They came out through the exterior door with the SIG and the Remington leveled. There was no one in sight.
Travis looked down and saw the paint chips he’d left earlier. He shook his head.
They moved east across the southern span of the building, out of view of anyone in town. They ran at nearly full speed and reached the southeast corner in a little under a minute.
The donut of open space surrounding the terminal was a quarter mile on every side. They’d first come into the airport from the north, with the city at their backs. They were facing south and east now, with nothing ahead of them but a few pole barns at the edge of town and then a tundra of cars covering miles and miles of flat desert.
Finn and his people were in town. Probably toward the middle. A sprint from this corner of the terminal toward the southeast would be largely hidden by the building itself, at least for the first half of the run. After that they would probably be visible to someone high up in the city, like a watcher on the top floor of the hotel.
Travis saw Paige judging the distance, running through the same logistics.
“I don’t imagine they’ll have a watch posted anymore,” she said. “They’ll have everyone working on the camera mast. They’ll want it raised as soon as possible, and once it’s up they won’t need a watch at all.”
She looked toward the sun. Couldn’t look right at it. The arid sky did nothing to filter its glare, even though it was shining from low in the west. Their guess inside the book shop had been right: it was an hour above the horizon.
Travis suddenly understood Paige’s concern.
“Thermal cameras,” he said.
She looked at him. Nodded. “Eight FLIR cameras, seventy-five meters up. The kind of mast they’ll use is lightweight, guywire stabilized, rapid-deployable. What the military uses for forward operating bases in open country. A skilled team can put one up in an hour.”
Travis looked around at the tarmac. Looked at the scrubland past the perimeter fence, and the sprawl of cars beyond. Every outdoor surface in Yuma was still baking at over one hundred degrees.
But not for long.
All of it would cool quickly once the sun set. It might be cooling already. And once the background was cooler than ninety-eight degrees, the three of them would be the warmest things within a hundred miles of Yuma. Even if they got far out among the cars and army-crawled into the desert all night long, the cameras atop the mast might see them. Infrared light from body heat radiated and reflected like any other kind. It could bounce off metal and glass. FLIR cameras watching from a height of seventy-five meters would have an effective horizon dozens of miles out.
If they were still in Yuma an hour from now, they might as well be wearing neon body suits.
They ran.
They reached the perimeter, crossed the fence and made their way among the cars.
They ducked low and zigzagged south and east for over half an hour, until even the terminal building was at least a mile away.
They stared through the cab of a pickup toward the center of town. They could see the mast going up, rising meter by meter as unseen workers added sections to it at the bottom. The camera assembly was already mounted on top. The mast seemed to hold itself perfectly straight as it rose. Travis pictured four men holding onto guywires—invisible against the sky at this distance—that they would stake into the ground once the mast was complete.
Travis studied the nearest edge of town. On this side of the airport there were only a few outbuildings, all of them tucked in close to the fence line. The zigzagging had put the three of them well beyond the bounds of the city, in what should be empty desert in the present day. There would be little risk of any bystander seeing them appear through the iris.
“Let’s do it,” Paige said.
Travis nodded.
Bethany was still carrying the cylinder. She settled onto one knee and aimed it at almost ground level between the rows of cars. She switched it on.
The iris opened to vacant land under the same kind of long sunlight they were crouching in now, maybe half an hour before dusk. For a second, that seemed wrong to Travis: the present was shifted an hour ahead of this side. It should already be dark over there. Then he remembered. The present was an hour later in the day, but two months earlier in the year. August instead of October. The sunset would be a lot later in August, about enough to offset the difference. It occurred to him that rival armies using this technology against each other would have a lot of abstract thinking to do.
He crawled to the iris and looked through at the broad sweep of present-day Yuma.
He felt the back of his neck go cold.
“Shit,” he whispered.
Paige was beside him a second later. Bethany remained ten feet away, holding the cylinder.