“Sir!”

He turned his head. Fultz, rasping and clawing beside him, pointed upward.

He looked. The ridgeline, barely twenty feet further.

As they stomped and struggled upward through the last steps, he heard a new sound growing above and behind him.

They staggered and fell to earth at the crest, out of sight.

He collapsed in a heap just over the top, the noise rising stronger and more steady behind them. He rolled to his back, heaving gasps raking in and out of him, a fresh panorama of height and depth filling his vision. His body, ravenous for air, gorged at the meager feast up here.

Fultz lay on his face beside him, sucking in the mountaintop soil, one arm thrust out toward him holding the handset.

The noise resolved itself and roared over his face, faceless and unknowing. Heavy-lift cargo helicopters, on their way someplace in some other godforsaken valley, with twenty-foot concrete blast barriers hanging beneath them.