The Deep Zone

yelled.

They took off back the way Hallie and the narcos had come. Bowman carried the AK-47 in his left hand, keeping his right arm tight against his belly. Louder shouts came now, mixed with the pounding thuds of booted feet.

“Run!” Bowman yelled.

They ran. Hallie’s soles were cut, her body slashed and bruised, and she was so tired that she had been able to doze while walking with the narcos. None of that mattered now. She sprinted, cradling the steel cylinder in her right arm like a football, gasping, looking over her shoulder to make sure Bowman was still there. He could have run much faster, she knew, but would go no faster than she could.

A burst of automatic rifle fire, then another. Bullets snapped past, hissing and cracking. Others clipped leaves and branches, thunked into tree trunks. She looked over her shoulder to make sure Bowman was not hit again. More rifle fire. Rounds kicked up spurts of dirt.

She felt herself going anaerobic, chest burning, muscles flooding with lactic acid, and it was as if she were running through mud, but there was no possibility of stopping. She heard a long burst of fire, Bowman shooting left-handed from the hip as he ran backward. Through the forest ahead she could see the meadow, then ran toward the light, pain blossoming in her chest.

She looked back at him again. He was clutching the AK-47’s pistol grip in his right hand, pressed against his body. In his left he held a black, softball-sized grenade, one of several that had been hanging from the big mercenary’s harness.

“Pull the pin!”

Without breaking stride, she reached back with her left hand, grabbed the ring, yanked. The pain in her hand almost knocked her down. He opened his fingers, letting the spoon fly loose, turned, threw the grenade underhanded without missing a step.

“Go left!” he shouted, and she veered in that direction. She heard the grenade blast, heard screams, curses. The meadow had to be close. A hard blow in the middle of her back slapped Hallie down. For an instant she thought she had been shot. She hit the ground face-first, so hard that it knocked the breath out of her and made her vision blur, but she did not lose her grip on the canister. She felt no pain in her back, felt no blood pouring out of her.

“Don’t move!” Bowman was yelling, moving, pressing her down all the while. Fifty feet farther on, between them and the meadow, two narcos materialized out of the forest gloom. One was having problems with his AK-47. The other was not. He fired off a short burst on full automatic—spraying and praying—and bullets cracked the air around them. Bowman threw himself on top of Hallie. The narco fired again, correcting his aim, coming closer, bullets kicking up spouts of soil on the trail as he walked his rounds toward them. It was happening in microseconds, too fast for Bowman to fire back.

Though Bowman had his arms over her head, she had a slice of vision between them and could see the narcos. And then she saw the strangest thing. A quick silvery glint, like light flashing off a mirror, and the narco stopped firing. The barrel of his rifle drooped, slow and easy as a dying flower, until its muzzle was pointing at the ground. Another flash of light, and the second narco dropped his rifle.

She watched as the two fell slowly forward, like men who had suddenly gone to sleep standing up. Before their bodies hit the ground, both heads toppled from their shoulders, fell to the trail, bounced, and rolled away. Then the bodies flopped down onto their chests, spouting blood from their headless necks.

She glimpsed something white slipping from the trail into the forest. Then nothing except the two headless corpses and one small, white dog with eyes like red coals. He walked to one of the decapitated heads, sniffed, and disappeared into the forest.

Running again, they broke out of the trees, into the meadow. The cave mouth was two hundred yards away. She was running harder and harder but moving slower and slower, her muscles tying up, face contorted with the pain flooding her body.

Bullets snapped and crackled around them, whined off rocks. It was not easy to shoot accurately at a dead run, she knew: the only reason the narcos had not brought them down already. That and aguardiente and God only knew what kind of drugs they’d taken. Bowman must have thrown another grenade, because she heard the explosion, closer this time, felt pieces of soil and rock pelt her head and back.

Halfway across the meadow, Hallie realized that Bowman wasn’t behind her. She stopped, turned, saw him kneeling, firing single shots from the AK-47, hitting men with every one. He yelled, “Keep going! To the cave!”

The narcos had come running out of the tree line into the open meadow, exposing themselves, and Bowman had six of them down in three seconds. There were a dozen others at least, but they understood what was happening, spun on their heels, and fled back toward the trees. Bowman got two more, fired the rest of that magazine in one long, ripping burst, and sprinted toward the cave’s mouth.

A line of boulders formed a natural wall a hundred feet from the cave, and Hallie was there, on hands and knees, gasping, when Bowman jumped over the rocks and landed beside her. “Stay here!”

He ran, crouching, back into the cave mouth, bullets spanging off boulders, spraying chips and splinters of rock. Hallie could see that his right side was soaked with blood, which was now running down over his pants as well. He disappeared into the cave, and for a few horrible moments Hallie was alone there. She inched her head out to look across the meadow, but the narcos were holding in cover, sheltering behind trees, spraying and praying, the bright muzzle flashes of their rifles reminding her of Fourth of July sparklers. Their wild firing made one continuous, ragged, wavering blast.

Bowman returned, carrying in his left hand both the odd weapon she had seen on the stealth flight in and the SIG Sauer.

There was something she did not understand. “Why are they coming after us like this?”

“We must have been approaching a secret camp. They can’t afford to let us get away now that we know its location.” He paused, checked the weapons. “Looks like you’ll get to shoot this sooner than we thought. It’s heavier than an AK and I’m not going to be any good one-handed. Twenty-four rounds. Look through the scope, put the pipper on your target, and squeeze.”

“Pipper?”

“Red dot. It’s the laser that tells the projectile where to go. For now just put out some suppressing fire.”

“What’s suppressing fire?”

Bowman actually grinned. “Just point it and shoot.”

“Give me the thing.”

Bowman handed her the weapon. It was much heavier than she had expected. She settled the stock into her shoulder, wrapped her right hand around the pistol grip, cradled the forestock in her bloody left palm, found the trigger. Her cut hand was on fire with pain, but she could manage it.

“Wait for them to shoot.” Bowman was getting his breath back. “The moment they stop, you pop up. Don’t linger. They can’t aim worth a damn, but they have a lot of bullets.”

“Okay.” She took a long breath, let it out, waited for a burst of automatic fire to end. When it did, she rose up, rested her elbows on top of the boulder, pointed the weapon’s muzzle at the tree line, and squeezed the trigger.

The next thing she knew she was sitting on the ground. Her butt hurt from the impact, but she still had hold of the weapon. Bowman hauled her up with his good arm. “Sorry. It was set on full auto.” He moved the fire- selector switch to its semiautomatic position. “One round for every trigger pull now. It’s got quite a kick on full auto.”

The recoil had been worse than that of the 12-gauge shotgun she’d used to hunt geese on the Chesapeake, but the second time she was ready for it, leaning into the weapon, back leg braced. She rose up, fired four rounds, each a half second apart, saw them rip the air with yellow bursts at the tree line, dropped down again.

“Don’t fire from the same position twice.” Bowman was sitting with his back against a boulder, cradling his right arm with his left, his voice getting a little sloppy, his tan face starting to whiten. She looked, saw blood on his other side, just above his waist. He had been hit again while out in the open.

“Bowman.”