34
Sarah was on her feet and moving toward the center of camp before Mike fully processed what he was seeing. He jerked out an arm to pull her back but it was too late. He got to his feet, his hand on his hunting knife—the only weapon he had—and followed her.
“Stop it!” Sarah screamed as she entered the camp. “Leave her alone!”
A man came out of the bushes and grabbed Mike by the shoulders. With a grunt, he slammed Mike against a tree trunk. He was easily two inches shorter but Mike held up his hands in surrender. The man seized his knife then punched him in the stomach. Fighting for breath with a rasping groan, Mike folded up and sank to his knees, explosions of pain thrumming out from his core.
“Get up, ya bastard,” the man snarled, delivering a vicious kick to Mike’s midsection. “I can shoot ya here just as easy.”
Mike forced himself to his feet, looking up in time to see Denny fling Fiona away and lunge for Sarah. Suddenly, a monstrous roar of noise bombarded the camp, hurling a cannonade of excruciating echo and sharp debris. A shower of rock and dirt pummeled the group as the thunderous salvo of sound strafed the camp.
A hut across the camp center collapsed and the jagged sounds of terrified screams mixed with the din of the aftershocks reverberating in the air.
Mike slammed his fist into the man’s jaw, following it with a bone-crunching uppercut to the bastard’s chin. The thug went down with a grunt and didn’t get back up. Mike snatched up the man’s gun and dashed toward the camp center, pushing past fleeing women and children.
Were the wankers bombing them?
He walked to the center of the camp—his arm outstretched pointing the gun at Denny. Fiona sat on the ground, stunned by the impact of the explosion. Mike breeched the outer ring of the camp’s interior and saw Sarah struggling between two men who held her.
“You’ve got one minute to clear out,” he bellowed to Denny, who pivoted around to face him. He was disconcertingly confident, Mike thought, for having a gun pointed at his head.
“Really? And how about you’ve got one minute to live,” Denny retorted, a malicious grin stretching across his face.
Mike made a quick assessment of the situation. Sarah captured, most of the camp, including the men, fled into the woods—at least a dozen fatigue-clad hoodlums, including one woman, running unchecked, knocking over cook pots and ransacking the tents and huts.
He heard the ominous sounds of multiple guns cocking and chambering their rounds—and all of them pointed at him.
“Drop it, matey,” Denny said. He jerked his head to indicate Fiona on the ground. “I’m afraid I won’t give your sister my best performance with you holding a gun on me.”
Mike pulled the trigger at the same moment a terrible pressure imploded at the back of his head. Seconds later, he realized he had blacked out and was being dragged facedown in the dirt. All his senses were engulfed by an embracing, crushing pain in his head. He felt rivulets of blood streaming down his face as he fought to come fully conscious. He could hear Sarah’s voice—hysterically pitched and shrieking—and Fiona’s screams. His stomach clenched in a nauseating whirl of motion as strong hands heaved him over onto his back and wrenched him into a sitting position against the porch.
“Oy, Jason! Denny wants him awake.”
The man, Jason, backhanded him hard across the mouth. “Oy! Wake up, ye bogger.”
The woman held a gun to Mike’s head. “Come on now, Buck, open those pretty blues. I know you’re not gonna want to miss this.”
When he tried to move, the pain became a fusillade of agonizing spasms that migrated from the back of his head to the front. The intensified pitch of Fiona’s screams cleared his double vision back into single focus. He tried to get up and felt the gun barrel pressed against his cheek.
“Settle down, big fella,” the woman said. “Your turn’s coming. Woulda shot ya before now, but Denny wants everyone alive for the show.”
Mike could see both Fiona and Sarah on their knees, holding each other by the main campfire. The maniac, Denny, was walking in front of them, waving his gun. Although Mike couldn’t hear what he was saying, from his body language, it was clear he was gearing up for something. Sarah’s back was to Mike, but Fiona’s face was visible over her shoulder. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her lips moving in prayer.
Mike surged to his feet with a roar, knocking the woman backward onto the porch steps in the process. He nearly made it as far as the camp center before Denny whirled around and brought his pistol up to take aim. Mike knew there was no way he would reach him before the bugger pulled the trigger.
He tucked his head and charged.
The sound of Angie’s scream jerked Sarah out of her cocoon of hopeless inevitability and she twisted around to see Mike, his head bloodied, his eyes unfocused, staggering toward her and Fiona while Denny drew a bead on him.
Sarah closed her eyes, burying her face in Fiona’s neck. When she heard the gunshot, she forced herself to look back at the body—Mike’s body—on the ground. But what she saw instead didn’t make sense.
Mike was still coming.
Had Denny missed? At that range? Had his gun misfired?
