* * *
The sky was lightening to the east when Blair was startled awake by a slap on her shoulder and a gruff order to get moving. By the time the sun appeared over the horizon, she had the Blackhawk fifty meters above the smoldering Skynet lab, ready to follow the mysterious cable.
At first, it was easy. As she’d already noted, the explosion had sent shock waves through both the ground and the cable, periodically kinking the latter hard enough to shove loops of it to the surface. With the slanting sunlight exaggerating every bump and dip, Blair could usually see five or six of the humps at any given time.
But as the sun rose, and as the distance from the lab increased, the humps grew progressively smaller and less obvious. Finally, somewhere around the twenty-kilometer mark, they disappeared completely.
“Now what?” Barnes asked.
Blair gazed out the window, squinting against the windstorm beating across her face and wishing for the umpteenth time that the Blackhawk’s storage lockers had included some goggles. The desert had given way to a sort of tentative grassland, with forested foothills and mountains directly ahead.
“I think we should keep going,” she said. “So far, the cable’s been running pretty straight along this vector. Let’s assume it continues that way, and see what we run into.”
Barnes grunted. “Not easy to keep a cable running straight through the middle of a forest.”
“True,” Blair said. “But if anyone could have done it— or have wanted to do it—it would be Skynet.”
For a moment Barnes was silent. Blair kept her eyes forward, wincing in anticipation of his inevitable outburst.
She could hardly blame him. He’d kept his side of the bargain she’d forced on him, and had let her drag them out here trying to follow the cable. Now that the trail had petered out, he would be perfectly justified in insisting she drop the whole thing and head back to San Francisco.
And when he did, she was going to have to argue with him. Because the more they’d traveled along the cable’s path, and the more she’d seen how much effort Skynet had put into it, the more she was convinced it was something they needed to check out.
But Barnes wouldn’t see it that way. He’d already been saddled with her longer than he’d expected, and way more than he’d wanted. He would insist on heading back, and down deep she knew that trying to pull the pilot’s trump card on him again would be a dangerous thing to do. He might even put a gun to her head, figuring he could argue his way out of trouble with Connor when they got back—
“We should grab a little more altitude,” he said. “In case the cable takes a turn somewhere. Don’t want to be too low to see that.”
“Yes—good idea,” Blair said, fighting to keep the surprise out of her voice as she angled the Blackhawk upward. An actual, rational decision from him, uncolored by his current feelings? Was he finally starting to come back to normal?
She stole a sideways look at him, her small hope fading away. No. He was intrigued by the cable, and smart enough to know how to separate his personal feelings from the job of fighting Skynet. But that single glance was enough to tell her that he still hadn’t forgiven her for her brief relationship with Marcus Wright.
That relationship had been real, she knew. So had her feelings, and those feelings hadn’t changed with her discovery of the half man, half machine that Skynet had turned him into. She’d done what she’d done, and she had no regrets.
But if her time with Marcus had permanently cost her Barnes’s friendship and respect, she might someday have to seriously consider whether it had truly been worth it.
They’d gone another twenty kilometers, and were well up into the mountain forests, when Barnes suddenly pointed ahead and to the left.
“There!” he snapped. “Smoke.”
“I see it,” Blair confirmed. There were several slender plumes drifting upward from a clearing just east of the river the Blackhawk was currently following. A town or village, far enough out in the middle of nowhere that Skynet had missed it? “Think it’s worth checking out?”
“You’re the pilot,” Barnes said. “You’ll just do whatever you want anyway.”
Blair sighed inwardly. No, he hadn’t forgiven her.
“Okay,” she said as she swung the Blackhawk to the right. Whoever was in that town, she didn’t want to spook them by landing right in the middle of the place. “Keep an eye out for an open spot where we can set down.”
There were half a dozen small clearings within a mile of the smoke plumes, all of them to the east and south. Most were too small for a safe landing, but two looked big enough to accommodate the Blackhawk. Blair picked the larger one and headed down.
The ground was spongy with dead leaves and matted fir needles and a half-buried, decaying log that she almost didn’t see in time. She skidded a couple of meters sideways to avoid it, then set the helo down. Taking a careful survey of the area, she shut down the engines.
The roar faded away into silence as she slipped off her headphones.
“You see anything?” she asked Barnes.
“Lots of forest,” he replied, already out of his seat. He slung his backpack onto his shoulders, then added his SIG 542 assault rifle and his RAI 300 sniper rifle. “Turn off the cockpit fan on your way out, will you?”
Blair frowned. With the wind whipping freely through the broken windshield, she hadn’t even noticed the fan was on.
“You had the fan going?” she asked as she thumbed off the switch. “Why?”
“‘Cause that’s how you start the chopper now,” he said calmly. “I hooked the fan into the starter circuit last night while you were asleep.”
Blair’s first impulse was to ask what the hell he thought he was doing messing with her helo’s wiring. Her second was that that was actually a pretty good idea.
“Clever,” she said. “We’ll probably want—” She broke off, feeling her eyes widening as he heaved the minigun up off the deck. “You’re taking that?”
“I’m sure as hell not leaving it,” he countered with a grunt.
Blair winced, trying to think of a diplomatic way of saying this.
“The people in that town over there may already be leery of strangers,” she tried. “If we show up looking like arms dealers—”
“Then they’ll know not to mess with us, won’t they?” he cut her off. “Grab that shotgun.” Without waiting for a response, he hopped out through the side door, landing with a thud.
Blair picked up the Mossberg M500 shotgun and ammo pack and slung them over her shoulder. Checking the Blackhawk’s compass one last time to get her bearings, she stepped out into the leaves.
The smoke plumes had been almost directly northwest of their landing site. Barnes was already ten meters that direction, stomping through the undergrowth and forcing his way through the occasional line of close-set bushes. Blair picked the most distant tree she could see in the right direction and set off after him, splitting her attention between the tree and her footing.
She’d closed the gap between her and Barnes to a couple of meters, and the Blackhawk had been lost to sight behind them, when Barnes suddenly slowed.
“Keep going,” he murmured. “Straight on, and don’t look at the bushes.”
Before Blair could ask what that was supposed to mean he was off again, resuming his brisk pace but with his direction now shifted a few degrees to their left.
Frowning, Blair continued forward, casually dropping her hand to her holstered Desert Eagle.
She’d gone another twenty paces when she spotted the glint of metal behind a cluster of bushes to their left. It took her another couple of steps to identify it as an arrowhead, a wide, nasty-looking version that seemed to be made of four angled razor blades. Crouched in the bushes behind the arrow was a shadowy figure holding a compound bow.