by Patrick Lee
“I don’t imagine they’ll have a watch posted anymore,” she said. “They’ll have everyone working on the camera mast. They’ll want it raised as soon as possible, and once it’s up they won’t need a watch at all.”
She looked toward the sun. Couldn’t look right at it. The arid sky did nothing to filter its glare, even though it was shining from low in the west. Their guess inside the book shop had been right: it was an hour above the horizon.
Travis suddenly understood Paige’s concern.
“Thermal cameras,” he said.
She looked at him. Nodded. “Eight FLIR cameras, seventy-five meters up. The kind of mast they’ll use is lightweight, guywire stabilized, rapid-deployable. What the military uses for forward operating bases in open country. A skilled team can put one up in an hour.”
Travis looked around at the tarmac. Looked at the scrubland past the perimeter fence, and the sprawl of cars beyond. Every outdoor surface in Yuma was still baking at over one hundred degrees.
But not for long.
All of it would cool quickly once the sun set. It might be cooling already. And once the background was cooler than ninety-eight degrees, the three of them would be the warmest things within a hundred miles of Yuma. Even if they got far out among the cars and army-crawled into the desert all night long, the cameras atop the mast might see them. Infrared light from body heat radiated and reflected like any other kind. It could bounce off metal and glass. FLIR cameras watching from a height of seventy-five meters would have an effective horizon dozens of miles out.
If they were still in Yuma an hour from now, they might as well be wearing neon body suits.
They ran.
They reached the perimeter, crossed the fence and made their way among the cars.
They ducked low and zigzagged south and east for over half an hour, until even the terminal building was at least a mile away.
They stared through the cab of a pickup toward the center of town. They could see the mast going up, rising meter by meter as unseen workers added sections to it at the bottom. The camera assembly was already mounted on top. The mast seemed to hold itself perfectly straight as it rose. Travis pictured four men holding onto guywires—invisible against the sky at this distance—that they would stake into the ground once the mast was complete.
Travis studied the nearest edge of town. On this side of the airport there were only a few outbuildings, all of them tucked in close to the fence line. The zigzagging had put the three of them well beyond the bounds of the city, in what should be empty desert in the present day. There would be little risk of any bystander seeing them appear through the iris.
“Let’s do it,” Paige said.
Travis nodded.
Bethany was still carrying the cylinder. She settled onto one knee and aimed it at almost ground level between the rows of cars. She switched it on.
The iris opened to vacant land under the same kind of long sunlight they were crouching in now, maybe half an hour before dusk. For a second, that seemed wrong to Travis: the present was shifted an hour ahead of this side. It should already be dark over there. Then he remembered. The present was an hour later in the day, but two months earlier in the year. August instead of October. The sunset would be a lot later in August, about enough to offset the difference. It occurred to him that rival armies using this technology against each other would have a lot of abstract thinking to do.
He crawled to the iris and looked through at the broad sweep of present-day Yuma.
He felt the back of his neck go cold.
“Shit,” he whispered.
Paige was beside him a second later. Bethany remained ten feet away, holding the cylinder.
“What is it?” Bethany said.
For a few seconds neither Travis nor Paige answered. They just stared through the iris at the living version of the city—which was filled with police and federal and even military vehicles. Flashers stabbed at the evening air from a hundred places, and at a glance Travis saw at least three helicopters circling high above.
“I had it wrong,” Travis said. “They did set a trap for us in the present. They just waited until we were on this side to spring it.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Bethany closed the iris.
They lay there on the hard ground, silent.
The breeze played over the tops of the cars. It dipped among them in weakened breaths, noticeably cooler than it’d been even ten minutes ago.
“It’s probably a Homeland response,” Bethany said. “The president can initiate one without anyone’s approval. They’ll have every road into the city blocked off. The residents will be locked down under curfew. Anyone moving around in the open within ten or fifteen miles of town will be stopped and questioned. Our chances of escape are better on this side.”
“Our chances of escape are near zero on this side,” Paige said.
“I know,” Bethany said.
Travis got up into a crouch, and looked through the truck’s cab again at the rising mast. It was impossible to accurately judge its height, but it was a lot taller than the six-story hotel a few blocks from it. It wouldn’t be long before it was completed, and in fact the cameras on top were probably already functional, even if the desert was still blinding them. And that protection might only last another twenty or thirty minutes.
“What’s working in our favor?” Paige said. “What can be made to work in our favor?”
Travis thought about it, but for at least a minute nothing came to him.
Then he smiled.
Finn watched the mast take shape. Lambert and the other specialist, Miller, were quick and efficient in their moves. The tech, Grayling, had the camera feeds already routed to a line of eight laptops, arrayed on the pavement of Fourth Avenue in the lengthening storefront shadows.
So far the cameras could resolve nothing. The laptop screens were fully white, overwhelmed by the desert’s background heat. But that would change very soon.
