The drone was flying a wide arc a few hundred feet out. Walker scanned the woods and the scrub. Nothing. He raced back to the cabin, where Paul was trying to hand-start the generator.
“They’re here!” Walker said. He picked up Paul’s rifle, put a round in the breech and moved to Monica, who was still doing her hands-in-the-sky routine.
“Where?” Paul said.
“I don’t—” Walker stopped. He saw them. A HALO drop. High Altitude, Low Opening. They were coming in from the north, with the wind at their back. Maybe 10,000 feet out. Falling at around 250 feet per second. Four of them. Tiny dots. Growing bigger.
“The bikes—” Paul started to say.
“Split up!” Walker ordered. “Put Monica in the back seat of the truck and I’ll take her—you take a bike, meet at Jasper’s apartment in Palo Alto. You know it?”
“Got it.”
As Paul lifted Monica and made his way to the truck, Walker took up position outside the container and dropped to a knee, lining up the drone through the scope of the rifle. Crack! Miss. He followed its arc, his mind working out the drop with gravity that the bullet’s trajectory would take, and the wind resistance that would sheer across its path as he fired east—
CRACK.
Miss.
He reloaded.
He took a deep, measured breath as he continued to follow the drone’s flight. It was executing a circle, maybe a thousand feet in diameter with the container at its center. It was now almost to the south. The wind would be behind the bullet, not sheering across it. He exhaled and his finger tightened—
CRACK.
Hit.
The bullet struck a wing. The drone lurched to the side, a tight banking. The aileron control on one wing was severed, forcing it away on an unsteady flight path.
Paul zoomed past Walker on one of the bikes. Walker ran to the other bike and kicked it onto the gas-bottle stove.
The intruders were ten seconds out. Almost in range of pulling their chutes, then they’d open up with weapons.
Walker checked that Monica was secured in the back seat of the truck and then started the big diesel engine and dropped into gear. With the rifle next to him he drove, his hands tight on the wheel, doing a big loop back down the track. He stopped a hundred yards out, just in sight of Paul’s bike as it disappeared.
PING PING.
One of the group in the air had a long rifle. A sniper. They’d just deployed parachutes. But shooting from an arrested fall was harder than shooting from the steady ground.
Walker lined up the gas bottle under the remaining bike.
CRACK.
Boom.