Hunt Among the Killers of Men by Gabriel Hunt

while the other half was galvanized into directionless flight. Gabriel shoved one runner aside in time to save his life. The man cursed him in Arabic. The casino’s black-suited security men had unlimbered a frightening variety of snubbed full-autos and were handing their disorganization back to the crowd in the form of scattered bullet-sprays at anything and everything that might be an antagonist. Gabriel knew that, in a firefight, those little earphone-buds only worked in the movies, so if the shooters were trying to communicate or coordinate, right now they couldn’t hear a damned thing.
    The racket was incredible inside what was still essentially a huge metal room. Flat-nosed slugs chuddered up a balustrade and destroyed a fake Grecian urn next to Gabriel’s head.
    The two acrobats who had made their grand entrance by defenestrating from the security portal were still trying to find their wits and their feet. One man was yelling and pointing. The other was trying to shield his boss.
    Forgoing the increasing availability of weapons as a good contingent of assorted bodyguards and security men inadvertently shot each other, Gabriel bypassed his instinctual craving for a firearm (if anything, he would have wanted his Colt, but he’d left that stashed back on the Foundation jet) and made for the vacant security window. Mitch was up there. Alive, dead or compromised—he had no way of knowing except through immediate action.
    Slugs tore across the baize at his heels as he hit a chemin de fer table at full tilt and vaulted toward the gaping eye of the blown observation port. Its rubberizedmount was fanged with shards of glass but Gabriel managed to pull himself up and over.
    He found himself in the security nest with a couple of dead guys and one gibbering employee still stashed beneath the console. Equipment was sparking and blowing out all around him as incoming fire destroyed costly electronics the way rock breaks scissors.
    Outside the nest door was a secondary corridor more in keeping with the ship’s utilitarian naval origins—a lot of cast iron and shatterproof lights.
    Thirty yards ahead, Qingzhao and Mitch encountered two security men rushing toward the danger zone. Qingzhao flat-handed one in the face, pile-driving his palate back toward his spine. He collided with his buddy, whose legs Mitch took away in a fast and clumsy sweep-kick. It was enough. The man bonked rivets and decking with his head all the way down. Qingzhao quickly disarmed them and handed off the extra firearm to Mitch.
    They had no time for a huddle. No time to exchange numbers. No time to recognize each other as anything but an ally.
    “Where to?” said Mitch.
    “Out,” said Qingzhao.
    They untethered a blistering spray of bullets back the way they had come, just as Gabriel Hunt ran into their field of fire.
    Gabriel flattened out in a home-run slide. An inch higher, a split second sooner, and he would have caught a bullet in his left nostril.
    The women were firing at the gunmen who had crowded into the passage in Gabriel’s wake. Men who were shooting back just as ferociously as the women tried to flee.
    Hornet swarms of lead exchanged position above Gabriel as he pulled himself into an opening in the wall—steam piping, cold now, unused in the new incarnation of the aircraft carrier. There would come an eyeblink instant when all shooters had to reload, and that was what Gabriel was waiting for.
    The volley ebbed and Gabriel mad-dashed for the next hatchway, knowing from seafaring experience how to grab the upper ledge and swing through without giving himself a skull fracture.
    Mitch had spotted him during the exchange. She had even uttered his name—“ Gabriel? “—but this had gone unheard in the cannonade. She hesitated. Qingzhao had to drag her along with a snort of frustration.
    Her yanked arm erupted with sudden pain and Mitch looked down to see a bullet hole in her left shoulder. Dammit, she’d been hit! Stupid!
    They were