Finn had brought fifteen men through the opening. Three were assembling and configuring the mast, four were holding the guywires, and eight were just standing there, HK MP5s in hand, ready to run. Ready to make the kills.
If the condition of the ruins had affected any of the men, they weren’t showing it. Finn wished they would, at least to some small degree. Wished he could see some human reaction in them—a respect for the suffering that’d happened in this place. He was sure they felt it, deep inside—maybe not even so deep inside. It was only human for them to stifle their empathy in the presence of others, but Finn had to believe that any one of them, walking these ruins alone, would have been brought to his knees. It helped to think so anyway.
“We’re not going to make it painful for them,” he said. He turned his eyes on the eight who were armed. “Miss Campbell and her friends aren’t bad people. From their point of view they’re in the right. There’s no call to make them suffer. We make it fast, as soon as we’re on them.”
Travis, Paige, and Bethany covered distance among the cars as quickly as possible, moving straight west from their earlier position, from one lower corner of the town toward the other.
The wide driving lanes between the cars ran north and south, but the going was just as easy from east to west. The cars had the same natural channels between them that existed in any parking lot: the spaces their drivers had needed in which to open their doors that final time, long ago.
They slipped through the channels, every few seconds crossing the wider lanes. They were acting on a risky assumption: that Finn’s people weren’t standing lookout at all, but were just waiting for the cameras to do it for them. The assumption was as necessary as it was dangerous: they needed to move quickly in order for Travis’s plan to work, and they couldn’t do that while staying low among the vehicles.
They moved upright at half the speed of a sprint. They’d have gone faster, but the plan required stopping at vehicles every few hundred feet—among other things.
For Tra
vis there were two other reasons to slow up. Two specific items he was looking for, that he hoped to find in glove boxes along the way. He found the first within minutes. The second took longer, but only a little. He pocketed both things and continued along at a quicker pace.
If they were lucky they might cover two miles before the cameras could see them. Maybe even three. But either way it was going to be close. The plan would succeed or fail by minutes. Seconds, even.
If it worked at all.
The first thing that showed on the laptops were the broad lanes between the cars, stretching away to a vanishing point like rows of corn. Finn had expected that. The ground between the cars had lain in shadow for at least an hour now.
Humans still wouldn’t be discernible in the lanes: the lanes were reading a hundred degrees, while the tops of the cars were reading five degrees higher. But it was progress.
It crossed Finn’s mind that Paige Campbell and her associates, however many she had with her, might be hiding in one of the structures within the city. That would be problematic, short term. Every building’s interior had been superheated all day long by the greenhouse effect. It was probably a hundred twenty or higher in each of them, and that heat would take time to bleed out through closed windows and plaster walls.
But long term it was no problem at all. How long could Campbell and the others stay hidden in those conditions? It was unlikely they’d brought much food and water of their own, if any, and they sure as hell weren’t going to find any left sitting around in Yuma.
If it came to simply waiting them out, that would be fine. They weren’t going anywhere on the present side, and they weren’t going anywhere on this side either. It was going to end here, sometime in the next twenty-four hours.
But every instinct told Finn that they were out among the cars, making whatever run for it they could, and that this would be over very, very soon.
He stared at the laptops again. Watched the contrast of the lanes deepen. Some portions of them were taking on a new shade now. Ninety-nine degrees.
Moving quickly. Not quite running. Stopping at intervals. They were dead south of town now, two miles west of where they’d begun their sideways move.
Not far enough, Travis thought. Not nearly far enough. The plan had a giant drawback built into it: it was going to give away their position the instant they executed it. Which might be okay, as long as the plan worked. As long as its effect was immediate and overwhelming for Finn’s people.
But for that to happen, they needed to cover a certain amount of distance first. The path they’d taken so far was a line from east to west, south of Yuma. Like they were underlining the city on a map, right to left. The longer they could make the line before everything happened, the more likely the plan was to succeed.
Distance and time. They needed more of one. They were running out of the other.
Nearly straight ahead of them, the sun’s lower rim touched the horizon.
The mast was finished. Lambert and Miller stood armed with the others now, while the four with the guywires staked them into the ground.
Grayling was moving back and forth over his laptops, hunched, looking excited.
Finn could see sparse portions of the open lanes reading ninety-seven degrees now. Even the cars themselves were reading down around one hundred.
Two and a half miles. Still probably not enough. It was impossible to guess exactly what would be enough. The plan would work or it wouldn’t.
The sun was gone. The desert felt immediately cooler, though Travis was sure that was a psychological effect. It’d been cooling steadily for a long time now. He let his hand press on the hood of a truck as he passed it. Warm, but not hot.
“There!” Grayling said. His hand shot out to indicate the fifth laptop’s screen. “South of southwest, a mile and a half away.” He dropped to one knee and studied the monitor. “I see three of them. Christ, they’re not even hiding. I’ve got direct line of sight. They’re moving—straight west through the cars. I wouldn’t say they’re running. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. It’s like a fast walk, hunched over. Maybe they’re tired.”
