more than he’d wanted. He would insist on heading back, and down deep she knew that trying to pull the pilot’s trump card on him again would be a dangerous thing to do. He might even put a gun to her head, figuring he could argue his way out of trouble with Connor when they got back—
“We should grab a little more altitude,” he said. “In case the cable takes a turn somewhere. Don’t want to be too low to see that.”
“Yes—good idea,” Blair said, fighting to keep the surprise out of her voice as she angled the Blackhawk upward. An actual, rational decision from him, uncolored by his current feelings? Was he finally starting to come back to normal?
She stole a sideways look at him, her small hope fading away. No. He was intrigued by the cable, and smart enough to know how to separate his personal feelings from the job of fighting Skynet. But that single glance was enough to tell her that he still hadn’t forgiven her for her brief relationship with Marcus Wright.
That relationship had been real, she knew. So had her feelings, and those feelings hadn’t changed with her discovery of the half man, half machine that Skynet had turned him into. She’d done what she’d done, and she had no regrets.
But if her time with Marcus had permanently cost her Barnes’s friendship and respect, she might someday have to seriously consider whether it had truly been worth it.
They’d gone another twenty kilometers, and were well up into the mountain forests, when Barnes suddenly pointed ahead and to the left.
“There!” he snapped. “Smoke.”
“I see it,” Blair confirmed. There were several slender plumes drifting upward from a clearing just east of the river the Blackhawk was currently following. A town or village, far enough out in the middle of nowhere that Skynet had missed it? “Think it’s worth checking out?”
“You’re the pilot,” Barnes said. “You’ll just do whatever you want anyway.”
Blair sighed inwardly. No, he hadn’t forgiven her.
“Okay,” she said as she swung the Blackhawk to the right. Whoever was in that town, she didn’t want to spook them by landing right in the middle of the place. “Keep an eye out for an open spot where we can set down.”
There were half a dozen small clearings within a mile of the smoke plumes, all of them to the east and south. Most were too small for a safe landing, but two looked big enough to accommodate the Blackhawk. Blair picked the larger one and headed down.
The ground was spongy with dead leaves and matted fir needles and a half-buried, decaying log that she almost didn’t see in time. She skidded a couple of meters sideways to avoid it, then set the helo down. Taking a careful survey of the area, she shut down the engines.
The roar faded away into silence as she slipped off her headphones.
“You see anything?” she asked Barnes.
“Lots of forest,” he replied, already out of his seat. He slung his backpack onto his shoulders, then added his SIG 542 assault rifle and his RAI 300 sniper rifle. “Turn off the cockpit fan on your way out, will you?”
Blair frowned. With the wind whipping freely through the broken windshield, she hadn’t even noticed the fan was on.
“You had the
“‘Cause that’s how you start the chopper now,” he said calmly. “I hooked the fan into the starter circuit last night while you were asleep.”
Blair’s first impulse was to ask what the hell he thought he was doing messing with her helo’s wiring. Her second was that that was actually a pretty good idea.
“Clever,” she said. “We’ll probably want—” She broke off, feeling her eyes widening as he heaved the minigun up off the deck. “You’re taking
“I’m sure as hell not leaving it,” he countered with a grunt.
Blair winced, trying to think of a diplomatic way of saying this.
“The people in that town over there may already be leery of strangers,” she tried. “If we show up looking like arms dealers—”
“Then they’ll know not to mess with us, won’t they?” he cut her off. “Grab that shotgun.” Without waiting for a response, he hopped out through the side door, landing with a thud.
Blair picked up the Mossberg M500 shotgun and ammo pack and slung them over her shoulder. Checking the Blackhawk’s compass one last time to get her bearings, she stepped out into the leaves.
The smoke plumes had been almost directly northwest of their landing site. Barnes was already ten meters that direction, stomping through the undergrowth and forcing his way through the occasional line of close-set bushes. Blair picked the most distant tree she could see in the right direction and set off after him, splitting her attention between the tree and her footing.
She’d closed the gap between her and Barnes to a couple of meters, and the Blackhawk had been lost to sight behind them, when Barnes suddenly slowed.
“Keep going,” he murmured. “Straight on, and don’t look at the bushes.”
Before Blair could ask what that was supposed to mean he was off again, resuming his brisk pace but with his direction now shifted a few degrees to their left.
Frowning, Blair continued forward, casually dropping her hand to her holstered Desert Eagle.
She’d gone another twenty paces when she spotted the glint of metal behind a cluster of bushes to their left. It took her another couple of steps to identify it as an arrowhead, a wide, nasty-looking version that seemed to be made of four angled razor blades. Crouched in the bushes behind the arrow was a shadowy figure holding a compound bow.
And Barnes was heading directly toward him.
CHAPTER NINE
The aircraft suddenly appeared like a roaring predator overhead and Hope’s first frantic thought was that it was going to land right in front of her, in the middle of the clearing she and Susan had staked out. But to her relief, it flew past, giving her a glimpse through the trees of a wide greenish-brown body. She listened closely, and a few seconds later heard the roar of the engines change pitch. Half a minute after that, the sound whined down into silence.
“What was it?” Susan asked, her voice hoarse, her face white and pinched. “Did you see it?”
“I saw a little,” Hope said, her own voice sounding a little shaky. “It didn’t sound like an H-K.”
“Who knows what H-Ks sound like these days?” Susan countered, clutching at Hope’s arm. “Come on, we have to get out of here.”
Hope took a deep breath, sternly ordering the butterflies in her stomach to settle down.
“We first need to find out who or what it is,” she told the older woman. “It sounded like it landed in Violet Glen, and there’s only one obvious route from there back to town. We’ll find a place along the way to hide and see who shows up.”
Susan’s jaw dropped.
“Hope, those could be
“They could also be the Resistance,” Hope said. “Don’t you remember Connor’s broadcasts? He promised that if we were out here the Resistance would find us. Maybe they finally have.”
“Or maybe they haven’t,” Susan ground out.
“I’m going to check it out,” Hope said firmly. “I want you to head back to town and alert my father.”
Susan’s eyes narrowed.
“Why? Because I don’t know what I’m doing?”
Hope reached down and squeezed her hand.
“Because I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said gently. “You’re important to the town. We need you.”
“No,
