Ice Woman Assignment (27 page)

Into his sights loped a peculiar animal. A green glowing fox-like beast on stilts, easily clearing the tall grass which would slow down and hang up a shorter animal. Morgan saw long wavy hair ranging down its back. Before the maned wolf could pinpoint the human intruders, Morgan's air gun made a coughing sound and, forty feet away, a dart stabbed into the wolf's neck. It stopped, looked around, and decided to lie down.

“He knew we were here, but that neutral scent soap of yours seems to keep them from pinpointing us,” Felicity said.

“Told you,” Morgan replied, pulling off his helmet. “If it lets you get closer to deer, it'll work against anything on feet.”

After a minute to think and orient himself, Morgan pointed them toward the house. Without helmets, breathing
gear or their parachute seat packs, they moved smoothly and silently, slipping through tall grass like two stalking leopards. They found it relaxing and almost fun, knowing they were undetected, in fact unexpected, due mostly to Anaconda's incredible confidence in her fearsome reputation and her political protection. While no nation would risk an international incident, no local person would dare risk the Escorpionistas' wrath.

During their slow trek to Anaconda's house they put seven maned wolves to sleep. Felicity had prepared the drugs and assured Morgan the animals would awake, healthy and strong, in five or six hours.

One hundred yards from the house they made their first infrared contact with human guards. One patrolled in front of the helicopter with an Uzi submachine gun. Three others walked a perimeter around the house, under lights directed so they bathed the house, but left darkness fifteen feet from it. It was token security. They counted on the wolves to raise an alarm if intruders approached. With the radios on their belts they could summon help from the barracks in seconds.

Morgan and Felicity crept in to within sixty yards of the helicopter. Felicity lay prone in front of Morgan, who stretched out, forming a “T” with her body. He placed the small crossbow on her back, cranked the string back and nocked a quarrel. His left forearm rested in the small of her back as he focused on the bow's four power night scope. Now they waited.

Twenty minutes later, the copter guard picked up his radio. Morgan whispered “Reporting in.”

“About time,” she answered. “The grass is tickling me something fierce.” She did not mention the chill from the ground creeping up into her body because she knew Morgan felt it too. The night sounds also annoyed her. She had learned few things were universal in the world, but one
of them seemed to be crickets. With her head on the ground, the noise was nerve wracking and chilling.

Sixty yards away, the guard put his radio away. Framed in a green luminous circle, he never even knew about the cross hairs leaning across him until a crossbow bolt punched him in the neck and his life blew out the hole and he crumpled like a deflated balloon.

He does it so easily, Felicity thought. To him, this is a war.

Crouching, the two intruders jogged to the helicopter. Morgan dropped to one knee. When a second guard rounded the corner of the house, he fired another bolt. Another corpse hit the ground. A thirty yard sprint brought Morgan to the house, setting himself prone behind the dead man. Guard number three stepped around into his sights. A second later he dropped from sight with a quarrel in his throat. Number four, shining a flashlight ahead of himself, spotted a dead friend and had reached for his radio when Morgan's next bolt made a crease between his eyes.

As quickly as possible, Morgan returned to the copter, climbed in and checked out its controls. It was a Eurocopter Ecureuil, a light six-seater he had flown a dozen times before. The fuel gauge read full and he saw no signs of unusual modifications. He could take off and fly this thing in his sleep. Something was going his way.

With men down, time was ticking away, so they headed for the house. The back of the house faced east. There, a long glass wall separated them from a large sitting room. A sliding glass door anchored one end of the glass. Felicity drew a small electronic device from her belt and clipped it magnetically to the metal tape running up the door near its edge. That would continue the current through the alarm, keeping the circuit from being broken. She spent three minutes picking the lock. The door slid open easily on whisper quiet tracks. Like that, they were in.

A fireplace covered the room's left wall, with two huge sofas facing each other in its center. Felicity entered first, moving across the large cold tiles, probing for a trap. She found nothing. With Morgan behind her, she went down the short hall, stopping at the first door on her left. This door had no alarm. Its simple slam lock yielded to her talents in seconds. The door opened without a sound on well maintained hinges. They found Frederico inside, and he had company.

