Red Equinox

Chapter Twenty-Six

Ryan was awakened by a soft, whispering sound. Someone was easing open the broken door at the side of the warehouse where he and Rick were hiding.

He lay in the midnight darkness with his finger on the trigger of the SIG-Sauer and waited.

There were two intruders. One was trying to press himself through the narrow gap at the side of the door. The rudimentary gas lighting outside cast enough of a golden glow for Ryan to see the shadow — a man, small-built, with the darting reflection off the metal of a handgun.

The other man was already somewhere inside the concrete vault. Whoever he was, he was good. Ryan had checked out the building a dozen times and had thought that all of the windows were secure. Now he knew that one of them wasn't.

The intruder near the door was short, lightly built and had long blond hair. Ryan still couldn't precisely locate the other man. It was difficult to concentrate, with Rick breathing heavily and moving restlessly in his sleep.

If there were only two of them, Ryan thought he should be able to take them out. But if they were part of a larger gang, then he figured it might be time to abandon the freezie and make his own getaway.

Also, if they were merely a couple of local killers trying their chances, it would be dangerous to use the powerful blaster.

Reluctantly Ryan holstered the pistol and drew the long panga from its soft leather sheath on his hip. Hand-to-hand fighting in almost total darkness wasn't among Ryan's favorite occupations. He wished that Jak was with him. The white-haired teenager was the best at close-contact butchery that Ryan had ever seen.

It crossed Ryan's mind that the two men who had crept in on him in the small hours of the morning could, possibly, be J.B. and Jak. The one he'd glimpsed near the door was the right kind of height, as well as having light hair.

Ryan edged away from the pile of rags that he'd been using for a bed. He'd calculated that Krysty's best speed through hostile country wouldn't have been good enough for anyone to have returned from the dacha. So, logically, it wasn't Jak and J.B.

The wooden haft of the panga was warming in his fingers. Ryan held the long blade down at his side to try to avoid the steel catching and reflecting the street light.

He deliberately slowed his breathing and controlled his heartbeat, moving only with infinite patience. The two men didn't seem in any hurry to get to him, and Ryan wasn't in any great hurry to get to them. Rick's mumbling and snoring were the only sounds audible in the large building.

Though he had a nagging doubt that Jak and J.B. might have crept in and were checking the place out, Ryan was ninety-five percent sure it wasn't them. The Armorer had known him long enough not to play triple-stupe by creeping up on him in the dark.

He heard a shuffle of feet toward the rear of the building, where there had been rows of empty closets and shelves. The floor was sprinkled with a number of rusted nails and screws, and the intruder had disturbed one of them.

Ryan waited.

"Patience never killed anyone," the Trader used to say. And the converse was equally true. The man who rushed blind into a fight often finished looking up at the sky.

Ryan waited.

Rick had a coughing fit and muttered under his breath. Ryan listened, hoping that the freezie wouldn't wake up and call out for him. The light in the part of the room where they'd been sleeping wasn't good enough to reveal how many lay there. As long as the two men didn't know that Ryan was up and ready, the advantage of surprise rested with him.

The other danger in Rick's mumbling and restlessness was that it could drown out the sound of someone moving in the darkness. Ryan wished that his fighting sense of hearing was better. If Krysty had been there she'd have pinned down the intruders like a ruby laser.

He waited.

There!

The nerves of one of the men had finally given way and he made his move, coming up out of a crouch against the rear wall, holding what looked like a sawed-off 10-gauge at his hip. The guy was silhouetted for a half second against the yellow light of the front window.

That was all Ryan needed.

He covered the distance between them in eighteen short steps, balanced on the balls of his feet, moving like a graveyard wraith.

He took the intruder from behind, when he was still several yards from the sleeping freezie. It wasn't like trying to take out a sentry without any alarm being raised. In a quiet room, there was absolutely no possibility of chilling the one intruder without the other man hearing the death. The best bet was to take him down fast, and move away into the deeper shadows.

When Ryan had obtained the panga from a 285-pound mutie woman who didn't need it anymore, the weapon had a round, blunt end to it. He'd honed it down so that both sides of the blade were sharp, and it tapered to a strong, needle point. It could be used equally well for either cutting or thrusting work.

The blow was a straight thrust from behind, delivered with all of his strength. The tip of the heavy panga penetrated the man's flesh, slicing it open like a razor through silk. Ryan felt hot blood spurt over his right hand and wrist and felt the shocked jerk of the body.

The blade was eighteen inches long, and the point erupted a handbreadth out of doomed man's chest, tearing through his heart on the way. Blood pattered onto the stone floor.

Oddly Ryan's victim didn't cry out. He merely inhaled sharply, strangely like a sigh of sexual pleasure.

