The Breach

CHAPTER SIX

Travis saw within minutes what it would take. A lot could go wrong, but he thought the advantage was his, even against these numbers.

On the far side of the encampment, fifty feet beyond, the pines were dense. More than heavy enough to conceal him. He could reach that spot undetected if he traveled far enough along the valley on this side, low among the rocks, before crossing over and coming back.

Fifty feet was close, and with surprise on his side he might do well to just start shooting. The first shot would be a free kill, maybe even the second. Then it'd be him against five, and confusion on their part might give him the edge for another kill or two, if he was fast enough.

But the ifs would stack up quickly then. Those left standing would reach cover. If even two of them found safe positions from which to return fire, he'd be in trouble. Most likely he'd be dead.

Surprise wouldn't be enough. He needed misdirection. He needed them looking exactly away from where he'd be firing from. He needed them looking at the place where he lay right now.

The idea came to him quickly, probably because he had so little material to work with.

He leaned one of the M16s against a waist-high fallen rock, and took from his backpack one of the nylon bags that held a single change of his clothes. He dumped the clothes back into the pack, and hung the empty bag-nearly weightless now-by its drawstrings from the M16's trigger.

Then he set a full water pouch atop the rock, and made a pinprick hole in it with his knife. What came out wasn't even a fine stream, but just a ceaseless drip, which he positioned to fall directly into the nylon bag. Designed to keep water out, the bag would keep it in just as well. When it held enough, and weighed enough, this gun would fire its entire clip into the sky. Peter Campbell was going to break.

He kept his eyes locked on Paige's as she cried, while the stringy little shit with the whiskers continued probing inside her arm with the nerve actuator. From time to time she would narrow her eyes and manage the slightest shake of her head within the strap, her message unmistakable: don't.

But he would. Had to. He'd been in denial about it for hours, though he'd only just now begun to recognize it.

These people had simply won. Help was not coming-would not be coming for days and days, if even then. Drummond had seen to that.

Drummond. He'd broken, hadn't he? And under what pressure? Nothing like what these past three days had been. As Peter understood it, the man had gotten a call from his wife, crying somewhere with a gun to her head. Almost anyone in the world would have caved to that, but Tangent operators were supposed to be stronger. That was one of the key attributes they were selected for, and Peter would have bet his life on Stuart Drummond's integrity. In fact, he had. And he'd lost.

It was little solace that everyone else had trusted Drummond too-trusted him supremely. Who else would have been tapped to fly a plane carrying some of Tangent's highest-ranking people, along with the most dangerous object ever to come out of the Breach? But the flight-coming from Tokyo and bound for Wind Creek, in Wyoming, where the object would have been secured forever-had made an unscheduled course change somewhere over the Aleutians. Drummond had murdered the rest of the flight crew, then depressurized the plane without releasing the oxygen masks. Finally he'd taken the jumbo jet down to pelican height-somewhere in there, overriding the damn safeties to keep the interior pressure equivalent to high altitude-and gone north into Alaska below radar.

Peter and the others had revived to the metal screams of the aircraft coming to rest God knew where, rejuvenating air at last flooding the plane through the broken fuselage.

Even as they'd heard the ATV engines closing in from outside, Drummond's voice had come over the comm, so hysterical he could barely speak. Peter had made out fragments of the apology and the story of Drummond's abducted wife, and then he'd caught one final phrase before the man killed himself.

The final phrase-Ink Burst-had unnerved him more than the gunshot that ended the transmission.

Just like that, he'd understood that hope was lost. Ink Burst-a technology derived from another Breach object, albeit a relatively benign and manageable one-was a defensive measure designed to hide a crashed aircraft from satellites. Even visual satellites. It pulled a variety of clever tricks to fool them; one involved broadcasting an omnidirectional signal that caused spy birds to ignore the live crash site and substitute their own archived shots. The effective radius was something like five miles from the crash site, to cover any possible debris field. Currently every satellite platform in the world was vulnerable to it, though DARPA had a system ready to launch in November that was immune-after all, you never knew when your own toys would be used against you.

That precaution would come a few months late, as it turned out.

The whiskered man made a sudden adjustment to the nerve actuator's power, and Paige's body convulsed, a new flood of tears brimming in her eyes. He did that every few minutes to break up the pattern, keep her from getting used to any one strain of agony. This round would go on for another hour and a half, and then they'd crank the table flat again and let her rest an hour, as the drug lost its edge. The resting hour had nothing to do with kindness; it was simply the whiskered man's understanding of how far he could push her and still keep her alive. The drug must be one of a dozen shock-inhibiting agents Peter knew of.

It was time to break.

He no longer cared what consequences would befall the world as a result. His world had shrunk until it no longer contained even himself. There was only Paige.

He could end her pain right now; in twenty words he could tell them where the Whisper's key was hidden on the plane. An inch-long strip of something like clear cellophane, the key was the easiest thing in the world to hide, and among all the components of a 747, even a team of Boeing engineers could spend months searching for it, if they didn't know where to look. Peter could give these people its location, and once they'd found it and verified that it was valid, they'd put a bullet in Paige's temple, and his own.

Chirping laughter broke from the group encircling the campfire. That the arrogant fuckers had built a fire at all had made it abundantly clear to him, three days earlier, that this place would not be found in time. For the first twelve hours he'd clung to the hope that Ellen had survived. He and the others in the equipment room had forced her to hide in a mainframe cabinet; she'd protested, unwilling to be spared the others' fate, and had given in only as the ATVs had stopped outside the plane. If she'd lived, she could have waited until the attackers left and then called for help.

But the hostiles, after executing everyone but Paige and him, had fired magazine after magazine into the equipment room, shredding every piece of machinery. He'd watched four shots pierce the compartment where Ellen lay hidden. There was close to zero chance she'd survived.

By the end of the first day, when Paige had already endured eight cycles of the torture, Peter's resolve had withered to a thread, and all that had kept it from breaking had been the angry insistence in his daughter's eyes, promising to hate him if he gave in.

All these impossible hours later, her strength was still intact.

But his was dead and gone.

It was time. In the pines at the edge of the campsite, Travis set two of the spare M16s on the ground. Another he kept slung on his shoulder, and the last he held in his hands.

Fifty feet away, String Mustache was still about his business. From this angle Travis could see the face of the other captive, an older man tied to a tree near the young woman. Travis wondered if a look of greater anguish had ever existed in the world.

Ten feet from String Mustache, four of the other men were gathered around a fire, carefully tended to burn clean without visible smoke. It was more or less a bed of embers that they continually fed sticks to. One of the men was cooking a lump of meat over it. These four seemed intent on keeping their attention off of the torture, their conversation-Travis couldn't pin down the language-serving as their own white noise to mask the woman's muffled screams.

The remaining two hostiles were seated facing the torture table as if it were a matinee screen.

Travis crouched, tensed to move. It would happen any time now. He'd made the trip from the overlook in twenty minutes, hoping like hell with every step that he hadn't misjudged the speed of the water drip, or the resistance force of the rifle's trigger.

Now it didn't matter. He was ready.

He thought he'd take the four at the campfire first. He might get them in one burst, depending on how much they separated when they turned away. After that he'd switch from full-auto to single shot-his thumb already rested on the selector-and be more precise with the other three, who were closer to the captives. By that time his rush would put him inside the camp, firing almost point-blank.

Breathing steady. Hands dry. Any second now.

And then the older man tied to the tree said, "Stop."