by Patrick Lee
“We’ve probably got three minutes before the first highway patrol units roll in here,” Paige said. “It’ll be a steady stream after that; anything we try to do will just get harder and harder.” She paused. “Three minutes. That’s not enough time to think of even a bad plan.”
Travis stared at the empty hillsides a moment longer, then dropped his gaze to the residential blocks nearer by. Dozens of homes, most of them probably empty by now. A natural gas explosion might make a nice diversion; five or six at once might even generate a smokescreen behind which they could climb. Or maybe he could hotwire a car, douse its interior with gasoline, and send it rolling down to the lake in flames. It would probably crash into something before it got there, but that in itself would be a fine distraction. It might buy them a fifty-fifty chance of gaining the trees unseen, provided they were way up at the edge of town and ready to run at the moment of impact.
But none of those things could be done in three minutes. Not even close.
“You’re right,” he said. “We don’t have time to plan anything.”
“So what do we do?” Paige said.
All Travis could think of was a panic option. It was the furthest thing from a plan. He couldn’t even properly envision how it would play out—he had yet to actually see the nearby Humvee and the number of men inside it. Probably more than one. Probably fewer than five.
He could hear it now, grumbling along in low gear, hunting the alleys that branched off of Main Street. It would pass this alley in another twenty seconds or so.
It hardly mattered that these guys had no description of their prey. The fact that the three of them were on foot would be enough. None of Rum Lake’s few remaining occupants were out for a stroll just now.
“Stay close to me,” Travis said, “but stay in the alley. And be ready to run if this doesn’t work.”
He said no more. He turned back toward Main, two hundred feet away along the alley’s length. Stared at the gap where the Humvee would soon appear. He was pretty sure he could get there first.
He ran. As fast as he could. Heard Paige and Bethany following behind, and the heavy diesel engine somewhere ahead and to the side.
One hundred feet from the alley’s mouth now. Fifty. Ten.
He burst right through it without slowing, and saw the huge vehicle in his peripheral vision. Twenty-five feet away. Matte black. Soaking up the overcast glare and reflecting away almost none of it.
Travis kicked the sidewalk with the front of his foot, and sprawled. He hit the concrete with his hands and tumbled once, scraping every part of his body that struck. He heard the Humvee’s engine throttle down hard. Heard the faint whine of shocks as the driver hit the brakes and the thing’s five thousand pounds rocked forward onto its front suspension.
Travis got up without coming to a stop. He snapped his gaze toward the Humvee and reacted to it. He went for a mix of surprise and relief, but didn’t let it linger more than half a second. Instead he advanced on the vehicle, his legs shaky, his hands waving frantically overhead as if to flag it down—as if he were too brain-addled to see it’d already stopped for him. He was fifteen feet away when the driver opened his door and got out. The guy with the deep voice. Had to be. Six-three and easily two hundred fifty pounds. MP5 submachine gun slung over his shoulder, right hand on its grip, finger outside the trigger well. Travis could see the weapon’s left side, and its three-setting fire selector switch, just like the ones he’d seen on the force two decades earlier. The settings were labeled S, E, and F, for German words that meant “safe,” “single-shot,” and “autofire.” This one was set to “safe”—for the moment. Travis glanced through the Humvee’s windshield and took in the other occupants. One more up front. Two in the back.
He took another visibly awkward step. Ten feet from the driver now. The guy was just drawing a breath to speak.
Travis recalled something else from his time as a cop—a training exercise called cone versus gun. The setup was simple. One man would play the cop and stand with an unloaded pistol holstered on his hip—safety on, holster strap in place. Another man would be the assailant, facing the cop from twenty feet away, an ice-cream cone in his hand to represent a knife.
From a standing start, the assailant would charge the cop. How close would he get before dying?
Most of the trainees had guessed ten feet: the guy would cover half the distance by the time the gun was leveled at him and clicking. Travis had felt generous and said he’d get within five.
