Page 37 of What Remains

“John!” Kazim said. “What you do, John?”

“The only thing I can.” Swinging out of the cab, he raised the flare gun and took aim to the right, away from the mountain and toward the men’s blind side, hoping against hope that Driver and Mac were like everybody else. The flare would be visible for five seconds and in that time, they would look to the sky first and follow that flame as it fell before trying to figure out where it had come from. Wouldn’t they? Of course, the flare would probably make the bad guys move even faster. They would realize they’d been spotted, that the jig was up, and so what the hell, come down screaming and forget trying to sneak around.

Stop, stop!A command he’d heard in his head only once before: when he’d been fifteen and forced to do something he could never take back, that could never be undone. The only way then, as now, was to do what no one else could.

Shoot.His arm steadied, firmed.Shoot already, shoot!

“Cover your ears!” he shouted to the boy and squeezed the trigger.

7

The blast was tremendous:a huge, startling, almost theatricalbangas loud as a .50cal handgun. The recoil juddered into his arms as the flare rocketed for the sky with a high-pitched decrescendo whine. On the heels of that thought came the nauseating realization that he had no idea if a flare, designed for use on water or snow, stopped burning in mid-air or when it hit water. The last thing he needed was to start a brush fire out here. Within three or four seconds, however, the flare reached the apex of its climb; the orange flame died, and then the flare, its supply of propellant gases exhausted, fell in its long arcing descent, trailing a ribbon of thick black smoke.

Please, please, please.No time to lose, no time to waste, no time to see if Driver and Mac or anyone down there was looking the right way. The sound had been so huge, they had to have been curious, and the flare was bright, the smoky trail stark against blue sky. Of course, the bad guys would’ve heard then seen the same thing. They had to know that they’d been seen. Which meant two things: either they’d gone to ground, or they were hurrying the hell up.

Which meant he had to get moving.

Yeah, but with what plan?All he could think was that Roni and Driver and all those kids neededthisHumvee to stand a chance of getting away. Swinging back into the cab, he dropped the Humvee into drive and hammered the accelerator. The vehicle sprang forward with a roar, and then he was spinning the wheel, sending the Humvee hurtling from the road and onto hardpack. As they left the road, the vehicle hopped, went briefly airborne then dropped like a stone. On his right, Kazim cried out in surprise.Hedid, too, the yelp jumping from his tongue as his body levitated and strained against his shoulder harness. They came down with a violent, bone-shattering slam so hard John felt the impact shiver through his spine and arms and into his teeth. For a split second, his grip on the steering wheel slipped. The Humvee wallowed in response and tried to spin. As he wrestled with the wheel, he heard a dullthuckas something caromed off the window and then pinged off the roof overhead. For a brief, heart-stopping moment, he thought maybe the Humvee had taken a bullet through the windscreen. The vehicles were reinforced, but they weren’t bulletproof and neither was the glass. Then something sailed past his ear. He caught a flash of blue and silver as the object bounced off the windscreen, flipped back, and landed in his lap.

That Flowers.Jumping a leg, he sent the crumpled can of Red Bull into the footwell and concentrated on not crashing. The Humvee wallowed in ruts and loose earth, tried tipping. Debris pinged and ponged against the undercarriage. Wrestling the vehicle back to the true, he white-knuckled the steering wheel, got them pointed in the right direction then floored the accelerator.

There was a tremendous lurch, a feeling that someone had stiff-armed his chest and pressed him into his seat as they sped over the flats, slaloming left and then right as he fought the uneven surface. Plumes of red dust boiled behind them. Theview out of his windscreen was fuzzy, lurching in and out of focus. He briefly wondered about the tires. A blowout would be catastrophic.

So will getting shot.He couldn’t just barrel up to the cavern. Snatching a quick look toward the mountain, he spotted maybe a dozen men scurrying down funnels and culverts and wrinkles in the landscape.

“Get the radio!” he shouted above the engine noise. “Kazim, grab the Harris, turn it on!” The radio was already keyed to the correct frequency. He had to hope that someone would be listening.Mac knows about the flare, he’s got to be calling for help.Except, unless they flew, reinforcements would never get here in time. They would have to beat back these men themselves and hope like hell they could outrun them. “Can’t take my hands off the wheel, so you’ll have to hold it so I can talk, okay?”

