Shadows of Annihilation Read online

  Luz knew how deceptive appearances could be; apparently and unsurprisingly York did too, from the long considering look and nod he gave the Black Chamber man.

  Lee’s driver hopped out after him, an American woman of about Ciara’s age, with brown hair done up in an efficient braid, a canvas campaign hat, boots and riding breeches and a knee-length cord jacket, with a large binocular case slung over one shoulder—it had an adjustable miniature tripod strapped to it—and a Thompson on the other. She stayed quietly behind him after a short nod to Julie; Luz suppressed a pang of envy at someone who’d had time to change into something more practical than her own streetwear.

  Lee wore an Annapolis graduate’s ring, Class of ’08, Luz saw with surprise. The Navy hadn’t grown as much as the Army—it had already been a considerable presence by global standards even back at the beginning of the decade, when the American land forces had been a joke comparable in size to those of Bulgaria or Serbia. Even so, the fleet was growing and by now a talented Annapolis graduate from ’08 might well be exec of a major warship or commander of a minelayer or destroyer.

  Julie answered Luz’s unasked question.

  “Mr. Lee is the best shot I’ve ever met,” she said.

  And Julie’s met me, among others, Luz thought.

  “He also decided to apply his talents with the Chamber when the Intervention was the only action around.”

  Lee smiled and inclined his head respectfully toward Luz.

  “I heard at the Yaqui Valley camp how you took down Villa’s galloping horse at eight hundred yards with one bullet, Executive Field Operative. It’s legendary,” he said.

  His accent was Kentucky, the soft almost-Virginian one from the rich rolling greens of the bluegrass country and not much like York’s hill-and-holler rasp.

  His driver nodded enthusiastically behind him and looked at Luz with rapt admiration; it suddenly occurred to Luz that the young woman—her name was Dora Parkinson, and she was from Oregon—might have ended up in the Chamber because of the example Luz had set. Emulation was a powerful force. She was also probably here, specifically in Zacatecas state, because Julie was station chief and HQ tended to send women to the same places so they could work together, to put the most charitable interpretation on it. Or to the same places so the sort of troublemaking females who ended up as Black Chamber operatives could irritate the minimum number of men, if you were feeling less inclined to be charitable; or possibly both were true.

  And Lee’s remark made her charitably inclined; capturing Villa had been the most satisfactory day of her life.

  Until the one when Ciara told me she loved me, she thought, and went on:

  “Legends grow in the telling, Field Operative. It was five hundred yards, Mr. Lee, though the horse was at a gallop. Which means it was good shooting and good luck, but not supernatural, thank you. Cold still air, several thousand feet up, and excellent light—ideal conditions.”

  Behind him York took time from talking to his men to give her a brief marksman’s nod.

  “You take the high road, Lee,” Julie said. “Any problems with that?”

  Lee looked up. “No, I’ve got a good route mapped, did that on the way over, and I should know Jerez by now,” he said, tracing a course with his eyes. “There’s a spot with acceptable . . . not great but the best available . . . coverage about three hundred seventy-five yards out. But I’m not a cat, ma’am, even if I am a good shot.”

  Which was a polite Get going hint. Julie was a meticulous planner but could take too long at it sometimes.

  “Come on, Dora, light’s a-wastin’.”

  The two operatives, sniper and spotter here, trotted off to get a staircase; the flat roofs of this section of Jerez made it fairly easy to travel unobserved across them, if you were fit and had a strong head for heights when you jumped over a narrow alley.

  “We’ll give him five minutes,” Julie said. “Then we go in. Captain York, we’ll have your men blow the main doors. Your lieutenant will have teams watching all the potential exits and replacing the police perimeter by now?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sure you don’t want to leave it to us?”

  Luz grinned friendly-wise. “It’s hard to interrogate decapitated subjects, Captain York,” she said.

  Julie shook her head with a matching expression. “No, I don’t think we’ll do it that way, Captain.”

