April 2: Down to Earth (50 page)

There was a sudden sharp noise, so out of place it took him a second to catalog it. He looked down and Diana the neighbor was looking up at them. He examined the upturned face trying to see what she could want and seeing no particular emotion at all, except perhaps a bit of irritation. She snapped her fingers again and shifted her gaze a little like she might not be looking at exactly the right spot. He finally figured out how to respond and snapped his fingers as she had. Diana relaxed her face a little and held a finger to her lips exhorting him to be quiet.  Then she turned away confident he had gotten her message.

Bill repeated the command to Howard. He hoped she hadn't told them to be quiet because she was hearing them. She did have spex on and might have audio amplification running too, but even then, they shouldn't be making enough noise to be heard. He could barely hear Howard at arm's length over the slight noise of wind in the trees and night creatures starting up. He wasn't going to count on it, but the way she acted made her seem favorably disposed to them. It just wasn't professional to count on that.

They sat for a long time, nobody making a noise above or below. After awhile the moon came up. Bill eased off the night vision in the glare and looked at Harold.

"Discipline!" Harold signed, with the index finger flip for exclamation. Then pointed down at the silent unmoving woman below, in case Bill didn't know who he meant. He was obviously impressed. It had been almost three hours and she maintained silence and a freeze as well as any professional troopers they had seen. Bill agreed.

After awhile the big dog stood up in a half crouch and wiggled around uncomfortable. Diana made a gesture and he moved away to the base of their tree and then they could hear the sound as he lifted his leg and watered their stand. Bill gripped his drop line after the sound faded out and leaned over to look below. With the night vision goggles he could see the broad black face looking up at him with uncanny precision and seeming intelligence. Surely he couldn't see that well in the dark...But he seemed aware and maybe even the choice of their tree was a bit of a disdainful message. But once comfortable he trotted back and sat silently by his mistress.

When the moon had climbed a hand's breadth from the horizon, something swooped through the yard, so quickly that by the time the eye moved it was gone. But in a few minutes it can back and circled around the house before sinking in a hover first at the kitchen window and then moved to the door wall opening on the patios.

Another shape came out of the dark in a vertical dive like a hawk and impacted the snooping drone. The two shattered in a spray of junk and splashed fuel, that made a fireball big enough to blow the glass doors in. A fire briefly burned on the patio and inside on the carpeting, but quickly ran out of fuel and left a patch of melted carpet smoking, until the home's fire system kicked on and sprayed the room. Diana never moved from her position below them.

After perhaps another half hour the dog stood up and shifted his stance more to the west. Diana put her hand on his hindquarters and pushed him back down to a sit.

The first soldier rolled over the west wall like a bug, skittering low and slinky. Once over he was just a dark spot against the base of the west wall even in the moonlight. Bill cranked the gain up in his spex and zoomed in playing, with the filtering to bring out detail. He didn't have as much magnification as his binoculars, but that wasn't critical at this range. Then the man turned his face up and looked over his shoulder. He was visibly Oriental, even with night vision goggles on. Not that that meant much. There were Oriental fellows in Bill's outfit too. But the gear was distinctive, especially the helmet. He was Chinese Special Forces and the distinctive dot on each side in the camo of his helmet, was a unit mark, to show he was with the Hunting Leopard dadu from Chengdu.  When a second soldier slid over the wall, he turned and advanced.

Crossing the neighbor's yard to get to the Lewis home made sense. The low fence between the houses was probably easier to cross, than the downhill edge of the lot facing the nature preserve. They likely would have simply crossed straight to the Lewis property, if their drone hadn't been destroyed. It would be easy to be critical of that decision, but when the drone finished examining the house, it might have examined the yard and boundaries in detail and exposed Diana's position. So better to have destroyed it early, rather than later.

The fellow who first crossed, reached a point where the thermal decoy in the bamboo came into his line of sight. He obviously was equipped to see into the infrared also, because he turned and walked three short bursts of fire across the big grass. >Rrrrp-Rup-Rup< The gun was so quiet, the bullets splintering the green bamboo were much louder.

