“Maybe someplace you have a good reason to avoid?” Barnes suggested.
Halverson cursed viciously.
“Klein.”
“Damn it,” Preston said, just as viciously. “Bear Commons.”
“Bear Commons?” Barnes asked.
“A big clearing where one of our hunters, Billy Klein, got mauled to death by a bear about six months ago,” Preston told him. “Or rather, mauled to death by something we assumed was a bear.”
“We haven’t let any hunting parties go near that area since,” Halverson added.
Barnes nodded. Six months ago would put it three months before Lajard and the others arrived in Baker’s Hollow. Plenty of time for Skynet to throw something small together out here and run a data cable to it.
“Sounds like the place,” he said. “How do I get there?”
“By following me,” Preston said. “You’ll never find it on your own.” He peered back toward town. “Do we go now or wait for Williams to get here with the chopper?”
“We go now,” Barnes said. “A Terminator support base is usually stocked with extra guns and ammo. We need to get there before Jik finishes putting that T-700 back together and heads back to rearm.”
“You’ll never get past him,” Halverson warned. “There’s not enough room between the river and the ravine for you to sneak by without him hearing you. You’ll have to go around the southern end of the ravine.”
“Or we go up the east side of the river and take the rope bridge,” Preston said.
“The forty-year-old bridge?” Barnes said, doubtfully. “The one put together by a couple of kids?”
“That’s it,” Preston said. “Unless you’d rather go toe-to-toe with another Theta.”
For a moment, Barnes was tempted. Thirty minigun rounds ought to be enough to make quick work of the damn Theta.
But only if he got a clear, clean shot. Given the mass of tangled undergrowth he’d already seen clogging that side of the river, it was a dangerously big if.
“No, we’ll try the bridge.” He turned to Halverson. “You wait here. When Williams gets here with the chopper, tell her where we’ve gone.”
“Like hell I’m staying here,” Halverson growled. “With Terminators on the loose and my wife out there with a bunch of useless shirt-makers? Forget it. She needs me.”
“She needs our Blackhawk and its M240 machineguns a hell of a lot more,” Barnes retorted. “And she needs them in the air, not sitting here with Williams wondering where the hell we went.”
“Can’t you call and tell her?” Halverson asked. “Even Jik’s got a radio. Don’t you?”
“Usually, yes,” Barnes said. “But in the last week—” He broke off. “Hell.”
“What?” Preston asked sharply.
“Nothing,” Barnes said, cursing his thick-headedness. So that was why Skynet had been jamming all the radios in San Francisco. “No, we don’t have radios. That means you’re staying here. Even if I have to nail you to a tree.”
Halverson’s face darkened.
“Look—”
“What if we told her we aren’t here anymore?” Preston cut in. “Would she be smart enough to come find us?”
Barnes hesitated. Williams was smart, all right. And she knew the cable ran up that side of the river.
“How do we do that?”
“With this,” Preston said, reaching into his shirt and pulling out a whistle. “You might want to cover your ears—it’s pretty piercing.”
It was piercing, all right. But with the proliferation of whistles in the San Francisco camp these days, it was hardly something Barnes hadn’t heard before. Preston blew a quick succession of short and long bursts, paused, repeated the sequence, then slipped the whistle back into his shirt.
“That’s the best I can do. Ready?”
Barnes resettled the minigun on his arm.
“Ready.”
“Good luck,” Halverson said.
“You too,” Preston said. He hesitated, then reached down and took Halverson’s bow and quiver. “Here,” he said, pressing his rifle into the other’s hand. “You can’t use a bow, not with broken ribs. You might be able to use a rifle, though.”
“Thanks,” Halverson said softly. “I see Lajard or Valentine, you’re damn right I’ll be able to use it.”
A minute later, with the roar of the river on their left, Preston and Barnes left the open area at the ford and once again plunged into deep undergrowth.
“What was that about the radios?” Preston asked over his shoulder. “Something you didn’t want Halverson to hear?”
“No, just something that wasn’t worth wasting time talking about,” Barnes told him. “I just figured out why Skynet’s been jamming our radios in San Francisco. It wasn’t just to annoy us, but to keep us from hearing the fake John Connor broadcasts Jik’s been making.”
“Because if you heard them, you’d send someone to investigate,” Preston said, nodding. “Lucky for us— well, lucky in the long run—you came anyway.”
Barnes winced. Except that they wouldn’t have if Williams hadn’t gotten her back up on tracking that cable.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why do you put up with him?”
“Who?”
“Halverson,” Barnes said. “You’re supposed to be in charge. Why do you let him tell your people what to do?”
Preston’s shoulders hunched in a shrug.
“That’s just Halverson,” he said. “He was a master hunter out here long before Judgment Day, and he likes to think he knows how to do everything better than any of the rest of us.”
“And you just stand there and let him think that? Why?”
“Because he is a master hunter, and we need him,” Preston said. “More than that, we need the rest of the expert hunters who look up to him.”
“So you just let him walk all over you,” Barnes bit out. “You let him make you look like a fool.”
“I suppose you could say that,” Preston said calmly. “But letting him play his games is what keeps this town functioning and its citizens alive. I think that’s worth a little wounded pride, don’t you?”
He gestured. “We’d better be quiet from here on. We don’t want to reach the bridge to find Jik waiting at the other end.”
The distant whistle call was faint, just barely on the edge of hearing. But the dots and dashes were distinct.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
From the puzzled look on Hope’s face, though, the message itself wasn’t nearly so clear.
“Well?” Blair asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Hope murmured back. “That was one of our hunting codes. It means an assigned area has come up dry, and that the hunt team is moving on to the next one. But why would anybody be out hunting now?”
Blair looked around through the fading light at the densely packed tress and bushes hemming them in from all sides. The snaky, Hope had called this route. Blair would probably have named it ‘the claustrophobic.’
“You said the hunt team. But you’d normally have more than one out at a time, right?”
“Right,” Hope said. “Yes, I see—the team leader’s code should have been attached. But there wasn’t one.”
“So it probably wasn’t talking about a normal hunt team,” Blair said.
Hope pondered that a moment.
“You think they’re telling us to give up?”
“More likely that Barnes and your father are leaving the river ford,” Blair said.
“To go where?”
“I don’t know,” Blair said. “Maybe once we’re in the air we’ll be able to figure that out. How much farther?”
Hope looked around them.
“Ten minutes,” she said. “Fifteen if we want to be extra quiet.”