Denny, screaming in rage and pain, turned away from Mike’s advance. Sarah saw Denny’s face contorted in agony as he reached for the handle of the knife protruding from his left thigh where somebody had thrown it.
Mike hit him from behind, knocking the gun from his grip. Sarah pulled free of Fiona and scrambled to her feet as Mike lifted Denny in the air and heaved him onto the campfire.
She had to get that gun.
Denny crawled out of the fire, slapping at the embers on his pant legs and bellowing bloody retribution, his eyes searching the ground for his weapon. When Sarah saw it, lying in the dirt not two steps from where she stood, she lunged for it. But before she could reach it, a tall man wearing rags and rings in his dreadlocks appeared as if from nowhere and scooped it up in one fluid movement. He hefted the weapon in his hand and gave Sarah a large, toothy grin. She staggered backwards in shock.
“Declan!”
Declan turned and shouted to six men who were with him. Together they swarmed the camp, wielding clubs, hammers and hatchets. Sarah ran to Fiona and Mike, who watched the gypsies in stark amazement.
“It’s the gypsies!” Sarah said. “The ones I met on the road!”
Mike nodded to indicate he understood, then picked up a large piece of firewood and entered the fray. “Go to the woods!” he shouted.
Sarah grabbed Fiona’s hand and ran to the edge of the camp, where she stopped and grabbed up a knife that was on the ground. “You go on, Fi,” she said. “Tell the men to come back and help.”
“You come with me.”
“Just go!” Sarah gave her a hard push and ran back to the camp.
The scene at the center of camp was bedlam. If it weren’t for the gypsies looking like a band of rioting homeless people, Sarah wouldn’t have been able to tell the good guys apart from the thugs. Even with the gypsies’ help, she knew that short-handled knives and pieces of firewood were no match against automatic weapons.
Taken by surprise as the invaders had been, no shots had yet been fired. But that wouldn’t last forever.
If they didn’t get those automatic weapons away from them soon…
She looked wildly around to find Mike in the melee, or Denny. And she looked for one other. She searched for the one man she knew she had been looking for from the moment she stepped back into camp—the man called Jeff.
When she finally caught a glimpse of him in the same ugly black trainers and filthy jeans he had been wearing in their last encounter, he was standing—gun in hand, talking animatedly to Angie. Sarah’s stomach clenched and a vision of that afternoon in the pasture came rushing back to her. She remembered his laughing eyes as he regarded her terror. She remembered how he tricked her into dropping her gun.
And she remembered what happened next.
Without even knowing she was doing it, Sarah moved toward him. Two other gang members joined Angie and Jeff, and Sarah watched as Angie pointed to the camp exit that led to the grain storage area where the community kept their food and seed supply.
So it was true. They know every point of entry to the camp, and every weakness.
Jeff nodded and then, with the two other men, ran in the direction Angie had pointed.
Sarah couldn’t let them do whatever they intended on doing.
She couldn’t let David’s killer get away.
Sarah skirted the worst of the hand-to-hand fighting by jumping on porch fronts and over collapsed tents to reach the exit where the men had gone. Most of the men from Donovan’s Lot, and even some of the women, had returned to help fight. It wouldn’t matter, though, if they couldn’t disarm Denny’s thugs before they started shooting.
The exit Jeff and his group slipped through was just a gap between two large tents, but before Sarah could reach it the thunderous rumble of a second explosion erupted, knocking her off her feet. This time, large stones and rocks flew through the air. Sarah crawled behind one of the short stonewalls that lined a section of the camp’s perimeter and covered her head with her arms.
A gypsy fighter lay stunned next to a jagged boulder, a thin line of blood creeping down his face. When she saw the smoking rubble strewn around the camp—the fighters momentarily dazed or running for cover—she realized that the explosion must have come from somewhere near the cairn.
As Sarah stood up, she saw the bloody stump of a leg with the foot still attached lying inches from where she had crouched.
The foot was still wearing a black trainer.
The sound of the explosion seemed to come seconds after Mike felt the ground jerk away beneath his feet. He released the man he’d been grappling with and the body fell limply to the ground like a discarded rag doll, Mike’s knife embedded in his ribs.
Mike jerked the knife out and lurched to his feet. Two of the camp tents by the main fire had been flattened and their canvas was now flapping wildly. He tried to find Sarah but all he could see were the small groups of grappling men.
And then he saw Denny. His leg was crudely tied with a piece of shirtsleeve that was already sodden red and he was attempting to pick himself up from the last blast.
Mike watched in disbelief as Denny aimed his gun at a scrum of men wrestling on the ground near the fire and, insanely, fired into the midst of them. Someone howled and the other three jerked away and separated.
The psycho had shot his own man.
