Ling was finally able to get someone back on the radio. "What's your status?" she asked.

Antoine answered. "It is good to hear your voice," he said, panting.

"We are on our way. What is your status?"

"Not good, I'm afraid. I hope you have good news."

Ling read off coordinates to Antoine. "This is a place northeast of your position where the canyon reaches the road. If you can get there, we'll be waiting to pick you up. It's as close as we're going to be able to get without walking. There are no other paths."

"I understand," Antoine said breathlessly. "Stand by . . . "

Lorenzo's voice squawked over the radio next. "Okay, I'm looking at those coordinates you gave us. s.h.i.t, that's a long way. Are you sure there's nowhere closer?"

"I'm positive, Chief," Reaper said, stomping Ling's transmission before she could reply. "I'm looking at maps and footage from Little Bird. That's the closest place anywhere near your path of travel where you'll even come close to the road. There's another spot up a different canyon from there, but it's even farther away from us, and it looks like it'd be a pretty steep climb to get up to road level. The coordinates Ling gave you are your best bet."

"Acknowledged," Lorenzo said. "Do you still have eyes on us?"

"Little Bird's running low on fuel, but I'll be your eyes in the sky for as long as I can. The Exodus guys will probably catch up with us before we get to the rendezvous point. We'll all be there."

"Yes we will," Jill said suddenly, transmitting before Lorenzo could reply. "You d.a.m.ned well better get there, Lorenzo. I mean it."

The radio was silent for a moment. "It's good to hear your voice, honey," he said.

"Hang on," Jill said, sounding like she was trying to keep her fear under control. "We're on our way!"

Chapter 24: Pick a Direction and Run.

LORENZO.

The Mountain "You're alive. Good," Antoine said as Shen and I caught up.

"We got a few of them, but they're still coming," I bent over, put my hands on my knees and retched into the snow. Running at this alt.i.tude was killer. I stood, wiped my mouth, and noted, "Fajkus is awake?" Ibrahim's second in command was sitting on a rock, his face in his hands.

"Yes, but he is incoherent. He took a severe blow to the head," Antoine nodded toward him. "He awoke screaming, talking about . . . things coming out of the silo. Now he is not speaking to anyone."

I watched as Fajkus wrapped his arms around his chest and began to rock back and forth, glancing nervously side to side. I had seen people lose it like that before, especially back in Africa, brains just overloaded with awful s.h.i.t. "He's sh.e.l.l-shocked." In the light of my magnified vision, I could see that the other survivors were deeply disturbed by Fajkus's behavior, their eyes shining bright, wide, and afraid.

"No," Shen shook his head. "He's one of our most experienced men."

Antoine agreed. "Fajkus has seen more battle than any two of us put together. He has been fearless before certain death many times, and his courage has inspired the rest of us. No . . . this is something else."

I felt an uncomfortable shiver, and it wasn't from the cold. "Don't matter what it is, because if we don't keep moving, we're dead." I strode over to Fajkus, grabbed him by the sides of his head, and jerked his face up. He looked confused. "Hey. Listen up." I slapped him, hard. This seemed to startle the others.

And I learned why, really quickly. Fajkus moved, way faster than I thought a stocky fellow could, one hand clamped around my throat as he jerked me forward, and something cold and metallic slammed into the side of my head, a pistol apparently, as I heard him c.o.c.k the hammer.

"No, you listen, a.s.shole. I'm just f.u.c.king fine," Fajkus snarled as he screwed the gun into my ear hole. "As fine as you could be considering that I just met the f.u.c.king devil himself. If you had seen whatever the f.u.c.k I just saw, then you would need a moment too." He sounded calm, rational, but there was something just beneath that, something that indicated that this man was well and truly freaked out. "I saw h.e.l.l open up and take a s.h.i.t on my men, on my friends, and now Jihan is going to catch us, and swallow our souls, because apparently we're walking, because your girlfriend betrayed us and left us to die, and if I remember right . . . " he shoved the gun in even harder, and the hand around my throat clenched off even more precious air, "you were the one that said we could trust her."

"Sir, please, Lorenzo is on our side," Antoine said calmly. "We do not have time for this."

Fajkus's eyes flashed down as he felt my knife press up between his legs. "I'll make time," I growled back as I put enough force to indicate that I was feeling real serious. The pressure released enough from my throat to let me talk. "Get your hands off me."

He let go, and lowered his gun. "Well, I guess you are walking too, so at least you aren't in league with that Montalban Exchange b.i.t.c.h."

"No, I've been taking turns carrying your unconscious a.s.s up a mountain for hours. If I was walking, I would already be out of here." I rubbed my throat, but I didn't put away my knife. "What did you see back there? What happened to Ibrahim?"

He shook his head, mind distant. It took him a long moment to respond. "I don't . . . don't really know. All I know is that Jihan is more dangerous than the Council knew, more than Ariel expected."

I had no idea who that was, but Fajkus was a man whose faith had been shaken.

"And now this is all that remains of Exodus' warriors." He gestured at the survivors, ragged and tired. "We are ruined."

There was random gunfire behind us as the soldiers mistook a menacing tree for one of us. The noise was way too close.

"Keep moving," Antoine ordered, unconsciously taking command. The mystery would have to wait. Dawn was coming fast.

We plodded forward. Roland and Phillips were behind, setting up another ambush. They had demanded a turn. I had turned my borrowed night vision over to Roland and was stumbling along through the shadows beneath the trees, Svetlana again on my back. But it wouldn't matter for too much longer. Dawn was coming fast.

