Lambert took point as Finn moved aside. He moved slowly, silently, one step per second. No need to rush.
He came even with the open channel between the last few cars and saw the three targets easily. Two were dead right now if he pulled the trigger. The third—someone small, slender-framed—was crouched at the back corner of the van, halfway around it. That one might create a problem if the shooting started too soon. Might get clear and lead a pursuit among the cars, however brief. Might even return fire—Finn had said these people were armed. Better to take them all in a single action.
Lambert raised his foot to take another step, and heard a faint suction noise from the ground beneath it. He looked down. Saw nothing there in his thermal vision. Looked up again at the targets, still a good thirty feet away. The largest of them had his hand to the ground. Looked like he was holding something with it.
Finn took another step aside as the men filed past him. As he did, his heel struck something in the darkness. It made a light, hollow thud. Something big and empty, made of plastic. It spun aside easily under the impact of his foot. He looked but couldn’t see anything. Whatever it was, it was the same temperature as the ground.
He stooped, felt for it, found it. A smooth container with a handle.
And a spout.
He drew it toward his face, and his next breath told him exactly what it was, and what he’d smelled from atop the truck bed twenty seconds earlier.
Travis was sure the Bic would work—would spark, anyway. Flint and steel shouldn’t have changed at all in Yuma, these past seventy-three years.
He was less sure that the spark would be big enough, or long-lived enough, to ignite the fuel-soaked tire crumbs.
He flicked the sparkwheel with his thumb. It generated a tiny flash that barely escaped the lighter’s windscreen—and had no effect on the fuel.
He flicked it again.
Same result.
Lambert pressed forward between the cars. Twenty feet from the targets now. Still no clean angle on the little one behind the van.
What the hell was the big one holding?
Lambert could see the guy’s thumb moving. Snapping across whatever it was. Each time there was a tiny pinprick of light in his FLIR-enhanced vision.
The third spark did nothing, either. It wasn’t working. Not this way.
Travis pressed the end of the lighter directly into the soft tire crumbs. He put the tip of his index finger to the sparkwheel and dropped his shoulder, allowing plenty of slack into his arm. Then he pivoted, swung his entire upper body clockwise, and kept his finger pressed to the wheel until the last instant, so that every ounce of his momentum would come to bear on it. When his fingertip jerked across the wheel, he felt the steel dig into his skin almost hard enough to draw blood.
In the same instant he heard a man shouting, somewhere close by in the darkness. He was saying, “Fall back!”
Lambert heard Finn start to shout just as the big target lowered its shoulder and wrenched its torso around.
It was the last thing his FLIR goggles showed him.
A tenth of a second later his vision was washed out by blazing white light, and he felt a wave of heat engulf his legs and waist.
Travis had expected Finn’s men to be close. Maybe within a hundred feet. Maybe closer than that.
When the trail of gasoline ignited, revealing the men in a line formation just over a car length away, it was visually startling but not so surprising. Travis threw himself backward, still in his crouch, slamming into Paige and pushing her back with him.
He got his left hand beneath himself on the ground to keep his body from sprawling. He brought his right arm up and around, getting his hand on Paige’s shoulder, and the moment they’d cleared the back of the van, he shoved her sideways, propelling her and Bethany behind the vehicle’s bulk.
At no point did he take his eyes off of the men in the flames. They may have caught him off guard, but it was clear they’d gotten the worse end of the encounter. They flinched backward, their left hands coming off of the forward grips of their weapons, reaching instinctively for their eyes. The top halves of their faces were hidden by some kind of night-vision goggles, but the lower halves said more than enough about the sudden panic they felt. They were blinded and confused, and a second from now their clothing would be on fire. They were in every kind of trouble.
But they weren’t the whole story. Beyond the five who were trapped between the vehicles, Travis could see as many as five more who hadn’t yet filed into the narrow space. They were disoriented too, but they weren’t immobilized.
They were going to be a problem.