Then the assailant had burst forward, and an instant later the room was full of low, surprised whistles.
The ice cream was mashed against the cop’s neck before he could pull the trigger even once.
Same result on the second run. And the third, and the tenth. Didn’t matter who played which part. Didn’t matter if one was a trainee and the other a hardened veteran. After a few iterations, certain truths became evident. First, twenty feet wasn’t that damn far, and the last third could be covered in a single, diving lunge, the body tipping forward and the arm shooting out in a movement that erased several feet at blink-speed. Second, there was a concentration issue. It took focus to snap loose a holster strap, draw a pistol, thumb off its safety, raise it, aim it, and fire. It took lots of focus, in fact, and focus was in short supply when someone was charging toward you like a runaway log truck. Your body was preconditioned to tense under those circumstances. Your hands wanted to go up in front of your face, not to your hip. You had to work against those instincts every time, even after you’d trained yourself to expect them. Even when the attacker was a friend with an ice-cream cone.
“No closer,” the driver said. His thumb went unconsciously to the selector switch.
Travis didn’t have a knife. Didn’t even have an ice-cream cone. He also didn’t have twenty feet to cross.
He charged.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It happened in less than three seconds, and it felt like less than three seconds. At no point did it seem to slow down. At times in Travis’s life, eruptions of violence had sometimes taken on special clarity. A simplicity made of goals and obstacles and means, playing out in a few beats of his pulse. He’d heard Paige put it in similar terms.
None of that happened here.
It was all motion and panic; flinching bodies and jerking limbs and the startled beginnings of shouts. Travis crossed the distance in a burst of momentum, got his left hand on the MP5’s barrel guard, balled up his right and slammed it into the big guy’s Adam’s apple with all his forward speed. The man’s free hand went to his throat, and his gun hand loosened, and Travis took his attention off the guy completely. Arms were moving inside the vehicle. Reaching for door handles. Reaching for weapons Travis couldn’t see. He knocked the driver’s hand away from the MP5, gripped the gun with both of his own, thumbed its selector to full-auto, and yanked it down away from the huge torso. The strap pulled tight, but there was enough play for what Travis had to do. He put the weapon’s barrel into the gap between the open driver’s door and its frame. Right at the front, above the hinge, head-level with all three men inside. Like an archer pointing a drawn arrow through a loophole in a fortress wall.
He aimed for the front passenger and pulled the trigger. Felt the cyclic, full-auto recoil as the thing roared. Saw the guy’s head come apart, and shoved the stock hard clockwise to spray the backseat, hitting both heads there probably five times each. He let go of the trigger and hauled the gun back out of the gap, its strap still tight around the big man—who’d recovered enough to reach for the weapon again. Travis pointed it straight at him and fired, and its last four rounds entered right below his jaw. The guy went limp and dropped where he stood, his weight on the strap tugging the gun out of Travis’s hands.
Silence, except the vehicle’s idling engine.
Travis looked up the length of Main Street. No sign of the other Humvees just yet.
He raised his eyes to the distant Raines house, just visible over the nearest shopf
ronts, and saw the three spotters up there going apeshit. Grabbing one another’s arms and pointing down toward the action. Drawing two-way radios and shouting into them.
Time to get going.
Travis turned and saw Paige and Bethany at the mouth of the alley. Paige looked only a little shaken. Bethany more so.
“Seconds are going to count,” Travis said.
Paige nodded, shoved Bethany forward and ran after her.
Travis opened the back door on the driver’s side and Bethany got in first, heedless of the bodies—all the blood was farther back, covering the rear windows and the storage area behind the seats. Paige climbed in after her, and by then Travis was at the wheel, slamming his own door and shoving the vehicle into drive. For half a second he considered reversing instead, backing up and taking the nearby cross street. Then he thought of the spotters up high again, on their radios, and knew it was pointless. There would be no hiding from the other Humvees. He floored the accelerator and the vehicle shot forward along Main, toward the street at the far end that led to Raines’s house.