Harold started to pick his weapon off his knees and Bill reached across and pushed it firmly back down.

The man was in a crouch, but turned twisted to his right, submachine gun held poked forward, with the elbows barely bent. The second man turned to see what his mate was shooting at too.

Diana stood when the soldiers both turned their faces away and lifted the machine she had laid out before her. It was very compact, only about seven hundred millimeters tall and now Bill could see it was a compound bow. When she released, it was quieter than the gun, a faint sigh of air over the fletching and head and she immediately dropped behind the wall, not waiting to see how accurate her aim had proved. It was fair enough. The shaft appeared sticking out of the far man's arm pit angled to the front. The shallow way it penetrated suggested it was an expanding broad head, that spread its blades wide on entry rather than carry straight through. If his armor would have stopped it or not didn't matter. The shot was a clean miss on his vest, going right in the arm hole, pinning his arm to his side. Unfortunately, it was angled to the back into the shoulder bones and muscle instead of the chest cavity and organs. Still, the man thrashed on the ground, probably out of the fight.

His partner pivoted to the left to face them, knowing the arrow had come from that side.  The long wild burst he let off didn't have any clear target. The shots rattled up the wall and over it into the night. Three even thudded into the trunk of their tree and were felt through their limb.

The yard behind the soldier lit up in a brilliant flash, that made him a black silhouette, as he took a laser hit right between the shoulder blades. The armor vaporized was a brilliant halo of plasma behind him, that washed out their night vision goggles for a heartbeat. The beam was invisible, though Bill had no doubt it came from behind the boulder pile. The man threw himself to the ground and rolled away before a second shot could work at the already ablated weak spot on his armor. He tossed out a round shape as he rolled and then one the opposite direction when he stopped. They spewed smoke even before they stopped rolling.

Supporting fire winked from the top of the stone wall, where the first two had come across, breaking the remaining windows in the back of the house. A couple more smoke grenades arched into the yard from behind the wall also.

Bill barely caught the reflection, as an object similar to the smoke grenades flew in a high arch, from the boulder pile across the west wall. He had no time to warn Harold so he just reached out and switched his goggles off. He barely got his own turned off when the flash came around the rubber eye cups and dazzled them still. There was no time to turn them back on or react, before a big hand swatted them off the limb, when the shockwave arrived.

The tooth aching shock of hitting the end of his safety line, was followed by a sickening swing back and forth as a human pendulum.

He tried to run himself back up with his winch, but something was tangled all around him. Bill stopped struggling for a moment and switched his goggles back on, then realized it was the camo net and reflective sheet - stripped off the hang points and blown around them. A thrashing told him Harold was trying to extricate himself also. His knife was still there when his hand sought it and he gathered a handful of net to his chest and slashed at it. A couple more strokes and his head and shoulders were through. The wiggling shape under the net had to be Harold and he gathered in a couple arm's lengths of material making their lines swing toward each other. Harold must have felt himself being tugged closer and got still.

When he was close enough Bill patted at him flat handed to let him know he was being rescued. Then he carefully cut with the knife, sawing at the net where he could pull it away, not slashing wildly. Once he'd cut a line from his opening to Harold's the whole  bundle fell away with a flutter into the night.  The night was brighter and looking around, he discovered a good half of the leaves on the tree had been stripped off by the explosion.

Harold had his night vision goggles pulled down, but could easily see him motion for them to climb back up and they both did so not worrying about the slight wine of the winches.

Once he was safely back on the massive limb, he pulled his rifle up on the end of its tether and was finally able to look back at the action. There was still smoke lingering over the yard, but the grenades had burnt out and were not spewing anymore. Their kits were still strapped securely to the limb, clinging better than they had.

