Ahead, the Land Rover comes into view, parked in the middle of the stream, the cooling water flowing over its bumper and around its flanks, glowing with otherworldly light above the water line, as if it is a phantom coach that conveys the spirits of the dead to their reward.
They are now within the perimeter of the helo’s downdraft. The trees thrash overhead, spinning off leaves that shudder through the green dark like huge moths, and the tall grasses shiver, and the turbulent air beats shapes into the surface of the stream that was heretofore as smooth as glass.
They’re thirty yards from the Land Rover…now twenty…fifteen. The windshield is a darker rectangle in the bright green of the vehicle. Beyond the glass there are no warm shapes of people, as though the Rover has been abandoned.
If the Washingtons have foolishly set out on foot with the boy in this forbidding territory, they can’t have gotten far. The trees might mask their smaller heat signatures from aerial surveillance, but there will be breaks in the canopy through which they will sooner or later be sighted, and eventually there won’t be any trees at all.
Ten yards, and now Jergen and Dubose are in the very eye of the downdraft, where the air is calmer, although the engine roar and the whump-whump-whump of the rotary wing are louder than ever.
Perhaps it is only the tidal crash of rhythmic sound resonating in the hollows of Jergen’s bones, but suddenly he shudders with the suspicion that they have walked into a trap after all.
6
Gavin was slumped down in the driver’s seat. The single lens of the ATN PVS7-3 goggles, which fed a gathered image to both eyes, was aimed through the thick spokes of the steering wheel and just over the top of the dashboard, so that he presented little or no heat profile separate from that of the Rover. From this uncomfortable position, he saw the men appear out of the gloom, one on each side of the stream, pistols at the ready, and he watched them approach through the wind-tossed vegetation.
Travis had put the briefcase full of money and Jessie’s blade-runner prosthetics on the backseat, and he had taken refuge on the floor, where the dogs cuddled with him. Jessie was in the cargo area, which the shepherds had occupied previously; she was sitting, propped against the back of the backseat, below window level.
Gavin had switched off the engine when they had first driven into the stream, hoping that the cooling flow and the sheltering trees might blind the chopper to them. When that hadn’t worked, he had started the engine again and prepared to make a break for it when the moment was right.
In the roar of the helicopter, the men approaching along the banks of the stream would not be able to hear the Land Rover. They might assume the engine wasn’t running, or that the vehicle was abandoned.
When the gunmen drew as close as Gavin dared to let them get before taking action, he shifted the idling vehicle into drive. The pressure of the rushing water prevented the Rover from drifting forward, so that the thugs were not alerted until he popped up in his seat and tramped the accelerator. For an instant, the big tires spun on the flowstone bed of the stream, but then the Land Rover surged forward.
The assassins startled and hesitated for but a moment, which brought the Rover almost even with them before they opened fire. Three muzzle flares, two on the right. A bullet barked off the roof panel above the windshield. Another knocked a side mirror cockeyed. Maybe the third went wide. Even as they were firing, Gavin gave them a blast of the horn, which might have further startled them, but which was primarily meant to be a signal to Jessie.
7
Seated in the cargo area, back pressed to the backseat, Jessie faced the open tailgate, shotgun ready. When the horn blared all but simultaneously with the gunfire and they kept moving, she could only suppose that Gavin hadn’t been hit, thank God, and that they were already passing the gunmen.
In the immediate echo of the horn, as plumes of water flared up from the back tires and chopper downdraft cast a cold spray into the cargo area, Jessie squeezed off the first of four rounds, unable to see any target, intending only to make the gunmen drop flat and hold their fire in the Land Rover’s wake, muzzle flare for an instant glittering in thousands of airborne droplets, recoil bucking her against the bracing seatback. Few things equaled the thundercrack of a 12-gauge to make sober men duck and cover, and by the time she squeezed off the second, third, and fourth rounds, the Rover was so far upstream she didn’t feel in danger from their pistol fire.
Ears ringing, half-deaf for the moment, Jessie resorted to the open box of shells between her thighs to slip a round in the breech and three more in the tube magazine.
8
The German shepherds were good dogs, but they were howling now in the backseat, protesting the painful volume of shotgun blasts in such a contained space, and Gavin sympathized, his ears ringing as though he’d been slapped hard up both sides of his head. He shouted to Travis, his voice sounding as if it came from the far end of a culvert. The boy shouted back just loud enough to be heard—he was okay—and Jessie gave a shout-out, too.
The blackish trees beyond the reach of the helo’s downdraft stood as still as if petrified to stone in another millennium, and on his left he came to a break in their palisade and swung out of the stream, over the low grassy bank, onto the canyon floor. Fifty yards ahead stood some model of truck he’d never seen before, even though, as he closed on it, he could make out the word FORD in large letters across the grille.
If there had been three men with the truck, one remaining behind, it might be a mistake to stop, but he didn’t think there was a third. He didn’t see anyone. He braked beside the Ford, threw open his door, and drew his Springfield .45. He emptied the magazine into the two rear tires on the driver’s side, blowing out both, a couple rounds ricocheting off the alloy wheels, distorted reflections of the bright green muzzle flashes quivering through the glossy black paint like some aurora borealis in an evil netherworld. He ejected the empty magazine, slapped in a new one, closed his door, holstered the warm pistol, and drove east at high speed.
The gunmen were on foot now and no longer an immediate threat, but the helicopter was giving chase.
Gavin came to a place where the trees relented on both sides of the stream. Beyond the sinuous slide of water, the south wall of the canyon looked lower and less steep than the north wall, offering what appeared to be a clear route to the top. He forded the stream and motored up an incline of grass. The ground was still soft from recent rains and moist below the first couple inches, and he gouged out muddy tracks all the way to the crest.
On the higher ground, the helicopter came at them from the west. It was a civilian helo, large enough to carry six or eight passengers in addition to the crew, if it had not been retrofitted for another purpose. It bore no agency ID that he could see in the drowned light of the NVGs.
Maybe the pilot had been military in an earlier career, but maybe he was just a chopper jockey who had no service training, no war experience. The latter seemed to be the case when he swooped in no more than fifty feet above the Rover, as though to intimidate the driver, which was a hopeless cause.
But even if they weren’t ex-military, the pilot and his copilot might be more than just aerial-search specialists assisting a hard-boiled ground crew. If the copilot was a trained sniper—or if a sniper was aboard—that might justify a lower approach in order to take out the vehicle without accidentally killing anyone aboard. No doubt the people trying to find Jane would prefer to interrogate Gavin and Jessie rather than kill them, and at all costs take Travis alive. Or maybe their intent was to spook him with one dangerous feint after another, using the helicopter much as a matador used a red cape to thwart a bull, distracting and delaying him long enough for the ground crew to scale the canyon wall and reengage.