The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

presence just out of sight.
    As Travis stared forward along the side of the Black Hawk, something flicked his whiskers. Hard.
    But he couldn’t place it. He swept his eyes around, and for some reason he kept coming back to the front right wheel, extending down and away from the side of the fuselage on a foot-long strut. There was nothing wrong with it, as far as he could tell. The tire and strut both seemed fine.
    Shaw saw him looking. “What is it?”
    Travis had no answer for him, and shook off the sensation. He hadn’t slept in over thirty hours—unless he counted the few minutes he’d been unconscious after getting knocked out—and had spent the last two of them wandering around a mass-murder scene. A little jumpiness should be expected.
    “It’s nothing,” Travis said, and nodded ahead through the trees. “What you’re looking for isn’t far. Fifty steps past their camp, buried near the biggest tree in sight.”
    He took another glance at the wheel, then passed through the group of men to take the lead—
    —and stopped again.
    He turned back to the Black Hawk.
    In the soft dirt on either side of the wheel was a footprint, each one facing outward—the prints a man would make if he were sitting right on the tire with his back against the side of the chopper, maybe holding onto the gun mount above it for balance.
    Travis stared at it, part of him expecting the footprints to shift before his eyes. Then he became aware of Shaw standing beside him.
    “Tell us,” Shaw said. “I don’t care if you think it’s stupid. Tell us what you’re thinking, right now.”
    The guy sounded more than just serious. He sounded scared.
    “Look at the prints beside the wheel,” Travis said.
    Something like a second passed—enough time for Travis to imagine these men laughing when he was compelled to explain himself.
    A second later, he understood that he was very wrong in that impression.
    Shaw flinched—Travis was sure he saw it, though the movement was swallowed up by the blur that came next, as the man snapped his rifle up and opened fire, putting a burst of half a dozen shots through the side of the Black Hawk, a foot above the tire.
    The bullets punched through the metal. No blood. No screams.
    “Eyes open for a weapon, all sides!” Shaw yelled; already he was sprinting over the disturbed ground toward the chopper. The men around Travis shouldered their rifles, each choosing a direction. They did it instantly and without discussion, as if they’d drilled for this sort of thing. Travis suddenly felt sure they had. Even the pilots, also out of the chopper, had drawn sidearms and were scrutinizing the sparse trees around them.
    Shaw vaulted into the Black Hawk’s troop bay and swept his rifle back and forth inside, in large but efficient strokes. He didn’t so much aim with it as feel with it, like a blind man whose life depended on finding his quarry. Travis’s eyes easily picked out the handholds the enemy could have used to pull himself into the chopper without touching the ground.
    Shaw found nothing.
    He returned to the door. His gaze fell to the dirt before it, and went cold. Travis saw why: the ground leading from the troop bay was saturated with their own footprints—so many they overlapped—leading off of the bare earth onto the grass. The enemy’s path could be any of them.
    One of the men whispered, “Fuck …”
    That single word, so drenched with fear while coming from someone so hardened, told Travis all he needed to know about the trouble they were in.
    He had a second to think about that, and then the pilot took a bullet to the head. There was no sound of a gunshot—just the impact, like a heavy oak panel being split, and then the man was down, already gone. The others were shouting, training weapons and eyes in all directions. Travis saw Shaw jump from the chopper and run to his men, screaming for them to be quiet, and he saw the copilot staring around, scared shitless, as a terrible understanding came to him, and even as Travis made the connection himself, the man took the second shot right over his left eye, the entry wound facing Travis so directly that the bullet must have passed right over his shoulder, and now Shaw was looking at him and shouting, “Which way?” and Travis threw his arm out to point behind himself, and in the next instant the world was nothing but machine-gun fire.
    They fanned out. Travis got behind them and watched the red tracer rounds carve a wedge of