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Giselle’s heightened senses detected the trap before Geoff had a chance to trip it. She caught up with him and placed her arm across his chest, motioning him to stop and stay silent. She crouched and he followed suit. The blonde warrior separated the tripwire from the leaves covering it, following it backward to its source with her eyes. Satisfied with the nature of the booby trap, she motioned Geoff down still further, then gave the chord a yank.
Whooosh – THUD!
The wooden framework with its multiple sharpened spikes that had been lashed to the springy tree limb had embedded deeply into the trunk of the tree on the opposite side of the trail. The ‘bear trap’ would have impaled Geoff against the tree if he had snagged the chord with his boot. Not satisfied she had seen the last of the Golganthan’s cunning, she extracted the combat knife from Geoff’s belt and probed the path on the other side of the tripwire.
She uncovered the punji pit with the third thrust of the knifepoint. It was smallish and not even knee-deep. But the pit contained enough of those same sharpened spikes to shred a human foot, boot or no. If either she or Geoff had spotted the tripwire,and stepped over it….
Geoff was ashen-faced.
“How did you know?”
Giselle shrugged her shoulders.
“Our guys started seeing these combination traps in the Mekong Delta in nineteen sixty-five. Every generation of soldiers since has been taught to watch out for them, and similar booby-traps. Aren’t you glad I didn’t sleep through that class?”
Geoff leaned over and gave her a quick kiss.
“Rah – thur!”
The kiss saved his life. The Golganthan arrow embedded itself in the tree trunk just below the bear trap. If Geoff hadn’t moved his head, the arrow would have penetrated his left temple and likely passed completely through his skull.
“Time to go!” Giselle barked.
She was up in a flash, both hands a blur of motion. They lightly grazed the front of her tunic, then whipped out in different directions. The pellet in her right hand raised a puff of smoke at their feet, masking their sudden flight off the path and through the trees. The four-pointed shuriken zipped from her left hand, whizzed through the air and embedded itself in the Golganthan warrior’s longbow, jerking it to one side. Had the bow not been raised in firing position, the throwing star would have buried itself in his eye. During their mad dash, the Golganthan female suddenly popped up directly to their right, her own bow drawn and read to let fly. On the dead run, Geoff drew his sword, swept left-to-right at chest level, and ran on. The sword’s blade sliced through the longbow, causing the severed halves to snap back into the astonished female’s face and chest, knocking her unconscious and off her feet.
The two Humans stopped to catch their breath some two hundred yards on.
“That was a neat piece of work you did with that sword,” Giselle gasped. “It allowed us to escape cleanly.”
“Uh,not exactly,” Geoff wheezed. Then, he collapsed.
“Oh, God,no,” the Amazon moaned.
The arrow had penetrated back-to-front. The two-tiered triangular stone arrowhead and six inches of shaft protruded through the front of his tunic on the right side. She could tell by the position it had taken his kidney and either a hunk of small intestine or ascending colon, possibly both. Hopefully, it had missed the renal artery – otherwise…. Giselle snapped off the front portion of the arrow. She grabbed the large compression bandage from the med kit and pressed it on the front wound, wrapped the long wings around his torso and tied them off. She packed gauze around the arrow shaft in back and taped it in place.
She sensed the third arrow, rather than saw it. Geoff’s sword was at her fingertips. In one fluid motion, she drew and swept the air before her, halving the incoming arrow in mid-flight. She was up and away like lightning, bearing down on her porcine stalker. Judging the speed of her approach and aware of the fate of his third arrow, the Golganthan saw the futility of launching a fourth. He saw, instead, the wisdom of a speedy withdrawal.
The good soldier knew the right thing to do was to finish it, right there and then; run him down, cut him to ribbons, then do the unconscious female and be done with it. Earth would be safe once more – at the cost of onlyone human life. Giselle remembered she had another agenda; if they were towin, the life lost could not behis. She returned to her prince, dropped both their swords into the dense undergrowth, carefully hoisted Geoff on her shoulders and started running. She would have to leave the rest of the arrow in him to make certain he didn’t bleed to death on the trip back.
