Next to him in the muck under the hut, Charlie had fallen completely silent except for his breathing, which sounded a lot like the old steam trains from the movies, chugging and huffing at a rate that couldn’t be healthy.
“Are we going to die?” Charlie whined.
“I don’t think so,” Evan said. He tried to sound more certain than his words, even though his mind was screaming the same question. He didn’t have the luxury of panicking, though, because Charlie had gotten there first, and one of them had to keep a level head.
“Who are they?” Charlie asked.
“It’s a long-”
Before Evan could finish his answer, his head exploded in pain, and he found himself being dragged through the miserable soup of mud and cold water. “Ow!” he yelled, and when he reached for the top of his head, he found a fist wrapped around a handful of his hair. By touching the fist, he seemed to have accelerated the rate at which he was being dragged out from under the hut.
He clawed at the ground with his heels, but there was no stopping his attacker. In just a couple of seconds, he was completely clear and dangling on tiptoes from his hair.
It was Victor, towering huge as ever, and now slicked with what looked in the dim light to be blood. His eyes burned with an anger that Evan could actually feel.
Evan wrapped his hands around the man’s forearm for leverage and kicked out for the man’s crotch, scoring a hit solid enough to make him lose his grip, but not enough to make him drop.
“Help!” Evan yelled. “Mr. Jonathan! Mr. Jonathan! Help!”
Victor still had his Louisville Slugger. He unleashed a two-handed home-run swing at the boy’s head. Evan ducked, barely dodging the blow that splintered the hut’s wall, and fell back into the mud. He screamed again.
In the flashing, dancing light of the fire, he saw Victor smile as he brought the bat high over his head. Evan shrieked, first in terror, and then in agony.
Jonathan understood in a single glance what was happening, and he kicked himself for having dropped his guard. You never put all eyes in one direction, and you never leave the precious cargo alone. He had done both, and now a large and very pissed-off local was threatening to ruin everything with a baseball bat.
Jonathan pushed away from the wall. “Stay on the chopper,” he commanded to Boxers. With Harvey’s ruse on the edge of working and the helicopter flaring to land, Jonathan couldn’t afford the noise of a gunshot. He drew his KA-BAR and rushed the man.
Evan was on his left side on the ground, cowering, his knees up and arms protecting his head, screaming like a terrified animal as the attacker raised the bat high over his head, as if it were an axe. Jonathan sprinted toward him, but he was still two strides away when the bat came down with everything he had on Evan’s raised shin. He saw the bone break, heard the resonant crack.
The agonized shriek churned his stomach.
Jonathan hit the attacker hard, driving his shoulder into the man’s side and burying the knife to its hilt into his belly. The man tried his best to yell, but it was a weak effort. Jonathan’s blade had found the descending aorta that he’d been aiming for, dropping the man’s blood pressure to zero in an instant. By the time he withdrew the KA-BAR from the gaping wound, the man had already gone limp.
Behind him, as Evan wailed, “My leg! Oh, God, my leg!” Boxers opened fire on the chopper.
Ponder sensed that something was wrong the instant after he gave the order to land. The man in the rotor wash-the man who, on closer inspection, truly did not look familiar-became distracted by something off to the helicopter’s right-hand side. Ponder looked, but he didn’t see anything.
When he returned his gaze to the front windscreen, the man in the rotor wash had changed. His posture seemed to have recovered.
Ponder yelled, “It’s a trap!” the instant the wheels touched the ground. “Get us up! Up!”
The pilot jumped, and his hands shifted on the controls, and an instant later, his head burst open, dousing the windscreen and the controls with blood and brains. Behind him, in the cargo bay, the gunner made a sound like a barking dog, and when Ponder heard his weapon clatter to the floor, he knew that the gunner was also dead.
He also sensed that he was next. He reached for the door handle, but in the panic, he fumbled the effort. Something big and invisible kicked him in the chest, driving the air from his lungs. Whatever it was-and he knew it was a bullet-had rendered his arms useless.
As blood spilled down the front of his white shirt, he was surprised how little it hurt to die.
While Harvey tended to the wounded, Jonathan and Boxers secured the scene. That meant walking the entire perimeter of the compound looking for living threats and then dispatching them. The fact that he’d heard no gunshots told Harvey that the first round of destruction had been successful.
