The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

waiting. They were arranged in a rough triangle, two forward and one lagging back, all three staring ahead into the darkness at the top of the shaft. Travis took a position directly behind the loner. He brought the knife out from under the suit and raised it slowly until it was eight inches behind and to the left of the man’s neck—nowhere near the edge of his peripheral vision.
    He held the blade level, with the cutting edge facing back toward himself.
    With his other hand he pulled the suit’s hem outward once more, ready to hide the knife again in a hurry.
    “I don’t hear anything,” one of the men up front said.
    Travis slipped the knife beneath the loner’s jaw and yanked it straight back with all his force. It sliced through skin and cartilage and tough rubbery cords of muscle about as easily as it would’ve passed through ground beef. The man’s body spasmed hard and his hands jerked to his throat, and a ragged choking noise came from his mouth.
    The other two men spun, raising their weapons instinctively.
    Travis brought the knife down to his waist—blocked from view by the still-standing victim—and raised it back into concealment within the suit.
    “Gordy,” one of the other two said, his eyes taking in the wound but unable to comprehend how the hell it’d gotten there.
    Gordy dropped. One shoulder landed first and his head went back and to the side, and the awful gash drew open and began founting blood in thick pulses.
    The man who’d said the name sank fast to his knees and reached for him. The other guy stood back, hyperventilating, looking around instinctively for a threat he couldn’t perceive.
    He settled on the tunnel’s mouth, ten feet away. The only logical place the attack could have come from. He stared at it, eyes darting, MP5 held tense.
    Travis sidestepped around him in a wide arc, got behind him and brought the knife back out, then sliced him carotid to carotid.
    He didn’t rehide the knife. He simply stepped forward and slashed the third man’s throat before number two had hit the ground. Just like that, there were three bodies convulsing and dying on the concrete, one of them maybe five seconds further into the process than the other two. Nothing about the encounter had been loud enough to carry to the men downslope.
    Travis scooped up one of the dead men’s MP5s, flicked the selector to full-auto and walked to the tunnel’s open end.
    “Heads up!” he screamed, his voice high enough that it could’ve belonged to any man, and opened fire with the weapon. He raked the stream of bullets randomly across the Humvees far below, heard shouts of alarm and confusion and saw bodies dive out of sight. He didn’t bother aiming for them. He dinged up the sides of the vehicles until the machine gun ran dry, then dropped it in the dirt and sprinted away laterally across the slope. He knew his feet were kicking up sand and needles, but between the ground vegetation and the fact that no one was looking, he didn’t worry. He exerted only enough effort to keep his footfalls close to quiet, and the knife hidden up inside the suit.
    Fifty yards from the access he stopped. He turned straight downhill and moved at a careful walk, entirely soundless now and kicking up nothing. He descended until he was level with the Humvees, and saw the men crouched behind them on the downhill side. Anxiety in every set of eyes. Universal confusion over the screamed warning, the gunfire, and now the silence.
    Travis counted fourteen men. He also counted two fewer Humvees than had chased them up here earlier; the others must have gone to the north access.
    Getting at these fourteen from behind would be a joke—they were all looking uphill, over the vehicles’ hoods or through their passenger compartments. The men were clustered in twos and threes, the Humvees spaced dozens of feet apart among the redwood trunks. One little group at a time, these people could be handled with no more difficulty than the first three.
    Travis stared at them and wondered why he didn’t feel worse about this. Why he’d felt nothing for the guys he killed on Main Street earlier, or those in the tunnel. Maybe necessity just pushed remorse aside. Maybe that was an animal thing from way back. Maybe he had more of it than he should. He considered that idea for another second and then pushed it aside too, and started across the slope in a long arc that would put him below the Humvees.

Chapter Thirty-Eight
    It took ninety