Janus Trap

There were more gunshots, and a hailstorm of bullets drilled against the crates beside them. When the shooting stopped, Kane flicked his head out into the space between the crates, taking in the scene in a fraction of a second before ducking back behind cover as more bullets whizzed past.

“It’s not us they’re after,” Kane told Brigid as he returned to cover. “I think someone’s come to speak to your new friend.”

“With bullets,” Grant added, shaking his head. “Nice.”

Chapter 3

At the back of the cave, the assassin who moved like a ghost waited patiently as Decimal River’s fingers played across the laptop’s glowing keyboard. At the other side of the low-ceilinged cave, Cloud Singer’s eyes flicked to the ghost woman, still wary of her despite all that had happened in the month since she had found her way back to the Original Tribe.

The woman, the assassin whose warrior name was Broken Ghost, had such an air of stillness about her, of utter calm despite the tenseness of the situation, that it made Cloud Singer uncomfortable. The woman’s flesh seemed almost washed-out compared to the café-au-lait complexions of the other members of the tribe. Her braided black hair and dark eyes gave Broken Ghost a striking appearance unlike anyone else in the tribe. She had painted her face with subtle blends, adding the illusion of shadow, intensifying her cheekbones, making her sharp-angled face appear almost skeletal, and she had weaved bits of glass and small, sharp chips of rock into her thick hair. She wore a loose undershirt that left her lean arms bare, their tight, corded muscles visible. Her skirt was really just two strips of material—one in front and one in back—that dangled to her knees and left her firm legs unencumbered.

Cloud Singer looked down at her own body, perversely unable to stop comparing herself to the magnificent warrior. By contrast, Cloud Singer was just a girl. Sixteen years old, with all the energy and suppleness that that granted, but none of the raw power of the formidable woman at the back of the cave. She wore her warrior’s garb, as she had done ever since returning home to the outback: a tight strip of material stretched across her small breasts like a bandage, with more strips across her groin and legs, wrapped around her arms and encasing her scarred knuckles. Once upon a time, those strips of material had been the pure white of the clouds for whom she sang. After the massacre in Georgia, of which she was the only survivor, the strips had been washed with the blood of a squealing boar while Cloud Singer slit its neck, squeezing its life out of it, until the material was dyed red. After that, despite protests from the elders of the tribe, Cloud Singer had refused to remove her warrior clothes, to the point of even bathing in them in the underground pool that the tribe used. Only alone, in her few moments of absolute solitude, had she stripped out of the strange uniform, and then only to be naked. Until the mission was complete, she would never wear anything other than her warrior’s garb. She had promised that much to Neverwalk as he lay there, head lolled at that dreadful angle, the dried blood splashed all about him in the underground bunker in the Caucasus Mountains.

“They’ve used their slicer,” Decimal River stated, his head turning right then left as he addressed the two women on opposite sides of the cave. He was a young man, just a few years older than Cloud Singer, and his left arm was decorated with tattoos of circuitry. He wore baggy shorts and a loose shirt, open to the waist. The shirt was dark with sweat, and clung to his dark skin where its folds touched him. His hair was braided, like Broken Ghost’s, and his face showed a nasty scar from a burn across the left cheek, stopping just shy of his eye.

“Not slicer,” Broken Ghost corrected, her voice low, eyes closed in meditation. “Mat-trans. They call it a mat-trans.”

Decimal River pulled up a window of scrolling information on the laptop’s screen, flicking his hand before the motion sensor to run quickly through the pages of information displayed there. “Fifty-seven minutes ago,” he continued, “they activated the mat-trans, crossing from their home in the Montana mountains to…here.” He pointed to a paper map that was stretched across the wall of the cave. The map showed North America, and a red cross marked the Bitterroot Mountains. His finger tapped at an area close to the bottom right, but it meant nothing to Cloud Singer.

Broken Ghost took a single pace forward, and she seemed suddenly much more imposing as Decimal River looked up at her from his seated position. “Prime the trap,” she said, her words the barest whisper as they left her mouth.

Cloud Singer smiled. Soon the Original Tribe would get its due. Soon they would have their revenge on Cerberus and its accursed leader. And then Lakesh would die.

“IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME with these bottom-feeders,” Kane growled as he mentally assessed the immediate area around the crates where the three Cerberus warriors had taken cover. The exit door was ten paces ahead of them, and there was certainly enough cover to escape the boathouse if they wanted to.

“What do you see out there, Kane?” Grant asked.

