The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

guy’s thumb moving. Snapping across whatever it was. Each time there was a tiny pinprick of light in his FLIR-enhanced vision.
    The third spark did nothing, either. It wasn’t working. Not this way.
    Travis pressed the end of the lighter directly into the soft tire crumbs. He put the tip of his index finger to the sparkwheel and dropped his shoulder, allowing plenty of slack into his arm. Then he pivoted, swung his entire upper body clockwise, and kept his finger pressed to the wheel until the last instant, so that every ounce of his momentum would come to bear on it. When his fingertip jerked across the wheel, he felt the steel dig into his skin almost hard enough to draw blood.
    In the same instant he heard a man shouting, somewhere close by in the darkness. He was saying, “Fall back!”
    Lambert heard Finn start to shout just as the big target lowered its shoulder and wrenched its torso around.
    It was the last thing his FLIR goggles showed him.
    A tenth of a second later his vision was washed out by blazing white light, and he felt a wave of heat engulf his legs and waist.
    Travis had expected Finn’s men to be close. Maybe within a hundred feet. Maybe closer than that.
    When the trail of gasoline ignited, revealing the men in a line formation just over a car length away, it was visually startling but not so surprising. Travis threw himself backward, still in his crouch, slamming into Paige and pushing her back with him.
    He got his left hand beneath himself on the ground to keep his body from sprawling. He brought his right arm up and around, getting his hand on Paige’s shoulder, and the moment they’d cleared the back of the van, he shoved her sideways, propelling her and Bethany behind the vehicle’s bulk.
    At no point did he take his eyes off of the men in the flames. They may have caught him off guard, but it was clear they’d gotten the worse end of the encounter. They flinched backward, their left hands coming off of the forward grips of their weapons, reaching instinctively for their eyes. The top halves of their faces were hidden by some kind of night-vision goggles, but the lower halves said more than enough about the sudden panic they felt. They were blinded and confused, and a second from now their clothing would be on fire. They were in every kind of trouble.
    But they weren’t the whole story. Beyond the five who were trapped between the vehicles, Travis could see as many as five more who hadn’t yet filed into the narrow space. They were disoriented too, but they weren’t immobilized.
    They were going to be a problem.
    Travis understood all that, even as he shoved Paige, while his own body’s momentum continued backward. A millisecond later it shifted beyond the balance point of his left arm beneath him. His feet kicked out of place on the rubber crumbs, and he went down hard on his back, landing on the shotgun he’d slung on his shoulder.
    Finn had already torn his FLIR headset off by the time the flames erupted, his second shouted word still clearing his mouth. He saw the burst of light forty feet away, and a fraction of a second later the fire was rushing toward him. It didn’t just spread along its pathway: it screamed. It looked like a bullet train emerging in flames from a tunnel. Finn only just managed to step clear of it, even with plenty of distance to see it coming.
    Lambert and Miller and the three behind them were almost immediately ablaze. Finn saw why. It wasn’t just the ground beneath them that was burning—the sides of the vehicles had been doused with gasoline, too. The men were walled in by the inferno.
    Even the five who hadn’t yet entered the space were flailing, impulsively trying to cover their eyes instead of the FLIR lenses five inches in front of their foreheads.
    Finn lunged at them. He swatted their headsets up and off, one after another, and shoved them toward the next channel through the cars.
    “It’s a fucking diversion!” he screamed. “Take them before they can move on it!”
    Paige saw Travis land on the Remington, even as she and Bethany fell to the ground behind the van. Paige landed on her ass, twisted hard to the side, slammed both hands to the ground and pushed herself up into another crouch, all in one fluid move. Then she was rising, uncoiling like a spring to full height, her right hand automatically drawing the SIG-Sauer from her waistband.
    She heard Finn yelling something about a diversion.
    She came out from behind the van,