“Get the guns off those guys in back,” Travis said.
“Already on it,” Paige said.
Travis reached with his right and unslung the front passenger’s MP5 from his shoulder. He set the weapon in his own lap and patted the guy’s pockets for extra magazines. He found two in a big pouch on his pant leg.
Three blocks from the end of Main now, doing sixty. A second later the first of the other Humvees appeared ahead. It rounded the corner Travis meant to take, at the end. Another followed half a vehicle length behind it. Then came four more. The whole procession advanced, roughly single-file, accelerating to meet him.
If these guys had had time to form a plan, they might’ve spread out like horsemen riding abreast. No way could Travis have rammed through that barrier; his vehicle weighed exactly as much as any one of theirs. But in the few seconds available, as the closing distance shrank toward zero, the column simply stayed in a straight line, bearing toward Travis in an impromptu game of chicken.
At least maybe it looked like that from their point of view.
Travis jerked the wheel to the right at the last possible instant, veering past the leader. As he did, he saw the rest of the line begin to destabilize, the Humvees braking or jogging to one side or another—little movements that betrayed their drivers’ confusion. But Travis was passing the formation almost too quickly to notice those things—or to care. Sixty miles per hour, he’d read somewhere, was just under ninety feet per second. With these vehicles moving the other way at the same speed, he was passing them at closer to one hundred eighty feet per second. In hardly more than a second they were all behind him, just shapes in his side mirror, stopping and turning and trying not to slam into each other like cops in an old movie.
Travis braked hard and took the turn at the end of Main doing thirty, then gunned it again along the secondary street. He could already see the curve ahead that would take them uphill toward Raines’s. No doubt the three men still up there had their guns in hand by now. Travis guessed this vehicle’s shell could withstand 9mm fire, but he wasn’t certain of it.
He took the curve and saw the incline rising above him, steep as any street in San Francisco. There were houses to his left and right, but just ahead the way opened up on both sides to a broad, empty grassland. Raines’s house was three hundred feet above that point, the redwoods almost at its back wall.
Travis saw the three spotters. They had their guns. They were positioned way up next to the house itself, maybe ready to duck inside it if they needed cover.
They wouldn’t. Travis didn’t give them a second glance. He pulled hard right on the wheel and left the road altogether, angling up across the slope to miss the house by two hundred feet. As the redwoods drew nearer, he sized up the gaps among them. At a distance, the trees had been just a visual screen, but at this range he could see several openings that would admit the Humvee. They probably wouldn’t get far into the woods, but any distance was better than none.
They were still a hundred feet from the trees when the spotters at the house opened up. A burst of a dozen shots hit the window right next to Travis; the pane bulged inward as the glass sandwiched between the lexan layers shattered. Other salvos pattered against the vehicle’s metal sides. Travis aimed for the biggest opening in the trees, and a second later they were through it, deep in the shadows and the green-filtered light beneath the boughs. He angled back to the left; Jeannie had said the mine access was straight uphill from the house. He dodged a trunk that loomed out of the dimness, and saw a gap between two others, just ahead, that for half a second looked wide enough to pass through. Then it didn’t. He stood on the brake and felt the huge tires slide in the sandy soil. He cranked the wheel right, felt the vehicle rotate without actually changing course, and a moment later, sliding almost sideways along its path, it rocked to a halt.
Travis shoved open his door, heard Paige and Bethany scrambling out of theirs. Far away down the slope, men were shouting and heavy engines were racing; the Humvee column was less than thirty seconds behind.
The three of them ran. Clambered up the needle-carpeted slope. Scanned the way ahead for any sign of the shaft’s opening. It occurred to Travis for the first time that the thing might be difficult to spot. It might be choked with ferns and low scrub; it might look like nothing but a patch of undergrowth at any distance beyond ten feet—it might be impossible to see that it was an opening at all. He worried about that for five seconds and then Bethany screamed “There!” and shot her arm out ahead, and Travis saw that his concerns had been groundless. The shaft access was an upright opening, like a garage door but a third smaller. It formed the end of a rough, squared concrete tube that jutted straight out from the hillside, its end cracked and worn and showing rebar.