“Here, here.” Straightening both legs, the boy braced himself against the footwell and then thrust the Harris at him. “On! Talk,talk.”

Please, Driver, please be listening.“Driver! Mac!” he bawled into the mouthpiece. “You’ve got fighters coming down the mountain from the north. To your left, your blind side, behind you, behind you,behindyou!”

“Look!” The boy pointed. “Someone coming out from the cave.”

Squinting through the windscreen, he caught a brief flash of a face as someone peered out and then around the corner, and then one of Driver’s men wheeled around, rifle in hand, staying low and pivoting to face the cave’s blind side. From the way the man moved, he thought this might be Meeks but couldn’t be sure.

But this answered the question. His warning had been heard. Mac would’ve turned on the radio after the?—

A crackle from the Harris, but with all the bouncing he couldn’t catch what had been said. He also couldn’t stop and now he had a decision to make. He could either rocket for the cave itself, take up a defensive position, and get in the fight.

Or….

He jumped his gaze to the right. The bandits had gathered at the base of the mountain and were clustered behind boulders amid tangles of scrub and brush.

An idea coalesced in his brain. Would this work?Whatever you’re going to do, do it fast.“Kazim,” he shouted over the engine roar, “in the glove box, there are more cartridges for the flare gun. Not bullets. They’re short.” How many had Flowers said he kept? Two? Three? He couldn’t remember. With luck, he might need only one. Of course, if he got himself shot… “Get them out then take the flare gun, put in a cartridge then give it to me!”

Out of the tail of an eye, he saw the kid pawing around the glove box, pulling something out. Then he stopped looking because there was that last, short rise coming up before the final descent toward the aqueduct. Instead of slowing, he took it at speed, the Humvee roaring up the incline then soaring skyward as they topped the rise, and he thought of that beautiful last scene, Thelma and Louise holding hands as they rocketed into the void?—

And then the Humvee came down, striking the earth hard. Gritting his teeth, he waited for the tires to blow or an axle to break, for the vehicle to flip, but then he was spinning the wheel to the right and away from the cavern, moving roughly parallel to the mountain’s base. People there now, but the Humvee was going so fast, they were only so many smears. Although he did think he spotted Mac, a radio at his mouth, and then Flowers, a kid on his back, another two tucked under either arm like footballs, making for a vehicle.

Roni, where’s Roni?Probably with the kids, maybe all gathered at the entrance, trying to decide if they should fight, if they had to chance at running. But then he stopped wondering because he was concentrating on the future, what he could do,ifhe could do it and just how much distance he had to put between him and the mountain.

No base of any mountain is ever made of straight lines. Mountains are curved, their bases’ jagged with sharp angles and debris because, by definition, they have been forced up by tectonic forces powerful enough to shatter through layers of compressed earth and rock. The aqueduct’s entrance nestled in the center of an arc sculpted over the centuries first by water and then human hands. But the arc was also lopsided; standing at the cave’s entrance, the right was flatter, more linear while the left was like one half of a pair of parentheses.

Accelerating, John skirted the mountain’s left flank, and then they were on a straight, streaking along the mountain’s base. Ahead, he spotted the bandits at about the same time as they saw him because, all of a sudden, a dozen rifles were pointing his way.

“Kazim, down!” A shout, punctuated by the pock and spang and thunk of bullets smashing against the Humvee. Hunching over the steering wheel, he got low and small, only the top of his head—sans helmet, because who’d have thought he needed one—and forehead and eyes and, in the nick of time, too. There was a sharpercrack, nothing as glassy as the sound of a baseball shattering a window but something more like hitting an egg against the lip of a mixing bowl. A split second later, a sudden irregular starburst of smashed glass appeared at a point where his face had been only moments before.

Please, God, make this work.He wanted to add something about God maybe stopping those guys from thinking about using an RPG but didn’t because he didn’t want to jinx it. Buzzingdown the window with an elbow, he transferred the flare gun from his right hand to his left and, while he was at it, sent up a brief of thanks to his uncle for making him learn how to shoot with either hand because you just never could tell.

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