And another, just above his scalp.
At the edge of his vision he saw something; his body reacted to it as much as his brain did. He turned without stopping and sprinted on a diagonal from the line he’d been running on. A bullet splintered a thin branch six inches from his face. Scraps of bark stung his cheeks; his lungs filled with the smell of pine tar.
He reached what he was running toward three seconds later: a knotted old tree with a trunk twice as wide as his body. He slammed to a stop against it, putting it between himself and the chopper.
For ten seconds the gunner held his fire. Dryden drew back from the tree, slowly, ten inches and then twenty. Enough to catch sight of the chopper’s tail, past the trunk’s left edge. Enough to keep tabs on the aircraft as it circled, and to keep himself shielded by the tree no matter where the chopper put itself.
He could circle this tree all day; the chopper couldn’t. It had only so much fuel, and only so much time before some motorist found the bodies near the wheat field. The guys in the chopper wouldn’t want to hang around once police started showing up in the area.
The aircraft’s tail was slipping away to the right. Dryden eased himself clockwise around the tree, keeping just the last two feet of the tail in view.
Easy.
Then the chopper went stationary, and turned sharply to the right, a move that would point the gunner entirely away from him. Why? Dryden risked leaning out past the trunk to see the reason.
He saw.
Forty yards away from him stood Marnie and Claire. Marnie had her Glock in hand, held low. The two of them stared up as the chopper rotated to point the gunman at them. Then they bolted sideways—and away from each other—as a rifle shot ripped through the space where they had been standing.
Dryden lost sight of Claire. He managed to keep his eyes on Marnie as she moved roughly toward him.
The gunner kept his eyes on her, too. Another bullet cut through the pine boughs, missing Marnie by a foot at most.
Dryden drew the Steyr M40 he’d taken from one of the dead men. It was the first time he’d had a clear angle on the chopper without the .50 caliber rifle being pointed at him.
He raised the pistol and aimed it high, compensating for the chopper’s altitude and distance, and opened fire.
There was no way to see what he was hitting inside the cockpit. A direct hit on the pilot would be ideal. A ricochet that winged him with a bullet fragment would be almost as good. All he had to do was make the guy flinch at the controls. Make him lose focus for half a second. That would be enough.
Flying a helicopter was difficult as hell, and holding in a hover was the hardest part by far. You needed both hands and both feet engaged at all times. You had to manage drift and altitude and yaw, each one a separate task, and any correction to one of them threw off the other two. You had to focus.
Dryden saw at least one bullet hole open up in the aircraft’s thin metal skin. Saw one of its side windows blow inward.
The pilot lost his focus.
The chopper’s tail dipped and slewed to the left. Through a window in the back, Dryden saw the gunner reach frantically for a handhold. A second later the aircraft tilted deeply forward, as if to bow at the conclusion of its performance. As it did so, its main rotor clipped the top of a pine tree; the chopper reacted as if an invisible giant had reached up and slapped it sideways, hurling the craft into the highest boughs of a nearby grove. The rest of the rotor assembly tore itself apart against the tree trunks, at which point the helicopter was essentially a falling minivan. Loaded with aviation fuel.
It slammed into the earth beside the grove, its tanks rupturing and detonating in the same instant. Dryden felt the radiant heat flash out and warm his skin.
He turned and saw Marnie staring at him. A second later he saw Claire; she stepped into view past a screen of brush, twenty feet away.
Claire Dunham. Alive and well. She looked healthier than when he’d last seen her. She’d slept, at least.
An ugly thought came to Dryden; he realized he had suppressed it for most of the past twenty-four hours: Deep down he had not expected to see her again.
She stepped past the brush and came toward him. She drew a folded sheet of paper from her pocket; it was the note he’d given Marnie in the Suburban. Claire unfolded it as she crossed to him, stopping two feet away. She held it up, her expression somewhere between amused and pissed.
She said, “Your plan is for all three of us to vanish off the grid for the rest of our lives? You really expect us to do that?”
“We did do that,” Dryden said. “Would have, anyway.”
Marnie came up beside them. “Do we still have to?”
Dryden shook his head. “The girls in the trailer didn’t have to stay dead. We don’t have to stay missing.”