Seeker's Curse (19) by Alex Archer

Author:Alex Archer [Archer, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-12T07:00:00+00:00

Pan shouted something as she flashed past him. She ran bolt upright, hair streaming behind her, trusting speed rather than hunkering down or dodging to get to the temporary shelter she sought. Automatic weapons, several at once in different timbres, roared angrily at her, fil ing the valley with shuddering thunder. Behind her Annja heard the harder, measured whack of Lal squeezing off aimed shots from his Enfield. Pan, shouting wordlessly, emptied a double-stack magazine at the granite bluff, desperately trying to force the ambushers’ heads down.

Annja’s goal was a narrow, dry channel that ran down the slope to their right. It was floored with a lot of loose rock, treacherous footing. But if she judged properly she’d be protected from fire from both directions once she reached it.

Bullets struck off a rock in front of her. A ricochet moaned past her ear. She launched herself forward in a dive, remembering to hold her Glock up with her finger outside the trigger guard as she landed on her bent arms in the scree.

She slid, scraping her hands and banging her elbows cruelly. As she crunched to a stop she heard a scream. She raised her head far enough to see the granite cliff. A rifle fell, sling flapping. The figure of a man followed flailing. He fell headfirst into the rock at the foot of the cliff. His drawn-out cry died with him.

“Whoa,” Annja breathed. Evidently an incautious ambusher, overcome by buck fever and trying furiously to track the sprinting woman in his battle sights, had risen out of cover. Either Pan or, more likely, Lal had nailed him and he’d toppled forward into the air.

A sudden attack of common sense made her flatten herself as a single shot fired from ahead and above cracked over her head and hit a flat rock a yard away. It didn’t much surprise her that nobody had hit her on her desperate dash. Nor that the opening burst of the engagement hadn’t hit anybody. The truth was nobody could hit anything ful -auto at any distance except by accident or sheer volume of firepower.

The ambushers had made mistakes but were smart enough to figure that out. An assault rifle, especially a Kalashnikov, wasn’t ideal for aimed fire. But if you had the self-discipline to aim and fire single shots, the range was actually pretty short.

Annja crawled fifteen feet up the dry wash. The rocks gouged at her. Fortunately she wore long sleeves rolled down and long pants, or she’d be scraped seriously. As it was, she was going to look as if she’d been dragged through the proverbial knothole backward.

If she lived long enough. That was key. Living until you could care how you looked.

She had gotten far enough upslope for serious rock juts to flank her on the left—the direction the granite cliff now lay in relation to her. Tufted dry grass shielded her from the guys high right.

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