Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

He came even with the open channel between the last few cars and saw the three targets easily. Two were dead right now if he pulled the trigger. The third-someone small, slender-framed-was crouched at the back corner of the van, halfway around it. That one might create a problem if the shooting started too soon. Might get clear and lead a pursuit among the cars, however brief. Might even return fire-Finn had said these people were armed. Better to take them all in a single action.

Lambert raised his foot to take another step, and heard a faint suction noise from the ground beneath it. He looked down. Saw nothing there in his thermal vision. Looked up again at the targets, still a good thirty feet away. The largest of them had his hand to the ground. Looked like he was holding something with it. F inn took another step aside as the men filed past him. As he did, his heel struck something in the darkness. It made a light, hollow thud. Something big and empty, made of plastic. It spun aside easily under the impact of his foot. He looked but couldn't see anything. Whatever it was, it was the same temperature as the ground.

He stooped, felt for it, found it. A smooth container with a handle.

And a spout.

He drew it toward his face, and his next breath told him exactly what it was, and what he'd smelled from atop the truck bed twenty seconds earlier. T ravis was sure the Bic would work-would spark, anyway. Flint and steel shouldn't have changed at all in Yuma, these past seventy-three years.

He was less sure that the spark would be big enough, or long-lived enough, to ignite the fuel-soaked tire crumbs.

He flicked the sparkwheel with his thumb. It generated a tiny flash that barely escaped the lighter's windscreen-and had no effect on the fuel.

He flicked it again.

Same result. L ambert pressed forward between the cars. Twenty feet from the targets now. Still no clean angle on the little one behind the van.

What the hell was the big one holding?

Lambert could see the guy's thumb moving. Snapping across whatever it was. Each time there was a tiny pinprick of light in his FLIR-enhanced vision. T he 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!" L ambert 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. T ravis 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. F inn 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!" P aige 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, leveling the SIG across the roof of the compact car next to it. She was vaguely aware of Travis right beneath her, trying to roll over and get his hands onto the shotgun, but other things took greater command of her attention.

The fire trail. Surging away across the desert like the exhaust wash of a rocket.

The five men in the flames, their clothing ablaze, their hands grabbing at zippers and buttons, their bodies running into one another and into the cars that boxed them in on the sides.

The other five men. Not on fire. Not even wearing their headsets anymore. Turning and running in this direction, through the nearest free pathway between the vehicles. Finn urging them on.

Finn.

Right there. Just beyond the compact car and the lowrider that faced it. He was thirty feet away, and holding the other cylinder.

For a moment Paige met his eyes. She had the SIG leveled in the neutral space between the charging men and Finn himself. It was like an intersection in time. The last point at which all options remained open.

She felt her training begin to exert itself. The world didn't exactly slow down for her. It just became simple. Very, very simple.

There were targets.

Some of the targets were threats, and some weren't.

Some of the threats were more immediate than others.

The most immediate was the man leading the pack between the cars. Twenty feet away and closing. His MP5 coming up. His eyes on her chest, where the first shots were going to go about a third of a second from now.