Travis understood all that, even as he shoved Paige, while his own body’s momentum continued backward. A millisecond later it shifted beyond the balance point of his left arm beneath him. His feet kicked out of place on the rubber crumbs, and he went down hard on his back, landing on the shotgun he’d slung on his shoulder.
Finn had already torn his FLIR headset off by the time the flames erupted, his second shouted word still clearing his mouth. He saw the burst of light forty feet away, and a fraction of a second later the fire was rushing toward him. It didn’t just spread along its pathway: it screamed. It looked like a bullet train emerging in flames from a tunnel. Finn only just managed to step clear of it, even with plenty of distance to see it coming.
Lambert and Miller and the three behind them were almost immediately ablaze. Finn saw why. It wasn’t just the ground beneath them that was burning—the sides of the vehicles had been doused with gasoline, too. The men were walled in by the inferno.
Even the five who hadn’t yet entered the space were flailing, impulsively trying to cover their eyes instead of the FLIR lenses five inches in front of their foreheads.
Finn lunged at them. He swatted their headsets up and off, one after another, and shoved them toward the next channel through the cars.
“It’s a fucking diversion!” he screamed. “Take them before they can move on it!”
Paige saw Travis land on the Remington, even as she and Bethany fell to the ground behind the van. Paige landed on her ass, twisted hard to the side, slammed both hands to the ground and pushed herself up into another crouch, all in one fluid move. Then she was rising, uncoiling like a spring to full height, her right hand automatically drawing the SIG-Sauer from her waistband.
She heard Finn yelling something about a diversion.
She came out from behind the van, leveling the SIG across the roof of the compact car next to it. She was vaguely aware of Travis right beneath her, trying to roll over and get his hands onto the shotgun, but other things took greater command of her attention.
The fire trail. Surging away across the desert like the exhaust wash of a rocket.
The five men in the flames, their clothing ablaze, their hands grabbing at zippers and buttons, their bodies running into one another and into the cars that boxed them in on the sides.
The other five men. Not on fire. Not even wearing their headsets anymore. Turning and running in this direction, through the nearest free pathway between the vehicles. Finn urging them on.
Finn.
Right there. Just beyond the compact car and the lowrider that faced it. He was thirty feet away, and holding the other cylinder.
For a moment Paige met his eyes. She had the SIG leveled in the neutral space between the charging men and Finn himself. It was like an intersection in time. The last point at which all options remained open.
She felt her training begin to exert itself. The world didn’t exactly slow down for her. It just became simple. Very, very simple.
There were targets.
Some of the targets were threats, and some weren’t.
Some of the threats were more immediate than others.
The most immediate was the man leading the pack between the cars. Twenty feet away and closing. His MP5 coming up. His eyes on her chest, where the first shots were going to go about a third of a second from now.
Paige made a slight adjustment with her wrist. It took a fourth of a second. She pulled the trigger. The bullet punched into the pack leader’s forehead like a finger into stale piecrust, collapsing it inward in big bony shards. His head snapped back but his body continued forward, already dropping, obeying simple laws of physics now instead of whatever was left between his ears.
Four men left. Two of them still plowing forward between the cars.
But not the other two. They were checking their movement. Falling back. Turning their attention on Finn now, defensive. They understood the danger he was in—probably better than he understood it himself.
Finn was still in her field of fire. Still a target.
But there were still threats. Immediate threats.
Paige retargeted from the falling corpse of the first man to the second, five feet behind him. She fired again. Caught him right in front of the ear. The entry wound was small, but in the firelight she saw what had to be the full contents of his head come out the back in a ragged cloud.
Then things began to change very quickly.
The two men closest to Finn got ahold of him. Dragged him down and away. Paige saw their heads whip around, their eyes tracking over their surroundings, looking for the best route to safety—to distance and cover.
At the same time, the third man between the cars was dropping. Dropping faster than the corpses of his friends. Getting down out of her line of fire. He hadn’t reached the compact car yet. He was still passing the lowrider. The chasm between it and the next vehicle was shallow, but as Paige lowered the SIG to follow him into it, the compact car’s roof slid up into her gunsights, blocking the angle.