Sly was standing outside, close to Jim. “Can me take a leak, please?”
“Sure. Over there.”
The teenager walked slowly over to a pile of rocks, going behind them. He reappeared almost immediately, waving his hands. Jim gestured for Nanci and Paul to turn off the engines.
“What is it, Sly?” he shouted.
“Me hear a plane coming. Whirlybird.”
“Helicopter! Shit.”
Now he could hear the sound, the vibrating, menacing noise of a helicopter. Maybe two machines. Somewhere out of sight over the hills at the far, southern side of the valley, but undeniably coming in their direction.
He glanced at Nanci and was shocked to see the dismay in her face. Somehow he’d expected a positive response from her, or some sort of idea about what they could do.
“Could be Zelig,” he said.
“No. Chinooks. The Hunters. Warn the McGills and then jump aboard. Need to back get over the crest behind us. Chance they won’t spot us in dead ground.” But he was stricken at how suddenly hopeless the woman sounded.
“TWO BANDITS, south and east, General. Choppers, closing in on us.”
Zelig was standing up, head and shoulders out of the top hatch, looking down and in front of his six-vehicle convoy. There seemed to be a large lake, with a dam at the southern end. It looked as if the valley ran steeply away, but the blacktop didn’t give him enough of a vantage point.
The voice of the radioman came crackling through his headphones, repeating the warning.
Zelig switched on his throat mike. “Range?”
“Less than five miles, General.”
“Pass it on to the others. I’m coming down and sealing off. Could be getting warm in a couple of minutes.”
The line of M113s, two towing the fuel tanks, ground on up the hill, closing with the helicopters.
“APCS, CHIEF!” The voice cracked with the sudden excitement. “Six of the fuckers. Got to be Zelig and his men.”
Margaret Tabor was sitting behind the copilot and she leaned forward, gripping him by the shoulder, her fingers biting so hard that he actually yelped in pain. But she was too carried away to even notice.
The Chinooks had come in from the south, over a region of total wilderness, seamed with narrow valleys and the tumbled remains of thousands of dead pine trees. They had seen no evidence of any human life at all, though the observers had twice reported seeing packs of large dogs ranging over the bleak ravines. Once there had also been a grizzly. A humpbacked brindled sow, with two cubs following as she loped along the ridges.
Pockets of snow still lay in the hollows, though the recent change to warmer weather had melted most of it. Tracks were slimed with mud, and every watercourse that they swooped over was filled to overflowing.
Now, strung out along a snaking road, the Chief of the Hunters of the Sun saw what she’d been waiting for. The convoy of camouflaged armored personnel carriers was moving slowly along toward a valley headed by a dammed lake. Just below them on the right was the burned-out shell of what had once been a sizable mansion with its own tennis court.
Every eye in the choppers was glued to the tracked vehicles as they roared five hundred feet above them.
Not one eye looked in the other direction, where they would have seen two battered farm tractors, each one towing a dirty horse trailer, vanishing over the ridge on the western flank of the same valley.
THE MOMENT they were into the dead ground, where the road dropped steeply and there were groves of tall, dead trees, Nanci pulled off the blacktop, threw on the brake, killed the engine and leapt from the cab. She yelled for the others to get out of the trailers. “On foot, as far as we can!”
“We can take cover among the trees,” shouted Jim, helping Sly and Heather from the horse trailer, making sure that Carrie was also safe. Behind him the McGills were all getting out.
“Yeah. Do it now. They’ll have machine guns on the Chinooks. Rip us apart if they spot us.”
Jim led the way in among the twisted and blackened branches of the pines, picking a path toward the crest of the slope, where they would be able to look down into the valley and see what the helicopters were doing.