Mike grabbed up the automatic rifle from the man whose neck he had just broken and tossed it to the big gypsy, Declan, as he ran past. “Find Sarah!” he yelled. Declan nodded and reversed course, running through the growing smoke that was starting to envelop the camp and quickly disappeared.
“Correy!” Mike bellowed as he crossed the camp toward him. “Drop your gun, arsehole and call your men off.” He watched Denny face him, his face creased with rage and frustration.
“You sorry Irish bastard!” Denny shrieked. “I’ll have her and then my men will have her—”
Mike reached him and backhanded him before Denny could get his gun aimed, knocking it out of his hand. Denny lunged at him, grasping Mike’s head in his hands and smashing his own hard into his forehead.
Mike crumpled to his knees, his eyesight gone to black, his head a blinding monument of agony. He reached, unseeing, for Denny’s face as he went down, trying to pull the bastard down with him.
“I’ll gut you like the fish you smell like, you country shite,” Denny snarled, panting. Mike felt Denny’s fingers working to pry Mike’s knife from his hand. When that happened, it would be all over.
Blindly, Mike released the knife to him, then grasped Denny’s head tightly between his hands—and wrenched.
A woman’s strangled scream jerked Sarah’s attention away from the piece of bloody leg. Angie stood not twenty feet from her, staring at the wreckage the bomb had created. Behind her, three of Denny’s men stood with their automatic rifles to their shoulders. They were aiming into the crowd of gypsy fighters.
Angie shifted her gaze from the smoking rocks and body parts to Sarah. They locked eyes. Sarah saw the ugly stub of a gun appear in Angie’s hand.
Angie took aim and Sarah dove for cover.
She heard the shot but felt no impact. She tried to protect her head with her arms, but heard no other shot fired. Sarah peeked out from under her arms in time to see Angie drop to her knees, her hands clutching a gaping wound in her stomach. Gore poured from the wound, pumping the bloody life force from her body.
When Sarah snapped her head around to see where the shot had come from, she saw Declan standing behind her, the rifle he’d shot Angie with still to his shoulder. He adjusted his stance and aimed his rifle at the three gunmen standing behind Angie.
Sarah knew she and Declan didn’t stand a chance against them. She closed her eyes.
Please, God, take care of my boy. Give him strength and solace for a life without me and his father. Watch over him.
She took a breath and held it, waiting.
Finally, she opened her eyes to see Denny’s men, one by one, lowering their weapons. One even dropped his in the dirt.
She turned to Declan. His face was streaked with blood and one eye was closed. There was an open gash on the side of his head and the hand that gripped the gun was caked with dirt and blood. “What’s happening?” she asked hoarsely. “Are they giving up?”
The big gypsy glanced away and Sarah followed his direction to see Denny, walking with difficulty between Mike and one of Declan’s gypsy brothers. As they approached, Sarah could see that Denny wasn’t walking at all. Nor would he ever again.
Mike heaved Denny’s body on the ground. Denny’s neck flopped at an unnatural angle. As Sarah turned away, her stomach roiling, she saw Denny’s men move in to look at the body of their fallen leader.
“Head of the snake,” Declan muttered. “They’re not going to fight on if he’s not here to make ‘em.”
Declan stepped over Denny’s body and held his hand out to Mike. “Met your Sarah on the road. Said if I was ever in Ireland, I needed to come look up Mike Donovan. Didn’t expect to have to work for my supper, though.”
Mike grinned and clasped the gypsy’s hand before Sarah launched herself into Declan’s arms. “Thank you, Declan,” she said, tears streaming down her dirt-streaked face. “Thank God for you.”
Sarah knelt by Angie. She could see there was nothing they had in the way of first aid that was going to make any difference but she couldn’t let her die alone. She eased Angie’s head onto her lap.
Around them, the camp was noisy with people righting carts, and bandaging wounds. The laughter that floated over the noise told Sarah that none of their own had been seriously hurt. She could see Mike and Declan, shoulder to shoulder, as they labored to put the camp back to order.
Denny’s men had melted into the woods.
“I always wondered if they’d fight on without Denny,” Angie said, grimacing against the bleeding wound in her middle that she clutched with both hands. “If I’d only killed the bastard myself. I had plenty of opportunities. I can’t believe it’s going down like this.” She coughed and cried out. Sarah didn’t speak. She hoped it was enough that she was here. She wasn’t sure she had the stomach to offer anything more.
“You were right, Yank.” Angie’s eyes fluttered and finally closed. “I have a little girl. Named Dana.”
Sarah scanned the camp. It was still smoking in spots from where the cairn had exploded.
Angie coughed again. “I was just trying to give her a chance to grow up, same as you and your lad.”
