Bodyguard: Ambush (Book 3) (25 page)

Still in post-phobic shock, her eyes glassy
and unfocused, she didn’t reply. But the colour in her cheeks seemed
to be slowly returning. Connor touched her
arm and she almost leapt out of her skin.

‘It’s all right,’ soothed
Connor. ‘You’re safe now.’

‘Safe?’ said Amber, staring at
him incredulously, then waving her hand at the surrounding savannah. ‘You call
this
safe?’

She stood and began striding down the gully.
Connor grabbed her arm.

‘Let me go,’ she demanded with a
fierce glare at him.

‘But that’s the direction the
gunmen went,’ argued Connor.

‘It’s also the way my brother
went,’ she replied, shaking herself free from his grip and dashing out of the
gully.

Shouldering his Go-bag, Connor raced after
her, expecting at any moment to run straight into the rebel soldiers … or the open jaws
of a bloodthirsty hyena. He almost lost sight of Amber among the tall grasses but
finally caught up with her kneeling at the base of a small acacia tree. Henri’s
inhaler was lying discarded in the dirt beside a pool of sticky blood, a cloud of flies
buzzing over its surface. Connor felt his heart sink. They were too late.

‘Have you … found him?’ he
asked, fearing the hyenas had torn the boy apart.

‘It isn’t his blood,’ said
Amber quietly as she retrieved the inhaler. She indicated a dead hyena sprawled on the
ground behind the tree, its belly exploded open by a high-calibre round. ‘My
brother must have reached this tree. He was safe. He escaped the hyenas, but –’
she looked up at him, her eyes rimmed red with tears – ‘not the gunmen.’

They’d both heard the repeated blasts
of gunfire and the rebel soldier shout out. However, that didn’t necessarily mean
Henri had been shot. The evidence suggested the rebel had saved her brother from being
eaten by the hyenas. That
was surely a good
sign. But what had happened to Henri afterwards? That was the question.

Was he injured? Had he escaped? Or had the
soldier captured him?

From a nearby bush came a pained
high-pitched cry.

‘Henri?’ called Amber in
desperate hope.

They rushed over only to discover a wounded
hyena. It lifted its head at their approach, revealing a torn ear, and snarled at them.
Bullets had reduced the animal’s hindquarters to a bloody, furry mess, yet the
beast still clung on to life. It lunged at them with its forepaws, its jaws snapping in
agonized torment. Even as it was dying, the hyena seemed determined to kill them.

Connor and Amber backed cautiously away.

‘We
have
to find
Henri,’ insisted Amber.

‘Our best hope is to reach the lodge
and call for back-up.’

‘No,’ said Amber firmly.
‘I won’t leave my brother alone in this hellhole. I need to find out
what’s happened to him.’

It was a catch-22 situation. Connor
couldn’t abandon Henri to his fate. Yet he couldn’t lead Amber into further
danger. She was the one Principal left under his protection. That made her his priority.
Or did it?
They were both equally important. But should he risk one to save
the other? It was a gamble that could result in him losing
both
Principals, as
well as his own life.

Hearing a rustle in the grass behind him,
Connor spun to confront a rebel soldier emerging from the bushes. Before the man could
level his AK47, Connor hip-shoved
Amber to
one side, sending her flying into the cover of the tree. Then he launched himself at the
soldier, taking three running steps to add power to his flying side-kick. The soldier,
completely unprepared for the speed and suddenness of the attack, was struck in the
chest. The technique, a speciality of Connor’s in kickboxing matches, impacted so
hard that Connor heard a rib crack as the soldier was knocked off his feet. The man
tumbled backwards into the heart of a wait-a-while bush and was instantly ensnared.
Scrambling to seize hold of his AK47, he only entangled himself further until the bush
had wrapped round him like a ball of barbed wire. Helpless in its clutches, bleeding
from multiple cuts and wheezing from a broken rib, the soldier cried out for help.

Connor turned to Amber to make their escape
but, before they could, the barrel of a gun was pressed into the small of his back.

‘Don’t m–’

Not waiting for the rebel to finish his
sentence, Connor pivoted on the spot, knocking the barrel aside with his elbow, and
struck full force with a one-inch-push to the chest. The modified palm strike not only
smashed the solar plexus, winding his attacker, but sent him flying several metres back.
A burst of rapid gunfire filled the air, bullets shooting off in all directions as the
rebel crashed down hard on to the ground. Connor dropped to one knee while Amber cowered
behind the protection of the tree trunk, splinters of bark flying.

For the first time Connor got a good look at
his
attacker. It was the boy soldier with
the black bandana, the letters
DREDD
etched in white
across the front. He wore the same dead-eyed gaze as when he’d shot at their Land
Rover, and his right ear was missing, as if it had been hacked off by a machete. The boy
was slightly smaller than Connor but, hardened from a life of warfare in the jungle, he
was already rising to his feet. Connor couldn’t let that happen. He rushed over
and kicked the assault rifle from his grasp.

Trained only in fist brawls, Dredd bulldozed
head-first into Connor’s stomach. The tactic, inelegant but effective, knocked the
wind out of Connor and they both tumbled to the ground. Dredd knelt up first, pinning
Connor’s arms with his knees, then pummelling him with his fists. Connor’s
head rang as he was pounded with knuckles hard as iron. Somewhere far off he heard Amber
cry out his name and the howl of the wounded hyena. Connor bucked and arched his back,
trying to dislodge Dredd from his dominant position as a particularly vicious strike
split his left eyebrow. Blood pouring into his eye, Connor’s vision became
blurred. If he didn’t do something soon, he’d be beaten to death.