  “Didn’t rightly figure you would, ladies, but a gentleman should offer.”

  Julie looked at her watch.

  “Lee’s in place. Let’s go.”

  FOURTEEN

  Town of Jerez

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 21ST, 1917, 1917(B)

  The approach to the warehouse was swift and very quiet—and without obvious spectators. Word spread quickly in a situation like this and nobody wanted to be involved when the Bugkalot were out to collect more household ornaments. Not many thought the Chamber was good company either, for that matter. Since when you thought about it, ending up anonymously cremated by people who then denied they’d ever heard of you—and questioning the claim really, really wasn’t wise at all—didn’t amount to all that much of an improvement over your skull hanging in a net.

  Shutters were firmly closed and locked, though eyes were probably . . . almost certainly . . . watching through them as the Americans and their Filipino soldiers approached Sandoval’s place of business . . . and Luz wouldn’t be surprised if most of the neighbors had already heard about him, too.

  Gossip had always moved fast; it moved faster still with telephones, but fortunately most people hadn’t yet realized how easy they were to tap. There was absolutely nothing like getting unfiltered conversations nobody knew you were listening in on. People on telephone lines often lied to each other, but they weren’t trying to lie specifically to you.

  They halted two buildings away and across the street.

  “A little closer and you’ll be covered by the raised section around the edge of the roof,” Julie said, and York nodded.

  That meant anyone on the roof would have to show himself to shoot downward, which would be dangerous with Field Operative Lee waiting in the background.

  “And we’re in shadow down here as the sun gets lower. Let’s—”

  PTANG! Crack! Chunk!

  A white-red spark slammed off the cobbles not far from Luz’s foot, and a fragment stung her ankle just above the line of her shoe. From behind them Lee’s sharpshooter cracked, close enough to the round fired at her that the sounds and echoes of the two weapons blurred together.

  Mierda! Luz thought as she dove for the ground, crawled on her elbows, and huddled into a doorway.

  That was from the roof—good shooting in this light from that angle, too damned close. But he was probably hurrying because he suspected someone like Lee would be waiting for him to show himself . . . Hope Lee got him, but I doubt it.

  Ciara was right behind her, she was glad to see, pistol in hand and face stark white but fixed in an iron calm.

  “I think that was from the roof but I can’t be sure,” she said.

  “Shit!” Julie said crisply as she hit the ground at about the same speed.

  In the same moment she also snaked out a hand, grabbed Henrietta by an ankle, and yanked her foot out from under her.

  The younger woman landed with a squawk, the last of their party to end up prone, but fortunately on a reasonably well-padded posterior. The sound was covered by an eruption of gunfire that blended into a continuous stuttering roar. All the Rangers had opened up with their R-13s and Thompsons, concentrating on one spot on the second-story roof right above the big vehicle-sized door gates in the front of the building. Brass tinkled and rang on the cobbles, muzzle flashes stabbed orange-white in the shadow thrown by the walls, and the sharp chemical scent of nitro powder overrode wet d
irty cobbles and old donkey dung and piss.

  The limestone blocks of the coping started to splinter under the impacts, sparks whipping off at sharp tangents to mark ricochets.

  “Cease fire!” York shouted.

  They did—which was unusually good fire discipline for men who’d just been shot at in an unfamiliar environment. Then he added something in their own language, of which she had not a word; if she’d had to guess Luz would have put down:

  Don’t shoot unless you’ve got a target! and Watch the windows too!

  Luz felt her mind expand and narrow at the same time. She was aware of everything, every hair on her body and her ears and skin and eyes drinking in every morsel they could. And she was thinking . . . but thinking only about what happened next, because if you died in the next few moments the future became sort of pointless. The pain from the bruises—which going flat fast on cobbles inevitably caused—was there, but it wasn’t important and she barely noticed it.

  “When everyone else gets down, get down,” Julie snarled at Henrietta without turning her head.

