The Breach

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Travis ran the last thousand yards to the highway. His knee joints felt like they were riding on glass chips instead of cartilage. Through the front windows of the Brooks Lodge and Fuel Depot he saw half a dozen patrons, maybe the regulars watching a baseball game on the TV above the serving counter. It was eight o'clock at night, the sunlight slanting long and red from the northwest.

He stopped at the road, a hundred feet from the restaurant. Paige was stirring in his arms, jostled by the run but unable to regain consciousness. Her breathing had developed a rattle in the past two hours. Sometimes she took a deep breath and sounded like she was choking for a second before getting past it.

Travis studied the patrons as well as he could at this distance. They looked harmless enough-to the extent he could judge it.

There was every reason to expect trouble from Paige's enemies here, the one place where their arrival could have been predicted-and predicted well in advance. The only advantage the town offered was its limited size: there was simply no place where the enemy could have set up a stakeout without attracting attention. No sprawling parking lots to conceal a van. No residential side streets, either. The one place in town where a person might sit for a few hours without drawing looks was the restaurant in the lodge, but if the hostiles' reinforcements were anything like the ones Travis had seen at the camp-foreign nationals armed with halting English-then blending in that way would be off the table as well.

Granted, they probably had the connections to send someone who didn't stick out so much, and they'd had a day and a half now to do it, but even at that, Coldfoot was just not a place where outsiders lingered. Truckers heading north to Prudhoe Bay might stop for a meal, and the occasional van full of tourists might spend the night, but nobody hung around. Coldfoot was a stop on a long road that went to exactly one place. It was nobody's endpoint.

No, if there were watchers here, they were in concealment high above town. Travis swept his eyes over the encircling ridges; there were so many pine and alder groves it wasn't worth scrutinizing any one in particular. Either they were there, or they weren't. If they were, then trouble would arrive long before help, and it would simply have to be dealt with. The 9mm pistol from the hostiles' camp, the only weapon he'd brought along, felt reassuring in his back waistband, his shirt draped loosely over it.

He crossed the highway and jogged the last distance over the gravel lot, past his own Explorer, two Jeeps, and a yellow Land Rover. When he was thirty feet from the building, a big guy in a John Deere hat inside saw him coming, looked confused for a second, and then ran to shove the door open and meet him.

"What happened?" the man shouted.

Behind him, the others had forgotten the ball game and were on their feet, staring through the windows as Travis ran up.

He had the abridged version of the story well rehearsed, and the stress in his delivery would simply be genuine.

"I found her in a valley west of here," he said, hearing his own voice for the first time in twenty hours and finding it convincingly ragged. No doubt his appearance matched it.

The big guy held the door aside as Travis stepped through, and the gathered patrons reacted as one to the sight of Paige's arm; it couldn't have been much worse if he'd brought a corpse into their midst. A blonde woman who'd come from behind the counter-Molly, according to her shirt-choked down most of a scream, stepping back and knocking over a wire newspaper stand.

Then everyone was talking, a short woman with her hand on her mouth, her eyes going from Paige to Travis and narrowing, maybe judging, the big guy in the hat coming around from the door now, reacting hard at the sight of the clamps, asking what in the holy fuck they were "This is how I found her," Travis said over them all. "She hasn't spoken, I don't know who the hell did this. I don't know anything, just call it in, okay? How fast can the cops and paramedics get up here?"

That last bit was for the locals' benefit only-he had no intention of waiting around for police or anyone else, or entrusting her to their protection even if they somehow arrived before whoever Tangent sent.

But it worked. Any suspicion aimed at him vanished. Molly was already rounding the counter, picking up the phone and dialing something longer than 9-1-1.

"Gonna be five, six hours for the cops," the big man said. "There's no highway patrol on the Dalton. Medevac chopper out of Fairbanks, figure ninety minutes at least. Had a trucker come in here having a heart attack, couple years ago, took that long for them to make the flight."

Molly, waiting for the call to connect, shouldered the phone and scooped a key from a pegboard. She tossed it to the big guy and said, "Three's clean, he can set her in there."

The man led Travis through the back exit of the room, into a short hallway lined with doors.

Room Three was simple and clean, lateral sunlight casting a coppery glow on the bedspread. Travis set Paige carefully atop the cover, taking the most precaution with her arm; letting anything press against the wound might traumatize her. As it was, the change of position triggered another of the deep breaths that seemed to nearly choke her.

