Path of the Tiger, стр. 439
The attack had to be launched immediately. Njinga, Zakaria and Ranomi, each of whom was gripping a hand grenade, were perched on thin steel rails that were only barely able to support their weight; especially that of Zakaria, clad as he was in his armour. He was at the front, positioned directly above the first line of troops, facing Njinga and Ranomi so that they could see him and thereby synchronise their movements with precision. Ranomi was in the middle, right above Hrothgar, while Njinga was at the rear, above Joao and his two sweepers.
In the inky darkness of the cramped ceiling, through which the Rebels could see with their night-vision goggles, Zakaria gave a subtle nod and yanked the pin out of his grenade, as did Njinga and Ranomi. With their hearts pounding with such freneticism in their chests that they felt as if they were on an amphetamine high, each of them counted down silently, the booming, rhythmic thudding of their hearts deafening inside their hot ears. The grenades had to be tossed only two seconds before detonation; if they were thrown too soon they would give away the Rebels’ position and allow the troops below to react, and, of course, if they held onto the grenades too long, they would blow themselves up.
It was for this reason that they had practiced counting with a metronome, over and over, until their internal timekeeping was as solid as any Swiss watch. In one move, all three of them kicked out the ceiling squares directly under them and dropped the hand grenades.
Hrothgar, Joao and the troops only had a second to shout in surprise and try to dive out of the way as the deadly steel balls bounced at their feet. Two seconds later, those fist-sized harbingers of violent death ripped a titanic explosion through the corridor, sending a shock wave tearing along the walls, floor and ceiling, and blasting white-hot shears of shrapnel out in all directions.
The instant the grenades exploded Ranomi transformed. Morphing in a split-second from a forty-kilogram woman into a six-hundred-kilogram Sumatran rhinoceros, her eighteen-fold increase in weight tore the thin steel out of its wall attachments, and the entire ceiling around her collapsed downward.
She landed directly on top of one of Joao’s sweepers, crushing and killing him. Joao dived for cover and only just avoided being trampled, but his second sweeper, riddled with smoking shrapnel from the grenade, was neither as fast nor as lucky as his commander. In a burst of speed, Ranomi charged and thundered over him, trampling him under a flurry of sledgehammer hooves.
Njinga and Zakaria dropped out of the ceiling too, landing in the centre of the smoke-thick chaos and confusion. Three of the front-line troops had been killed outright by the blast, while the others had been badly wounded. Hrothgar, thanks both to his preternatural reflexes and a bulletproof vest, had only been mildly injured by the grenades, but his assassin had taken a terrible beating from the explosion and had been flung across the corridor, his body pierced all over with jagged shrapnel.
Despite being stunned from the combined force of the exploding grenades, however, these men were seasoned and battle-hardened veterans, all of whom had been shot and stabbed many times before, so without even thinking of recovery or flight they launched an immediate counterattack.
Njinga had landed close to Hrothgar, and he quickly fired his sawed-off shotgun at point-blank range, giving her two direct hits in rapid succession; one was a blast to her face, which tore the hi-tech helmet – the only thing that stopped her entire skull from being macerated – right off of her head, while the second was a direct hit to her torso. The force from the shotgun blast to her chest punched her off her feet and hurled her against a wall, the impact knocking all the wind out of her lungs and leaving her gasping futilely for breath that just wouldn’t come. She had dropped her AK-47, and even though she had a nine-millimetre pistol holstered on her hip, she was stunned and virtually immobile, and therefore almost helpless as Hrothgar bore down on her through the swirling smoke and wall-jarring gunfire, his battle-axe raised with deadly intent above his head.
Zakaria, meanwhile, unloaded half of his Uzi clip into the face of one of the surviving soldiers of the vanguard, and then dived to the floor under a scything arc of M-16 fire unleashed by the other trooper, emptying the rest of his clip into this opponent the moment he hit the ground. As his lifeless adversary flopped to the floor, Zakaria dropped his empty firearm and scrambled to his feet, moving with swift agility despite the weight of his suit of steel. Now that he was without a firearm, he drew his two-handed sword and prepared for hand-to-hand combat.
At the rear of the action Joao, his arms and legs riddled with shrapnel and his trousers dark and slick with blood, backpedalled toward the exit while firing off his twin Desert Eagles with focused wrath at Ranomi. However, due to a combination of Ranomi’s spurt of speed and her russet-coloured form being only partially visible in the half-light, most of the shots missed, with only a few of the heavy rounds hitting home. One shot, however, passed right over Ranomi’s shoulder and hit one of Joao’s own men. The bullet obliterated his skull, taking off half