Niceville

rise up into the grassy foothills of the Belfair Range.
    Across the street the crows fell silent, as if listening, and then they exploded upwards in one swirling black cloud, amber light shimmering on their wings.
    He felt the drumbeat of a chopper, coming in low, hidden by the tree line, and then, under the siren wail, the squealing of tires as Merle pushed the Magnum through a curve a quarter mile away.
    The sirens grew more shrill, crazy echoes bouncing off the hills all around, mixed up with the snarling sound of engines racing.
    Coker hefted the rifle, put on a pair of ear protectors, let out a long slow breath, got into a seated brace, resting the rifle’s bipod on a stump in front of him, and depressed the stock until the squared-off muzzle brake was covering the top of the tree line.
    The rifle was a semi-auto five-shot. He had five rounds in the box mag, and three more full mags in the canvas bag on the ground beside him. Coker figured that if he needed those extra mags, he’d be dead by sunset.
    He did not put his eye close to the Leupold scope until he saw the shiny red ball of the news chopper appear above the trees. Then he leaned into the scope, set the stock in tight, braced for the machine’s mule-kick recoil, eased his finger onto the serrated ridges of the trigger blade, pressing down on it until he could just feel the sear begin to engage. Stopped. Held it.
    The chopper was slipping left, skimming the tree line, following the curve of the hills, intent on the chase, a steady glide, hardly moving at all, so the newsgirl could get a good smooth camera pan. Coker could see two pale figures through the canopy bubble. The newsgirl would be in the copilot seat, on the left side of the canopy, working the radio and the camera and talking her talk.
    The pilot would be in the right-hand seat, busy with the cyclic andthe collective and the pedals, his mind totally taken up with situational awareness, with thinking about power lines and tree branches and big dumb suicidal geese and all the other air traffic that might be zipping around in the pursuit zone.
    Even if the pilot had been looking right at Coker’s position, all he would have seen was a little scrap of tan cloth in a field of pampas grass, maybe a long black rod sticking up.
    Coker locked down on the sight image, inhaled, breathed out slow, held it at half, stilled himself.
    Squeezed the trigger.
    The Barrett bucked in his grip, slamming back into his right shoulder, the muzzle-brake gasses flaring out sideways. The chopper image in his scope was momentarily obscured by the heat ripple but Coker saw the pilot take the .50-caliber round right in the middle of his chest.
    Basically, the guy exploded, the hydrostatic shock wave blowing through the water-filled tissues of his body at the speed of sound, like an asteroid slamming into the sea.
    Coker had seen it before, many times, a center mass hit like that. Usually, when you got down to the vehicle, you found the driver’s head hanging by strings, both eye sockets blown right out, ears and mouth running black blood, and nothing left of his upper body but pink vertebrae and gaping ribs.
    Firepower
, thought Coker.
You gotta love it
.
    With no living hands on the cyclic and the collective, the chopper staggered, dipped, and then, vibrating crazily, went into a sideways roll.
    In the TV screen Coker watched the camera image as the sky and the ground traded places. The TV picture turned into a whirling blur as the cottonwood trees came rushing up.
    Faintly, through the sound-canceling earphones, he heard a high shriek of raw terror, thin as a silver wire, coming from the TV speakers. The newsgirl, filing her last best story, an up-close and personal eyewitness report right from the scene of a fatal chopper crash.
    Happening Now!
    The thought made him smile, putting a cold yellow glitter in his pale brown eyes, his hard mouth tightening.
    He felt the concussion through the earth as the chopper hit hard on the far side of the tree line. Out of the corner of his right eye he saworange fire come billowing up, but by then he had shifted his position, reset himself, the rifle scope now zeroed in on the highway as Merle’s Magnum came flying up the curve towards Coker’s position.
    Coker had taken a stand that allowed him to see down the entire length of the S-curve as the cars came directly at him. It would give him the most time-on-target and a field of fire that would stretch right down the line of