Outlanders 37 Rim of the World, page 3
Angrily, Suliedor whirled toward her. "What is that?"
"Oops," she said with feigned shame, extending her right leg. The warble emanated from the pouch pocket. "I should've let my service know I wasn't accepting calls during the trial by combat."
Snarling a torrent of enraged Arabic, Suliedor marched toward her, reaching out for the pocket. As he bent over, Brigid jacked her knee up against his bearded jaw with a sound like an ax chopping into wood. The sheikh hadn't expected an aggressive move from a woman and was taken completely by surprise.
As Suliedor stumbled back a pace, she whipped up her legs, bending her knees at her chest. Hands wrapped tightly around the crossbar, she straightened out her legs, pistoning them forward like a pair of horizontal pile drivers, the thick treads of her boots smashing full into the man's chest.
The belled sleeves of his robe flapped like the wings of an ungainly bird as Suliedor Entwhistle catapulted backward into the fire.
Chapter 3
As the sheikh tumbled into the flames, Kane wasted no time gaping at the spectacle—unlike Suliedor's followers. None of them caught the blur that was the lightning-quick motion of Kane's right arm. Firelight flickered on polished steel.
The man holding a rifle on Grant staggered backward as if he had been struck a blow. Gurgling and choking, his eyes bugging, he tilted his head back, his chin forced up by the hilt of the jambiya knife jutting from his throat.
With a dying effort, he lifted his rifle with both hands, struggling to trigger it with fumbling fingers. He sank to his knees as the twin bores of the rifle gouted thunder and flame. A clansman attempting to render aid to Entwhistle cried out in agony, jackknifing violently over a belly wound.
Suliedor Entwhistle hurled himself out of the fire, his clothes aflame. Leaping to his feet, he performed a whirling-dervish dance, beating at the hem of his robe. A man shifted to one side, trying to get out of his sheikh's way. His attention was focused on Suliedor's spark-spewing contortions and he didn't realize that he moved directly in front of Grant.
Clutching at the posts, Grant sprang up and closed a leg-scissors lock around the clansman's neck. He devoted all of the strength in his powerful leg muscles to choking the life out of the man. Knots and ropes of sinew rippled along his massive legs, as well as a flow of blood.
A drawn-out, gagging gasp burst from the man's lips as he clawed frantically at Grant's boots, then grasped his ankles and tried to wrench them apart. Grant continued the relentless pressure.
Simultaneously, Brigid Baptiste tightened her body like a bowstring and surged up and over, her hands using the crossbar as an axis. She somersaulted over it, her flying feet catching an Arab in the face, knocking him backward. Arms wind-milling as he tried to regain his balance, the man fell against one of his companions and both of them went down heavily.
With a whiplash motion of her body, Brigid wriggled atop the crossbar, then planted both feet on top the posts, standing spraddle-legged. She jerked the wooden shaft free of its sockets, and though her wrists were still bound to it, she used the length of wood as a club, whacking a Bedouin atop his burnoose just as he struggled to his feet.
Dazed, he fell onto his back. Brigid jumped lithely from atop the posts, her feet slamming solidly against the man's torso. All the air left his lungs in an agonized, grunting whoosh.
She wheeled around toward Grant and the man locked fast between his ankles. The Arab's legs thrashed as if he were running in place as Grant continued to apply the lethal pressure. The man's eyes distended, his tongue slowly protruded as he clawed for the dagger sheathed in the sash girding his waist. Dragging it free, he held it as if to stab Grant through the calf of his left leg.
Brigid was faster, leaning forward to drive the blunt end of the pole against his sternum, then using it to flick the knife from his suddenly slack fingers. The blade spun end over end twice before she was able to catch it by the pommel with both hands. Grant relaxed his scissors hold and the man slid limply to the ground.
With the knife's razor-keen edge, Brigid sawed through the thongs. They parted just as a clansman rushed her, the firelight glinting dully from the tip of the two-foot-long khanjar blade in his fist.
