears. She watched every hole
around and in the metal sculpture.

She couldn’t tell what it was
supposed to be. It just looked like fat blobs of metal and some
kind of cage.

A pair of hands appeared in one of
the openings. She pointed at them.

“I’m unarmed. I promise. You have
to trust me.”

“Then come out where I can shoot
you, and we’ll see who trusts who.”

“Okay. Don’t shoot.”

A hispanic looking man came out,
squeezing through one of the gaps. Once through, he held his hands
high in the air and moved slowly towards Eva.

“Stop there!” she commanded. He
obeyed.

“Look, ma’am. I’m just a guy that
used to have a family. I just want past that gang, just like you
do.”

“What’s your name?”

“Juan Nepomuceno Polycarp de la
Serda. What’s yours?”

“Polycarp?”

“I’m named after my eleventh great
grandfather.”

Eva laughed.

“Listen,” Juan said. “I’d love to
discuss my genealogy, but there’ll be more of those guys showing up
soon. You got lucky there were only two on duty when you hit the
trap.”

“Stay right there.”

Eva stood and walked deliberately
over to the Glock, picking it up off the ground, and putting it in
her pocket.

“You can trust me,” Juan
said.

“I have a lot of firepower and I’m
sure a lot of people want it. If you cross me, you’ll be the first
to die and then I’ll blow everything up. Your gang won’t get
anything and we’ll both be dead.”

“I have no gang,
ma’am.”

She stared at him again. He was a
big guy, but athletic looking. She was probably being an idiot, but
he did look honest.

“How did you get out
here?”

“I’ve been hiding in one of those
houses over there.” He pointed to some houses to Eva’s left. “From
those guys. They own this whole part of town. I ran out of food two
days ago. I didn’t know what I was going to do until I saw your
jeep heading for the trap. I decided to follow you.”

“On foot?”

“I was desperate,
ma’am.”

“Eva. You can call me Eva. Okay.
I’ll trust you for now. Don’t try anything.”

“Eva is a pretty name.”

She raised the gun towards
him.

“I won’t try anything. I promise,
ma’am. It’s clear you have special forces training or something,
and I know you can probably kill me with your bare
hands.”

Eva doubted that. The guy had at
least a hundred pounds on her. But she nodded in
agreement.

“Let’s go see just how desperate
we both are,” she said.

They headed for the jeep, passing
an elevated ramp sticking up out of the road.

“How come we didn’t see that?” Eva
asked.

“Piston driven. They funnel you
onto it, then activate it from their hideout. It pushes up on one
side of the car and usually flips them over. That’s why the
concrete was removed where you went through. To give the cars room
to flip. Your driver must have been pretty good to keep your jeep
from rolling completely.”

“His name was Mark, and he was my
partner, not my driver.”

They got to the jeep and she
checked on him.

She was stunned to find him still
alive.

He was unconscious. His left arm,
from the elbow down, was crushed under the side of the jeep. She
needed to get the jeep off him, needed to see if it still drove
good enough to get them out of there, and needed to get him medical
treatment.

Juan must have had the same
thought.

“You’re going to have to
tourniquet his arm before we try to push the jeep upright. And I
don’t think we have much time.”

Eva found the duffel bag filled
with medical gear several feet away from the jeep. She rooted
through it and found rubber tubing and a metal rod. She knew
putting it on meant that Mark would lose part of his arm, but if
she didn’t he would probably bleed out. He’d probably die from
shock anyway, but she had to try.

She wrapped the tubing around his
arm, using the metal rod to twist it as tightly as she could. She
unbuckled his seat belt.

“Help me, now,” she
said.

Juan pushed on the jeep, relieving
the pressure on Mark’s arm. Eva pulled her partner out of the seat
and away from the vehicle.

“Stay with me, buddy.”

Mark’s face was gray.

She heard a crash and saw that
Juan had succeeded in pushing the jeep back onto its
wheels.

“Help me put him in the back
seat.”

Juan came over. That was the
moment she almost shot him. He moved quickly, athletically for his
size, but he grabbed Mark’s legs and helped carry him over to the
jeep.

“Get the rest of the gear, then
let’s get out of here.”

Juan picked everything up that had
spilled out of the back of the jeep. Eva got back into the back. It
had probably saved their lives that she had been there, in the
back. That, and Mark keeping the jeep from going upside down when
the ramp forced the jeep up onto its side.

And the serious
firepower.

“You drive,” she said to Juan when
he stood there, waiting to be told what to do next. “Do you know
how to get out of here?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he
replied.

She thought he was lying, but she
didn’t care. She had a new ally.

18

It took hours for
the Hrwang to figure out how to dock with the
Beagle
. The science vessel wasn’t
designed to sit in one of the Hrwang hangars. It had been built in
space and its designers never intended it to land anywhere,
especially inside of an alien spacecraft.