Survivalist - 22 - Brutal Conquest (12 page)

Eden M.O. perfectly.

She looked at Ward as her cola arrived, took a sip of it, then tossed her hair back from her shoulders as she asked, “So, what’ll we do, big guy?”

“If we start something and I’m wrong, we’ve created a diplomatic incident with Eden. If I knew what to do, I’d be doing it, Emma.”

Emma Shaw nodded, thinking.

Marie suggested, “How about the Shore Patrol?”

“Same thing,” Ward told her. “Our boys go into action, diplomatic incident time. But we can’t just sit here.”

“Wait a minute,” Emma said. There was a. permanent Shore Patrol Station at the harbor. All the spots along the strip had the number and could reach the station instantly in the event Allied service personnel started trouble. It was just standard procedure. “If the Shore Patrol is called in by us, it’s a diplomatic incident maybe. If the club management calls in the Shore Patrol, it’s another story.”

Ward just looked at her, then started to smile.

Emma bowed her head and batted her eyelashes, saying, “Thank you very much.” Then she slipped off her bar stool and started walking along the length of the bar, toward the end nearest the stage. There were a half-dozen Russian merchant seamen at that end, and although Russia was a member of the Trans-Global Alliance and a good friend of the United States on an official level, there was no love lost between U.S. and Russian personnel at the personal level.

She stopped in front of the largest of the six Russian seamen, turned, and slapped him in the face. “You son of a bitch! You can’t talk to a woman like that!”

The man looked at her dumbfounded. His English, heavily accented, was pretty good. “What is wrong with you, Commander?”

“Filth!” She slapped him again, harder, feeling sorry for the guy as she did it.

From the edges of her peripheral vision, she could see some of the U.S. service personnel starting to turn around and stare, some of them even standing.

She shouted at the Russian sailor again, “Look, Ivan, maybe you can talk that way to your own women, but you can’t talk that way to an American girl! Put ‘em up!” And she took a swing, not a slap this time, but her right fist balled up. He dodged her and she lost her balance a litde, almost falling on her pride.

But the Russian seaman did what she’d been hoping he’d do since she slapped him the first time. He shoved her.

Despite his size, he didn’t shove her hard enough to knock her down, but she took the shove as if he had and sent herself sprawling onto the floor.

Then she screamed, “You beast!”

There was a blur of khaki as a U.S. Marine lance corporal stepped up, offered her his hand, and said, “Ma’am.” She let him help her up, making herself cry (she’d learned the trick in high school when she went out for drama club). “Don’t worry, Commander,” the lance corporal said. Then he turned around to the big Russian and socked him right across the jaw, slamming the Russian into his friend beside him.

The friend took a swing at the lance corporal, but somebody—a U.S. sailor this time—caught the Russian’s arm in mid arc and spun him around, then fired two right jabs and a left hook, putting the Russian’s lights out.

And in the next instant, almost everybody was fighting—the Russians at the bar, the American service personnel, the Port Reno civilians, even some of the

hookers. All around Emma, chairs and synth-glass botdes flew through the air.

She dodged one, ducked another, then hitched up her skirt and kneed one of the Port Reno civilians in the crotch as he grabbed for her. Ward Aldridge caught him, reverse jackknifed him to a standing position, and crossed his jaw with a short left.

Ward shouted, “Shore Patrol’s coming! Shore Patrol!”

And Emma Shaw knew his reasoning. This way, the GFs would get out and not have to spend the evening in the brig.

She looked around and saw Marie crack a synth-glass botde over a civilian’s head.

But past Marie, near the entrance, she saw several of the military-looking civilians Ward had pegged as Eden terrorists making for the door. She tapped Ward on the shoulder and he turned around so fast she thought he was going to take a poke at her. “What?”

“Those guys you thought were terrorists. Let’s follow them.”

“With what?”

“Desert cab?”

“And I betchya I know who picks up the tab. Right?”

“Well, it’s the gendemanly thing to do,” she told him, batting her eyelashes again.

“Shit. Let’s go!” Ward ran for the door, presumably to hail a desert cab.

Emma Shaw looked for Marie. But her friend wasn’t there. “Marie! Marie?!”

The fighting was slowing down, most of the GFs running out onto the strip. But there was no sign of Marie.

Although she’d probably hit the bricks like everybody else, Emma was getting a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach and it wasn’t from the pizza. She ran toward the door, shouting, “Out of the way! Out of the way!”

