Deep Sky

army in here pretty soon, taking orders from us.”

The fingertip drummed again. Less than a second.

“Make the call.”

A click ended the static and then the window came down hard, and muffled steps faded away behind it.

The three of them ran along the row of back lots until they’d passed four more alleys. They stopped behind a building that nestled against a side street, and listened.

Far away, across and above town, the Humvees at Raines’s house fired up one by one and began to move. Then their sound was lost to the roar of the one near the Third Notch.

Travis nodded quickly and they sprinted across the street to the next block. They continued into it past the first building, then turned down an alley and moved farther away from Main Street, at last coming out between a little art gallery and the town’s post office. The street they now faced ran parallel to Main. Across it were small homes tucked close to one another, and beyond lay three more blocks of the same, the whole spread rising toward the exposed hills. Those hills could be easily climbed—the three of them had come down them fifteen minutes ago —but it would take a good sixty seconds to reach the redwoods from the concealment of the highest backyards. That hadn’t been a problem when nobody was watching. Now that at least three sets of eyes would be, an undetected crossing was pointless to even think about.

Travis thought about it anyway. If they could get up into the trees and hide, they could circle around to the mine, probably a mile away through unbroken forest.

Paige gazed up at the woods too, and the open ground beneath, clearly running all the same calculations.

“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