Garin swung his arm around until the terrorist’s staring right eye, visible inside a curl of his hostage’s white hair, was perched like a plum atop his foresight post. He squeezed the trigger.
The eye vanished in a red splash. The terrorist dropped out of sight behind the woman.
She turned and looked down at her captor. Then she looked back at Garin. She seemed more startled than afraid.
“That was a remarkable shot, young man,” she said shakily.
“I learned from the best,” Garin said. I wonder what she’d say if I told her that meant Wild Bill Hickok? he thought, amused.
Then he winced. It felt as if he’d been kicked by a mule. His body armor, worn from habit because his business dealings had a tendency to turn nasty, couldn’t prevent bruising from the impact of such a close shot.
“You folks should find someplace to hide,” he said. He quickly subvocalized commands to his security force, whom he had earlier ordered to stand easy and await events, via a high-tech and very well-concealed phone. Events having begun, he ordered them to move quickly to neutralize the other hijackers. He had faith they would do so with discretion and brutal effectiveness. He knew how to hire skill.
ANNJA’S HEART JUMPED into her throat. Garin! she thought. The guard with the long kinky hair was starting to bring up his rifle. His body language suggested he was about to start shooting.
Who are these people? she wondered. Terrorists were vicious by definition and usually crazy, but most of them knew not to massacre their hostages except as a final dying gesture. It not only burned all their bargaining chips, it ensured the authorities, when they inevitably landed on them, would be in a vengeful frame of mind. They’d shoot first—and probably not ask any questions. Ever.
Annja was already moving. Her total lack of coordination on those ridiculous spiked heels acted to her advantage. She tottered a couple of quick steps toward the gunman, then stumbled against him.
He caught her reflexively with his left arm. It left him still clutching the Kalashnikov’s pistol grip with his right hand, and his finger still on the trigger. But in grabbing her he automatically dropped the weapon offline. It no longer threatened the innocent hostages.
His eyes went wide and his pupils dilated inside his mask as his left hand closed around Annja’s right butt-cheek. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “It’d be a waste to shoot a hot chica like you.”
“I think so, too,” she said.
Annja snapped a right backhand into the hijacker’s Adam’s apple.
He fell back against the bulkhead, clutching his throat and emitting a rattling gasp. If she’d succeeded in collapsing his windpipe, he’d be dead in minutes unless he got an emergency tracheotomy—unlikely under the circumstances, however the events of the next few seconds played out. If not, he was still going to be way too preoccupied with a trivial little matter like trying to breathe to shoot anybody.
As Annja turned away from him she formed her right hand in a fist and exerted her will. Obedient to it, the hilt of her sword filled her hand, summoned from the otherwhere where it rode, invisible but always available.
The other gunman had turned to gape back down the gangway at the sound of the far-off gunshot. Turning back, he goggled at Annja, struggling to swing his heavy rifle up to shoot her.
Somehow Annja managed to execute a flawless high-line lunge in her heels. She drove the sword through the man’s sternum to the hilt.
He bent over as he took the blade. Or it took him. His eyes stood out of his head. He was literally dead on his feet, his heart virtually cut in two.
Annja let go of the sword. It vanished back to its private dimension. She grabbed the Kalashnikov as it fell.
Letting the man slump, she spun. Blessing the universal thug propensity to carry a weapon with the safety off at all times, she snapped the rifle up.
Still clutching his ruined throat with his left hand, the young man Annja had stunned was raising his own assault rifle to shoot her. She fired a burst from the hip. He fell backward as three metal-jacketed 7.62 mm slugs lanced through his chest and belly.
Glancing around the shocked faces of her fellow hostages, she quickly settled on the young steward with the prominent forehead as the calmest-looking of the lot. “You,” she said in a voice that acknowledged no conceivable possibility that he’d do anything but what she told him. “Take the gun. Get the people in the storeroom and guard them.”
He nodded and quickly knelt to recover the second Kalashnikov. Its owner was clearly dead, huddled against the base of the bulkhead. Annja wasted no pity on him—he was a victimizer of the innocent. He had gotten what he deserved.
“And watch where you’re pointing that!” Annja snapped at the steward.
“Oh! Right. Sorry.” Hastily he lifted the muzzle away from Annja’s navel, where he was pointing the weapon because he happened to be looking at her. She smiled to take the sting from the tone she’d used.
“No problem. You might want to shake him down for more weapons and extra magazines.”
“Sure.” He seemed excited, eyes wide and bright, and dark cheeks flushed, as anybody would be. He seemed in no danger of losing it.
“What about you, young lady?” asked an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a substantial belly pushing out his white vest beneath his tailcoat.
She thought like mad as she finished searching the man she had run through for other weapons, finding none, and spare magazines, coming up with two.
“You never saw me,” she said. Then she frowned. Where am I going to carry the magazines? she wondered.
“But that sword you used,” said a blond woman about her own age in a floor-length blue gown. “Where’d that come from?”
Annja looked at her and forced a conspiratorial grin. “What sword?” she asked, and winked broadly.
She settled on unfastening the dead man’s web belt. It was bloody. She grimaced but pulled it out from under him. She’d learned not to be squeamish since the sword had entered her life. Darn, she thought. And I became an archaeologist so I wouldn’t have to deal with bodies that were still juicy.
She stood up. Everyone was staring at her with a combination of fear and awe. She felt hurried relief that, in apparent violation of the laws of motion, her breasts had not escaped custody in all the commotion.
“Listen, people,” she said, “this is secret stuff, okay?”
Everybody nodded.
“I know,” the young steward said. “You’re some kind of special operator.”
She gave him a smile. “I was never here,” she said. “Okay?”
“Anything you say, ma’am,” he breathed. He seemed to be working on not hyperventilating. She reckoned she had probably tripped the switches for all his adolescent male fantasies at once.
She turned to look at the others again. They seemed mostly to have huge saucer eyes, like alley cats who have been awakened to find themselves nose-to-nose with a grizzly bear.
“What you saw,” she said, “is a big bald guy in a tux take these two down.” That was a fair description of pretty much any random member of Garin’s squad of bodyguards. “You didn’t see any details because you were busy ducking like the smart people you are. You really don’t remember it clearly anyway—you’re so traumatized and all. Do you understand? This is extremely important.”
They stared.
“Nod,” she said.
They nodded.
“Breathe,” she said.
They breathed.