A sniper found Iantuano, the largest, slowest target. On his shoulder Sawyer convulsed, drilled through the chest, and Iantuano buckled three-quarters of the way across the yard. The man was near enough for Cam to see the dismay in his eyes and he expected Iantuano to fall dead, hit in the neck or torso by the same bullet. But the round must have bounced inside Sawyer’s ribs and exited at an odd angle, because Iantuano was wounded low on his side and only lightly. He pushed himself up on his arms — both arms, even the broken one— then clutched at Sawyer.
D.J. was unable to make the decision to go left or right around them and paused there, high-stepping over Iantuano’s legs.
The sniper winged him. D.J.’s forearm flapped out from his body and he twisted after it, staggering. He kept his feet just long enough to collapse beyond Cam.
Iantuano could have rolled the last yard and saved himself. Instead he tried to improve his grip on Sawyer, worming forward with both legs, his face distorted by effort. But his bloody gloves slipped loose and a shadow of a new emotion altered his expression as he glanced down at Sawyer. That shadow was miserable doubt, almost wistful.
The sniper put his next round through Iantuano’s helmet.
* * * *
Sawyer’s wounds were mortal. Where the bullet had exited through his abdomen, the tough rubber suit was peeled open in a fist-sized flap. His stronger arm beat irregularly on the ground but weakened to a twitching as Cam gawked.
He faced in the direction they’d fled, upside down, bent over his air tanks. Whether he saw them and the safety that he could never reach was impossible to know. His one glaring eye shifted toward Cam and passed on, still lively in his misshapen face.
They left him out there like an animal. And it was wrong and it was right. A bad death was nothing more than Albert Sawyer deserved for all of his selfishness and his savagery— and yet those traits had also been Sawyer’s best, his force of will, his adaptability. There was no final equation.
Cam left him out there to die alone and turned and ran.
* * * *
Todd helped Cam with D.J., who was clumsy with shock and wanted to sit down. “I can’t, I can’t,” D.J. said, but that he was talking was a positive sign.
Captain Young ranged ahead, not bothering to sneak a glance around the rear of the fourplex before crossing an alleyway. Nor did he make any attempt to find cover as he jogged through a nearly empty parking lot. If there were paratroopers in front of them, it was over. Their only hope was speed.
Ruth moved like a drunk, swaying as if her air tanks were solid steel weights. But whether she’d sprained an ankle or simply exhausted her legs, she never complained.
“I can’t—” It was a hideous wound. The impact through D.J.’s forearm had broken his elbow as well, and bone chips from his shattered ulna had acted like shrapnel inside the muscle. Blood dribbled from his sleeve over his hip and his leg, and also painted Todd. Cam thought he could fashion a tourniquet from one of the spare gun belts Newcombe wore like bandoleers, but they’d need to stop running and that wasn’t going to happen.
“Squeeze your arm with your other hand,” Cam said. “Squeeze on it or you’ll keep bleeding!”
“I can’t, I can’t.”
“Almost there,” Todd said, muffled. “Almost there.” His headset was loose in his helmet, poking his neck, broadcasting every bump and scrape like footsteps.
Newcombe brought up the rear in an awkward skipping stride, turned halfway around with the M16 at his hip. “Nothing,” he reported, “nothing, still nothing, where are they—” He banged against Cam’s pack and stopped.
Beyond this block of apartment housing lay the outskirts of the business district from which they’d detoured on the drive in, and the street before them was endless with traffic. Many cars had come up onto the sidewalk and wave patterns showed which vehicles had stopped first, other drivers swinging around them into the lots of a dry cleaner’s and a used-book store.
“Move move move,” Newcombe said, pushing his hand into D.J.’s lower back. Young and Ruth were already ten yards into the standstill traffic, angling left and then left again through the smooth, colorful shapes. Windshields caught the noon sun, obscuring the ghosts slumped inside.
“Let me go!” D.J. wrestled away from Cam.
“What? We’re just—”
The maze of vehicles was more difficult for them, too tight nearly everywhere to stay in a row together, and D.J. wouldn’t cooperate. “I’m not dying for it! Let me go!”
Halfway across the street, Young turned to look and Ruth sagged onto the blue hood of a commuter car, her breathing loud in their radios. “Calm down,” Young said. “It’s always an hour or two before the plague actually wakes up and we’ll be there in ten minutes if you just keep moving.”
“They’ll shoot you! They’ll shoot your plane down!”
“Maybe not.”
A skeleton in moldering rags folded around Todd’s boot as he kicked into its pelvic bone, watching D.J.’s face instead of looking where he was going — and his hands, carefully placed on D.J.’s shoulder, jarred that shattered arm.
“Haahhh!” Twisting, D.J. drove his air tanks into Cam’s chest and threw him against a silver four-door. D.J. kept turning, ready to run, but Newcombe blocked his path.
Cam knew too well how pain affected the mind, and in one sense this injury was bigger than D.J. He couldn’t see past it.
D.J. swung his good arm at Newcombe, who took the punch and held his M16 up in an entirely defensive position, making a fence of himself.
D.J. sobbed, crazed, hateful. “They’ll kill you!”
“Fuck. Let him run.” That was Young.
Todd said, “We’re almost there! D.J.!”
But Newcombe stepped aside and D.J. surged past him.
“Don’t, no!” Ruth yelled. “He has the samples!”
They tackled him after just two yards as the F-15s raged overhead. Within the trembling roar, Cam snagged at D.J.’s pack and Newcombe swatted his mangled arm. D.J. collapsed, his piercing wail lasting as the jet engines faded.
“Get it, get it!” Newcombe shouted, his rifle leveled away from them back toward the apartment buildings.
D.J. fought as Cam rummaged through his chest pockets, not to keep the sample case but to regain his feet. He rolled upright again as soon as Cam released him, shambling, clutching his arm with his other hand.
He was still tottering away when Cam glanced back from the far side of the street.
Why hadn’t the troopers enveloped them? The lab equipment was a prize but Leadville had men to spare, and any pursuit should have closed in by now—
“Green, do you copy?” Their pilot. “Green, green!”
“Here,” Young said. “We’re here.”
“Shit news. I got a bunch of guys taking up position out on the freeway.”
Young stopped and raised one fist, as if they could possibly miss him. He had outpaced the group and was the only animate shape within the canyon of buildings.
As they surrounded him, Ruth knelt, heaving for air. Cam turned to watch the way they’d come and Newcombe did the same, though it seemed more and more like a bad guess to expect troopers behind them.
“How many you got?” Young asked.
“Nine or ten.” The pilot sounded apologetic. “Some of them are rushing the plane.”
“Can you—”
“We are not resisting,” the pilot continued, formal again. He must have been simultaneously transmitting these words to the men outside his door. “We are not resisting.”
They’d counted at least forty troopers chuting down, likely fifty, and riding in the jeep Young had supposed that the last ten were kept as a reserve aboard the enemy C-130, unless Leadville had misrepresented the size of their force, a common trick. Of those fifty, a few would have been hurt in the drop. Young had comforted his team with the fact that impact traumas routinely hobbled 2 percent of gear-heavy troops landing in an open field, and the confines of the city must have upped that number drastically, no matter that these soldiers were an elite and outfitted with gliders instead of regular chutes. A sky crossed with power lines, the streets treacherous with cars — if they were lucky as many as a dozen men had been immobilized.