“Yes,” Preston said thoughtfully. “You suppose that thing’s flammable?”
“No idea.”
“Let’s find out. You still have any of that aviation fuel on your boots?”
Barnes reached down and touched his boot.
“Maybe a little.”
“Give me a piece,” Preston ordered, slipping the bow he’d taken from Halverson off his shoulder.
Barnes pulled out his knife.
“How big?”
“The biggest you can get without cutting off any toes.”
Barnes nodded and set to work. A few seconds later, he had freed most of the upper toe section.
“Got it.”
“Stick it on here.” Preston handed Barnes one of his arrows and dug into his pocket. “Run it down to just below the arrowhead.”
Barnes did so. Preston took the arrow back and handed him a small object.
“My lighter,” he identified it as he set the arrow into the bowstring and drew it back until the wet leather was almost touching the fingers of his bow hand. “Gasoline fueled, so watch out for your fingers.”
Barnes wasn’t expecting much of the aviation fuel to still be left in the leather. He was wrong. At the first touch of the lighter’s fire the piece of leather blazed into bright blue-yellow flame.
Preston angled the bow upward.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he murmured, and let it fly.
The arrow shot up, tracing a flaming arc up toward the camo netting. It hit, jamming itself into the mesh.
For a long moment nothing happened. The fire smoldered and faltered, looking on the verge of going out. Then the fire began to gain new life. It caught, brightened—
And abruptly roared back to life, burning and spreading across the net. A minute later, the whole circle was ablaze, the flickering flames lighting up the clearing below.
“Perfect,” Barnes said, picking up the G11 and returning his attention to the forest around them. “If she doesn’t see that, she’s gone blind and stupid.”
“Now what?” Preston asked.
“We wait for her to get here,” Barnes said grimly. “And we expect Skynet to make one last shot at taking us down before she does.”
Blair had the Blackhawk in the air when she spotted the first glimmer of light amid the forest gloom. Frowning, she started to turn to Halverson, strapped in at the portside M240, to ask what it might be.
And then, abruptly, the glow flared and spread out. By the time the Blackhawk reached the river, it had become a complete circle of blazing fire.
“That’s the place!” she heard Halverson shout over the wind buffeting her through the broken windshield. “That’s Bear Commons.”
Mentally, Blair threw Barnes a salute. “Get ready!” she shouted. “Hope?”
“I’m ready,” the girl at the starboard gun called.
Blair pitched the Blackhawk forward, sending the aircraft racing toward the circle of flame. Hope might say she was ready, but Blair knew better. She’d seen the look on the girl’s face after what had happened with Valentine and Lajard, and she was anything but ready to do that again.
Blair could hardly blame her. Shooting red-eyed metal Terminators was one thing. Shooting Terminators with human faces looking back at you was something else entirely.
They were nearly to the fiery circle now. Barnes and Preston were somewhere down there, Blair knew, hopefully still alive. Jik, another Terminator with a human face, would also be down there.
Blair would have to make sure that, when the time came to open fire, Jik was on Halverson’s side of the Blackhawk.
The fire was fading as Blair eased them into a hover directly above it. Much of the camo mesh itself had already burned away, revealing a network of slender cables anchoring the mesh to the treetops around the edge of the clearing.
“What now?” Halverson called.
Blair settled her hands on the controls.
“Hang on,” she advised.
Shoving the throttle forward, she sent the helo into a stomach-lurching drop straight onto the mesh.
Open-area camouflage nets were designed to support their own weight, the additional pressure of an occasional curious bird, and very little else. The mesh held the helo’s weight for maybe half a second before collapsing in a flurry of displaced sparks and snapped treetops. Blair was ready, hauling back on the throttle to kill the Blackhawk’s drop and bring it back up to treetop height again.
“Look sharp,” she shouted as she set the helo into a slow clockwise rotation around its vertical axis. “They’re down there somewhere. So’s Jik.”
“There!” Halverson snapped. “That clump of birch trees. I can see someone.”
Blair craned her neck, angling the helo a bit so that she could look past Halverson out the portside door. But the fading fire wasn’t bright enough to give any clear light to the edges of the clearing.
Paradoxically, it was bright enough to throw flickering shadows across the ground, adding that much more visual confusion to the gloom already filling the forest.
“I don’t see anyone,” she called.
“He’s there,” Halverson insisted. “Crouching behind those birches.”
“Was it my father?” Hope called from the other side of the Blackhawk.
“I couldn’t tell,” Halverson said with an edge of impatience. “I need to get closer.”
Unfortunately, that was exactly what they couldn’t do right now. Like all Resistance helos tasked with hunting ground-based Terminators, the Blackhawk had a heavily armored underside. Hovering here at treetop height, they were reasonably safe from anything Jik could be waiting to shoot at them.
But once they headed down, all bets would be off. The main cockpit skin was much thinner and more susceptible to weapons fire, and Blair didn’t have even the modest protection of a windshield anymore. A single shot into her head, and all three of them would die.
“We can’t get closer,” she told Halverson. “Not until we know who that is.”
“How the hell do you expect me to figure that out from way up here?”
And then, almost as if on cue, there was a fresh flicker of fire from below them. Not from the birch trees Halverson had indicated, but from halfway across the clearing. The flame faltered a little, shifted position slightly—
And then flashed across the clearing to impale itself chest-high against the trunk of a big tree a couple of meters away from the birches.
“That’s a fire arrow!” Halverson shouted, a note of triumph in his voice. “That’s Preston—he’s marked Jik for us!”
“Can you see him?” Blair called. “Can you see that it’s Jik?”
“He’s there—he’s right there,” Halverson confirmed excitedly. “But I can’t—damn it, I can’t swing this thing far enough around.”
“Hang on,” Blair ordered, slowing the helo’s clockwise rotation and starting it turning back the other direction. “And don’t lose him.”
Suddenly, without warning, a burst of fire from the forest on the other side of the clearing shot across toward them. Reflexively, Barnes ducked—
And with a sharp thunk a flaming arrow buried its tip in a big tree two meters to Barnes’s right.
Preston gasped, dropping lower as a shower of sparks rained down.
“What the—? Barnes?”
For a fraction of a second Barnes just stared at the burning arrow. What the hell was Jik up to?
Tearing his eyes away from the fire, he looked upward.
The chopper, which had been slowly turning as Williams searched for a target, had come to a stop. He watched, with a surge of horror, as it started turning the other direction.