Pine set the drone down and fired it up. Manipulating the controls, she watched as it rose into the air, then she directed it toward the road.
She guided it up to a hundred feet and drove it forward some more. Pine studied the illuminated screen closely. Threading across the screen was a cluster of heavily armed men. They were outlined in black and gray on the screen and were making good time, but there was caution in their movements. The lead man knelt down, scanned the ground, picked up a handful of loose dirt, and sniffed it.
The gas, thought Pine. The smell was still in the dirt.
The group moved forward. She thought she could make out Buckley. He was near the front, a shotgun in his hands.
She let the drone hover over the group for a few moments. Then she put her finger on the button Spector had showed her, said a silent prayer, and pushed it.
The darkness over Buckley and his men was ripped away as the drone’s searchlight exploded down on them like a sunrise of startling proximity.
A bare millisecond passed before Pine heard Spector’s rifle begin firing.
On the screen Pine saw a man shot and he fell. Then another, and a third. The rest scattered, trying to avoid the light from the drone that made them sitting ducks. But Pine moved the drone to keep them in the spotlight.
Spector’s rifle roared again and again. And more men fell.
Shit, thought Pine. That gal can shoot.
The next moment the drone was blown out of the sky by a shot from one of Buckley’s men. The darkness instantly returned.
But the damage had been done.
Spector scrambled down from the ledge as return fire hit all around her position, blowing off shards of rock with each impact. She met up with Pine.
“We need to fall back.”
“The road gets narrower up ahead,” said Pine. “We can funnel them into that.”
They raced away as shots continued to fly at them, and the sounds of running feet echoed off the canyon walls as their pursuers closed in. The gunfire became so intense that they finally had to stop running and duck down.
“Look out,” screamed Spector a few moments later.
A man appeared out of the darkness and charged forward, firing at Pine. She turned and shot him in the chest. He fell dead to the dirt.
Then Pine groaned as a piece of sharpened rock, blown off by all the concentrated gunfire, slashed her in the arm, shredding the skin and flinging blood over her.
Pine grabbed her arm but managed to turn and run.
Spector slung her rifle over her shoulder, pulled a pistol, and sprayed the area behind them with gunfire to buy them some time. They rounded a bend, sprinted ahead, and reached the SUV.
Pine grabbed the first aid kit, and Mercy helped her bandage her arm.
“You gonna be okay?” asked Mercy.
“Oh, yeah,” said Pine. “No way I’m missing this shit.”
Pine grabbed some spare mags from one of the duffels.
Mercy snatched up the shotgun and held the weapon at the ready.
“I laid Carol down in the back seat,” she told Pine. “Figure bullets are going to be flying.”
“You’re the failsafe, Mercy. If they get past us it’s up to you.”
She racked the pistol’s slide, slid the mags into her jacket pocket, handed some to Spector, and said, “Now, let’s finish this.”
CHAPTER
75
PINE WAS ON THE LEFT SIDE of the trail and Spector on the right. They crept forward, trying not to make any noise, and pausing and listening in the still air for the sounds of anything coming their way. Pine knew that the fact that they were hearing nothing meant Buckley and his men had hunkered down and were reevaluating things in light of their heavy losses.
Pine looked across the trail and saw Spector pause and kneel down. She glanced at Pine and pointed ahead, held up her pistol, and then made an X with her forearms followed by a sweeping motion in front of her. Pine gave her a thumbs-up.
She took aim with her pistol, pointing it to the far right, about two feet in front of Spector’s position.
And waited.
When the two men came into view, Spector’s gun fired; a split second later so did Pine’s. They were employing a cross-stream tactic, meaning they had overlapping fields of fire covering the entire space in front of them.
They both emptied their fifteen-shot mags, paused to reload, and commenced firing again.
Three men eventually dropped dead in front of them.
The only drawback to this tactic was their muzzle flashes had revealed their positions.
Concentrated gunfire started to rain down on them. It was so intense that both women had to hurl themselves over rocks and fall flat to their bellies. When it stopped, Pine jumped up and ran over to Spector, and helped her up.
“We need to go, now!” barked Pine.
Out of the darkness, two men appeared, guns pointed at them. Pine whirled and kicked the weapon out of one man’s hand. The other man fired at her, but missed because Spector had kicked him right in the nuts.
Then they went at it, hand to hand. The men were far bigger and far stronger. And they ended up being no match for the two women because, in a fight like this, physical strength was vastly overrated. Spector ended the life of one by gutting him with a knife. Pine broke the neck of the other man by pinning him with her legs and wrenching his head violently to the right. Both women rose, breathless and hurting. They had won this battle, but the men had managed to inflict considerable damage on both of them. The women were cut, bruised, and exhausted. Pine could barely move her left arm, and her right knee was swollen tight against her pants.
“Let’s go,” said Spector.
The next moment she grunted as a round pierced her left calf and shot out the back, taking part of her with it. A piece of shrapnel sliced into her cheek, another gouged deeply into her oblique.
As the rounds continued to hurtle down on them, Pine fractured her ankle falling over a rock and cut both her hands and her face when she landed on the hard ground; she also broke one of her fingers. A bullet sliced through her jacket, burning through the surface of her forearm but luckily not entering her body. She jumped up, turned, and emptied her mag across the mouth of the trail. This cover allowed Spector to get up and join her, firing as she retreated.
Pine was breathing hard and gritting her teeth with each step as blood leached from her lips. When she looked at Spector she saw her face was ashen, except where the blood streamed down her face from the wound there.
“Where else are you hit?”
“Calf, oblique, but I’m good,” Spector lied. “You?”
“I’m good, too,” Pine lied right back.
They both fast-limped toward the truck. Both of them understood this would be their last stand.
They reached the SUV, and Mercy stood up from behind the front of the vehicle. She eyed both women, saw the awkward gaits, the blood, and the gritted teeth.
“How bad?” she said.
“It’s not a problem,” said Spector, and Pine nodded in agreement. But both slumped against the SUV’s side and sucked in air, trying to catch their breath as sweat slipped down their faces and mixed with the blood.