Patrick Lee - The Breach

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 co-pilot 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 space against the valley wall sixty yards north.

Shaw screamed for them to get more space among themselves. He'd just finished saying it when a bullet hit his throat and came out the back of his neck, making a fist-sized crater. He dropped, his eyes wide and his hands pawing at his collar.

The men broke formation, running and firing at the same time. One of them stooped, grabbed Shaw's rifle and threw it at Travis; he just managed to get his hands up and catch it.

Then he was running with them-the half that had split in this direction. Running for the encampment, and then through it, his mind only now getting around to what his body had already decided.

The tree stood out like an obelisk, easily twice the width of any other nearby. He pulled up short and swung past it, kicking aside the carpet of needles to expose the gouged surface where Paige had refilled the hole.

Somewhere a man screamed and went down hard as he ran. He lay crying for help, but after only a few seconds Travis heard him gargle as his windpipe filled with blood.

Travis dropped the rifle, fell to his knees beside the hole and attacked the dirt with his bare hands. It was soft, having been torn up and replaced only a day and a half earlier, but the going was Not fast enough. No way was it fast enough.

Because the killer knew it was buried here. Travis had given this location out loud, right outside the helicopter.

He heard another head shot, twenty feet to his left, and turned to see a body still plunging forward with its running momentum, but with the top of its skull missing. The shoulder hooked a tree trunk and the body twisted around it, falling in a tangle at the roots.

Travis dug faster, his ears suddenly keening with the rush of blood through his carotid arteries-why could he hear that now?

Then he understood: the shooting had stopped.

He quit digging and looked up.

They were all dead.

His hands went to Shaw's rifle again and lifted it. They were caked with clay; he could barely get his finger into the trigger well.

In the silence, only a soft breeze moved. The boughs of the smallest saplings rose and fell with it.

What had Shaw yelled? Eyes open for a weapon. Would the killer's gun be visible?

Travis swept his gaze left to right, slowly, trying not to focus on any one thing. With no other sound or movement among the trees, maybe he'd see something.

Then he did see something-but not in front of him.

At the bottom edge of his vision: a shimmer of blue. Against all instinct to keep his eyes on his surroundings, Travis looked down. His last handful of dirt had exposed a dime-sized portion of the Whisper's surface. The color swam across the face of the sphere. It looked like a little world, all ocean, all in twilight at the same time, somehow.

Something stirred in the trees.

He snapped his gaze up but saw no sign of movement. He couldn't even be sure which way the sound had come from. He pivoted, still kneeling, but saw nothing on any side.

The killer was being careful, now that it was just the two of them, but there was no question of how this would end. The question was how many seconds of his life remained.

If you have to wake it up…

He took no hope from the idea. Whatever the Whisper did, how could it possibly help him in this situation? This was far beyond any danger Paige could have foreseen.

Ten seconds? Did he have even that much time left? Ten seconds on his knees in the dirt, wondering if he'd feel it when the bullet fragmented in his head?

It wasn't much to lose.

He dropped his free hand from the rifle's barrel guard, drew the cellophane key from his pocket and plunged it into the hole, mashing it against the Whisper as he pulled it free of the dirt.

Light flared from the thing, searing blue, so brilliant that even over the pulse of his own fear a new thought dominated: it was a star, somehow he was holding the heart of a star Then that thought was gone as well, like a scrap of paper in jet exhaust, and his mind filled with a voice more beautiful than the blue light, and he realized he knew it, though he hadn't heard it in years: Emily Price, when she was seventeen and he was seventeen; Emily's voice in the humid dark of the tree house in her parents' yard, the night she'd told him it all felt right, that the moment was right But she wasn't saying any of that now.

"Behind you," she said, "two feet left of the double pine. He's drawing. Go. GO."

Travis spun, the rifle coming around in his right hand, stopping just before the twin pine that came up in a V from its roots, fifteen feet away.

He heard a man gasp-surprise laced with anger-and in the same moment he saw the impossible: a silenced pistol slipping into view as if from a fold of nothingness.

Travis fired.

The heavy rifle gutted the air, the cyclic recoil maybe three times harder than the M16's had been, pushing him off target almost immediately-but it didn't matter. Even over the blast-chatter of the rifle he heard the killer scream, and the pistol went sideways, end over end in a pitched arc. A second later the lowest bough of the double pine bent violently downward; it seemed to pin itself to the ground.

Travis let go of the trigger. Silence. Then he heard the man crying and fighting to breathe.

Travis looked at the sphere in his hand. The blue light was strobing now, the rhythm matching his own accelerated pulse.

Emily's voice cooed in his head, and he heard her giggle.