Another hail of bullets hammered into the crates beside them, splintering the wood and kicking up puffs of sawdust, and they heard the sounds of guards running all about them between the stacked crates.

“People in diving suits,” Kane said. “Frogmen armed to the teeth. They were rushing in from the open dock.”

Grant nodded toward the door to the boathouse. “You want to get out of here?”

Kane thought for a moment, glancing across at Brigid for confirmation. “Nah,” he decided. “Let’s go make friends, cause mayhem.” With that, Kane stood, reached up and pulled himself up the stack of crates beside him, clambering to the top in a series of quick, economical movements.

Raising the Sin Eater before him, Grant hunkered down and stalked off into the shadows, his black duster helping him blend into the darkness. Brigid took a different route toward the opposite side of the boathouse, weaving through the crates at a fast trot as bullets zipped all around, the TP-9 held high. As she ran, she rooted around in her satchel with her free hand, producing three small metallic spheres, like ball bearings, from its hidden depths.

As Kane pulled himself to the top of the stacked crates, he saw one of Ohio Blue’s men up there stagger backward toward him, an oozing red stain across his chest where he had been riddled with bullets from below. The man cried as he misstepped, falling from the high stack and plummeting past Kane to the solid floor almost fifteen feet below. Across from him, on a nearby tower of crates, another guard was falling over his own feet, a gout of red gushing from a large wound in what was left of his skull. Whoever the newcomers were, they were well-trained, Kane realized—it took some nice pinpoint work to take out the high guards so quickly.

He pulled himself over the lip of the crates and, keeping his body low, stalked across the towers as flashes of gunfire continued to light the floor below. The body of another security guard lay sprawled on his back close to the far side of the crate tower, a single red-rimmed wound between his staring eyes. In an automatic gesture, Kane’s left hand reached down and closed the dead man’s eyes as he passed.

Kane dropped, lying flat on his stomach, and crawled the last few yards to the edge of the tall tower. His head popped forward, and he peeked over the side as the gunfire continued below him. It looked as though a miniature war had erupted down there. In heavy helmets and diving gear, a dozen men were working as a team, using long-nosed pistols to take out Ohio Blue’s guards as they approached the beautiful trader where she cowered behind her crimson recliner, bullets flying all around.

As Kane watched, the tall blond trader reached beneath the bullet-riddled recliner and produced a long-barreled revolver from its hiding place, taped to the underside of the couch. It was a Ruger Security Six, a silver six-shooter with enough stopping power to drill through a wag door. Blue hadn’t been cowering, Kane realized; she was using the recliner as cover while she armed herself.

In a flash, Ohio Blue raised the Ruger, steadying the butt with her free hand, and blasted a shot at the lead frogman. The bullet took him full in the chest and the masked man staggered for a moment. Then, to Kane’s surprise, the frogman shook his head and continued walking toward Ohio Blue, almost as though nothing had happened.

Ohio’s guards were also having little success, and Kane now saw why. The divers were wearing bulletproof vests over their diving suits.

Ohio Blue continued firing at the lead frogman, her shots going wild as she started to panic. A moment later, the six-shooter was out of bullets, but it took several pulls of the trigger before the beautiful woman realized. She tossed aside the useless weapon and ducked behind her crimson recliner as bullets zipped all around her.

“We want her alive,” one of the frogmen reminded his team as the group got closer.

On the crates above, Kane sighted down the length of his Sin Eater, slowing his breathing and focusing on the rearmost man in scuba gear. After a moment, Kane’s finger stroked the trigger, unleashing a short burst. The 9 mm bullets raced to their target, hitting the diver’s faceplate and shattering the strengthened plastic mask in an explosion of hard splinters.

Kane watched as the man ducked and clawed at the mask, his companions turning to look at him. From up there, Kane couldn’t hear the man’s howls over the sounds of gunfire, but he assured himself that his victim was cursing their unseen attacker even now. A grim smile crossed Kane’s lips at the thought, and he pulled himself back from the edge of the crates, rolled to one side and made his way to a new location as a hail of bullets slapped against the edge of the uppermost crate.

On ground level between the towers of crates, Grant rushed back toward Ohio Blue, his dark eyes assessing the squad of men in scuba gear. Even as he watched, the rearmost man took Kane’s bullet to his face and dropped to his knees, clawing at the shattered remains of his faceplate.

Placing his back flush to the crates, Grant scanned the area until he spotted Ohio Blue crouching behind her recliner, muzzle-flashes reflected in the sapphire blue of her dress. She was too far away and too out in the open for him to reach safely; he would need a distraction.

