The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

hair caught fire. By that time he’d stopped moving and screaming. She watched him for another ten seconds; then she picked up a rifle dropped by one of the hostiles, thumbed it to auto without even looking at it, and fired a burst into the back of String Mustache’s head.
    She dropped the gun and turned back to Travis, and for a moment he wasn’t sure her eyes were even human. Then they fixed on her father, dead against the base of the tree, and all doubt about her humanity evaporated.
    She crossed to the pine and sank beside his bound corpse, pulling herself against him, her face pressed to his despite the blood. She cried again, silently.
    Travis went back to the edge of the camp and listened to the distant ATV engines. Thirty seconds later they stopped.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Travis expected to have to gently pry the young woman from her grieving. They needed to get out of the encampment and find positions from which to kill the other two hostiles when they returned.
    But she sat with her father only a few minutes before standing, taking Travis’s knife again and cutting the dead man free. She set him carefully flat on the ground, then looked around, troubled.
    Travis understood. “Where do you want to take him?”
    Her gaze settled on the dense stand of pines where he’d hidden earlier. “There.”
    Travis knelt and lifted the man, and carried him to the trees. He maneuvered the body among the boughs and laid it under the deepest cover, then waited silently as the woman stood looking down at it.
    “We need to get out of here fast,” she said after a moment. “As soon as we kill the two that left on the quads.”
    “There are more besides them?” Travis said.
    “A lot more.” She nodded toward the camp. “These guys were calling in on a satellite phone every hour. When their people don’t hear from them, they’ll know there was trouble. They’ll send reinforcements with a helicopter.”
    The woman took a hard breath, gave her father a last look, then turned away, back toward the encampment. As she did, Travis got another look at her right arm. The set of clamps the torturer had used to pry apart her triceps were still in place, keeping the skin and muscle wedged open at least an inch. Heavy black clots filled the cavity, along with what could only be infected tissue.
    Seeing him stare, Paige turned her arm and saw the opening herself. Travis knew by her reaction that she was looking at it for the first time. She took it well.
    “I wouldn’t pull those clamps out without a doctor close by,” Travis said. “You don’t want to trap those infections inside your arm, away from the air.”
    “I don’t think I’ll be in a doctor’s care anytime soon,” she said, but made no move to detach the clamps.
    She stepped out of the pines and moved into the camp. Travis followed.
    “Can you use their satellite phone to call for help?” he said. “Get the military in here, or whoever your people can send?”
    She shook her head. “These guys had to use a code to make outgoing calls. If I were more of a tech, maybe I could get around it, but I’m not. How far from a town are we?”
    “On foot, fifty miles.” He looked at the remaining two quads parked nearby. “We could cover two thirds of it on one of those, taking the long way around a few ridges. Then there’s a river, and no way across but log bridges and rocks. We’d have to ditch the quad and walk from there, maybe a full day to reach Coldfoot.”
    She considered that, looking more concerned than hopeful. Her eyes went past him to the open valley and the succession of mountain ridges beyond, as if the landscape were an executioner’s scaffold. Travis imagined a full day’s walk over the mostly exposed terrain, being hunted by armed pursuers in a helicopter. The young woman’s expression suggested similar thoughts.
    “This is going to get bad,” she said. She stared a moment longer, then looked at Travis. “My name’s Paige. Thank you for saving my life.”
    The riders were coming back. The engines had started up a minute earlier, and now the two ATVs were just visible past the curve of the valley, maybe a mile away yet.
    Travis kept his M16 steady against a pine trunk. Paige held her own rifle at the next tree over, left-handed—clearly not her natural choice—and braced across a branch. Her damaged arm hung at her side.
    In the silence of the clearing, the distant hum of the engines was no more than an insect buzz. The wind through