The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

seconds. When he’d finished, he dropped the knife and sprinted uphill to the access. He shouted the all-clear to the others, ran back to the Humvees and got one started.
    They rolled down out of the trees and saw the town full of police vehicles far below. Crown Vics and SUVs and pickups, state and local, every flasher strobing blue and red in the overcast gloom. The big guy in the Humvee had ordered them in here earlier, to help search the town for the three of them.
    Travis braked on the narrow road near Raines’s house and put the vehicle in park. He switched on the two-way radio mounted to the dash and heard a man’s voice in mid-sentence.
    “—any assistance needed, please advise us on that, over.”
    There was a long hiss of static and then the same man began speaking once more: “Say again, any civilian unit, this is CHP, please acknowledge. I see one of you just out of the woods now.”
    “They heard the shooting,” Paige said.
    Travis nodded. “And their signals must not be getting to anyone on the other side of the ridge.”
    He grabbed the radio’s handset and depressed the talk switch. “CHP and local departments, stand by for now. No assistance required. Echo unit, meet us on the highway; we’re bringing out a subject for extraction, over.”
    He let up on the switch and shut off the radio.
    “Nice,” Dyer said.
    Travis, sitting in the driver’s seat and still wearing the transparency suit, glanced around at Dyer and then Paige and Bethany.
    “Take the wheel,” he said to Dyer. “You look exactly like someone who’d be driving this fucking thing.”
    He clambered out of the seat and into the back, where Paige and Bethany had already taken the hint and ducked out of sight below the windows.
    “Pull into the first good-sized parking lot we see,” Travis said.
    It was five minutes later. They were back in bright sunlight, heading south on the Coast Highway. The Pacific lay to the right, low grassy hills to the left. Here and there the land dropped into flat stretches that might have been flood plains, or even extensions of the seafloor in ancient times. Farm buildings and other isolated structures dotted most of them, but Travis recalled seeing others developed into mid-sized towns on the drive up.
    They needed to swap the Humvee for something else. There was no question it had a LoJack or some equivalent on board, and that someone would start tracking it at any time. The ruse back in town had bought only minutes, and probably not many.
    Travis was in the passenger seat now. He’d pulled off the suit’s top and had it bunched in his lap. He looked at his phone. A quarter past one. Five and a half hours until Richard Garner killed himself.
    Travis turned to Dyer. “Skeleton crew aboard Air Force One, you said.”
    Dyer nodded. “If they’re torturing captives, I doubt they brought the press corps along. Doubt they brought anyone they don’t need.”
    “If we can get within a mile of any airport where it lands,” Travis said, “getting aboard in this suit would be fishing with depth charges.”
    Dyer said nothing. He simply drew his BlackBerry from his pocket and opened an application, his eyes darting between its display and the road. A few seconds later he said, “Two flight plans. One’s already expired: the plane landed at an undesignated site in eastern Wyoming, just over an hour ago.”
    “Border Town,” Paige said.
    “Holt’s touring his new property,” Travis said.
    Dyer scrolled down through the text on his screen. “Second flight’s coming almost straight to us. Plane takes off from Border Town in half an hour, arrives at Oakland International in two and a half.”
    “He’s visiting the points of conflict,” Bethany said. “Probably has people aboard the plane that he trusts to check out the aftermath and make assessments.”
    Travis managed his first smile in some time. “They’re going to be busy today.”
    Half a minute later they saw a supermarket with a sprawling lot a quarter mile off the highway. Beyond it lay suburbs and a few blocks of low-rise commercial buildings—the western sweep of some unseen city further inland.
    Dyer swung off the highway, then into the market, and parked out at the edge of the lot. Something like half the spaces were occupied. There were probably two hundred cars to choose from.
    Travis pulled the suit’s top back on. Then he opened the huge glove box in front of him and saw three different wrenches and half a dozen