He tried to reach for his knife, but the
handle was caught beneath him and his arms were still pinned.

Come on, hotshot. The round’s not over yet.

Ling’s ringside taunts filled his
head. Their matches had not only toughened him up but also taught him a trick or two.
One of her favoured techniques was to attack nerve points –
kyusho-jitsu
–
enabling her to disable limbs, inflict
extreme pain and break down the body’s ability to
fight, nerve by nerve.

Dredd stopped battering him with his fists
but only to grab a large stone. Through the red filter of his vision, Connor saw the boy
lift it high above his head. Realizing with horror that a single strike would be the end
of him, Connor reached for the
yako
point – halfway up the boy’s inner
thigh. He pinched and twisted the nerve near the skin’s surface.

Dredd leapt off him with a high-pitched yelp
of pain, then a moment later began screaming. Dazed and bloodied, Connor crawled away.
Even he was amazed the nerve point was so effective. Then he saw that the boy had rolled
into the wounded hyena’s reach. Its jaws had clamped round Dredd’s upper
arm, which it was now ravaging between its teeth. In agonized panic, Dredd battered at
the hyena’s head with the rock. But he was having little effect on the enraged
animal.

Connor staggered to his feet, seizing their
opportunity to escape.

‘
Aidez-moi!
’ cried the
boy soldier, his attack on the hyena weakening as the animal gnawed on his arm.
‘
Help! Please!
’

Despite Amber being his number-one priority,
Connor couldn’t leave the boy to be ripped to shreds. It was too horrific a death,
even for someone who’d just tried to kill him. The boy’s AK47 lay in the
dirt beside Connor. Snatching up the assault rifle, its weight even heavier than
he’d anticipated, he lined up the sights and pulled the trigger.
The AK47 roared, its butt hammering into his shoulder, the
recoil of automatic fire almost knocking him over. Bullets ripped up the ground as he
battled to keep control of the powerful weapon. The hyena, its jaws still clenched round
the mauled arm, let out a pained whimper then went limp. Dredd collapsed back on to the
earth, groaning in pain but alive.

‘Let’s go,’ said Connor,
running over to Amber. He could hear the other rebels, alerted by the gunfire, crashing
through the bush towards them.

‘But what about Henri?’ she
asked as he dragged her into the long grass.

‘We’ll never find him if
we’re dead.’

Barely knowing in which direction they were
headed, Connor’s only goal was to evade the gunmen. Keeping a firm grasp of
Amber’s hand, he weaved a path through the disorientating clumps of bushes and
trees. As he ran, the AK47 thumped painfully against his hip. Cumbersome and heavy, the
weapon was slowing him down. But he rejected the idea of discarding it. The rifle was
their only serious means of defence.

The shouts of the rebel soldiers continued
to pursue them through the bush, drawing ever closer. Connor stopped, shouldered the
rifle and fired several warning shots into the trees.

Clamping her hands over her ears to muffle
the gun’s thunderous blasts, Amber cried, ‘You’ve just given our
position away!’

Connor nodded. ‘But now they know we
have a weapon too. That should make them more cautious about following us. And hopefully
slow them down.’

Avoiding the obvious trail that lay before
them, Connor
checked his compass watch and
altered direction, heading at right angles through the bush. The sun was glaringly hot
and his throat felt parched and clogged with dust. Amber was also panting hard, but he
dared not stop again, however much a drink might revive them. As they negotiated a steep
rocky slope, Amber stumbled and Connor had to drag her upright. The constant running was
beginning to take its toll on both of them. Their meagre breakfast of berries had been
barely enough to satisfy their hunger, let alone sustain them. Now they were running on
empty, only adrenalin and fear fuelling their flight.

They burst through a copse of trees and
disturbed a group of dik-diks feeding on the brush. The tiny fawn-coloured antelopes
bounded away, whistling a high-pitched
zick
-
zick
in alarm. Connor knew
the soldiers would be on to them again. To make matters worse, the ridge had flattened
out into a grassy plateau, leaving them dangerously exposed. As they raced across the
open ground, Connor heard the sound of rushing water. It grew louder with every step
until it became a mighty roar. All of a sudden they found themselves teetering on the
brink of a barren rock ledge. A billowing curtain of white water cascaded some thirty
metres straight down to form one of the primary tributaries that fed the Ruvubu River. A
fine mist hung in the air, catching rainbows of glistening sunlight.

Connor cursed their bad luck. The overhang
was little more than a picturesque dead end for them. They’d have to double back
and find an alternative route to the plain.

‘We could
climb down,’ suggested Amber, peering over the ledge at the sheer rock face.
Connor took one glance at the dizzying drop and the slick, treacherous stone and felt
his stomach lurch.

‘Not if I were you,’ said a
rough voice. ‘This is Dead Woman’s Fall.’

The two of them spun round to find Blaze
standing behind them, his shaven head glistening with sweat from the chase. A moment
later the boy soldier with the red beret appeared, breathing hard, gun in hand. Connor
immediately levelled his own AK47 at Blaze.

‘The Batwa tribe used to throw women
suspected of witchcraft from this ledge,’ the rebel explained, unperturbed by the
gun pointing at his chest. ‘Any woman who survived the fall was declared a witch
and put to death.’ He thumbed the handle of his machete on his hip as he slowly
advanced on them. ‘But most didn’t survive, and the few who did were almost
always eaten alive by the crocodiles waiting at the bottom.’