Surprisingly, the other outlander, Cass, was out of his carriage and running toward Bernie’s car. “Get down!” Vladislav shouted. “Get down before you get shot!”
What was the man doing? Vladislav wondered. He was playing with the back of Bernie’s car. The back of the car opened like a great mouth, hiding Cass from Vladislav’s view.
There hadn’t been bandits in this area for years. It was too well patrolled. Not out of fear of bandits, but to provide warning of an attack by Poland. Vladislav waved to the embassy bureau troops who were bringing up the rear. “To the knyazhna! Don’t worry about the carts, protect Natalia Petrovna and Bernie!” They could probably replace the stuff in the carts if they had to, but they had to protect the princess and Bernie. Vladislav shot one of the bandits and dropped the pistol. He drew the second. He always carried one in each boot and two in his belt.
“Yeeeehaaaw!”
Vladislav looked around, startled by the scream. Cass had reappeared from the back of Bernie’s car and was carrying a long gun of some sort. He was running at the woods on the north side of the road, screaming like a banshee. Clickety boom, came the noise. And again. Clicktey boom. Clicktey boom. Two bandits were down, one with most of his head blown away. Vladislav watched as Cass cut to the right. Clickety boom. Cut left. Clickety boom. Cass ran in some sort of wild pattern that the attackers couldn’t follow. Neither could Vladislav.
Crack. A different noise sounded. One of the bandits fell from a horse. Since most of the bandits had been on foot, Vladislav figured he was probably their leader. They should have been paying attention to Bernie instead of Cass, who stood behind his car taking well-aimed shots at the attackers. He was propped up on the front of it, rather. Vladislav could see his head and shoulders. The bandits would be lucky to see his head, or the .30-06 that was killing them. It would take a special miracle to actually hit a target that small.
* * *
Bernie had frozen for a moment, when the attack began, immobilized by another flashback to the battle of the Crapper. But as he usually did, he managed to shake it off quickly. Store it away, rather; he never did really shake off those memories.
A familiar detachment came over him. He reached over the back seat, got his rifle, opened the glove compartment and took out a box of ammo. Then he got out of the car and took position using the hood as a firing stand.
Immediately, he spotted a man on horseback and shot him out of the saddle. Then he looked for Cass. The idiot had managed to take out at least two attackers because they’d been completely caught off guard by his broken field charge and weren’t accustomed to the rate of fire of an up-time pump-action shotgun. But they were fighting men and they were all around him. Bernie could see a bandit already taking aim at Cass from the side.
Bernie took him down. One shot. All he needed. He wasn’t in the league of someone like Julie Sims when it came to sheer marksmanship but he was very steady in a fight. At this close range and with a modern rifle, that was plenty good enough.
Lowry gunned down another bandit at point blank range. But for the first time one of his opponents fired back before he fell. He missed because Lowry’s rush unsettled him, but they wouldn’t all miss.
There was another bandit just beyond Cass, aiming at him. Bernie took him down. A bandit next to him. He went down too.
Another flashback paralyzed Bernie for an instant. Furiously, he drove it under. But he’d been out of it long enough for Cass to shoot down another bandit—and three bandits to fire at him.
Blind luck—Cass lost his footing and fell. The bullets passed harmlessly over him. He hadn’t done that intentionally, though. In fact, it was obvious he hadn’t even seen the three men to his left.
Bernie shot one of them. The other two immediately ducked for cover. Bernie fired two more shots to keep them down, giving Lowry a chance to get away. Then he started reloading the rifle.
* * *
Vladislav looked around again. The situation wasn’t as bad as it had at first appeared. The attackers had been spotted before most of the column was in the trap. Bernie had apparently gotten their leader, who’d been trying to shift his troops. And Cass, the madman, had spread panic in their ranks—which was made all the worse by Bernie’s deadly covering fire.
Meanwhile, Vladislav’s men were pushing against their northwestern flank and pinning most of them away from the body of the column. Vladislav wanted to charge the bandits; to use the loss of their leader and the panic. A charge now, even with the few men he had, would break them and send them running. If these were all there were. But, what if there was another group? His job was to protect the knyazhna and Bernie, not to leave them unprotected while he went on a boar hunt.