Dryden was only a little winded when he reached the top of the hill. He had moved as quickly as possible through the trees, seeking the high ground in the middle of the woods. Now he stopped and held still and let his pulse slow. He turned in a circle, listening. To the north—it was easy to keep track of direction, because the bay was visible through the pines—he heard someone slip and catch himself on loose soil. The sound was hundreds of yards away.
In almost the same moment he heard another sound: a heavy engine running hard, then braking and shutting down. It was somewhere to the south and west. Dryden had no sooner processed that than he heard it all over again—racing engine, skid of tires, shutdown—this time south and east of his position.
Eversman and his men were coming into the circular woods from three equally spaced points along its edges: the corners of a triangle laid over it. Eversman and Collins were entering at the top of the triangle; the guys in the Suburbans—four men per vehicle—were starting from the two bottom corners.
They would all fan out. Like hunters driving prey. What they thought was prey, anyway.
Dryden took the Beretta from his waistband. He had only one of Claire’s two pistols, but he had both magazines. One of them was loaded into the weapon, full with fifteen 9mm Parabellums. The other magazine, in his pocket, held nine. It was missing the two that had gone into Harold Shannon in the Mojave, and the four that’d gone into Dale Whitcomb in the scrapyard.
Ten adversaries. Twenty-four shots.
He heard vehicle doors open and shut at the lower corners of the triangle. Heard footsteps on concrete, and then nothing.
He looked down and considered his clothing: the khakis and flannel shirt he’d borrowed from Eversman last night. Not quite what he’d worn during wilderness training, fifteen years back, though at least the flannel was black and green.
He heard the trickle of a flowing stream, a spring breaching the slope somewhere downhill toward the west.
He moved. Fast and silent. He covered fifty feet and found the stream. It was hardly more than a mudslick, like someone had left a garden hose running in a flowerbed.
Good enough.
He crouched and set down the pistol. He took handful after handful of the mud, smearing it on the cream-colored khakis until a fine layer of it was ground into the fabric, rendering it brown. He smeared more of it on his face and neck. Then he wiped his palms on his shirt and picked up the gun again.
He moved thirty feet from the stream and listened.
Nothing.
It was tempting to find cover right there and wait, but the location was wrong. Too close to the center of the woods. Too likely to be a convergence point where he might encounter all of Eversman’s people at once.
He turned and faced southwest, toward where he’d heard the first Suburban stop. He got moving, staying in the cover of ground vegetation as much as possible. Staying quiet.
He stopped again after a hundred yards. He found a dense spot of brush and got low in it, facing the direction Eversman’s men should be coming from, and settled in for the wait.
He felt his heart rate drop, felt his breathing go silent—all of it happening automatically. The primordial psychology of waiting for game.
A minute passed.
Two.
He heard something.
The faintest rustle of movement—dry pine needles on the sandy ground, yielding to the pressure of a footstep.
Somebody moving—but not in front of him. Off to his left somewhere, outside his field of vision.
Someone close by, and coming toward him. Less than ten feet away.
Dryden held perfectly still. Even turning his head right now might give away his position.
Another footstep. Closer.
Dryden had the Beretta in his right hand, his left braced flat on the ground, his whole body coiled like a spring, tense and ready.
The guy would either spot him or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, then Dryden would take him easily—either the moment the guy stepped into his view, or after he’d wandered off just far enough that Dryden could turn without being heard.
If the guy did spot him, then things were going to get complicated in a hurry, and hundredths of a second would suddenly matter: the sharp little fragments of time in which he would hear the man’s breath catch, and the sound of the guy’s feet scraping the soil as he flinched and turned. After that it would be a race, decided by fast-twitch muscle fibers, the geometry of firing angles, the momentum of arms swung fast and checked fast. And luck.
Another step. Closer still.
Dryden breathed shallow and waited.
*
Eversman was halfway up the hill when he heard the first gunshot. A flat crack cutting through the trees, followed half a second later by a rapid salvo of three or four more shots, and before the echoes had faded he heard someone shouting, high and shrill: “I hit him! I hit him! Move in on me, I hit him, I fucking hit him!”
Eversman heard a flurry of motion in the southwest quadrant of the forest, over the hill from where he stood. Men running, breaking through thin branches, kicking up ground cover as they raced in toward the voice.
Eversman cocked his head, listening as the shouting went on.
Which of his men was that? The voice could have belonged to almost anyone, yet he could just about pin down—
He sucked in a breath as understanding hit him.