If the room was divided in half diagonally, one side could be the mirror image of the other. A wooden chest of drawers stood against the wall to their left, followed by a twin bed. The wall ahead of them held identical furniture, placed so that the beds were head to head. them. Frederico lay face up and snoring on one of the beds, but it almost looked like he was on both.

Felicity hesitated at first, greeted by this double vision. Of course, only one face in the night scope belonged to Frederico. The boy snoring in the other bed had to be his brother. Morgan stepped forward quickly and jabbed an anesthetic dart into his shoulder. The boy started up, but Morgan slapped a hand down over his mouth, holding him in place until the drug took effect. Felicity went to the other side of the small room.

“Wake up,” Felicity whispered, kneeling beside Frederico's bed. “It's Felicity. We're here to get you out of here.” No response. She shook him gently. Then she gave him a rougher shake. Then she pinched his earlobe hard. Nothing. A peek under an eyelid with a penlight on his pupil told the story.

“He's drugged too,” she said. Morgan stepped forward.

“So this is where the wrinkle comes in,” he said. “He can't walk on his own. Damn. You know, if we're spotted, it's over.” Felicity nodded. Morgan handed her his dart gun, bent and lifted Frederico onto his shoulder. The boy wore
only the familiar shorts. Morgan pointed Felicity ahead of him and followed her out of the room. Preparing for his mission's final goal, Morgan pulled the paper wrapped lump of C4 high explosive out of one squeeze pocket, the fuses from another.

Still they heard no sound, sensed no danger in the vast house. Navigating the darkness with extreme care, they slowly made their way to the sitting room. Morgan eased around the couches.

That's when Frederico jerked, as if a seizure was starting. His weight shifted radically and Morgan, caught off guard, lost his balance. He pitched forward under the weight of a full grown six foot tall man they had called a boy since they met him. Morgan's knees cracked painfully on the hard tile floor. Thrust out full length on top of him, Frederico's heels hit the open sliding door. The impact was not enough to break the glass, but it started the barest crack.

“Shit!” Morgan's oath was loud in Felicity's earphone, almost simultaneous with the clanging alarm. Before Morgan could stand, lights started coming on in the house. He managed to get Frederico onto his shoulder again, and ran out the door with Felicity close behind. Three steps from the house powerful flashlights supplemented the outside lights.

A harsh voice shouted “Halto.” Morgan transferred the fuses to his left hand with the C4, drew his pistol, spun, and dropped one of the light carriers. A burst of automatic weapons fire answered his challenge. He gritted his teeth and ran, as well as he could with his burden, toward the helicopter.

Felicity fired both dart guns blindly behind her. She heard yelps of pain when she connected and wondered how many men pursued them. She moved on an evasive course, hearing bullets hitting the ground around her. She always knew when one was targeted on her and so far had
managed to jog left or right to avoid them. Long black shadows stretched before them over the long grass through which they frantically fled.

Morgan charged into those shadows as quickly as he could. Ear-splitting as it was, he knew the volume of fire came from only four guns. Felicity must have dropped several with tranquilizer darts. He was within reach of the copter. He figured he had a fifty-fifty shot at getting it airborne before some idiot put a bullet in the right place and brought it down. Good enough odds to run with.

Morgan planned to throw the boy ahead of himself into the cockpit and count on Felicity to get in on the other side while he fired up the engine. Anaconda's men fired from the house, but seemed reluctant to give chase. It was a bit of luck Morgan hadn't counted on. Unprepared for such a daring invasion, the guards could not know how many armed intruders might await them in the dark. By the time they decided to pursue, Morgan and Felicity could be lifting off. Three steps from the helicopter it was looking like a fair shot.

Morgan felt it coming, but with Frederico on his shoulder he could not move fast enough to avoid it. Like a cigar's glowing tip, a nine millimeter bullet dug into the back of Morgan's left calf. He fell forward, sliding on his knees, dropping Frederico to the left. When he pitched forward, Morgan's forearms slammed over the helicopter's left runner stunning his hands open and empty. Explosives could not help him now anyway, but he searched frantically in the grass for his pistol. When he had it he rolled over, prepared to exact an awful price for his life.

