Iron Rage

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Ryan reversed his panga. Gripping the hilt with both hands, he took a running dive toward the immense reptile.

The wide-bladed panga was not meant for stabbing, especially, but it did have a point. He aimed to bring that down on the spine behind the horror’s triangular skull.

But the croc was heaving too much. The panga sank into its neck a full six inches as Ryan landed half on the croc, half in the water.

The croc whistled in pain and fury, but it did not open its mouth and release its prey. Instead it started to roll away from Ryan, either in a premature death roll meant to drown its captive, or more likely as a simple animal reflex to get the injured site away from the thing that had caused it unexpected pain.

Trying to mute his own awareness of the scaled, toothy horrors that could be wriggling toward him with their bulging eyeballs fixed on his legs, Ryan maneuvered himself to straddle the beast. He wrenched the broad blade free with the same effort it would have taken him to deadlift an engine block.

The croc had made a tactical mistake. Its back was armored well enough to shed bullets that hit at any kind of angle, if the crocodiles and gators he’d tangled with before were any guide. But its pale belly was vulnerable. As soon as Ryan saw the flash of yellow hide, he plunged the panga down again.

It sank into the beast’s chest, between its scrabbling forelegs. He twisted the blade, hoping he’d hit the heart. Then again he didn’t know where the nuking thing was located.

The crocodile roared. Meaning at least it opened its jaws—meaning it let Trace go. Ryan was in no position to confirm that fact, though, because before he could yank the panga free, or even let go of the handle, the monstrous creature had sped up its roll—dragging Ryan right along with it as if he were a rag doll.

For a moment he felt the crushing sensation of incredible mass on top of him. The thing had to have weighed a ton or more, at that size. The air was blasted out of his lungs in an involuntary yell. Had the mud beneath not been so soft, taking him into its slippery embrace and cushioning the weight, the behemoth surely would have crushed him to death.

The beast kept rolling. When the unendurable weight came off Ryan, he managed to let go of the panga’s hilt and somehow get one boot and one knee planted into the muck.

He was also able to draw his handblaster. He pressed its muzzle almost into the croc’s throat, right at the base of the long, triangular head, and started cranking off rounds. He figured if anything would cause handblaster rounds to penetrate the croc’s notoriously hard skull—not a triple-big target as well—it was a lot of them, from below, at near-contact range. The fact that the copper-jacketed 147-grain 9 mm bullets had a lot of penetration for a handblaster didn’t hurt.

The croc began to thrash from side to side. The water around it was maroon with blood except when its visibly diminishing efforts churned it to froth. That was pink.

Ryan flung himself away from the monster. It was still strong. A death-throe crack of the tail could pulp his hips or snap his spine like a baby’s arm.

Trace was on her feet but bent over and staggering in knee-deep water. She had her good arm pressed to her gut where the jaws had closed, but she waved her stump, its compress now soaked red with blood from her struggles, at the shore and the stunned watchers.

“Thanks,” she croaked. “I’m all right, all right, I’m fit to fight—”

She was yanked right out from behind her words and under the water in a flash. There was surprisingly little disturbance on the surface where she vanished. It was as if she’d never been.

Even Ryan was shocked immobile by the suddenness of her disappearance. But being Ryan Cawdor, he didn’t stay that way longer than a heartbeat or two. Instead he hightailed it for solid land. He was not diving into a river full of nuking killer crocs to wrestle with one big and strong enough to make the captain, who was no small woman herself, simply disappear like that.

If he was going to commit suicide, he’d pick a better way.

As he reached land, though, he turned. Long-practiced habit kicked in. Even as he scanned the creek’s surface for some sign of the captain—or where the next attack might come from—he kicked the magazine free of the handblaster’s well, stuck it in a back pocket and slammed a fresh one home. He had no idea how many cartridges he’d fired, but he wanted all of them if he needed to shoot again.

For a moment the creek’s surface was peaceful and even seemed free of crocodiles, at least in the stretch Ryan was watching with laser focus, past the Queen’s stern.

Then Trace burst out of the water, head back, arm and stump thrown high, but not under her own power. She was well out from the bank, where soundings by means of a predark weighted line said the channel was more than eight feet deep.

She spun counterclockwise, hitting the murky water in a shower of spray that dwarfed the one that had accompanied her brief reappearance. Then two separate waves sloshed upward on opposite sides of where she’d gone down again. Tall tails thrashed the water into curtains of spray.

Ryan took his SIG in a two-handed grip and blasted off the whole magazine, plus the cartridge up the spout. He reckoned if he chilled the captain by accident now, with two of the monsters fighting over her, it would just be a mercy chill. The spurts kicked up by the bullets striking were barely noticeable against the effects of their titanic struggle.

The farther croc reared out of the water. In its jaws was clamped one of Trace’s legs. Red flew from the ragged end, past the yellow knob of her femur head. The commotion ceased.

Dead silence reigned. It was as if time stopped, though Ryan’s pulse continued to pound in his ears. The violated water subsided into the usual ripple of its undisturbed flow so swiftly and smoothly it almost seemed to be trying to erase the horror that happened upon and inside it just moments before. The suspended moment was broken to pieces by a wailing wordless cry from Myron. The chief engineer was tackled by Santee just shy of the monster-haunted water as he tried to run to his doomed mate’s aid.

Ryan realized he needed to follow the advice he been given when he was a boy learning to hunt: shoot enough blaster. He holstered the SIG, which he’d already reloaded, and ran for his Steyr. The longblaster was propped against his pack thirty paces inshore, muzzle-up to keep muck from getting in the barrel.