He’d survived numerous near-death moments in Afghanistan, and Jessie had survived two helicopters being shot down and an IED detonating directly under her Jeep. When you miraculously escaped mortal threats often enough, changes occurred in your thinking. For one thing, you came to believe in miracles, although it was better not to expect them routinely.
For another thing, you began to wonder if just maybe there was a scheme to things and if perhaps your sorry ass had been saved for a purpose. When Jane showed up on their doorstep, needing a place in which to hide Travis, Gavin had at once thought, This is it, the very reason why my sorry ass is still on the planet. He had looked at Jessica, and her smile had confirmed that she’d arrived at the same conviction. She was the one who had said yes by saying, As long as this boy’s here with us, the worst thing that’ll happen to him is maybe he’ll stub a toe.
Saying such a thing was tempting fate, but it was the kind of bravado that Jane had needed to hear.
Now the time had come either to make good on that promise or die trying.
The first leg of their journey required them to cross out of Orange County, into San Diego County, far from where they had ridden horses earlier in the day, and pick up State Highway 76 east of Pala. The overland part of the journey was twenty-five miles if you drew a straight line between points, but the rough terrain didn’t permit direct travel; in fact, they might have to go as far as fifty miles. And there were stretches of ground over which they could not attain any significant speed, especially because of the need to avoid using headlights. Gavin hoped to reach Highway 76 by midnight, a little more than four hours after setting out.
He expected to be pursued. The only question was how much of a head start they might get. Jessie was certain—Gavin had to agree—there would be an aerial component to the search team. Which meant the pursuer would make faster progress than the pursued.
Consequently, he stopped periodically and switched off the engine and got out of the Land Rover to listen to the night and scan the land behind them through the NVGs. He needed to guard against the posse abruptly coming upon them without their knowledge.
The third time, when he parked at the head of a long decline, there were the usual desert-insect buzzes and clicks and busy ticks. Also feline cries that might have been a family of bobcats on the hunt. And from a distance…the distinctive sound of a helicopter.
He surveyed the night to the northwest, the direction from which they had come. At first, nothing. Just a green dark. Then he identified a three-point constellation in the totally overcast sky, brighter than any stars would have been, each as brilliant as Venus. The constellation rotated. Not stars. A minimal array of aircraft running lights.
They were closer than he expected. He needed to take the Land Rover to lower ground at once and proceed only through valleys and canyons, as deep below the rolling hilltops as he could get, where the engine heat would not register on the helo’s look-ahead cameras.
When he got in behind the wheel and started the engine, Jessie asked, “Has the shit hit the fan?”
“Not yet, but they’re flingin’ it our direction.”
Jessie looked over her left shoulder. “Are you belted in back there, cowboy?”
“Belted,” Travis assured her. “And the dogs are down like they’re supposed to be.”
Because of the noise made by the chopper, the pursuing ground unit wouldn’t be able to listen for the Land Rover. Gavin goosed the engine, and they sped down the long slope with stones rattling hard against the undercarriage and quick-settling dust billowing out behind them.
He had to stay as much as possible on sandstone and mudstone and slopes of talus, away from soft soil, avoiding any vegetation that would betray their passage, until he found a place to go to ground. He didn’t think he could reach the state route across the county line before they came upon him. His best chance might be to tuck the Rover away somewhere, lie low, and hope that the helo would pass over them, fruitlessly quartering the wilds in search of their human game.
But when you had a vehicle with a hot engine, where did you hide it from an infrared search in a night-cooled landscape as barren as this one?
3
In the kitchen, Gilberto didn’t need black coffee or caffeine tablets or lively music to stay awake. In the chair directly across the dinette table from him, Booth Hendrickson was the perfect cure for drowsiness.
Jane had ordered the man to sleep, and he slept, but his sleep was dream-riddled and never restful. Behind his pale lids, his eyes moved ceaselessly, fixing on whatever sights in some dark nightmare kingdom. His face was not slack, but enlivened by expressions ranging from perplexion to abhorrence to revulsion.
When he wasn’t grinding his teeth or chewing his lips, he made soft pathetic sounds or talked in his sleep, his voice haunting the kitchen as if it issued from another dimension.
“Hands and hands and more hands, a thousand hands…”
Because he was restrained by zip-ties linking his ankles to the stretcher bar between the back legs of his chair, his hands remained free. As he spoke, they crawled upon the table, nervous, uncertain, this way and that, as if he were seeking something that he feared finding.
“Don’t make me, don’t make me, don’t make me,” he pleaded in a whisper.
His respiration grew ragged and then panicky as he gasped for breath and exhaled in gusts, making thin sounds of desperation, as if some creature born of Hell pursued him. It seemed that he must wake himself, but each time the panic subsided and still he slept, sliding into a less urgent state of anxiety.
From time to time, he returned to the subject of eyes. “Their eyes…their eyes…” And later: “What’s that in their eyes? Do you see? Do you see what’s in their eyes?”
Although Gilberto didn’t need caffeine, he wanted something to settle his stomach. The Scotch he’d drunk had soured in his gut, and acid refluxed on him. He brought a glass of cold milk to the table and used it to chase a tablet of Pepcid AC before he sat down again.
“Don’t leave me in the dark,” Hendrickson pleaded in an urgent and despairing whisper. “No way is the way you think it is, there’s no out, only in.”
For a few minutes the man was silent, though his face appeared no less tortured.
Abruptly he opened his eyes and sat forward in his chair and seemed to look at Gilberto as he whispered, “Heads inside heads, eyes inside eyes, they’re coming now, I know they’re coming, no way to keep them out of my eyes, out of my head. They’re coming.”
“What can I do for you?” Gilberto asked. “Can I help you somehow?”
But maybe Hendrickson didn’t see him after all, hadn’t been speaking to him, and was still asleep even when his eyes were open. He closed them and settled back in his chair and grew quiet again.
Gilberto doubted that the milk and acid reducer were going to work.
4
Radley Dubose becomes increasingly agitated as forty minutes pass with no sign of further spoor left by their quarry. He curses the Washingtons, the night, the desert, the helicopter, its pilot, and its copilot. Even though he gets to drive a VelociRaptor with all the features that Hennessey’s wizards of customization can provide, a truck costing north of three hundred thousand dollars, he is not happy. He is possessed by a backwoods urge to whup somebody, anybody.
Carter Jergen is also frustrated, though he would be much less so if he were behind the wheel instead of stuck in the passenger’s seat, relaying messages from the helo copilot, who for forty minutes has not had any news worth passing along. It’s almost as if the Land Rover has gone airborne.