The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

screwdrivers, both slotted and Phillips types. He grabbed the biggest slotted one.
    “We’ll wait here until you get something hotwired,” Paige said.
    He nodded and got out into the sharp wind coming off the ocean, and shut the door behind him. It would occur to him only later that she couldn’t have seen the nod—that from her point of view he’d simply left without acknowledging her words.
    He stood surveying the nearest row of vehicles, and settled on the oldest thing in view: a mid-’90s Ford Taurus forty yards to the right, probably antique enough to lack any special security measures in its ignition. He sprinted for it.
    Just inland from the lot, a train horn blared. Seconds later the rumble and clatter faded in, and he looked over his shoulder and saw it: a little six-car freight coming up from the south.
    He reached the Taurus, gripped the screwdriver by the end of its shaft and swung it like a hammer. Its handle connected with the driver’s side window and burst it inward in a spill of crumbs. He unlocked the door, brushed most of the glass away and got in. Five seconds later he had the ignition smashed open and the starter wires isolated. He was about to touch their stripped ends together when something made him stop. Some sound right at the edge of his awareness. Something to do with the train, he thought. The racket of its wheels suddenly sounded wrong, though he couldn’t say how—or why it had struck him as important. Why it made the skin on his arms prickle. He listened for another second and then disregarded it. Whatever the hell was spooking him, sitting idle here wouldn’t help matters.
    He sparked the wires and heard the starter motor kick over, and then the engine roared.
    He opened the door and got back out. The train had already passed, churning away to the north, its clatter going with it. It’d faded for another second when Travis’s skin began to crawl again.
    Now he knew why.
    He could hear the sound even over the grumble of the Taurus’s engine. A sound that’d been perfectly masked by the passing freight.
    Rotors.
    He spun and looked around wildly, but for a few seconds he couldn’t pin the direction. The staccato hammering of the chopper’s blades seemed to come from everywhere, bouncing off the broad storefront and from the panels of every nearby vehicle.
    Then he saw it. A quarter mile south. Coming in right out of the sun glare.
    For a moment he thought it was a police chopper. It was black and there were bulky shapes hanging off the sides that might’ve been cameras or loudspeakers.
    An instant later he saw he was wrong—he recognized the flattened, broad profile of a Black Hawk. But not the standard transport model; it was some special variant with stub wings jutting off the fuselage.
    And missiles clustered beneath them.
    Travis turned and sprinted for the Humvee, screaming Paige’s name. Screaming Get out, over and over. He could see her through the heavy glass, seated in back on the side facing him.
    She couldn’t hear him.
    He screamed louder, the soft tissue lining his throat going ragged.
    In the direction of the chopper, high in his peripheral vision, white light erupted and something shrieked.
    He was thirty yards from the vehicle now, moving as fast as he could move, screaming as loud as he could scream.
    Paige turned toward the sound of his voice at last, centering her focus on it so perfectly that, for an instant, Travis forgot she couldn’t see him. She was looking right into his eyes when the missile hit the Humvee.

Chapter Thirty-Nine
    The vehicle simply vanished. One millisecond it was there, and the next it’d been replaced by a hurricane of flame and shrapnel and whipping soot. The air shattered and a superheated wind slammed into Travis. It picked him up and threw him backward eight feet. He landed off balance and tumbled and ended up lying on his chest, staring straight ahead at the roiling fire.
    He was curled on the grass way off the edge of the lot. He couldn’t remember getting there. He was still in the suit. There were police and fire vehicles all around the blackened shell of the Humvee. The flames were gone and there was a thick gray column of smoke coming off the wreck, trailing almost sideways in the shore breeze.
    He realized he was crying. Holding his knees against his ribs and saying No with every fractured breath. Some deep, barely flickering, analytical part of his brain understood that he was bargaining more than denying.