The guy in the hat stood just inside the door.

Travis watched Paige's breathing return to normal and then said quietly, "Do you have any weapons here?"

In the corner of his eye he saw the John Deere hat turn toward him.

"The camp I found her in," Travis said, keeping his eyes on Paige, "there were different kinds of boot prints, three at least, none of them hers. No telling where those people are now, but if they were to show up here…"

"Christ…" the man whispered.

"The cops are six hours away, like you said," Travis continued. "Anyone familiar with this area probably knows that too. If you've got a gun, be ready with it. You and anyone you trust, if you have more."

The guy nodded, then went to the window and stared out, the brim of his hat touching the glass as he scanned the ridges to the west.

Travis felt bad lying to him, but the truth was simply not workable, and it would have been far worse to stay silent, given the risk he'd just brought upon this place. That part, he felt the worst about. But what choice had there been?

The man in the hat turned back to him. "Yeah, let's not fuck around," he said, and made for the hallway.

"Can I call out on this?" Travis said.

The guy stopped in the doorway and looked at the phone on the nightstand Travis had indicated. "Dial nine first," he said, and left.

Travis pushed the door most of the way shut, took the First Lady's note from his pocket and began to punch in the number she'd provided. As he finished dialing, he heard the door creak, and saw it swing slowly open again under its own weight. The phone cord kept him from reaching it now; no matter.

The call rang once and then a lively recording began. "Thank you for calling Laketon Associates, your consulting solution for dynamic-"

He entered 4-2-5-5-1. The line clicked, and within less than a second a woman spoke.

"Key term," she said flatly, more a demand than a question.

Travis blanked. "I don't know it."

"Who is this?"

Matching her lack of banter, Travis said, "I'm a civilian. I found your plane. Everyone's dead except Paige Campbell."

Things happened very quickly then: a rapid exchange of voices somewhere, then muffled clicks as other extensions opened.

A man: "Where are you calling from?"

Travis thought they probably already knew that. "Coldfoot, Alaska," he said. "The crash site is thirty-six miles west of here-"

"Stop," the man said. "Your line's not secure. Give us direct answers and don't elaborate-"

"They're dead," Travis said. Exhaustion and stress had made it easy to get pissed. "You have one survivor, and if you want to keep her, you better send a goddamn cargo jet full of paratroopers up here, and make sure one of them's a surgeon. She might last another hour, and I could be really fucking wrong about that."

Silence for three seconds-either they weren't used to being spoken to that way, or they were writing it down. Then somewhere in the background of the call, he heard a woman say, "Move on it, go," and he felt better.

"Please answer this question with a yes or no only," the man said. "Are there hostile elements that can reach you within the next hour?"

"Yes."

"Again yes or no, can you estimate the number of possible aggressors?"

"No. But they have something you should know about."

"Go ahead."

"A helicopter. It's not an attack chopper, I doubt it's any threat to another aircraft, but whoever's coming here should be aware of it."

"Good," the man said. Sounding more human, he continued. "Don't say anything about your own defenses on this line. Be as prepared as you can manage, and wait for our people. I'm going to connect you to a surgeon who'll ask you to describe Miss Campbell's condition. Do that quickly and then set about your preparations."

The conversation with the doctor took three minutes. He didn't sound optimistic.

Travis finished, hung up, and pulled a chair from the corner to the bedside. He sat beside Paige and stared. She sounded terrible-worse now than when he'd stopped at the edge of the highway. Her good arm lay facing him; he took hold of her hand in both of his, and closed his eyes. Through the open door he could hear the baseball game on television.

The floor creaked in the hall. He opened his eyes and turned to the doorway. No one there. The creak came again, farther away now, moving toward the front of the lodge.

He'd just turned back to Paige when he heard a pneumatic snap, like a pellet gun firing, and a woman screamed in the front room. The snapping sound came in rapid succession then, and the front of the lodge filled with screams of fear-and pain, clearly. Travis rose fast from the chair, shoved it aside and spun to face the doorway, the 9mm out of his waistband, up to level.

In the instant it took him to do that, the screams from the restaurant were reduced to just one: a man crying and saying "Please," over and over. With a final snap, there was only the sound of the ball game.

Travis waited, the gun steady, keeping himself between Paige and the open door.

The hallway floor creaked again.