Brigid stepped away, the wooden pole in one hand, the dagger in the other. Over the past three years, she had been involved in any number of life-threatening situations, and she still wasn't sure if she'd survived them through luck, divine intervention or simply the proper management and application of skills to circumstances. Now she let her instincts and the intensive training she had received from Kane and Grant take over.
The Arab slashed out with his knife, growling deep in his throat. Brigid blocked the blow with the crossbar, then punched the butt forward from her shoulder in a fast, flat trajectory. The end impacted like a battering ram against the bottom tip of the man's nose.
There was a very faint, mushy crunch of cartilage. The man's head snapped back, his legs flying out from under him. His crushed nose spewed blood as bone splinters pushed through his sinus cavities and into his brain. The Bedouin was dead before his body settled.
With wordless, wolfish yells, four of the Bedouin converged on Kane. Yusef managed to shamble half- erect, and Kane maneuvered himself behind the young man. He swept his right leg out in a reverse heel-kick, catching the man just behind the knees. Yusef's legs buckled and he fell directly in the path of the clansmen. One of the men tripped over him and slammed full length to the ground. Kane snap-kicked him almost casually in the head.
The three men milled around him, trying to crowd him against a rock formation. A jambiya sliced through the air toward his face. Kane sidestepped, blocked the blow with a forearm, locking the man's right wrist in the crook of his left elbow. He wrenched back and up violently, breaking the man's wrist with a dry crunching sound. The man uttered an animal scream and his eyes rolled up in his head. He sagged to his knees in Kane's grasp.
The knife thumped to the sand and Kane kicked it out of reach. At the same time he used his left arm to shunt aside a fist driving toward his jaw. Spinning on a heel, he dropped the bedouin with a back-handed ram's- head punch between the eyes.
The third man managed to bore in from the other side, knocking Kane off balance just long enough to outmuscle him and secure a full nelson.
The man he had snap-kicked staggered to his feet, spitting out blood and teeth splinters. Snatching up the fallen jambiya, he lunged forward, the point of the knife on a direct line with Kane's belly.
Using the man holding him as support, Kane bunched the muscles in his legs and sprang upward, the thick soles of his boots catching the blade-wielding clansman squarely between the legs. There was a sound as of a butcher's cleaver chopping into a side of beef.
The bedouin doubled up, croaking in agony, clawing at his crotch. He fell over on his side, jets of vomit spewing from between his lips.
The clansman holding Kane in the full nelson jerked in response to the maneuver, bleating wordlessly in fear and confusion. Planting his heels firmly on the ground, Kane bulled himself backward, slamming the bedouin hard against the outcropping and pounding the back of his skull several times into the man's face. Teeth and vertebrae gave way with grisly crunches.
The clansman's grip loosened and Kane fought his way out of it. Even as he sagged to the ground, the Arab who had received the backhand staggered to his feet, drawing his own knife.
Brigid stepped up behind him and broke the length of wood over a burnoosed head. The man dropped limp limbed and unconscious to the sand. Kane pivoted on a heel, muscles tensed, looking for another enemy.
Suddenly, a blinding flash of fire and a deafening detonation rocked everyone to unsteady halts.
Standing among the fallen bodies, Yusef hefted a rifle in his arms, plumes of smoke curling from the bores. The echoes of the double reports rolled across the desert like the reverberations of a gong.
Stunned into silent immobility, the combatants all stared at Yusef, even Suliedor Entwhistle, who was in the process of stamping out the flaming hem of his robe.
"Enough!" Yusêf roared hoarsely. "Enough of this madness!"
Suliedor patted out his smoldering beard. Half of the man's whiskers were no more than charred, stinking stubble, the surrounding flesh swollen with leaking blisters. He had lost his sunglasses, and his blue eyes were bright with rage and humiliation. "I decide when enough is enough!" he snapped.
"Not if I'm fighting your battles!" Yusef pitched the rifle over his shoulder. It clattered and clanked loudly against the rock-littered base of Djebel Kif. "I will be the one to say when there has been enough of it!"
He swept an arm around the campsite, toward the many motionless men and the ones who stirred feebly, moaning with pain. "The outlanders have cut us down by a third because you lured them here with the false promise of friendship. This is Allah's punishment for your treachery!"
