The voice didn’t belong to any of his guys.
He turned and cupped his mouth to shout something—maybe it would have been Stop or Wait—but before he could make a sound, another series of shots erupted. They came from right where the first volley had been, though these were far less spastic and rapid-fire.
The shooting sounded careful this time. It sounded aimed.
Three seconds later it stopped; everything else stopped with it, the footsteps and the breaking branches. In the silence, Eversman found himself sure of only one thing: He had just lost the entire crew from one of the Suburbans.
*
Dryden took stock of the dead—all four of them—as quickly as he could; time was not in abundance.
They were down for good: head shots and torso shots, shirts soaked with blood.
He found a Steyr M40 on the first body, with two spare magazines in the guy’s pocket. He stuffed the weapon in his waistband and took the mags, and didn’t bother checking anyone else’s firearm. He was looking for exactly one thing, and he found it in the front pocket of the third body: the keys to the Suburban.
Even as he took them, he heard men shouting to each other, far away. He thought he heard Eversman’s voice among them, barking orders. Dryden didn’t need to hear what the orders were; it was obvious enough. They were coming for him. Fast.
His own best move was obvious, too.
*
Eversman was running. Sprinting and calling out to Collins and the other four men. Screaming for them to run for the Suburban at the southwest edge of the forest.
What else could Dryden be doing but simply running for that vehicle? There was nobody to stop him from getting in and driving away.
Eversman ran. He crested the hill somewhere west of the peak, and then he was moving downslope through the trees, brush twigs scraping at his face and arms, the .45 in his hand. Running downhill was practically a guided fall; you could maintain something near sprint speed without tiring. Off to his sides he could hear the other men crashing through the woods, keeping pace with him.
Then he heard the big SUV’s engine turn over and rev hard.
“Get on him!” Eversman screamed. “God dammit!”
The vehicle wasn’t far ahead. Another fifty yards, maybe. Eversman could just make out the edge of the forest now, the gaps in the trees filled with the bright surface of a gravel road and a wheat field beyond.
He heard the Suburban’s drive gear engage. Heard its tires spin and bite into the dirt road surface before it lunged forward.
Three seconds later he heard it crash. The sound was unmistakable. Steel on wood. Glass shattering and sprinkling onto metal.
Eversman broke through the treeline and saw the wreck, thirty yards to his left. The Suburban had veered off the road and hit a tree dead center.
Directly in front of him, Eversman saw the place where the vehicle had been parked. There were deep impressions where its tires had dug into the gravel when Dryden gunned the engine.
There was also blood. A thin, spattered trail of it, leading from the wood’s edge to where the driver’s door would have been.
“He’s hurt!” Eversman shouted. “He took one!”
His men were breaking from the forest now: Collins to his right, all four of the guys from the other Suburban to his left. The gravel road formed a perfect boundary between the pine forest to the north and the wheat field stretching away far to the south. There was thick, humid air rolling off the field. There was no other vehicle anywhere to be seen on the road.
The men had their weapons leveled on the crashed SUV. They began moving in on it now, a loose cluster, fanning out just enough to give themselves clear shooting angles. Eversman stood back and left them to it.
At twenty yards they opened fire—Collins and the other four. The storm of bullets blew out the vehicle’s remaining windows. Punched holes through the quarterpanels and the doors, high and low. One by one the men ran dry and reloaded and kept shooting. They were still at it when the top four inches of Collins’s head came off in a burst of blood and gray matter.
Eversman flinched and jerked and looked around; the other men didn’t even notice what had happened. Their eyes were trained dead ahead, their peripheral vision full of muzzle flashes, their ears full of nothing but gunfire.
The next three seconds unfolded like a slow-motion nightmare scene, Eversman screaming in vain, unable to hear even himself over the shooting. The men took their hits one after the next, left to right like empty beer cans on a fence rail. Only the last one sensed anything wrong. A spray of blood hit the side of his head, and he turned just in time to take the last bullet through his eye.
Silence.