The blaster rattled on the concrete, followed by the slow tumble of the corpse. By the time the body lay still, Ryan was on the far side of the building, kneeling against the wall with the window. He guessed he wasn't far from where the lightly built blonde was lurking.

It would have been inhuman if the second intruder hadn't been pushed into movement by the sound of the scuffle and the unmistakable noise of sudden, violent dying. There was a single hissed word. "Apasnost?" Apparently the man was asking his now-dead companion if there was danger.

It was sufficient for Ryan to locate his second target, who was more or less where he'd imagined, just to the right of the partly open door, already starting to move around the outside of the room.

Now, eye fully accustomed to the scant light, Ryan could make out the flicker of movement. Like a python sliding noiselessly from its den, Ryan went after the short figure, blood-slick blade probing the air ahead of him,

"What the fuck was that? Ryan? Ryan, are you there?"

Rick's voice, deafening in the silence, nearly put Ryan off his attack. The freezie blundered to his feet, trailing lengths of the torn cloth that he'd been using as a blanket. In the ghastly yellow light he looked like some wild-eyed corpse, dragged from its tomb, still bound with the ragged cerecloths.

"Ryan! Where... Oh, Jeeeez!"

He'd fallen over the outstretched hand of the corpse, tripping and landing facedown in the spreading lake of warm blood.

The muzzle-flash of a handgun lighted a small area by the door, and Ryan heard the whine of a bullet as it ricocheted off the far wall in a flare of sparks.

"Fireblast!" he muttered, hoping that the noise of the shot wouldn't bring some inquisitive sec guard on the run. Now, time was vital. The attacker had to be put away.

Fast.

"Help me, Ryan!" Rick shouted, floundering on the floor, becoming tangled up with the body. "There's a dead man down here."

In the passing stillness Ryan caught the faint click of a blaster being cocked again. He hurled himself across the building, aiming at where he knew the small blond man was waiting for him. It wasn't a situation for a cunning and subtle approach.

The long-bladed panga made contact, a yelp of pain and shock exploded from the darkness. But the feel of the blow was enough to let Ryan know he'd delivered only a glancing wound.

He rolled over on one shoulder in a breakfall, coming up in a classic knife-fighter's crouch. His lips creased in a mirthless smile. Now he could hear his opponent clearly, quietly sobbing to himself less than a dozen feet away. Ryan's night sight was way behind Jak Lauren's, but it was still better than most men's. Now he could see the dark silhouette of the intruder.

"Ryan?" Rick whined. "I'm scared, Ryan. Help me."

Outside, Ryan heard the rumble of a convoy of large transport wags moving along the road. The lights of the first vehicle shone coldly through the frosted glass, bouncing off the far wall of the workshop, providing enough illumination for Ryan to see the wounded Russkie. He did indeed bear a passing resemblance to Jak Lauren. Slight of build with a shock of blond hair that glowed white in the reflected glow of the wags' headlights, the youth had a narrow, pinched face, with hollowed cheekbones and deep-set eyes. He was holding a crudely made zip-blaster, not much more than a .22 caliber. It was in his left hand, pointing toward the floor. Dark blood flowed down his right arm, from a deep stab wound near the elbow.

"Nyet," he said, seeing Ryan at the same moment. He shuffled a couple of steps to his left, away from the one-eyed man with the panga.

Rick saw them both at more or less the same time, opening his mouth to yell, then closing it again.

Ryan considered throwing the panga, but it was a crude weapon for accuracy. The little gun continued to hang toward the dusty concrete, almost as if the young Russian had completely forgotten that he was holding it.

"Nyet, nyet. Druk." He pointed to himself, trying to convince the terrifying specter that he was a friend, which was a real uphill battle.

But the begging tone was unmistakable. Ryan shook his head, smiling gently at the terrified boy. "Nyet," he repeated, closing in on him, never taking his eye off the blaster.

The noise of the passing line of trucks was almost deafening, and their lights made the interior of the building as bright as day.

The blood changed from black to brown to red as the lights hit it, trickling steadily down the youth's forearm, over the wrist and plopping off the tips of the trembling fingers.

"Nyet," he stammered.

"No." was one of the handful of Russian words that Ryan had learned from Rick. One of the others was "Yes."

Now he was within reach. "Da," Ryan whispered.

He opened the Russian's throat with the singing edge of the butcher's knife in a forceful backhanded cut. The gun fell, bouncing off the young man's foot, so that it landed almost soundlessly. Ryan moved back quickly to avoid being dappled by the spray of blood that gushed out of the hewed gash across the pale throat.

A voice from near the door broke the stillness in the room, rising above the noise of the passing wags. The voice of J. B. Dix.

"Knew you were a mean son of a bitch, Ryan," he said.

Ryan laughed. "Good to see you, J.B. And you, Jak. Good to see you both."

Rick stood up, very unsteady on his feet. "I'll second... that, Ryan. I'll second..." And he fainted.