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Sean did not even look around. Ahead he saw the glint of barbed wire. The women's stockade was also well camouflaged under brush and netting, and it too seemed deserted by the female wardens.
"Claudia!" he shouted as he came up to the fence and gripped the wire.
"Where are you?"
"Here, Sean, here!" she yelled back. There were two buts inside the stockade wire. The doors were locked and there were no windows. Claudia's voice came from the nearest building, almost drowned out by the thunder of engines, the shriek of rotors, and the roar of ground fire.
"Give me a boost, "jean ordered, and backed away from the wire. The fence was seven feet high, he judged. Job and Dedan ran forward and crouched below it. Sean sprinted straight at them and, as he leaped up, he drove his feet into the cupped hands they had formed for him with interlocking fingers. In unison they bobbed up and flung their arms high, flipping Sean forward and over. He cleared the wire easily, somersaulted in the air, and landed on his feet. He cushioned the shock, tumbling like a paratrooper, and rolled smoothly back onto his feet, using his momentum to hurl himself forward.
"Clear the door!" he yelled at Claudia as he built up speed and crashed into the crude hand-hewn panel. It was too solid and heavy to shatter under the drive of his shoulder, but the hinges ripped clean out of the daubed wall and crashed inward in a cloud of dust and flying fragments of dried mud.
Claudia was crouched against the far wall, but as he burst into the hut behind the falling door panel, she rushed forward to meet him. He caught her in his arms, but when she tried to kiss him he whirled her around by one arm and ran with her to the door.
"What's happenings" she gasped.
"We are making a break." As they ran out into the sunlight again he saw that Job and Dedan had a hold on the bottom strand of the fence.
With all the strength of their arms and legs, they were dragging it upward, opening a narrow gap between the wire and the sun-baked earth. Sean stooped to the same strand from the inside, settling his grip between the clusters of spikes, and heaved upward. Under the combined strength of the three of them the ground at the foot of the nearest fence pole cracked and gave, the pole was lifted a few inches out of the hole in which it was planted, and the strand of wire came up in their hands.
"Down on your belly!" Sean grunted at Claudia. "Get under it!"
She was lean and nimble as a ferret, and the barbs cleared her back with inches to spare as she wriggled through.
"Hold it!" Sean barked at Job, and they strained up, black muscles knotting, faces contorted with the effort.
Sean dropped flat and pushed himself under the wire. Halfway through he felt one of the steel spikes snag in his flesh and stop him dead. "Pull me through," he ordered, and while Dedan continued to hold up the wire, Job stooped and they linked hands in a fireman's grip.
"Pull!" Sean ordered, and Job heaved. Sean felt his flesh tear and the blood spurt down his back, then he was free.
As he rolled to his feet, Claudia gasped, "Your back!" But he seized her arm again and demanded of Job, "Which way?" He knew Job would have studied the camp during the days he had been imprisoned here. He could rely on his judgment.
"The river," Job responded immediately. "If we can float down clear of the camp."
"TAad the way," Sean ordered. He had to shout to make himself heard. All around them rose the stutter of automatic small-arms fire. There was the deeper clatter of heavy machine guns, sounding like a stick drawn sharply across a sheet of corrupted iron, and then even that din was drowned out by a thunder like Victoria Falls in flood. Sean knew exactly what it was, although he had never heard it before-the sound of the Gatling-type, multi barreled ca
He felt Claudia falter beside him at the gut-melting terror of that sound, and he jerked her arm. "Come on!" he snarled at her.
"Run!" She was still limping slightly from her injured knee ligament as they followed Job and Dedan down toward the river.
Though they were still under the spread branches of the forest, just ahead of them was open ground.
A small -party of Renamo were doubling across this opening, coming up the track toward them, eight or nine men in Indian file.
Each of them carried an RPG mobile rocket launcher. As they ran, their faces were turned up toward the sky, seeking a target for their rockets.
The detachment of racketeers was still two hundred meters from them when suddenly the earth around them erupted. Sean had never in all his war experience seen anything like it. The ground dissolved, seemed to turn to a liquid that boiled into a fog of dust under the jet of 12.7-men ca
Along a wide swathe of ca
Sean still had a grip on Claudia's arm, and he pulled her down into the grass beside the track just as a shadow swept over them.
However, the canopy of branches overhead must have screened them from the eyes of the gu
The Hind cruised overhead, barely fifty feet above the tops of the trees, and abruptly they had a full view of the machine as it crossed over the open ground where the torn corpses of the rocket men lay scattered. Sean felt a physical shock at the sight of it. He had not expected it to be so large and so grotesquely ugly.