Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(25)

Job one was to get rid of the chopper; then she could worry about slowing the pursuit. Janet pulled off her protective mask, stuffing it into the backpack, and raised the Uzi into firing position. From where she knelt, deep in a thicket, she could judge the direction from which the helicopter was approaching. As the sound grew louder, she waited, her finger gradually tightening on the trigger.

Janet shifted position slightly, clearing her line of sight to the chopper, which was now almost directly overhead. Leading it by a half-hand, Janet squeezed the trigger, cutting a lazy S-pattern along the helicopter's line of flight, letting it fly into the spray of 9mm slugs.

The pilot banked hard to the right, but that only helped her, providing a moment when the entire body of the aircraft aligned itself with her firing line. And during that moment, the Uzi chewed into it, rupturing the fuel tank and sending it struggling back up toward the rim in a desperate attempt to set down before it lost the capacity for controlled flight.

Once again, Janet was moving. The helicopter had cost her precious seconds, and during that time, the FBI assault team had been busy. The sound of rolling rocks to her right indicated that the lead elements on that side had almost reached a point even with her.

Janet turned right, moving toward them in a running crouch that kept her in the midst of the thorn brush, accepting the small rips it inflicted on her clothes and skin in payment for the concealment it provided. Reaching a small, rocky outcropping, Janet dropped to her belly, wiggling into a slot between boulders, which gave her a view up the canyon. Almost immediately, she spotted them, three men scrambling down the steep slope, trying to get ahead of her. She slapped a new clip in the Uzi, aimed, and fired.

The short barrel weapon had limited accuracy at this range, but one of the men stumbled forward and the other two dived for cover, sending a volley of return fire into the rocks. Janet ducked down the backside of the outcropping and resumed her former path down a sheltered draw into the depths of the canyon. She didn't know how long her pursuers would pause before figuring out that she had gone on, but they would certainly proceed with more caution from here on out. And that would let her build her lead.

Something slapped her left thigh hard enough to send her rolling down the slope to crash into the thick branches of a juniper tree. The echo of the shot followed her down. Pain exploded in Janet's brain, shock narrowing the straw of her vision and threatening to extinguish her consciousness. A quick glance at the rapidly expanding red wetness along her pant leg meant she didn't have long. But before she could deal with that, she had to get some separation.

She aimed the Uzi up the slope in the general direction from which the shot had come and emptied an entire clip. Slapping in a replacement, she forced herself to move, although the pain almost made her scream. Reaching back inside the backpack, she extracted another of the white phosphorous grenades, pulled the pin, and tossed it into the thick, dry brush above her.

As she struggled down the slope and into the defile of a narrow ravine, she could feel the heat of the blaze on her back. Within seconds, the inferno spread to the tinder-dry surrounding brush. Fed by the wind that funneled up through the canyon, the fire began to climb upward, throwing off a thick cloud of smoke and burning embers.

Janet continued to move down until she found a long line of brush that let her turn right. Already, blood loss was weakening her, but she needed to get outside of the direct line the two pursuit teams were taking. It was now apparent that if she didn't get the bleeding in her thigh stopped, she wasn't going to be alive for them to catch.

She slumped to the ground with her back against a jutting rock ledge and slit open her left pant leg above the knee. The bullet had entered on the outside of her thigh and punched a clean hole out the top, barely missing the bone. Janet ripped the bottom of her pant leg free, cutting it into long strips. Then, grabbing the small, military first-aid pouch from her bag, she wadded the gauze into twin lumps, which she pressed into both sides of the wound and bound tight to form a pressure bandage.

It wasn't great, but it had slowed the bleeding to a mere trickle. It would have to do.

Janet forced herself to get up and moving again. On the hillside above, the fire had become a firestorm, generating its own local updrafts, which drove it all the harder. And with every fresh bit of dry brush that it consumed, the smoke and flying embers became denser. Already the entire upper part of the canyon was masked behind a dark haze.

She focused her attention on the task ahead. The rally point Jack had designated lay three miles to the southwest, separated from the spot where she currently stumbled along by incredibly rough terrain. No use thinking about that now. No matter how bad she hurt, it all boiled down to putting one foot in front of another and repeating that process over and over.

She reached the canyon bottom and paused. The FBI might be delayed, but soon they would recover, and when they got back on the trail, they would use dogs. Janet reached into her backpack and extracted the baggie with the balls of strychnine-laced hamburger meat, sprinkling a handful of the doggie treats along and to either side of her trail. The remainder she put back into the backpack for use farther down her trail.

She began moving forward again, rounding a bend in the canyon and moving up along a winding arroyo on the far side, letting the natural folds in the land and the periodic dense vegetation hide her movements. Her leg was tightening up more with each stride so that now she was almost dragging the left leg behind her.

Her thoughts flashed back to Dahlonega, Georgia, and the Camp-Merrill Mountain Ranger Camp. She had been the first woman to successfully complete Army Ranger training. Even though hers had been an unofficial class, it had been the real thing, conducted by real ranger instructors or RIs, as they were known to the current crop of students. Nine weeks of hell began at Ft. Benning, made its way into the mountains of Georgia, and eventually culminated in the swamps of Northwestern Florida.