Dark Rivers of the Heart

cockpit, one of the crew was visible, probably the copilot. "Two of them, I'm sure."
        "They don't take part in the assault?" Ellie asked.
        "No, of course not, they're flyers, not gunmen."
        She went to the door and looked north toward the front of the supermarket. "Have to do it. No time to think about it. We just have to do it."
        Spencer didn't even need to ask her what she was talking about.
        She was an instinctive survivor with fourteen hard months of combat experience under her belt, and be remembered most of what the United States Army Rangers had taught him about strategy and about thinking on his feet. They couldn't go back the way they'd come.
        Couldn't stay in the card shop, either. Eventually it would be searched. They could no longer hope to reach a car in the parking lot and hot-wire it, behind the backs of the gunmen, because all the cars were parked to the front of the chopper, requiring them to pass in full view of its crew. They were left with one option. One terrible, desperate option. It required boldness, courage-and either a dash of fatalism or an enormous measure of brainless self-confidence. They were both ready to do it.
        "Take this," he said, handing her the canvas bag, "this too," and then gave her the Uzi.
        As he took the S.I.G from her and tucked it under the waistband of his jeans, against his belly, she said, "I guess you have to."
        "It's a three-second dash, at most, even less for him, but we can't risk him freezing up."
        Spencer squatted, scooped up Rocky, and stood with the dog cradled like a child in his arms.
        Rocky didn't know whether to wag his tail or be afraid, whether they were having fun or were in trouble. He was clearly on the brink of sensory overload. In that condition he customarily either went all limp and quivery-or flew into a frenzy of terror.
        Ellie eased open the door to check the front of the supermarket.
        Glancing at the two women on the floor, Spencer saw that they were obeying the instructions they'd been given.
        "Now," Ellie said, stepping outside, holding the door for him.
        He went through sideways, so as not to bash Rocky's head into the door frame. Stepping onto the covered shopping promenade, he glanced toward the market. All but one of the gunmen had gone inside. A thug with submachine guns remained outside, facing away from them.
        In the chopper, the copilot was looking down at something on his lap, not out the side window of the cockpit.
        Half convinced that Rocky weighed seven hundred rather than seventy pounds, Spencer sprinted to the open door in the helicopter fuselage. It was only a thirty-foot dash, even counting the ten-foot width of the promenade, but those were the longest thirty feet in the universe, a quirk of physics, an eerie scientific anomaly, a bizarre distortion in the fabric of creation, stretching ever longer in front of him as he ran-and then he was there, pushing the dog inside, scrambling up and into the craft himself.
        Ellie was so close behind him that she might as well have been his backpack. She dropped the canvas bag the moment she was up and across the threshold, but she held on to the Uzi.
        Unless someone was crouched behind one of the ten seats, the passenger compartment was deserted. Just to be safe, Ellie moved back the aisle, checking left and right.
        Spencer stepped to the nearby cockpit door, opened it. He was just in time to jam the muzzle of the pistol in the face of the copilot, who was starting to get up from his seat.
        "Take us up," Spencer told the pilot.
        The two men appeared even more surprised than the women in the card shop.
        "Take us up now-now!-or I'll blow this asshole's brains out through that window, then yours!" Spencer shouted so forcefully that he sprayed the crewmen with spittle and felt the veins in his temples popping up like those in a weight lifter's biceps.
        He thought he sounded every bit as frightening as Ellie. just inside the shattered glass wall of the supermarket, beside the wrecked Range Rover, in a drift of dog food, Roy and three agents stood with their weapons aimed at a tall man with a flat face, yellow teeth, and coal-black eyes as cold as a viper's. The guy clutched a semiautomatic rifle in both hands, and although he wasn't aiming it at anyone, he looked mean enough and angry enough to use it on