Curtis held Quinn’s outstretched hand, pulled the arm outward slightly, and raised the heel of his mountain boot. In one swift movement he brought his foot down on Quinn’s disfigured shoulder joint, driving the head of the humerus down into the joint where it belonged. The sound reminded Johnson of the report of a Colt 44 pistol. The crack was loud, and Quinn cringed at the pain but didn’t cry out. He refused to let his pain do anything other than make him angrier at the killers who had murdered his team. His resolve to get answers and justice only grew stronger with the blaze of red and black that filled his vision as the pain vibrated through his whole skeleton.
After a moment of breathing heavily, Quinn got up and helped Johnson set up their tent. It was another garishly bright yellow TNF geodesic-dome tent. Quinn’s pack contained a miniature version of the futuristic stove Eva had seen back at the Sunnydale camp. After it was set up in the tent, the heat from the stove took only a few minutes to dry Curtis’s and Eva’s still damp synthetic fiber clothing after Quinn had wrung the garments out. In the meantime, they huddled in compressible micro-fiber fleece blankets. Since he wasn’t wet, Quinn hung his blanket from the gear loft near the tent’s ceiling, effectively creating a wall separating the tent into two halves, so that Eva could undress in private.
They sat in silence. Eva thought about her deceased colleagues. Johnson thought about the seismologist Val, and how he was supposed to have had a date with her once they had all returned to the States. That wouldn’t be happening now. Instead, he would be attending a lot of funerals—if they made it back to the States.
Quinn saw only a blistering haze of crimson as his thoughts turned repeatedly to revenge. He hadn’t been truly involved in his heart or his head with Eva’s mysterious plane crash, although he was attracted to her. He had been willing to believe that there was some explanation for the plane crash. But now there was no mystery. Someone had deliberately tried to kill Eva and the other two archeologists. And now the bastards that were after her had come back and tried again. Only this time they had murdered his entire team. Eight people whose lives were entrusted to him were dead, he himself had been buried alive three times in one day, and Johnson and Eva were nearly drowned.
Oh yes, he thought. I am completely involved now.
He went out of the tent and filled a small plastic resealable bag with snow and chunks of ice he carved out of the frozen ground with the retractable spikes on his boots. When the bag was full, he used a roll of neon green duct-tape to strap it to his aching shoulder and pulled his environment suit on over the improvised ice pack. He thought dark and grim thoughts the whole time. He wanted answers. He wanted names. He wanted to see someone bleed…
After Curtis and Eva were just finished dressing and Quinn had come back into the tent, Eva heard the sound.
“What’s that noise?” she asked.
“Helicopter.” Quinn frowned as he went back out again.
The other two followed him out and scanned the skies for the distant thumping sound. Snow was beginning to fall again. They were close to the river they had just escaped, and as Quinn searched the sky for a helicopter, he realized they were completely hemmed in on all sides by the dusty brown hills and brilliant blue and white snow covered mountains. They were in a valley, and they were sitting ducks if the chopper wasn’t friendly. He was about to suggest they try to find some cover somewhere, but it was too late.
The twin-turbine Bell 214 helicopter came screaming over a low range of hills and into the valley. It was the regularly scheduled ARGO supply helicopter that was supposed to stop by the Sunnydale camp. The logo on the side of the white fuselage simply said ARGO with a stylized mountaineering ice ax underlining the acronym. But it was a day early, and it was moving way too fast.
“Crap on toast!” Johnson clearly understood the implications of the helicopter’s untimely arrival.
They were all running in different directions when the angry sputtering blizzard of gunfire began. The line of fire ripped right through their tent, and the spot where they had all been standing just seconds before. Quinn recognized the sound. It was the almost leisurely cycle of an AK-47 assault rifle. The chopper blazed past on its first attack run, and Quinn caught a glimpse of both the unfamiliar Chinese pilot and the gunman in the open side cargo door with the Russian-designed weapon. Quinn continued his sprint back toward the river, hoping the helicopter would follow him.