“Angie, I…” Sarah stopped talking when she realized Angie had had the last word. She touched the woman’s no longer tortured brow. “Sleep now, Angie,” she said. “It’s over.”
Mike sat on the top porch step and surveyed the cleanup while Fiona wrapped a clean bandage around his head. It still hurt like bloody blazes, but his eyesight had at least returned to normal and he could only hope the pain—if it was just a concussion—would soon abate.
“You sure you’re okay, Fi?”
“Sure, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Okay, very funny. Just trying to be brotherly.”
“Well, at least you can feel a little less guilty about young John not being anywhere near all of this.”
“That thought did run through my mind,” he admitted, “in my ever-ongoing quest to think on the bright side of things while people are trying to kill me and mine.”
“Speaking of which, you seen Caitlin recently?”
He winced as she tied the knot to secure the bandage. “I’ll deal with it, Fi.”
“You know it had to be her told them all our secrets.”
“I said I’d deal with it.”
“Well, you’d best get ready to do it because here she comes as bold as chalk, and with one of ‘em!”
Mike looked up to see Caitlin walking down the center path of the camp, hanging on the arm of a large man with an ugly cut across his forehead. It was the man who’d attacked him in the woods.
She must have been waiting in the woods until the battle was over, Mike thought as she and the English wanker stood in front of him.
“I’ll be needing Fiona to tend to the injuries that your bowsies gave me Aidan. He’ll be staying with me in me tent.”
Had the daft bitch gone mental? Maybe Fi was right and she really was insane.
Mike stood up, feeling the sky sway just a bit. “Take this piece of shite and piss off, Caitlin. You’re not welcome here. Be glad I don’t dip you in tar first.”
Her mouth fell open in astonishment. “You can’t throw me out! I’m your kin!”
“You’re nothing to me. Now bugger off. Don’t make me lay hands on you.”
Aidan snarled at him. “I’d like to see you try, you big Irish bastard.”
Before Mike could respond, Sarah, who he’d last seen sitting with the woman Declan had shot, stepped forward. She must have come over as soon as she saw Caitlin return to camp.
“A word, Mike,” Sarah said turning to stare at Caitlin and Aidan. “Do we have laws in Donovan’s Lot?”
He frowned. “Aye. We do.”
Sarah pointed to Aidan. “This man aided in the murder of my husband, David Woodson.”
Aidan dropped Caitlin’s arm. “She lies!”
Sarah stepped up to him and put her face into his. “I saw you.”
Mike jumped down from the porch and pulled Sarah back as he bellowed out, “Jimmy! Patrick!”
Aidan whirled and ran four steps before two men standing nearby tackled him.
“Tie him up,” Mike said. “Throw him in the granary. I’ll deal with him later.”
Caitlin flew at Mike, her fists pounding his chest until he pushed her away and she fell in the dirt. “You can’t do this!” she cried as Aidan was dragged away cursing and fighting.
“I can. And you’ve got two minutes to leave on your own steam, Caitlin. After that I’ll lock you up so you can answer for your hand in today’s events.”
Caitlin looked at him, disbelieving, then climbed to her feet. She gave Sarah a look of loathing.
“Sixty seconds,” Mike said.
“I’ll see you in Hell, Mike Donovan! You and your Yankee whore!”
Sarah watched until Caitlin disappeared into the woods and then she turned to Mike. “What will you do with him?”
“There’s no traveling magistrate to hear the case, Sarah, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said wearily. “I’m the law here. He abetted in David’s murder.” He sat down heavily on the porch, as if standing were suddenly too taxing, and looked into her face, his expression stern and unrelenting. “So he dies.”
Suddenly, Fiona jumped down from the porch. “It’s Gavin!” she called. “He’s safe, Mike. Thank the Lord.”
Mike looked up to see the miraculous sight of his only child loping into the center of camp on Sarah’s horse, beaming and looking very much like he had something to do with today’s victory. A wave of relief cascaded over him. Now he could relax. Now he could finally rest.
Fiona ran up to Gavin when he dismounted and he picked her up and swung her in a wide arc. She squealed.
“We did it, Auntie!” he said. “I just wished I coulda seen the expressions on those bastards’ faces.”
Fiona laughed. “Was that you made all those explosions and saved our lives you big gobshite?”
Gavin walked over to where Mike and Sarah waited on the porch steps, both of them smiling to see him unharmed and well. “You know,” he said, grinning, “much as I’d love to take the credit, I reckon that mostly it was all John.” He looked at Sarah and grinned even more broadly.
Mike watched as Sarah looked at Gavin and then, her hand covering her mouth to stifle a gasp. Immediately over Gavin’s shoulder, jogging up the main center of camp, was twelve-year-old John Woodson, grinning from ear to ear.