Gone

CHAPTER 102

It took them twenty minutes to find the clearing with the double-wide trailer. Looking down at it from the rim of a ridge, Vida found the pale, low structure, sitting there all by itself in the center of the flattened hillside clearing, strangely iconic. Like a temple. Like a tomb.

It’s a tomb, all right, she thought, going down the pitch-black slope on the rocky, narrow trail behind Eduardo, Estefan, and Jorge. The Bennett Tomb.

It was when they neared the bottom of the trail that she felt it. There was something subtle and subliminal, like a kind of ground hum in the air. Or is it me? she thought. Some kind of pressure change on her eardrum from the altitude?

When the sound came a moment later out of the dead silence, she fell immediately to her knees, thinking she’d literally been hit with something, a rocket or a bolt of lightning. Then, from all around her, the buzz-saw electric guitar chord repeated again, speeding faster as drums kicked in.

Living easy, living free, season ticket on a one-way ride, shrieked a rough, joyously unhinged voice.

Rock music? But from where? she wondered, trying to think. She scanned around. Were there speakers in the trees? In the ground?

The first “Highway to Hell” refrain had just started when the lights came on. Floodlighting from the trees beside the trailer suddenly bathed the entire slope they were standing on, completely exposing them. Then the lights started to strobe. It was like the whole desert hill had suddenly been moved to the middle of a dance-hall club. What the hell was this?

She was flipping up the now-useless night-vision goggles when the gunfire erupted. Estefan, in a crouch at the front of the line, suddenly dropped forward and slid down the trail face-first. Eduardo, behind him, starting to backpedal, suddenly sat down and began rolling after him.

“Back! Back!” Vida screamed, pushing Jorge behind her.

She could feel heavy slugs slam into the dirt at her heels and off the rocks beside where she’d just been standing as she retreated back up the hill. As gunfire popped up dust on the trail, she looked around for muzzle flashes to return fire at, but she couldn’t make out a damn thing because of the strobing lights.

She dove over some rocks at the top of the trail and lay flat, gasping, her heart trembling. The hard-rock music chomped on like a chain saw carving at the night. She knew it was just a tactic, but it put a chill through her just the same. This was no pushover they were going up against!

She cursed herself as she crawled through dirt toward the grass berm where her last man was hugging the ground. She’d gotten sloppy, and two of her best soldiers had paid for it with their lives. It was just her now, and Jorge, the young up-and-comer in the group. Just great.

She had to think. The trailer sitting there in the middle of the clearing with only one way down to it had obviously been a decoy, some kind of trap. There would be others.

She scanned the ridge above the clearing for the next logical point at which to take up a firing position on the trailer. She found it thirty seconds later. Off the trail to the left, about twenty-five yards through the brush, was an outcropping of rock that one could lie on and from which one could fire down on the trailer with pretty good cover.

She grabbed Jorge and pointed at the flat rock.

“Crawl over to that ledge and lay fire on that trailer and keep position until I tell you otherwise!” she screamed over the music.

Vida watched him go over the sights of her machine pistol. Jorge had emptied a magazine out of his AK-47 and was putting in another when it happened.

A clump of grass on the hill behind him suddenly, incredibly disappeared. From where the grass had been, a silhouetted figure rose up. He bobbed straight up out of the ground, silently, like a carnival-game Whac-A-Mole.

Only this mole was holding a rifle.