"We had not shared the salt," Suliedor barked. "They are feringhi, foreigners, and they are infidels. Did the god not warn us about them?"
"A false god!" Yusef shouted. "There is no god but Allah, and the creature that spoke to you was as unholy as the jinn that you believe dwell there!"
He stabbed a finger at the towering black basalt pillar. "You are my father, and I do not want to oppose your will but—"
Yusef's words trailed off and in a far less formal, even plaintive tone he said, "Come on, Dad. You're a smart man. You know it was no damn god who spoke to us and there's no nest of damn jinn up there. We both know it's some old lab of military outpost built a couple of hundred years ago."
Suliedor stiffened. Kane and Brigid exchanged swift, startled glances. Gusting out a sigh, Yusef turned to face Kane. "This has been all bollocks and bullshit from the beginning. How about we try starting over?" His English accent was unmistakable.
Kane, feeling blood trickle from the shallow laceration across his upper back, decided to restrict his response to a simple nod.
Grant was not so restrained. Struggling against his bonds, he bellowed angrily, "How about we try cutting me loose before we try anything else?"
WHEN BRIGID SLICED through the thongs binding Grant's wrists to the crossbar, he growled ruefully, "I'm glad I could be of such help."
The man whom Grant had leg-throttled into unconsciousness had regained his senses and he glared balefully at him, massaging his neck.
After Grant was cut free, he took a limping step forward, rubbing his wrists to restore circulation. The bedouin hissed something in his own language. The words were incomprehensible, but the tone was unmistakable. Without altering the expression on his face, Grant turned and smashed his right fist into the belly of the man. He grated, "That's for shooting me, then trying to hamstring me."
The clansman folded in the middle, clutching at his midsection, a gassy wail escaping his lips. Grant strode on without a backward glance, one hand clapped over the wound in his thigh.
"How do you know he was the one who shot you?" Brigid inquired.
"Because he's wearing a white burnoose on his head."
Brigid started to point out that all the men wore white burnooses, but decided Grant wouldn't appreciate the observation.
While Yusef and Suliedor ministered to their dead and wounded, the three outlanders tended to their own injuries with the contents of the medical kit confiscated by the bedouin. Kane retrieved their weapons, glaring defiantly at the clansmen who muttered resentfully about it. He hadn't received official permission from either the sheikh or his son that they could recover their guns, but Kane didn't care. He wanted to be armed just in case the mercurial nature of the desert men changed from sullen resignation to homicidal fury.
While Kane held his Sin Eater and a Copperhead subgun in both hands, slitted eyes fixed on the Arabs, Brigid examined Grant, who sat down on a rock on the opposite side of the campsite. He cradled his own Copperhead in his big brown hands. She cut open the fabric and saw his wound was little more than a scrape where the heavy bullet had gouged the flesh of his thigh, bruising the muscles during its passage.
As she methodically cleaned the raw, two-inch-long furrow, Brigid asked quietly, "Do either of you have any idea of what might be going on here?"
Kane shrugged, then winced at the sharp sting in his shoulders. "Seems pretty apparent to me. One of the overlords, most probably Utu, since we already have a report of him operating here on the African continent, must be trying to reclaim a local holding. He's using the bedouin as ready-made guardians and cannon fodder."
Voice tight with the effort of repressing pain as Brigid swabbed out the blood congealed around the gouge in his flesh, Grant said, "I thought there was supposed to be an Overproject Excalibur cell inside this pile of rocks. That's the information we got from Aten, right?"
Brigid nodded, continuing to work. "Right."
Over a year before while visiting the hidden city- kingdom of Aten, the Cerberus warriors had come into possession of a computer file that purportedly contained all the data pertaining to the inner workings of Overproject Excalibur and its many subdivisions.
Excalibur was a major division of the Totality Concept, which itself was the umbrella designation for pre- dark American military supersecret researches into many different, yet at the same time, interconnected programs. The spin-off experiments were applied to an eclectic combination of disciplines, most of them theoretical—artificial intelligence, hyperdimensional physics, genetics and new energy sources.
