Several minutes later they heard the steady drone of choppers approaching, fast.
Kendrick had stepped outside to see if anyone was trying to enter the compound. He turned in time to see Buddy emerge from the doorway, still zipping up his fly.
'The tarpaulin,' Buddy urged him. 'Help me get it off.'
Kendrick nodded, and they unveiled the helicopter, its now-exposed skin gleaming black in the early-morning light. Kendrick saw Audrey staring off towards the east, and glanced in the same direction. Small shapes, rapidly growing larger, were heading towards them in a line across the sky.
Time's up.
Kendrick was surprised that the attack came from the air. Draeger's men, after all, had moved on foot. But then, he remembered, Draeger wasn't the only hostile force they had to deal with. The approaching aircraft could also belong to Los Muertos.
Buddy was now in the pilot's seat. The helicopter's rotors whined into life, producing a steady, deafening wail within seconds.
Audrey was nowhere to be seen as Kendrick pulled himself on board, the rotors beating at the air inches above his head. Buddy mouthed her name and Kendrick jabbed a finger towards the nearest building.
He saw Audrey emerge from a doorway. She was carrying some sort of weapon, a wicked-looking black thing with a snub nose. Kendrick started to climb back out of the 'copter, feeling that he should help her in some way.
Buddy placed a gloved hand on his shoulder and shook his head. Kendrick hesitated, realizing what Buddy was saying: it wasn't likely he'd be much use.
Audrey had slung the weapon over her shoulder on a strap before leaping up in an augmented blur to grab the lower edge of the building's roof with both hands. She pulled herself up effortlessly onto the sloping surface, running up to its apex just as out of nowhere a roar of rotors beat deafeningly down around them.
Buddy pulled back on the 'copter's stick until they were hovering several feet above the ground. There was a flash of light and the sound of gunfire. Buddy took the aircraft higher as bullets streaked through the air around them.
'We have to get Audrey inside,' Kendrick yelled in Buddy's ear. 'She'll get herself killed.'
'You think I don't know that?' Buddy yelled back. 'What am I supposed to do, jump out and get her?'
Audrey was returning fire now, her weapon spitting bullets at an astonishing rate. An enemy helicopter jerked up and away, swerving and ducking as she aimed for it.
Kendrick didn't allow himself the luxury of thinking about what he did next. He slammed open the door next to him and fell for several metres, hitting the ground rolling. Keeping low, he ran towards the shelter of a nearby shed.
Something hot zinged past his ear and he found himself taking cover behind a stack of concrete blocks, which looked like they'd been salvaged from nearby ruins. Puffs of dust suddenly spurted from the hard-packed dirt only inches away.
The attack was coming, Kendrick could see now, as a new helicopter appeared from an entirely different direction. He pulled himself up onto the roof, as he'd seen Audrey do. He watched in amazement as she jumped up onto one of the struts of the attacking helicopter and ripped open the door on the pilot's side.
The helicopter rapidly spiralled upwards. He saw a body tumble out, arms and legs flailing. Not Audrey -the pilot.
He saw her leap away from the craft as it spun end over end. Audrey landed back on the building roof, feet first, the movement almost ballet-like.
Kendrick started to move towards her, seeing what she hadn't yet spotted. As the helicopter twisted in the air above her, instinct made Kendrick roll away fast, dropping off the shed roof onto the ground.
The 'copter ploughed down on top of the building, and Audrey vanished in a great plume of flames and smoke that swallowed the structure, turning it into a huge pyre.
Kendrick turned, dumbstruck, just in time to see another helicopter sweeping over the burning roof towards him. He ducked away, ready to run, before he realized that it was Buddy.
He could see the fear etched on Buddy's face through the canopy. The aircraft dipped close enough to the ground to let Kendrick get on board.
He hurled himself back into the co-pilot's seat and, in the next instant, Buddy pulled back on the stick and they shot upwards.
Below them the ground fell away with alarming speed. 'Can we make it?' Kendrick yelled.
'There's six other choppers coming this way fast. That's going to be a problem.' Streets of broken buildings flashed by below.
To the east, the sun continued its slow climb into the sky, its rays reflecting off their pursuers and making them look like burning insects.
'They're keeping their distance,' Buddy announced, 'I don't know why. They could bring us down if they wanted to. We're outnumbered, but they're just following us.'
'You know,' Kendrick said carefully, 'that it's me they want, not just you. They seem to think I'm important.'
Buddy looked straight ahead and nodded. 'Yeah, you could say that.'
'If I hadn't come along, if Erik Whitsett hadn't been able to find me – if I hadn't come to Loch Awe that time. Is there any reason why you might not have been able to go ahead with all of this, your launch to the Archimedes?'
Buddy sighed, his eyes flickering over the screens that displayed the pursuing helicopters. 'Look, it was clear from the start that Los Muertos thought you were important. Maybe they knew something we didn't, something we'd missed somehow when the Bright showed us what they could give us. Then you went to visit Draeger and that made us think, yeah, maybe you were vital to the whole operation in some way that we couldn't figure.'
'So really you were hedging your bets. That's why you wanted me here.'
'Ken, you're one of us – that's why I wanted you here. So please don't write us off as a bunch of self-serving pricks like Draeger. Some of us are 'more' like the Bright than others, sure, but in the end I don't know if it makes any damn difference. Ask the Bright – maybe they know.'
So much had changed. In the beginning, Kendrick had wanted nothing to do with Buddy's plans: now he understood that the only way to halt the plans of Draeger or Los Muertos lay on board the Archimedes space habitat.
And then there was the question of the presumed evidence that could destroy Max Draeger. The thought that Peter McCowan was lying about such evidence -was engaged in some vast deception in which Kendrick had all too willingly played his part – had occurred to him more than a few times.
Yet, despite all his worries and doubts, he found himself believing McCowan. Or is that just my own guilt talking?
The landscape below revealed occasional oases of generator-powered activity where the post-Nuke reconstruction work had started. For the first time, Kendrick understood just how much he was prepared to sacrifice to bring Draeger down. More than he might ever have suspected, or admitted to anyone else.
'They're getting closer,' Buddy muttered, his face turning stiff and expressionless.
A screen displayed the pursuing 'copters against a blue sky, most of the detail lost in the glare of the sun shining down on the Santa Monica hills. Kendrick studied the screen and saw tiny pulses of light appear from the helicopters, moving fast. Buddy dived suddenly, almost running their helicopter into the ground, and a missile streaked past them to plough into the soil in an explosive burst of flame and smoke.
Buddy twisted the stick again so they were climbing, the ground falling away once more in a rush as more streaks of light came uncomfortably close.
Kendrick's head spun with vertigo. Buddy was pushing the aircraft to its limits.
Buddy grunted in surprise and Kendrick looked up to see a string of tiny lights hanging in the air barely a klick ahead, directly in their path. Something about the way they hovered suggested balloons of some kind – they didn't appear to be moving, so perhaps they were tethered to the ground.
'This could be some kind of trap,' Kendrick said. 'They might have set it up in advance, if they knew we'd be heading west.'
Buddy shrugged. 'Yeah, well. Maybe, maybe not. Can't turn back now. Shit.'
