“I tell you, there’s at least two of them. Maybe more.” The voice came in through the earpiece Karla had lifted from a dead Talon goon. Who were these guys? Didn’t they know enough to shut up, or at least change frequencies when they’d taken this many casualties?
Karla squinted, tried to relax on her high perch. Her eyes stung from the smoke that occasionally blew her way. But her location was perfect, perhaps twenty feet off the ground, her outline broken by a fir tree’s thick branches. She could just see through the great picture windows on the house’s upper floor.
No more than five minutes ago she’d watched two black-clad men wearing gas masks search the main room, submachine guns held before them.
“Your bosses are gonna call this a regulation clusterfuck.”
A tinny voice carried up from a loudspeaker on the road below the gate. “This is the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office. You are ordered to lay down your weapons and open this gate. Failure to do so will result in felony charges being filed against all persons responsible. I repeat, lay down your weapons and open this gate!”
“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen anytime soon.” Karla caught movement from the corner of her eye. Carefully, she turned her head, then eased the HK to clear the branch. The man approaching along the slope below held an imaging device, the kind that picked up infrared. He was slowly scanning the slope below.
And if he lifted it?
Karla took a deep breath, settled the front sight post on his chest, and mentally willed him to keep the scanner pointed at the ground where any sloppy assailant would be expected to lurk.
Step-by-step he proceeded, only to have two of his black-clad associates emerge from the trees behind him. One held a scoped rifle, the other a military-grade M16. They cautiously advanced across the needle-and-duff–covered slope, the ultimate hunting team.
Somewhere in the distance a helicopter was approaching. Karla could tell from the heavy beat of the rotors that it was something big, not Winny Swink’s flight-for-life chopper.
Grazier’s people? Rushing in with an extraction team aboard a Chinook? Wishful thinking. Sound was wrong for a Chinook.
Then, to Karla’s dismay, the guy with the scanner raised it, and started running it over the trees to her left.
That’s when her phone began to buzz in her vest pocket.
Hell of a time.
She shifted, feeling the cramp build in her left leg as she braced herself in the fork of the branches. The scanner lifted his sensor toward her. A moment before he pointed it at her, she triggered the HK. In one graceful swing she targeted the guy with the hunting rifle. Her burst caught him in the upper chest and unprotected neck. By the time she swung to the third man and triggered her weapon, it was to see her 9mm slugs chew into the tree trunk he ducked behind.
The phone continued to buzz in her pocket.
Heart pounding, she shifted, trying to catch a glimpse of the survivor.
“You’re surrounded,” he called. “We’ve got you triangulated now.”
Karla chewed her lips, knowing he was probably right.
Bracing the HK on the branch to cover his position, she slipped the phone from her pocket and jammed it to her ear, whispering, “Falcon?”
“Naw, it’s Winny. Can’t hardly hear you. I figure that’s ’cause you can’t talk. Got a way of showing me where you’re at?”
At that moment the guy behind the tree stepped out and jerked the pin from a grenade. She swiveled the HK and shot. One-handed, the gun jerked and bucked. At least two rounds hit him as he threw.
Karla hunched herself as the black orb rose, fouled on a branch, and deflected into the open. The bang, accompanied by the hiss of shrapnel and falling needles, left Karla’s ears ringing.
Then, to her amazement, the guy below stepped out from his tree, the M16 shouldered to follow up.
Karla used both hands this time, centering the HK, and shot him through the head.
In the ringing silence, all she could hear was the thunder of the helicopter and the Pitkin County sheriff’s nearly inaudible voice threatening arrest and conviction.
Karla wondered where her phone had gone to, couldn’t even remember letting go of it. Instead, she ejected her magazine, slipped the last one she’d looted from the dead into the well, and slammed it in place.
Through a gap in the trees she could see two more black-clad figures scrambling along the slope toward her, weapons in hand. They both stopped, staring up in disbelief as the helicopter’s downdraft caught them.
One threw up an arm, as if to protect himself. The other raised an M16, firing into the air on full auto.
Karla couldn’t see the helicopter through the screen of trees, but her own perch was swaying, the branches lashing from the downwash. What she did see was the two men—at the very last instant—hunching down before a column of falling water literally blasted them down the mountain.
Karla screamed her rage and tried to cling to her thrashing tree as a gale blew down from above. More gunfire could be heard, close enough to penetrate the chopper’s roar. Across from her, branches snapped and cracked.
It was all she could do to hold on. Shooting back had become an impossibility.
“Give me a fucking break!” she bellowed into the gale.
Something was smashing its way toward her through the trees.