They were wearing the suits inside-out, for whatever good it might do. Even the hoods—made of the same fabric as the body, and sporting a flexible plastic face screen—could be reversed. Dryden supposed the suits might’ve hidden them whichever way they’d worn them, but there was a good reason to have flipped them, regardless: Full-body reflective clothing was bad camouflage on a moonlit night. Reversed, the suits were simple black fabric on the outside.
They were also damned uncomfortable to run in. The moment he and Rachel had put them on, they’d turned and sprinted into the trees on a course perpendicular to the one they’d been on. Anyone watching on satellites, no longer able to see them, might assume they were still moving forward on their original path or had doubled back. Any other direction would be a guess.
As it happened, they were running almost straight north, toward a terrain feature Dryden had chosen earlier using a detailed map. The only way out, even if it was a long shot.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Gaul sat slumped in the chair he’d nearly thrown through the window. The full team was on the ground now. They’d converged on the spot where Dryden and the girl had vanished, and where Gaul had been certain they would find a mine shaft or natural tunnel of some kind; no other explanation made sense. Yet they had turned up nothing except the same hard ground—too rocky to hold a footprint—that covered the valley for miles in all directions.
“So, okay, let’s work through it,” Lowry said. “They fool the satellites, however the hell that’s possible, and they run. They disappeared twelve minutes ago, figure ten minutes to cover a mile—”
“Figure seven,” Gaul said. “They’re motivated.”
“That puts them almost two miles from where the team is, in which direction, we don’t know. We have a round search area growing in diameter by one mile every three or four minutes—”
Gaul stood, crossed to Lowry’s workstation, grabbed the communicator, and keyed it.
“Put the chopper on the deck,” he said. “Right now. Pick up the team and get airborne. Stow the fucking thermal vision; if the satellites can’t see them, neither will you. I want every man aboard wearing a standard amplified night-vision headset—there’s plenty of moonlight for that. I want all eyes scouring the woods from five hundred feet up.”
He set the communicator down and paced away. When he turned back, he found Lowry staring at him like an idiot.
“I don’t know where the chopper should start its search, sir,” Lowry said. “Which direction to send it.”
“Figure it out!” Gaul said. “People used to do that, before they had computers.”
Lowry knew better than to reply to that. He looked at his feet until Gaul turned away, then faced his monitor and brought up the widest Miranda image of the forest. He broadened it further still, to a width of five miles, and added a topographic map overlay.
“Let’s assume a man like Sam Dryden knows the terrain,” Lowry said.
“Let’s,” Gaul said.
“He’s also going to know we have the local roads blocked. But here’s Highway 198, about thirty miles away. He could figure we’re not expecting him to get that far, so maybe we’re not blocking it. Plus it’s busy; better chance to stop a vehicle and commandeer it.”
Lowry highlighted the path of a narrow waterway on the map.
“This stream bed transits the valley right down to the highway,” he said. “Straight shot, the whole thirty miles downhill. Dryden and the girl could probably make double time if they followed that. To reach the stream, their shortest path would be straight north from where we lost them. They wouldn’t have reached it yet, and right now they’d be right about…” He did the math in his head, then tapped the screen with his finger. “Here.”
He picked up the communicator and relayed the instructions to the Black Hawk’s pilot.
“Copy that,” the pilot said. “I’m setting her down now. There’s a clearing half a klick north of the team’s position, the only one big enough to land in. All boots rendezvous there.”
*
Captain Walt Larsen took the Black Hawk down into the clearing carefully; descending among sequoias was a first for him. They were about three times the height of any wilderness cover he’d ever landed in.
At twenty feet from the deck he saw that the clearing floor was a mess of ferns and scrub, two or three feet deep everywhere. Probably no risk of snagging a wheel, but he’d be careful on takeoff all the same. The Black Hawk set down as firmly as she would have on a tarmac.
“If you gotta step out for a piss, you got time,” Larsen said to his copilot, Bowles. “Team’s one to two minutes out.”
He’d no sooner said it than he heard one of the soldiers clamber into the troop compartment behind them. He turned.
It wasn’t one of the soldiers.
*
Dryden and Rachel had been sitting concealed among the brush from the moment they’d reached the clearing, ten minutes earlier. Waiting for the chopper had been the hardest part. Though Dryden had been confident it would land here, there was always the chance things could go wrong.