  Which was good advice; it was infinitely better to hit the dirt when you didn’t really need to than to take a chance on not doing it when you did. No amount of training could really get the habit in deep until you’d been shot at a time or two, she thought, or even better been shelled. And seen . . . and smelled and heard . . . the slow die.

  A fact flashed into Luz’s mind. Two of the bars covering the window next to the main doors were lying on the cobbles and a scatter of broken glass was lying across them. That would be where Salvador had tried to escape and been dragged back by something that had scared the witness profoundly, and the glass could well have been put there by a rifle butt even more recently . . .

  “Watch the right-hand window!” Luz barked; her own scattergun couldn’t reach that far to any effect.

  In the same instant four of the Rangers rose to their feet and dashed forward, with York on their heels; Lee was firing steadily from behind and above, into the expanse of the flat roof and probably trying to keep the head of the shooter there down.

  Two of the little Filipino Rangers carried canvas satchels stuffed with explosive, pulling the toggles that set the fuses going as they ran. The others had their weapons to their shoulders, and the remainder of the squad opened up again, this time at every opening in the façade as well as the coping around the roof. The shadow outline of a rifle’s muzzle and the flash of a shot did show from the broken window; York and Julie both responded instantly with their Thompsons, and Luz thought both struck inside the window—which was good shooting for her and near-miraculous for him because he was doing it on the move and from the hip.

  One of the Rangers went down, dropping his satchel charge and howling as he clutched at his leg. His comrade scooped up the satchel by a loop and kept running toward the warehouse doors. York bent as he ran by, grabbed the wounded man by the back of his webbing harness with his left hand, and hoisted him over that shoulder without breaking stride, jinking in the same direction like a broken-field runner—being that close to the target would have been certain death when the charges exploded. He stopped near the end of the building, laying the wounded man down and doing a quick field dressing; the window over his head started to open as he did, and he pulled a grenade from his webbing and pitched it neatly through the gap into the interior.

  Thud!

  A scream, loud even at this distance, sounded as the fragments bit someone inside, and York finished tying off the bandage.

  Both satchels landed at the base of the big iron-strapped wooden doors and the Rangers dashed after their commander, racing to get far enough away and then diving flat. Luz ducked her face into the crook of her left arm and counted with her mouth held open to equalize the pressure on her eardrums:

  One . . . two . . . three—

  CRUMP!

  The air battered at her, lifted her up and dropped her a few inches, and left her head ringing. She spat to clear blood from her mouth. Most of the energy from an open-air explosion followed the line of least resistance . . . which meant a fair amount went toward her. She took a quick glance backward and felt a moment’s sharp alarm when she saw red running on Ciara’s face; her partner shook her head and pressed a sleeve to her nose, showing that it was just a nosebleed.

  The two satchels between them had more high explosive than a shell from a heavy cruiser’s guns, so there was also plenty of force punching into the gateway they’d been tossed against. The heavy timber-and-iron doors were blown off their hinges, shattered and sent inward in a funnel of shards and splinters that would scythe like the blades of flying daggers through the interior of the building.

  The Rangers all bounced to their feet and charged before the sound of the explosion had died to catch the enemy while they were still stunned, their inward-curved Ginunting knives in their hands and the Bugkalot war screech loud even to the others’ battered eardrums. A rifle cracked and flashed from the darkened interior and one of the little men went down with a boneless, limp bounce-and-flop that spoke of instant death to an experienced eye. The rest poured through howling, and York followed them with three more at his heels.

  “Go!” Julie called, and the four Black Chamber operatives followed close behind.

  The interior was dark, but the Rangers had popped a few flares—York or one of his Bugkalot noncoms had been thinking ahead—and tossed them up into the room. York stopped in the doorway to throw his tomahawk in one draw-and-overarm-cast motion; another scream followed that, and he plunged into the darkness with his Thompson to his shoulder.