Bill searched in the smoke with his spex, finding the smoke was infrared opaque. It was probably meant to thwart laser fire too. It was clearing upwind, beyond the wall where the grenade had landed - grenade? Perhaps anything that powerful should be called a bomb - some of the smaller trees on the forest edge were down, or leaning away from the blast. The wall was down in a shallow notch that went all the way to the ground in the center, with stones scattered in a fan across the lawn and climbed on each side until it was straight and whole about eight meters each way. a crater a couple meters across showed the charge had landed about two meters beyond the wall. Nobody caught between that blast and the wall stood a chance.

The wind was pushing the smoke away from the Lewis house and Bill first saw some movement  and then the great dog became visible. He had the second soldier, who had sprayed fire their way, by the neck straddling him. His neck was well back, deep in the big dog's jaws. The angle his head hung back made it clear he was dead, but the dog still whipped him back and forth like a rag doll.

Diana and he must have gone over the wall into the smoke, right after the blast. Then it cleared a bit more and the two women were visible standing over the man with the arrow in him. Diana's bow was still in her left hand, an arrow notched. The soldier was on the lawn, leaning on his good arm and Bill could see zoomed in that he was talking, because his face was tilted up to them.

Adzusa had her back to their tree and there was a dark thin shape hanging across her back and sticking up past her shoulder. Their prisoner stopped talking and looked away from them. They must have been still talking to him, because he kept shaking his head no, still refusing to look up at them. Finally he lifted his face and said something with a nasty snarl.

Adzusa reached back and grabbed the handle sticking up over her shoulder and in one motion there was a flash of silver and the man's head rolled away downhill, then the headless corpse slowly fell sideways over the propping arm. She whipped the sword in a double twisting motion to fling the blood off it and sheathed in one continuous motion.

"Sweet Jesus," Harold said aloud, breaking their silence protocol. Bill couldn't find it in himself to chastise him. The man was staring wide eyed, feeling with one hand around the base of his neck, like he could imagine the blade passing through him. Below the last tendrils of smoke blew away and the wall seemed to have saved the rear of the house from the full effect of the blast, but the lanai was pushed over in a heap of sticks. Diana turned and called her dog off the corpse he was abusing.

"Let's go down and see if we can render the ladies any assistance," Bill suggested. "We are sort of silly, sitting up here with no blind and no leaves."

"Like they need a hand," Harold scoffed. "Let's call from the wall and make sure we're welcome...Sir."

Chapter 42

They woke Gunny and April who had finally succumbed to the fatigue from all the excitement and got back in the same Green and Blue SUVs. There was even more stuff piled in the back and April was astonished to see packages in the distinctive cream with burgundy pinstripes, the dress shop Lin took her to used. It was too soon for her formal stuff, but she had some more casual things now.

They pulled out the same door into the dark, lights out. The lead vehicle pulled to the side and let the vehicle with Li take the lead. They turned on lights when they hit the public street. A pair of electrocycles ghoasted past them and led well ahead, out of sight.

They seemed to go through a lot of residential streets, avoiding the main arteries as much as possible. A couple times April saw water in the distance, the moon making the choppy surface obvious. It was no surprise when they turned and a forest of masts was visible ahead, bright points of moonlight gleaming on the metal and rolled up sails.

The lights went off again as they turned in the drive and they actually drove right out on the jetty, stopping out near the end. Another jetty parallel to them had soft lights, with bonnets illuminating it, but theirs were out. Similarly, the interior lights stayed off when they opened the doors. Papa-san spoke in low tones, urging them on the boat to their right. There were a lot of big boats all around them. Mostly dark, but a few with soft lights, if they had a gangplank out.

Instead of a rattling conveyer with hundreds of little wheels, they had a big U-channel coated with something slick as ice. Their baggage and supplies slid down it with barely a whisper and were stowed below. They were loaded and the ropes thrown off, even before the trucks were backing down the jetty. There was a sigh of lines through pulleys and a sound April had never heard before, the murmur of sail cloth sliding against itself and the snap of it going taunt in the wind. They pulled away with barely a gurgle of water eddying in their wake.