The gunner in the bay door leaned farther out and looked straight down. Dryden could see some kind of bulky headgear on him. A helmet with a scope built right into the front of it. Probably a FLIR camera. Thermal vision. Even in daylight, it would make child’s play of searching for a human target in a forest like this. The shaded ground could be no more than sixty degrees. Dryden was thirty-eight point six degrees warmer than that. Not even the sunlit canopy of pine boughs overhead would be that hot. Not on a brisk day like this. Not even close.
The chopper stayed in its hover, the gunman staring down and taking in Eversman’s corpse. The FLIR scope would make it obvious the man was dead. There would be body-temperature blood seeping out in a big puddle, contrasting starkly with the cool dirt.
If the pilot took the chopper a little way to the west, the gunner would see the bodies of the first four men Dryden had taken down. There would be more puddled blood there, and the bodies themselves might have already cooled noticeably. The same would go for the other five out at the southwest edge of the woods, on the gravel road that bordered the wheat field.
The chopper didn’t do any of that, though.
Instead the gunner looked up from Eversman’s corpse and swept his viewpoint over the surrounding woods in a quick, efficient arc.
He saw Dryden almost immediately.
There was no question the guy had spotted him. The low brush Dryden was crouched in was useless. A two-foot-wide tree trunk would have helped, but there was nothing like that within sight.
For three seconds the gunman just stared. Dryden held still and considered his options. He couldn’t play dead; he was already upright in a crouch. He couldn’t stand his ground and fight; he would be outgunned and outmaneuvered to a degree that would be comical to anyone but himself. He couldn’t flee the woods to the nearby south or east side; there was only open farmland in both of those directions.
He could escape to the north. Out of the woods and into the city sprawl.
If he could get that far—the northern edge of the forest was almost half a mile away.
He was still thinking about that when the gunner’s mouth moved beneath the bulk of his FLIR scope. Instructions via headset to the pilot. A second later the chopper tilted forward and left its hover. It banked as it did, coming around in a shallow curve that would put the gunner right above Dryden’s position.
Dryden broke from the brush and took off in a sprint, straight north.
*
For the first thirty seconds he didn’t look back. He didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead, jumping deadfalls and low stands of brush. He heard the chopper’s rotors and control surfaces making rapid adjustments behind him, the sound chaotic through the trees. Dryden had flown helicopters before; it had been part of his training. He could picture the pilot moving the cyclic control left and right and forward, second by second, using the pedals to whip the tail this way or that, anything to give the gunner a good sightline as the aircraft skimmed the treetops and raced north, gaining on him.
He heard the first zipping whine of a bullet, somewhere just above him in the boughs, half a second before the sound of the gunshot crashed down around him. He didn’t stop.
Another bullet—this one buzzing through the airspace five feet in front of him. It left a ragged line of cut-loose pine needles in its wake, a ghost of the bullet’s path. Dryden ran right through it a split second later.
He heard Eversman’s words in his head:
I bet you instructed Marnie and Claire to stay away from here.
I also bet they’re going to ignore that.
In fact, I know it.
The third shot passed close enough that he felt its heat across his forehead, as if someone had waved a lightbulb two inches from his face.
If no one ever sees you three again, what else could it mean?
The chopper was above and to his left now, somewhere around his eight o’clock, and close by. The last two shots had come down on high, steep angles.
Dryden ran another five paces, until half a second before his internal stopwatch said the next shot was coming.
Then he jammed a foot into the dry soil and pulled up short, and heard the zip and the gunshot almost in unison, the bullet ripping through the base of a sapling three feet in front of him. He pivoted and lunged sideways, passing directly beneath the chopper, coming out on the gunner’s blind side ten seconds later. Then he turned and sprinted north again, the chopper now above and to his right. He heard it once more making adjustments, correcting its position. He imagined the gunner shouting into his headset, scouring the woods as the aircraft came around.
Dryden kept running. There was no other move.
The edge of town was still impossibly far north, given the circumstances. Somewhere between a half and a quarter mile—more than a minute’s run for a world-class athlete on smooth asphalt. Already he could hear the chopper settling into another favorable flight path for the gunman, this time taking into account the maneuver Dryden had used. The chopper would stay farther off to his side now, far enough that it would be useless to try dodging beneath it again.
Running hard, ducking branches, darting past clumps of pines. Cresting the flank of the hill now, the ground dropping away in a shallow grade before him, helping just a bit with his speed.
Another bullet cut through the air, spare feet behind him.