Claire’s breath hissed out like air from a ruptured pneumatic line.
The cruiser came to a stop. For five seconds it just sat there in the road, maybe three hundred yards to the north, its taillights glowing. Like the officer was weighing the decision. Wondering if he’d really seen something.
In the same moment, Claire did something Dryden couldn’t understand. She ignored the cruiser entirely and turned her gaze on the surrounding desert. She scanned the darkness, her eyes going everywhere, as if she suddenly believed something dangerous was out there. It made no sense—she had shown no such fear until now, after all the minutes they’d been parked here.
The cruiser’s brake lights stayed on. Like a tossed coin, tumbling in the air. Stay or go.
The brake lights went out.
The officer goosed the vehicle forward.
And brought it around in a tight U-turn.
Its headlights lit up the world, filling the Land Rover’s cab with harsh glare that made Dryden squint.
The effect on Claire was immediate. She turned the key in the ignition and shoved the selector into drive.
“What are you doing?” Dryden shouted.
Claire had not taken her foot off the brake yet. She turned to Dryden, and when she spoke, her voice was saturated with fear. “Get back in your vehicle and go. Now.”
“Claire, this is—”
“I can’t explain it! Go! Please!”
The way she screamed the words, it sounded like she was begging. Like she was kneeling beside a ditch with a pistol to her head. The sound of it pierced Dryden—a needle into the deepest part of his brain, the reptile complex where fight-or-flight decisions were made in thousandths of a second.
He decided.
He reached for the door handle.
But before he could pull it, everything changed.
A hundred yards away off the vehicle’s left side, far from both the Land Rover and the police cruiser, a pinprick of light flared. A millisecond pop, like a flashbulb—but it wasn’t a flashbulb.
The windows on both sides of the Land Rover’s middle bench seat shattered, and Dryden heard the buzzing whine of a bullet cutting the air, passing through the vehicle maybe a foot behind him.
On instinct, Claire took her foot off the brake and shoved the accelerator to the floor. The Land Rover lurched forward into the dark, its headlights still doused.
Way out in the night, the muzzle flash came again, followed by others in unison, like spastic fireflies. Three shooters, maybe four, clustered tightly together, all firing at once.
Claire had the SUV doing 40 now, jostling over the scrubland. She was driving by the indirect glow from the police cruiser, still a couple hundred yards behind them. All at once the cruiser’s beams swung sharply away. Dryden turned in the passenger seat and looked back. The patrol car had jerked sideways and stopped. In the faint interior glow of its dashboard equipment, Dryden could see that its windows had all been blown out. As he watched, one of its headlights burst. The cruiser was taking the brunt of the rifle fire; the cop was almost certainly dead.
Claire cursed under her breath, pushing the Land Rover to 50. Without the patrol car’s headlights, the desert surface was nearly pitch black. The only visible detail was the road, a faint asphalt ribbon reflecting the predawn sky. Claire veered toward it across the hardpan but had gone only a few hundred feet when another bullet hit the Land Rover, punching through metal somewhere toward the back. A second later the concentrated fire from all the shooters began to rain against the vehicle, blowing out the rear windows, punching through the panels of the body. Clearly the shooters had night-vision scopes of one kind or another.
A tire blew; the vehicle slewed violently to the left before Claire got it back under control. The road was close now, fifty feet away as she angled toward it.
Then the driver’s-side window shattered, and Claire gasped, losing hold of the wheel. The Land Rover pulled hard left again, much too sharply for this speed. Dryden reached for the steering wheel, got his hands on it in the darkness—
Too late. The world heaved sickeningly beneath him as the big vehicle pitched onto its side and then its roof, tumbling hard enough that he had to hang on to keep from being thrown clear. He felt the strange machine in its plastic case, his own body pinning it to the console as he leaned across and clung to the steering wheel. Then the rolling vehicle came down on its roof for a second time, and Dryden’s head smacked against something, and all sensation switched off.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“She’s breathing. I think she’s good.”