Those servicemen who looked her way at all deferred to her commander’s rank and her sex, but most didn’t even bother to look.

Pushing and shoving, she made her way into the bright lights of the strip and saw Ward Aldridge instantly, almost wresding one of the halftrack desert cabs to a halt in the middle of the street.

And then she looked to the other side of the strip, to the two Eden military surplus halftracks. She saw a flash of khaki being dragged through the fuselage opening just as the drop down hatch started to raise. “Holy shit!”

Emma Shaw grabbed her hair with her left hand, pulling it back and away from her face. She ran her tongue across her lower lip, then shouted, “Ward! Ward! They got Marie!”

Ward wheeled about toward the two military surplus vehicles and just stood there, like herself, she guessed, not knowing what to do.

But then she knew what to do.

Still holding her hair with her left hand, she drew her pistol from the shoulder holster under her armpit with her right hand, then fired it three times into the night sky. “Yo! Navy! Marines!” She realized she was standing on her toes. “The guys in those halftracks got Captain Marie Hayes in there with them. Get every vehicle you can and block the road! Move it!”

The second halftrack was still loading, four men running across the strip toward it, brandishing weapons but not firing. Emma Shaw, her pistol in her hand, started to run toward the four Eden terrorists.

At the far left edge of her peripheral vision, she saw the desert cab Ward Aldridge had flagged down starting to move. She shot a full glance to her left. The cab driver, a woman about Emma’s own age, was standing

there in the middle of the street, shaking her fist. The cab was aimed right for the still-lowered door of the second halftrack, Ward Aldridge at the wheel.

Desert cabs were used all along the west coast. They were converted halftracks, much like the vehicles the Eden terrorists drove, only stripped of the heavier armor and fitted with more comfortable seats, the engines worked over for better top speed.

The desert cab Ward drove was coming on fast. Two of the four men racing toward their still unbuttoned halftrack spun toward the desert cab and opened fire with energy rifles. But energy rifles were stricdy anti-personnel weapons and next to useless against light armor unless the hits were repeated and concentrated in one spot heavy enough to melt the armor.

Ward was zigzagging the desert cab as he drove it toward the men, making it impossible for their fire to penetrate his armor. Emma stopped running and brought her pistol up into a point shoulder position. Officers could select their own personal sidearm and she had selected the Lancer 2570 A2-C, the “C,” or Compact, and its full-size counterpart the only projectile-firing handguns still in the inventory. It was the choice of the Marine Raiders and the SEALs, and was favored by the Honolulu Police Department as well.

HeT father was a Honolulu cop and so was her older brother. She’d cut her teeth on the 2570 A2-C and had stuck with it.

Now she squeezed the trigger and dropped the nearer of the four Eden terrorists shooting at Ward in the desert cab. Ward ran over a second man and, involuntarily, Emma Shaw turned her head for an instant, recoiling from the sight. She’d never shot anybody before in her life, but at the moment putting out the lights out on a terrorist hadn’t sunk in enough to bother her.

But seeing a man turned into a smudge of grease about the same thickness of the pizza she’d just split with Marie Hayes was another thing.

As she looked back, the two remaining men were running toward the second vehicle, which was already in motion, its side loading door still open, dragging along the street surface and making a shower of sparks.

It was picking up speed.

The desert cab Ward Aldridge drove was nearly at top speed.

As the two vehicles met, Ward’s desert cab drove onto and stopped dead on the ramplike door. The halftrack spun around about ninety degrees and stayed there, Ward’s desert cab sitting on its door.

The street that bisected the entertainment strip was filling up with vehicles from both directions, more desert cabs, electric cars, and everything else the GI’s had been able to put into motion to block the escape of the two halftracks. But from the direction of the docks, there were Shore Patrol vehicles coming.

Emma started running again, dropping into a crouch beside the man she’d shot, feeling the knee go out in her right stocking as she did. She grabbed up the dead man’s energy rifle —she really had killed him. A shiver went up her spine and there was a slightly sick feeling in her stomach. The energy rifle in her right hand, the 9mm Lancer Caseless pistol in her left, she charged toward the first military surplus halftrack.

It was stopped, too, and the door was opening.

She saw some of the men from the bar, and between them she saw Marie Hayes. Marie’s hat was gone and her hair had fallen down. Her jacket was off her shoulders and over her arms, exposing the harness from her shoulder holster.