“Then it won’t be hard to catch them,” Finn said.
He turned and picked up the cylinder from where he’d set it on the curb. A second later he was running, holding the cylinder with both hands and tucking it against himself. Lambert and Miller and the other eight fell in behind him.
This would be simple. Straight south out of town along one of the broad lanes among the cars, until they were level with the east-west line the others were fleeing along. Then just catch up to them from behind—maybe stick to a parallel path ten yards north of theirs until the last minute, to stay clear of the sightlines between the cars.
Finn freed a hand from the cylinder and took from his vest pocket the FLIR goggles he’d brought along. He hung them around his neck by their strap. They weren’t necessary yet, but in another ten minutes the desert would be an ink-black void without them. His men each had them too.
Paige Campbell and her friends almost certainly didn’t.
Finn really did feel bad for them. It wasn’t even going to be a contest.
Chapter Thirty
Three miles. Three fourths of the town underlined. The going was harder now: their muscles were sore and the channels between the cars lay deep in shadow.
Yuma looked strange in the twilight with no lights coming on. Just low, black rectangles against the dying sky. Nearer, the sea of cars made a single, undefined field of darkness.
The wind was much cooler. Under any other circumstances it would’ve felt soothing.
Travis stopped. There was no question that Finn and his people had seen them by now. No question that they were coming, that they were out there somewhere among the cars, threading this way.
Paige and Bethany stopped too.
The three of them met one another’s eyes.
Finn found the desert surprisingly easy to traverse. The inch-thick layer of rubber crumbs, the remnant of a few hundred million tires, made for a soft—and silent—running surface. Finn had incorporated running into his exercise regimen years ago, not long after settling down in D.C. His mile time varied between 6:30 and 6:50. His men, most of them with twenty years on him, were all at least that fast.
They’d completed the southern arm of the sprint and were well along the westbound track now. They had their FLIR goggles on. The desert looked spectral through them. The cars were bluish white, while the passageways between them were shrouded in deep indigo and black. It was like running through a photo negative.
Finn held up a hand and brought the men to a stop.
He set the cylinder down beside a pickup, then climbed onto the sidewall of the truck’s bed. He balanced himself against the cab and surveyed the desert.
Christ, they were right there. Six cars west and four cars south. They were crouched low; Finn could see only the reflection of their heat signature against the side of a minivan.
Were they hiding because they’d heard the approach? Finn ruled it out. They couldn’t have heard.
The answer was simpler than that. They could no longer find their way in the dark. There was no moon. No light glow bleeding into the sky from distant cities. There was starlight, but starlight was worthless. Human eyes, even dark-adjusted for hours, couldn’t see a thing by it. Finn had faced that fact a number of times, in remote places all over the world.
Miss Campbell and the others had stopped because they simply couldn’t go on. They were crouched as low as they could get, hoping it was enough.
Finn considered waiting for them to go to sleep. Then they could be executed without even knowing it, and spared the jolt of animal terror that would otherwise mark their final seconds as the shooting started.
He thought of it and then discarded it. They would probably post a watch. That person would sit awake for hours, anxious and miserable, listening for footsteps in the dark. And that was its own kind of pain. No need to prolong
it.
He turned to step down from the truck—but stopped.
He’d smelled something. Just briefly. It’d come to him on the breeze, blowing northward over the cars.
He tilted his head up and inhaled. Couldn’t detect it again, whatever it was. He tried to place it, based on the trace of it he’d gotten. Somehow it made him think of gun lubricant, but that wasn’t quite it.
He took another breath, still couldn’t reacquire it, and let it go. Maybe it was the natural odor of tens of millions of cars, mothballed in the desert for all time. It occurred to him only for a second to question that idea—to wonder how any smell at all would still be around after seven decades of sun and wind—and then he stepped down from the pickup and waved the men forward again.
They rounded the truck’s front end and went south. Finn stopped them again one channel north of the row the others were crouched in, and led them west. They would drop down into the same pathway as Miss Campbell when they were two cars shy, and simply rush them. It would begin and end in seconds. As close to painless as circumstances afforded.
Travis took the first glove box item from his pocket. He shook it next to his ear. Empty as expected. Even though it was nearly a sealed container, its trace contents would’ve no doubt evaporated long ago, even in the sun-sheltered interior of a dashboard.
It didn’t matter. The item should serve its purpose here, regardless.
He lowered it until it was nearly touching the bed of tire crumbs.
Finn brought the men to a halt at the near edge of one of the broad north-south lanes. He could see the victims’ heat signature against the minivan, one channel south and two cars past the far side of the lane. He was sure all the men could see them too. No need to plan the final move. They knew what to do now. Finn stepped forward into the lane, and simply got out of their way. He sidestepped to the left. Waved them on.
They advanced, single file, angling across the lane toward the channel in which the victims were crouched.
Lambert took point as Finn moved aside. He moved slowly, silently, one step per second. No need to rush.