They sprinted for it as the engines roared behind them. Tires skidded and metal thumped hard against wood, and then doors were opening and voices were shouting again, no more than a few dozen yards back. Beneath all those sounds Travis suddenly heard his cell phone ringing. Jeannie, calling with the information from the old files. He ignored it, pointed his MP5 behind him and fired a quick burst. He heard feet slip and men curse as they went for cover. The access was right ahead now, fifteen feet away, pitch black beyond the tunnel’s mouth.
“Watch out for a drop-off,” Travis said, and then they were inside, blind for a second as their eyes tried to adjust.
An instant later Paige sucked in a hard breath and stopped—she threw both arms out to block the others.
There was a drop-off.
Ten feet in, the concrete floor ended as neatly as a high-dive platform, empty space beyond the left half, black metal stairs descending beyond the right half. Paige led the way down. Ten steps, then a landing made of the same metal gridwork, and another flight. And another. At the bottom of the fourth they touched down on concrete again—another horizontal tunnel. It stretched twenty feet and terminated against a slab of solid metal, eight feet square, visible in the pale glow of an overhead mercury lamp.
There were giant hinges on the slab’s left side, and there was a keypad on its right.
Travis stared.
He felt his thoughts begin to go blank.
High above, sounds reverberated through the stair shaft. The sliding of feet and hands on loose soil outside. Then the scrape of boots skidding to a halt on concrete.
Paige and Bethany ran forward, getting clear of the shaft. Travis followed, but at a walk; he’d barely noticed the sounds. All his attention was on the giant door.
Which was green.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“What the hell do we do?” Bethany whispered.
Paige could only shake her head.
There was a handhold inset in the steel just below the keypad. Her sense of futility manifesting in her body language, Paige took hold of it and pulled. The door didn’t so much as rattle in its frame.
Behind and above, in the shaft, more
footsteps thudded into the concrete tunnel. Voices spoke in low, soft tones, some of which carried unusually well in the strange acoustics.
“We called it in,” someone said. “They want them alive, whoever they are.”
Someone else cursed softly, then said, “Okay.”
Paige turned from the door and faced Travis, and seemed thrown by the look in his eyes. He imagined he appeared numb. He sure as hell felt that way.
“What is it?” Paige said.
Travis took a deep breath. He steeled himself for the likelihood—it should’ve been a certainty—that the dream had been only a dream. That this was the mother of all coincidences, and a cruel one at that.
Up in the shaft, something like a backpack dropped to the concrete. Tough fabric with metal objects clattering inside. A zipper came open.
“Travis?” Paige said.
He stepped past her to the keypad. Above the buttons was a simple readout, like a VCR’s clock. There were glowing blue dashes where digits could be entered. Five of them.
“There’s a dozen masks in one of the back storage holds,” someone up above said. “Go get them all.”
Then came a faint but sharp sound from atop the stairwell. Some tiny metallic thing being pulled free of something else. Like a key drawn from a lock, but not quite.
Travis blocked it all out and thought of the dream. The old man—the Wilford Brimley lookalike—staring at him from a few inches away. Asking over and over what was behind the green door. We already know the combo, the old man had said.
And then what?
What exactly had come after that?
High up in the vertical shaft, something bounced hard against the wall—by its sound Travis pictured a can of shaving cream, though he was pretty damn certain it wasn’t. The thing ricocheted again and again, hitting the stairs, the walls, the landings, making its way down. Travis turned with Paige and Bethany and watched it hit the bottom, less than twenty feet from where they stood. They could barely see it in the vague light there, but there was no real mystery as to what it was. It came to rest and did nothing for two seconds. Then it jumped and skittered and started blasting thick gas into the air. Tear gas or pepper gas or some variant. Another canister came rattling down after it. Then another.
