The man who’d said the name sank fast to his knees and reached for him. The other guy stood back, hyperventilating, looking around instinctively for a threat he couldn’t perceive.
He settled on the tunnel’s mouth, ten feet away. The only logical place the attack could have come from. He stared at it, eyes darting, MP5 held tense.
Travis sidestepped around him in a wide arc, got behind him and brought the knife back out, then sliced him carotid to carotid.
He didn’t rehide the knife. He simply stepped forward and slashed the third man’s throat before number two had hit the ground. Just like that, there were three bodies convulsing and dying on the concrete, one of them maybe five seconds further into the process than the other two. Nothing about the encounter had been loud enough to carry to the men downslope.
Travis scooped up one of the dead men’s MP5s, flicked the selector to full-auto and walked to the tunnel’s open end.
“Heads up!” he screamed, his voice high enough that it could’ve belonged to any man, and opened fire with the weapon. He raked the stream of bullets randomly across the Humvees far below, heard shouts of alarm and confusion and saw bodies dive out of sight. He didn’t bother aiming for them. He dinged up the sides of the vehicles until the machine gun ran dry, then dropped it in the dirt and sprinted away laterally across the slope. He knew his feet were kicking up sand and needles, but between the ground vegetation and the fact that no one was looking, he didn’t worry. He exerted only enough effort to keep his footfalls close to quiet, and the knife hidden up inside the suit.
Fifty yards from the access he stopped. He turned straight downhill and moved at a careful walk, entirely soundless now and kicking up nothing. He descended until he was level with the Humvees, and saw the men crouched behind them on the downhill side. Anxiety in every set of eyes. Universal confusion over the screamed warning, the gunfire, and now the silence.
Travis counted fourteen men. He also counted two fewer Humvees than had chased them up here earlier; the others must have gone to the north access.
Getting at these fourteen from behind would be a joke—they were all looking uphill, over the vehicles’ hoods or through their passenger compartments. The men were clustered in twos and threes, the Humvees spaced dozens of feet apart among the redwood trunks. One little group at a time, these people could be handled with no more difficulty than the first three.
Travis stared at them and wondered why he didn’t feel worse about this. Why he’d felt nothing for the guys he killed on Main Street earlier, or those in the tunnel. Maybe necessity just pushed remorse aside. Maybe that was an animal thing from way back. Maybe he had more of it than he should. He considered that idea for another second and then pushed it aside too, and started across the slope in a long arc that would put him below the Humvees.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It took ninety seconds. When he’d finished, he dropped the knife and sprinted uphill to the access. He shouted the all-clear to the others, ran back to the Humvees and got one started.
They rolled down out of the trees and saw the town full of police vehicles far below. Crown Vics and SUVs and pickups, state and local, every flasher strobing blue and red in the overcast gloom. The big guy in the Humvee had ordered them in here earlier, to help search the town for the three of them.
Travis braked on the narrow road near Raines’s house and put the vehicle in park. He switched on the two-way radio mounted to the dash and heard a man’s voice in mid-sentence.
“—any assistance needed, please advise us on that, over.”
There was a long hiss of static and then the same man began speaking once more: “Say again, any civilian unit, this is CHP, please acknowledge. I see one of you just out of the woods now.”
“They heard the shooting,” Paige said.
Travis nodded. “And their signals must not be getting to anyone on the other side of the ridge.”
He grabbed the radio’s handset and depressed the talk switch. “CHP and local departments, stand by for now. No assistance required. Echo unit, meet us on the highway; we’re bringing out a subject for extraction, over.”
He let up on the switch and shut off the radio.
“Nice,” Dyer said.
Travis, sitting in the driver’s seat and still wearing the transparency suit, glanced around at Dyer and then Paige and Bethany.
“Take the wheel,” he said to Dyer. “You look exactly like someone who’d be driving this fucking thing.”
He clambered out of the seat and into the back, where Paige and Bethany had already taken the hint and ducked out of sight below the windows.