Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(130)
The lively fireworks show of the raid finally began to ebb without the apparent loss of a single bomber this time, and they began drifting back to their bedding. Diania suddenly stiffened. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing far to the south. They all stared. Distant flashes glittered on the horizon past the bay, near where they assumed the southern end of the island must be. They couldn’t hear them but they came like lightning, sharp and swift. Most faded instantly but a few lingered, sputtering intensely, even casting a faint glow against the high clouds.
“Would’ja look at that?” Horn said softly.
“Maybe one of our planes got hit after all and crashed down there?” Sandra murmured doubtfully.
“That’s no plane crash,” Horn stated unequivocally. “That’s gun flashes—naval rifles—and mortars too, maybe. Plenty of cannon and rifle fire,” he added darkly, “and tracers shooting two different ways. If you look hard you can see ’em bouncing up, like sparks from a fire.” He took a deep, long breath. “I guess I’ve been in enough night actions to know one when I see it.”
“Then that means . . .”
“I believe your mate comes for us at last, Lady Saandra,” Adar said, his strong, confident voice belying his persistent frailty.
“And that’s just the start of it,” Horn agreed. “Whatever happens next’ll probably be big, creative, and hopefully unexpected. The question is, what’re we gonna do?”
“We can’t stay here,” Sandra reminded them definitively, “and we don’t have a lot of time. They’ve probably already sent somebody for us.” They’d long agreed that when this moment came, they had to make a break. Kurokawa would try to use them and that simply couldn’t happen. Even if it cost them all their lives. She glanced worriedly at Adar, but spoke to them all. “Is everybody ready for this?”
“We ha’ nae choice,” Diania agreed, putting a hand on Horn’s arm. It was a simple gesture, but full of meaning for them—and Sandra. She prayed they’d come through okay, have a chance to explore their feelings, perhaps even find what she and Matt had discovered. She frowned, and laid her hand on her belly. She wouldn’t just be fighting for herself, and, as Adar had said, she ought to be taking it easy, but she’d do what she must. Obviously, without her, the child had no chance at all. Helpless and unknowing, it risked as much as any of them. The thought chilled her and filled her with a deadly resolve.
“It’s settled, then,” Lange said. He and the two ’Cat sailors hurried to dig up their weapons. They weren’t much. Over the weeks, they’d removed an assortment of the sharpened stakes around their stockade, carefully reweaving the bindings so their absence wouldn’t be noted. Then, at night, they sharpened them further with stones the Japanese sailors had thrown, before hiding them for the day. Moments later, Lange and his companions returned with the sandy wooden spears and quickly distributed them. Sandra’s, Adar’s, and Diania’s were thinner, lighter, than the others, but Fitzhugh Gray had taught them what to do. Horn’s, Lange’s, and the other ’Cats’ were longer and heavier, and Horn had showed them how to handle them like rifles with bayonets. There were only two guards, as usual, and against normal Grik their odds would be good. But these had muskets with real bayonets, swords, and armor. Of course they also had the terrifying teeth and claws every Grik was born with. Armed with spears and determination the prisoners should still have a slight edge, but it was unlikely all, or even most, of them would survive.
Sandra hesitated. “I should use the pistol,” she said. She’d kept it secret, even from her friends, for quite a while. What they didn’t know they couldn’t spill. But when they’d started making weapons and planning what to do when the time was right, she’d revealed the little Colt and suggested it might give them an advantage.
“You could,” Horn hedged, “but how effective will a few rounds of three eighty be against two armored Grik? And what about the noise? There’s gonna be noise—nothing we can do about that—but screaming never seems to get much attention.” Grik fought among themselves all the time, at least these Grik did, and sometimes, for reasons they barely understood, one of their guards might be tossed in the moat. There was plenty of screaming then. “Shots’re different, though,” Horn continued, “and might raise alarm when nothing else will.”
“Agreed,” Adar said, looking intently at Sandra, “and re-gaard-less how the breakout goes, I will feel better knowing you have a final defense, for you and your youngling.”
“That’s settled, then,” Horn said, and with a last glance at the distant fighting, as if for inspiration, he grasped his spear more tightly and nodded at the others. “Let’s get it done.”
Quickly, most of them hid behind the stockade on either side of the gate, relying on the Grik’s poor night vision for concealment. Then, standing in full view, Lange and the two women began to scream at one another. Ordinarily, the guards wouldn’t care. But Lange’s experience as a tramp merchant sailor in the Far East, before joining the Hamburg-America Line, and some recent polish speaking with Toru Miyata, gave him enough Japanese that the guards—subject to Japanese orders all the time, and commanded specifically to keep Japanese sailors from the compound—should react. They wouldn’t know how a Jap got past them, but their first inclination—it was hoped—would be to get him out. Sure enough, illuminated by torches at the end of the land bridge, the guards turned to stare. When they did, Sandra and Diania began to fight Lange and scream more desperately for help. The “fight” consisted of exaggerated pushing and shoving, but the guards probably didn’t know why the Japanese had wanted in so badly in the first place. They only knew they weren’t supposed to be there. Together, they trotted over the land bridge, opened the gate, and rushed inside.