But he froze, not squeezing his trigger for lack of a target. All incoming fire had stopped, cut off as if a switch had been thrown. On his back on the grass, Morgan found the silence more frightening than the gunfire had been. His world was a wall of light lancing into his face, except for
one black vertical band in its center. As his eyes slowly adjusted, the black blot resolved itself into Felicity's form. She stood in front of the sliding glass door, facing him, with a CAR-15's muzzle pointed at her head. The pain on her face overmatched what he felt in his leg. He let out a long breath, stood straight and slowly holstered his gun.

“Oh well, it was a hell of a shot,” he said into the light.

From behind the lights, Anaconda's voice said “I hope I can make your death as exciting.”

Morgan and Felicity had both been strip searched before. Morgan knew it was part of the price you paid for getting caught. Far worse for him was lying on the floor with a gun at his temple watching it happen to Felicity. She wore an expression he would expect if she had to search through raw sewage to find a dead fish. When the searchers were satisfied, they dragged Felicity out. Morgan stood helpless with two guns trained on him. He heard the sound of running water but no screams.

When Felicity was brought back, she was once again a green eyed redhead. After pushing the girl in through the doorway, both gunmen backed to the door, and Anaconda stepped into the sitting room. Morgan expected a round of gloating, which he knew was another part of the price of being captured.

“How could you be so stupid as to think you could come right into my home and take what is mine?” Anaconda stood with her fists on her hips, barely waist high to the three gunmen behind her. Her tightly belted purple silk robe highlighted the curves of her diminutive form. Frederico was stretched out on a sofa, still in the shorts, still unmoving. Morgan and Felicity stood side by side, naked.

“Oh, I don't know,” Morgan answered. “Seems to me we did pretty good. Your security's kind of sloppy, lady. Maybe you should hire us.”

“You may joke about it, but your bravado does not
change the facts. You are my prisoner, are you not?”

“You got lucky,” Felicity said, her right hand on her left shoulder, her left over her crotch. “I tripped. That clown couldn't have run me down if I wasn't blinded by those damned lights in me face.”

“All talk,” Anaconda said, waving her men to push Morgan and Felicity onto one of the sofas. Morgan gritted his teeth when his leg hit the leather. Anaconda padded across the room toward them on tiny bare feet. Stopping just out of reach, she signaled to one man, who knelt to examine the wound.

“The bullet isn't here,” the gunman said. “It creased across the muscle, here, and went on. A lot of blood, but no real injury.”

“Bind it,” Anaconda commanded. “I want him healthy at dawn when I kill them. I want him to die knowing I bested him.”

“You're kidding, right?” Morgan said, flashing his most annoying smile. “You may be a big fish in this little pond, I'll give you that, but normally I step over people your size to get into fights.”

“You do not understand, do you?” Anaconda asked, crossing her arms. For just a moment, Morgan saw more than a small time drug dealer. “Your Al Capone was a big fish in the pond of Chicago until he became the name identified with a generation of criminals.”

“Wait a minute,” Felicity said. “What are you saying? Aspire to greatness, do you?” Was the late hour making Anaconda talk? She was confident of their helplessness. Would she reveal a weakness?

“There have been women in crime since it was invented,” Anaconda said. Here gaze when to the ceiling as she paced slowly. One might say that women, physically weaker, had to invent crime. But since Eve, no woman has ever been given credit for her own brilliance. Men would
not follow women, even the most daring, because they did not think them strong enough to hold power. I have broken that pattern. I am as ruthless, as deadly as any man. A fortunate set of coincidences, my height, my eyes, this culture, has positioned me to be the first great woman of crime.”

“Oh I don't know,” Felicity said. “Anne Bonny and Lady Killigrew made names for themselves as pirates. And I made a pretty good living at it myself before I gave it up.” “You, Miss O'Brien, I respect. You succeeded in a man's world, but your thefts only earned you money and a reputation for ingenuity. You never gained any power. But I. I will build a financial empire on the backs of America's drug hungry citizens. Unlike cocaine or heroin or LSD, the ice is amazingly addictive but rarely is its use fatal. I can maintain my clients without using them up. Like the bootleggers of America in the 1920's, I can gather power filling the need I create for this drug. And because it is synthetic, it is a resource which cannot run out.”