  The flares smoldered and sputtered and threw up oily stinking smoke that clung to the inside of nose and mouth with a vile burnt-mutton taste, but they cast some light from the burning magnesium. That and the rancid greasy odor and the wisps from the burst bales and the look of most of the interior—as if stacks of giant soft gray-brown dice had been tossed around in heaps or remained tottering in skewed blocks—explained why everyone inside wasn’t dead or unconscious.

  Great bales of wool, Luz thought disgustedly, as she took cover behind what remained of one despite the wisps of smoke it was giving off, and Ciara thumped down behind her.

  If you designed something to absorb an explosion, this would be it! And it’ll be full of holes and tunnels and pockets now where they’re leaned against each other—we’re going to need to stop until we have more troops! ¡Ay! No, there may be a real tunnel out of here that leads beyond our perimeter. We can’t wait.

  A bullet went by her ear, close enough that she felt the hot wind and saw the burlap binding the wool bale six inches from her face pucker and tear. Luz pivoted toward the rifle’s sound without being consciously aware of where it was. Almost at the same instant she heard Ciara’s pistol snap; in the fractional second it took to complete the motion and bring up the Remington she saw the man with the rifle, and saw him trying to recover from a duck-induced stagger on footing of spilled wool and work the bolt at the same time.

  Ciara’s shot had missed by a bit, but it had probably saved her and killed the man at the same time.

  Bam!

  A hard thump, and the recoil brought the muzzle of the Remington up against her grip. The spread of double-ought caught the rifleman squarely in the chest. No need to worry about him anymore. At that range it would blast a patch the size of her palm through ribs and breastbone, like a blow from a serrated meat-tenderizing hammer swung by a giant.

  Shick-shack, as she worked the pump action and the spent shell flicked away, looking everywhere in general for slivers of movement. One more, a man twelve feet up on a pile of bales, extending a hand with a revolver in it. Luz started to aim, but a Bugkalot was already on the move, bounding up the tumbled bales with an agility that made her eyes go a little wide—and Luz had trained with professional acrobats. The little man was screaming like a power-driven file driving through metal as he
made his final leap and swung his blade.

  No need to worry about that bandit anymore, either.

  Luz leapt up and around the corner of what had been the laneway between two stacks of bales and was now a shadowed triangular-topped cavern. A man lunged at her, knife edge glittering in the jerky actinic light of the flares as it came up in a gutting stroke.

  Bam!

  This time the red spear of the muzzle flash from her cut-down shotgun touched the man’s shirt and set it on fire. The heavy shot hit him in the gut like the kick of a mule; he collapsed without any histrionics, dead from the massive shock that hammered at his heart. Usually at this range knife beat gun . . . but it all depended on the person holding the knife. And the one holding the gun, in this case.

  Shick-shack. There was another man behind the one who’d come for her with the knife; he prudently whirled in place and ran, then started to scramble up a low pile of bales. She held the shotgun in her left hand and pulled the .40 with her right; this was going to require precision, especially given the bad light.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  The first two shots went below the climber’s feet. The third hit him, she thought in the ankle or the foot itself, which was what she’d wanted. Contrary to popular fiction, there was no safe spot to shoot someone in the legs or torso because there were so many big blood vessels. Not if you wanted to be sure they didn’t die, and an arm wound wouldn’t necessarily put down someone very determined.

  The man she’d shot screamed and toppled backward, falling from bale to bale and screaming again when he thumped hard to the flagstones. Luz leapt while he was still in the air, landing with her skirts billowing as he fell back. He’d thumped his head on the stone but was awake enough to start moving his right hand toward something. Luz kicked him in that elbow, hard, and then stamped even harder on his hand with her heel and he shrieked once more as bone crackled—but he wasn’t going to be needing the hand ever again, after all. She kicked him over onto his stomach and grabbed the collar of the jacket he was wearing, yanking it down so that his arms were pinned; by then he was limp and moaning.