The primary division of the Totality Concept was Overproject Whisper, which in turn spawned Project Cerberus and Operation Chronos, both of which focused on expansions and applications of quantum physics.
Conversely, Overproject Excalibur was a branch of the Totality Concept that dealt with genetic engineering and advances in human biology. One of the Excalibur subdivisions, Mission Invictus, was devoted to altering human DNA so a new breed of Homo sapiens could survive and even thrive in the post-holocaust environment. The Invictus mandate was to create the missing link, the biological bridge between predark and postdark man, an invincible superhuman designed to claim the world created by the atomic Armageddon.
The computer file from Aten had identified a Mission Invictus–related base as being located in the Sudan, hidden within the mysterious megalithic rock formation known as Djebel Kif. This particular base bore the code name of Conception: Beowulf. The Cerberus warriors learned a couple of years before that Beowulf had refined the researches of Mission Invictus to create a superhuman.
The scientist who oversaw Conception: Beowulf had found a means to increase the size, muscular capability and intelligence of a human being. As far as the three outlanders knew, the undertaking had created only one superhuman—Ambika, the self-styled pirate queen of the Western Isles in the Pacific.
They had assumed Ambika was merely an isolated, freakish phenomenon and not the avatar of a strategy to release scores, perhaps hundreds of extremely powerful, mutagenically engineered humans into the world. After coming across the Conception: Beowulf entry in the computer file, they began to think they had jumped to a premature conclusion.
"What now?" Grant asked impatiently, shifting position.
"You'll sit still until I tell you to move," Brigid said peevishly.
After the blood was swabbed away, Brigid sprayed the gouge with disinfectant from a small aerosol can. Grant gritted his teeth against the bite of it, but said nothing.
He silently admired the deft ease with which Brigid tended to the wound. Reba DeFore, Cerberus redoubt's resident medic, had done a good job teaching her field medicine. But Brigid's bedside manner was superior to that of her mentor, which Grant reminded himself wouldn't be too difficult.
The bandage Brigid applied came from a can, too. She used an aerosol spray to apply a liquid bandage. A skin like thin layer of film formed over the bullet scrape in his leg. The substance contained nutrients and antibiotics and would be absorbed by the body as the injury healed.
When she was done with Grant, Brigid rose and strode over to Kane. "Your turn."
Kane obligingly turned around so she could examine the shallow cut scored by the point of Yusef's knife. She didn't react to the sight of the swirling weal of scar tissue between his shoulder blades. It was from an injury he had sustained in the Black Gobi over three years before, when he rescued Brigid from the Tushe Gun's genetic mingler.
He had shielded her unconscious body from the mingler's wild energy discharges with his own. Only the tough, Kevlar-weave coat he had worn at the time saved his life. Brigid had suffered wounds of her own, far subtler and emotionally devastating. Her exposure to the energy of the machine and to an unknown wavelength of radiation had rendered her barren.
Still keeping a watchful eye on Suliedor and his bedouin, Kane only grimaced when he felt the tart pinch of the antiseptic spray on the raw knife cut. The cooling touch of the liquid bandage followed a moment later.
"You're all right," Brigid said curtly, handing him his black T-shirt. "Both of you were very lucky—again."
She took the Copperhead from Kane as he pulled on his shirt. "Suliedor has become a lot more agreeable," he commented.
"He's a businessman first," Brigid replied. "He reminds me of Mohammed bin Sayed, the master slave- trader of nineteenth-century Africa. He was educated and charming but also a robber baron of the most brutal kind. I think our Sheikh Entwhistle is modeling himself after Sayed."
Yusef warily approached them from the cluster of bedouin, a robe thrown carelessly over his shoulders. He kept his hands open and hanging loose at his sides to show he was unarmed.
"I guess it's too late for an apology," he said, "from either side."
Grant pushed himself to his feet and limped over to stand beside Brigid and Kane. "It's about one bullet, one knife-cut and an ounce of blood too late," he growled.
Yusef nodded as if he expected the response. "If you want to go climbing around Djebel Kif, my dad said to go ahead. Nobody feels like trying to stop you anymore. Even if we did, we don't have the numbers."
