Page 38 of What Remains

God, he hoped that Roni and the others were using the distraction he was causing to get the kids loaded, maybe even start heading for the road. He’d only have one shot at this. Those guys, whoever they were, would never let him try this trick twice.

Peering over the dash, flare gun in his left hand, he watched that shock of scrub and brush and the men bunched just above grow larger and larger andlarger…

Now.Steadying the steering wheel with his right hand, he thrust his left through the open driver’s side window. Watched as the Humvee gobbled up distance, and the men and those boulders grew larger and larger as he closed in.

And then, when he was maybe fifty yards away, he spun the wheel with his right—and squeezed the trigger with his left.

Again, the samebang, the same jolt shuddering down his arm. He had no idea if what he’d tried had worked because he was too busy steering. No point ending up pancaked against the mountain or a boulder. The Humvee caromed in a tight skid, the rear swinging out as he bolted upright and stiff-armed the wheel. He felt the rear of the Humvee try to outrun the front, but then the moment was past, and he was arcing back toward the aqueduct.

“Look!” Kazim was staring out the passenger side window. “Look!”

Glancing at his rear view, he spotted the orange and umber flames of a brush fire, which looked to be spreading fast and…

Were those flamesrunning?

“They on fire!” Kazim crowed.

“It’s all that hair, especially their beards.” Hair went up almost instantly and from there, the flames had only spread,turning several men into literal pillars of flame: tunic, shirt, everything ablaze. “If they’re smart, the ones who are left will push them into that spring.”

But he bet the ones who hadn’t gone up in a blaze of glory might not care. From the lack of explosions, the guy with the RPG launcher had escaped. Which was too bad because that didn’t give them a lot of time.

As he accelerated away, Kazim said, “That was like the song, John.”

“Song?”

“Yes. Goodness, golly.” Kazim showed his teeth in a wide grin. “Great balls of fire.”

8

Back at theircave hideout now. Stomping on the brake so suddenly that he thought this was precisely why he kept insisting to Roni to sit in the back of an airplane:Seriously, the only thing holding your head to your neck are a bunch of muscles and ligaments. Read any report of a crash and you see a lot of headless passengers.

And Roni, Roni, Roni, where was she? He didn’t see either her or Driver, though he spotted Meeks, rifle slung on his back, climbing down from a rocky perch.

Unbuckling, he muscled open the driver’s side door and pushed out of the Humvee as Flowers and then Mac, radio in hand, rushed up. “That was an excellent ploy,” Mac said in his best near-Cambridge accent. “Bought us some time for countermeasures.”

“Countermeasures?” he said at the same instant that Flowers, face streaked with sweat and muddy rivulets of red dust, pounded him on the back. “Man, that was beautiful,” Flowers shouted.“Boof!”Miming a mushroom cloud with his hands, Flowers let go of another laugh that sounded just the near side of slightly manic. “Talk about going up in smoke!” Reachingpast John, Flowers clapped a hand to Kazim’s right shoulder and gave the kid a shake. “You did good, kid, you did real good!”

Hmmm.He’d once seen a barn cat stalking a mouse. As the cat slithered along in slow-motion, its pupils had dilated until only a suggestion of iris remained. That cat had nothing on Flowers. Remembering Driver’s jitteriness of that morning, John thought that Flowers must’ve popped a couple of the same uppers. Which, given that the man had driven all night and, assuming they got away, was now going to put in another six hours was understandable, though maybe not very helpful. If Flowers got any higher, they’d have to tie a string around his foot to keep him from drifting away.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said. “They’ve got an RPG launcher and they’re going to regroup pretty fast.”And be madder than a nest of hornets.He’d bought them maybe fifteen minutes, tops. “How we doing here?”

“Now that we’ve got one more Humvee, better,” Meeks said. “Otherwise, we’d be tying boys to the hood.”

“How many did Shahida bring back? And where’s Driver, where’s Roni?

“On their way,” Mac said at the same moment that Flowers said, “Those new kids are in bad shape, man. Soon as you shot that first flare, with that big bang? They bolted back inside.”

“How many?”

“Ten, as we imagined,” Mac said. “Although one of which we seem to have lost.”

“What? How do you lose a kid?”

“Hey,” Meeks said, offended, “they’re small, they’re fast and there are a lot of honking tunnels in there.”

“Shahida and Driver are back with Roni now, trying to coax the boy to come out. But,” Mac said, sounding just the tiniest bit smug, “this may not be such an emergency soon. Help should arrive in a very few moments.”

“How do you figure?” But he didn’t stop to wait for an answer. “Kazim, stay here. Be right back.”

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