When he saw Lynn, Mark dropped the rifle and picked up the .38. His uncle watched with curiosity.
“You know her?”
“Yes. She’s the one I came here with, the one looking for Pate.”
Larry reached out and grabbed Mark’s arm as he turned to run. “Don’t set off like a damned fool again.”
“There are men right behind her!”
“Thank the good Lord for a scoped rifle, then,” Larry said.
“We aren’t shooting anybody unless we have to.”
“You didn’t have that problem earlier today.” Larry picked up the rifle and leaned forward, burrowing himself into the snow and assuming a sniper’s position on his belly. “Might as well back them off a touch, wouldn’t you say?”
Mark looked at him and then up the slope helplessly. He wasn’t going to cover the ground to Lynn uphill faster than those two would do it going downhill, but he didn’t want to start a firefight either. Not as exposed as they were here.
“Markus, they are closing on her fast,” Larry said.
“Back them off, then.”
Larry went silent and enough seconds passed that Mark thought he hadn’t heard the instruction. Then his uncle squeezed off four shots in succession, fluid as a firing machine, racking the bolt and squeezing the trigger, racking the bolt and squeezing the trigger, no change at all in his expression or posture.
“Well,” he said, “they didn’t care for that much.”
“You hit them?”
“Of course not; I wasn’t trying to hit them. They both dropped and went for cover. I can see one of them. The other one made it down in the rocks, out of sight.”
“Where is Lynn?”
“She stopped running too. She’s hiding in that gulch. I wish she’d been smart enough to keep running. This was buying her good lead time.”
“She probably thinks any shooting is hostile fire.” Mark looked at the gulch, two hundred yards away over open hillside. It was a ribbon of shadow in the gathering dusk. Once he got there, he’d feel safe enough.
But he had to get there.
“Shit,” Larry said. “They’ve got radios. That means they’ve got friends.”
“I’m going for her,” Mark said. “When I start running, put up some cover fire. Shoot to wound if you can. You don’t need a murder charge.”
Larry was feeding fresh cartridges into the rifle. “I’d say we’re past the point of worrying about our booking sheets.”
He was probably right.
Larry said, “When you get to her, head straight down the gulch instead of coming back across the hill. I can hold them off, and you’ll have better cover. You get to the bottom, where that stream is, just run like hell for the truck. I can keep them occupied long enough for you to make the truck.”
“How do you intend to get back across?”
“Creatively.” Larry didn’t look away from the scope. “If you’re going to move, now’s the time. They’re getting themselves collected up there.”
“All right.” Mark put one hand in the snow, bracing himself on the steep slope, and said, “I’ll run with your first shot.”
There was a two-second pause, and then Larry opened fire again, this time sending the bullets into the trees, blowing chunks of bark and branch loose.
Mark put his head down and ran.
The first bullet into the ground beside him barely registered. It was nothing more than a puff in the snow. The second passed close to his skull, and he ducked involuntarily and promptly lost his balance and slipped, landing hard and painfully on his right side, but fortuitously also, because more bullets stitched the air above him. Larry returned fire, shooting faster now, connecting with rocks near the summit, and when the bullets aimed at Mark ceased, he stumbled to his feet and charged on, crossing the last fifty yards without taking fire.
At the edge of the gulch he slowed, but just then a new bullet separated the branch of a fir tree from its trunk only a few feet above his head, and he jumped into the boulder-lined gulch without further hesitation.
The drop wasn’t much, ten feet at most, but he landed in the loose rocks and fell backward. In another few weeks the fall might have ended disastrously, because massive rocks waited to catch his head, but today there was still enough snow to cushion the impact. It hammered the breath from his lungs, but it didn’t crack his skull. For a moment he lay there and fought for air, listening to the popping barrage of the gunfire from the summit—an AR-15 or AK-47—and the responding booms from his uncle’s Winchester. He hadn’t asked Larry how many rounds he had. He’d told Larry not to shoot to kill, but if his supply went low, he’d have to start making the shots count.
Mark got to his feet and scrambled up the gulch, holding the .38 in his right hand and using his left for balance. He was prepared for gunfire, but none came. Above him, all had gone silent. He was alone in the gulch, scrambling through the shadows, the sun below the mountain, the evening sky lit pink. He’d gone about a hundred feet and was breathing hard, the altitude taking its toll, when the gulch made a sharp bend to the left that was partially blocked by the massive root ball of an overturned fir. He hurried around it, the gun held down along his leg, not in firing position, when he thought he heard a whisper of motion and slowed by a half step. As a result, the softball-size rock that Lynn Deschaine slammed at his face missed by inches.
Her momentum carried her past him, into the tree roots, as he raised the .38 and almost fired. He’d partially depressed the trigger before he registered her long dark hair, a stark splash against the snow where she’d fallen.
“Lynn!”
She slipped and fell as she tried to rise and turn and finally ended up on her back, facing him, stunned. She was breathing too hard to speak. Mark looked from her to the chunk of rock she’d swung at him when she’d sprung from her hiding spot. She would have neatly crushed his skull if she’d made contact.
“Let’s go,” he said, reaching to help her.
She kicked him in the throat.
He was unprepared for it, and it was a hell of a blow. His breath split into agonized trapped halves between brain and chest and he stumbled and fell to one knee as she rose and chopped at his wrist and knocked the .38 loose. It bounced into the rocks and he watched her go after it without attempting to stop her, frozen by pain and shock.
She was three feet from the gun when a shot rang out and fragments of rock exploded just inches from the revolver.
Larry.
“He won’t miss next time,” Mark rasped. The effort of speaking raised specks of light in his vision. He sat down and rubbed his throat. Lynn was motionless down in the rocks, torn between reaching for the gun and believing his words. She looked back at him warily, like a trapped animal.
“Are you with them? Did you know?” She was panting, fearful but fierce, and he knew that if she reached the gun she meant to use it. “You left the motel and they appeared. That’s a coincidence?”
He thought of his own outrage, standing in her motel room discovering the undisclosed connection to his family, finding the Homeland Security ID, and he realized for the first time that his own sense of betrayal had to be nothing compared to hers when she’d awoken to find him gone and attackers at the door.
“I don’t know that I even believe in that word anymore, but I didn’t set you up.”
She breathed hard, watching him and trying to decide. He knew that Larry was watching her with a finger on the trigger.
Mark said, “Go straight down to the bottom of the gulch, and you’ll find a truck. Take it and go. You’re in the crosshairs of a scope, but he’s a friendly shooter to you. For now.”
Her distrust began to waver. She stared into the trees. “Who are you here with?”
“My uncle.”
She turned back to him. “You’re telling the truth?”
“I’m telling the truth. I came to help you, and to kill Garland Webb. That’s all. I left the motel room because I was thinking about my wife. When I came back, you were gone. And I…and I found my way here.”
She rose unsteadily, her chest heaving. Strands of hair caught in her mouth, and she wiped them aside. “I’m not going without her.”
“Without who?”
“Sabrina Baldwin.”
Mark looked up at the summit. It was backlit with that beautiful sunset, but below, everything was giving way to the encroaching darkness. They were out of sight of the shooters above for now, but he expected the shooters were in motion and that they knew the terrain. Time was short. If they were going down, it had to be in a hurry.
But he remembered Jay Baldwin’s face. What would you do to get your wife back?
“She’s up there?” Mark asked.
“Yes.” Lynn took a deep breath, eyes on him, and added: “She’s with Garland Webb. And your mother.”