One of the terrorists shouted, “Back off or we kill the

Marine bitch!”

The Shore Patrol vehicles were stopping, uniformed SPs piling out, brisding with weaponry.

An electric staff car pulled up behind the wedge the SP vehicles had made. Emma Shaw recognized the man who got out of it. He was Captain Edmund Rahn, not only the youngest captain in the fleet and the sexiest hunk in the Navy, but the most obnoxiously arrogant and conceited man she’d ever met. He was also her commanding officer.

He took off his cap as he passed through the ranks of SPs, running his fingers through his dark, wavy hair. “Shaw! What the hell is going on here?”

She couldn’t very well come to attention or even salute, because she was holding a gun in each hand and they were both leveled at the terrorists. “Sir, we’ve got a situation here. These men are Eden terrorists. Captain Aldridge, Captain Hayes, and myself discovered them preparing to attack one of the clubs here on the strip. We started a fight in order to evacuate the building and preempt any enemy action. They took Captain Hayes hostage, sir.”

“Tell me this is some sort of stunt for a movie, Shaw. And Captain Aldridge is just playing a part. So that desert cab that’s having sex with that halftrack is just a prop.”

“No, sir! They really are having—I mean, Captain Aldridge used the desert cab to stop the vehicles, sir. The personnel who assisted us in evacuating the club were—”

“Why the hell I gave any of you clowns liberty at Port Reno is beyond me… .”

Emma Shaw couldn’t help it. “You were ordered to, sir, by Admiral of the Fleet Wilma Hayes, sir!” Admiral Hayes was Marie Hayes’s aunt, and right now Emma Shaw figured it was good to remind Captain Rahn about that since Marie’s life hung in the balance. It would look awfully bad on his gleaming service record to have lost the boss’s niece.

Captain Rahn just looked at her, then glanced over toward the terrorists. Emma looked at them, too. They honesdy seemed confused by what was going on and she didn’t blame them much.

As she turned her head, her eyes met Captain Rahn’s. “I can see, Commander Shaw,” he said, smiling at her with his perfect white teeth, “that as ranking Navy officer on the scene, you had the situation under control. So, carry on, Commander.” He turned on his heel and walked off, shouting to the young Chinese lieutenant jg who’d come up commanding the SPs, “Fong, take your orders from Commander Shaw. Carry on.”

She was tempted to stick her tongue out at him, but she didn’t. And even though Ward Aldridge was a Marine and had date of commission on her, Emma Shaw was technically the ranking officer.

But Emma Shaw didn’t quibble.

Instead, still holding a gun in each hand and, for some silly reason, very conscious of the fact she’d torn out the right leg of her panty hose, she shouted, “Mr. Fong, deploy your personnel to surround the enemy vehicles. On the double!”

“Aye, aye, ma’am! You heard the commander! Move it!”

Then she looked back at what was going on. Captain Rahn had stuck her with the duty in the event Marie got killed, so she—Emma Shaw—would get the blame.

Ward Aldridge was out of his desert cab, crouched behind it, his pistol aimed at no one in particular.

She had the conn, so she’d use it. “Unarmed personnel withdraw to the far side of the street. Move it!”

The GI’s who’d helped stop the enemy vehicles started drifting away as told.

She looked at the man who held a full-size energy pistol to Marie Hayes’s head. He shouted toward her, “Back off, bitch, or she gets it! I mean it!”

Emma Shaw stooped over and set down the energy rifle. Her pistol in both hands, she raised it slowly, deliberately, into a point shoulder position. Pong’s people were fully deployed now, ringing the two vehicles. If a shootout started, aside from Marie getting killed, Ward Aldridge would probably buy a stray bullet, too.

Her pistol on line with the terrorist spokesman’s head, Emma Shaw raised her voice and said, “If you surrender your hostage and your weapons, you will be turned over to the civilian authorities of Port Reno. Which, as we both know, means youH be able to talk or bribe your way out of trouble. If you do not cooperate, I will assume that your hostage will die anyway. Therefore, I will shoot your ass right now.” She didn’t want to remind the terrorists that their hostage was the niece of Fleet Admiral Hayes, of whom they had more than likely heard. That was why she avoided using Marie’s name, instead referring to her as the hostage. And, more to the point at the moment, since the terrorist spokesman had not yet responded, she didn’t want him to realize she was bluffing. “What’U it be? An easy buy-out or dead? I don’t have all night, fella.”