“Kane, Brigid,” Grant whispered as he activated his Commtact, a top-of-the-line communication device that had been recovered from Redoubt Yankee years before. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Even a deaf user would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact. The Commtact didn’t need sound to be activated; it could pick up and interpret subvocalized speech if necessary, making it an ideal device for sneak work. Permanent usage of the Commtact involved a minor surgical procedure, something many of the Cerberus staff were understandably squeamish about, and so their use remained at field-test stage for now. However, the communication device was considered an essential tool for Kane and other field teams.

“The trader’s in trouble,” Grant explained. “I can’t reach her. Any ideas?”

“Be careful,” Kane instructed over the linked transmission. “They’re wearing some kind of armor that deflects bullets.”

Brigid’s voice came over Grant’s auditory receiver after a moment. “I’m just getting in position now,” she said. “Going to give our guests a little light show.”

Grant knew what that meant, and he pulled a pair of sunglasses from the inside pocket of his coat as Brigid spoke, following up by inserting tiny earplugs into his ears.

“Count us in, Baptiste,” Kane said in a low voice over the Commtact as he got into place above them.

Brigid Baptiste was hunkered down in the shadows of the towering crates, close to one of the high walls of the boathouse. She had placed a pair of dark lenses over her own eyes and wore earplugs to muffle sound, just as Grant did. Her head was steady as she watched the group of frogmen swarming around the main area of the building, shooting the few remaining guards as they approached the recliner where Ohio Blue cowered. Swiftly, Brigid assessed the floorboards between her and her target—they were rough in places, and a little warped here and there with damp, but they were basically flat and smooth enough for her purpose.

She drew her arm back, rolling the three silver spheres in her hand for a moment, assessing their weight as she gave one last look at the scene. Then, her arm arced forward, low to the floor, and she released the three globes as her arm continued its fluid sweep ahead. Released, the tiny silver spheres rolled along the floorboards, bumping across the rough chinks in the wood as they rushed toward the recliner.

As the spheres rolled steadily across the floor, Brigid engaged her Commtact once again. “Three, two, one,” she whispered, narrowing her eyes and turning her head away from what she knew was about to happen.

For a moment, nothing did. The three spheres rolled to the open area beside the recliner, their momentum dwindling. Two of the intruders in scuba gear had spotted them, and one shouted a query as he stepped ahead and placed his foot in the path of the first sphere. “What the fu—”

His words were lost in the explosion of sound and light that followed as the flash-bangs detonated.

Atop the crate tower, Kane surged forward, his Sin Eater held low. Even through the polymer lenses of his darkened glasses, the dazzling explosive burned into his retinas, and he blinked the pattern away as he leaped from the high crate and out into the open.

A moment later, Kane dropped into the open area of the boathouse, the Sin Eater blasting a lethal arc of 9 mm steel before him. He landed amid the frogmen with a heavy thump of boot soles against wooden floorboards, then swiftly recovered into a fighter’s crouch as he began targeting the men in scuba gear. The sound of the Sin Eater seemed dulled by the ringing in his ears that the flash-bang had wrought, but his earplugs had helped protect him from the worst of it.

The flash-bang was a miniature explosive device, designed purely to shock and startle an opponent. The explosive was all sound and light, but the charge itself was so tiny as to be worthless as a demolition device. The flash-bang was standard equipment for Kane and his team, who often saw a benefit to using nonlethal force to restrain or completely halt an enemy.

The divers were all pulling at their masks in their sudden blindness, and several fired shots at random as they struggled to recover. To one side of the recliner, Ohio Blue was sitting on her backside, an enticing sweep of bare leg visible where her dress had fallen about her. Her blue-gloved hand was held over her eyes and her shoulders heaved as though she was crying.

Off to Kane’s left, Brigid was securing the area, her TP-9 raised as she checked every nook and cranny before moving closer to the main action. A few of Ohio’s guards were still alive, but they seemed to be wounded almost to a man. Tough to stand toe to toe with an enemy who could shrug off bullets, Kane realized.

Like a charging rhino, Grant joined Kane from his hiding place among the crates, fists swinging at the closest two frogmen as they staggered about blindly. His blows connected with solid finality, and the two men fell to the floor.

Kane turned to Grant and nodded his approval. “Not exactly subtle,” he shouted to be heard over the earplugs he assumed that the other man still wore.

Pulling the handblaster from another frogman and throwing it aside, Grant lifted the man off his feet and tossed him against the nearest stack of crates with bone-jarring force. “Their vests shrug off bullets, right?” Grant explained. “What was I supposed to do?”