Already we had moved from real darkness to a fuzzy gray reflecting off the snow. Last night, the sky had been brilliantly clear, but now a fat wall of clouds was coming in from the north, the direction we were traveling. We hoped it brought with it fresh snow and the possibility of evading our pursuers. The weather was actually warming up.

According to the map, we had crossed the highest point of the canyon during the night, and it was mostly downhill from here on out. There was one more bulge on the topographical map, but after that we were heading into Mongolia. Jill would be there waiting. As it stood now, we only had one option: forward. That also meant that the bad guys had a pretty simple path to follow in order to catch up.

Gunfire echoed behind us, bouncing wildly off the mountain walls. Roland and Phillips had sprung their ambush. Hopefully they would live through it. Antoine was on point, and he glanced up, listening, trying to ascertain how far away the shooting was. Shen was helping Fajkus, who was stumbling indomitably along, but the head wound had left him dizzy and uncoordinated.

Now that it was quickly brightening, I could see our surroundings better. I had no doubt that Jill would think that it was beautiful, a pristine, virgin-white, winter wonderland. The canyon was only a mile wide at any given point, and we were trekking along the bank of a river choked with ice flows. Sometime during the night we had lost enough alt.i.tude to be back in a real forest and the air smelled clean. For a city boy like me that was kind of scary. At one point, I noticed that there were wolves watching us from the trees. Giant, scary dogs, like Reaper had read about on the internet. They looked at us curiously before moving on to eat something without guns.

"-in. Come in, Lorenzo." The chirping of my radio startled me so badly that I almost dropped the sleeping Svetlana in the snow. She snorted loudly in my ear.

"Jill?" I gasped, my throat parched and aching.

"Oh, thank G.o.d. You're alive," she said. "Where are you?"

"We're most of the way through the canyon, heading into Mongolia. We're close to the coordinates Ling gave us."

"We're almost there. Reaper's got the Little Bird in the air . . . He's looking at the guys following you right now. He says he can walk you in to us before they catch up."

I was too tired to think. "Careful, the Montalbans will find you." My words were slurred.

"Reaper says he can handle that. He started to talk about trigonometry and the curvature of the Earth or something, I almost drove the truck off a cliff because it put my brain to sleep. Keep going. You're almost there. Reaper can walk you in."

"Awesome," I spoke up so the others could hear. "Guys, we're almost to our ride."

"Excellent," Antoine said just before the bullet hit him.

FFOOoooooommmm!

The shot had come from quite far away. It took the sound a moment to catch up. Antoine fell into the snow, clutching his side.

"Sniper!" Shen shouted as he and Fajkus dove to the ground. Svetlana gasped in pain as I took us down.

"I'm hit!" Antoine shouted, scrambling through the snow and finally coming to rest behind a log.

"Where is he?" Fajkus said. I raised my head and scanned the mountainside. They had to have been paralleling our path on the mountain above us, there was no other way.

The bark on the tree next to my head exploded in a shower of splinters and pulp. "d.a.m.n it!" I flinched back down. "I don't see him!"

"Antoine. Status?"

The big man didn't answer.

Shen leapt up, heedless of danger, and dove toward where Antoine was hiding. The two men were like brothers. He was only up for a split second, then back down. A bullet whizzed through the s.p.a.ce that he had been occupying, sounding like an angry bee on steroids. The sound of the muzzle blast came a moment after.

Fajkus popped his head up to look, and the snow next to him erupted. That one had been very close. The Exodus leader began to speak into his radio, trying to raise Phillips and Roland to tell them to take cover.

Svetlana was lying on her back, Sako across her chest, b.l.o.o.d.y and bandaged left hand hugging the rifle close, as she calmly scanned the mountainside. "Six hundred meters," she stated flatly.

"You see him?" I was scared to lift my head again.

"Not yet," she grimaced as she rolled over and began to low crawl into the trees, dragging her broken legs uselessly behind her. "I could tell by time takes sound to travel."

"What are you doing?"

"What I do best," she said.

"You can't even walk."

"I don't need to," she glared at me.

"Let me do it. You're missing fingers."

She held up her right hand, and then extended her middle finger. "I still have all these. Are you a trained sniper?"

"No."

"Then shut up and spot."

I was kneeling behind a rotted stump, now damp as the temperature, by some miracle, was moving slightly above freezing. Svetlana was on her belly, ten feet ahead of me, covered in pine needles, and scanning the mountainside through her scope. I was amazed how far we had crawled, how fast.

"Reaper, come in."

"Yeah, Chief?"

"Do you have us on thermal yet?"

"I lost you under the trees. It doesn't have X-ray vision."

"I've got a sniper on the mountain approximately six hundred meters to the northeast. Find him, Reaper. Fajkus?"

"Go." Everybody was switched on to the same channel now.

"Svetlana is going to try to take this guy. As soon as he's distracted, you three need to move. We'll catch up." The main body of soldiers had to be almost on top of us by now. "Where're the Mormons?"

"Almost there," said one of them over the radio. I couldn't tell which because the speaker was breathing really hard. "The soldiers are right behind us. Roland took a round."

"Shut up . . . Just a flesh . . . wound . . ." Roland was gasping. "Jerk."

This was going to be close.

"Lorenzo," Svetlana hissed. "There are three places I think he could be hiding. I need your help."

"Okay," I answered, scanning the mountainside, waiting for her to tell me which spot to watch.

"When I tell you to . . . stand up."

"Are you nuts?"

"Not for a long time, stupid. Just get up and move to side. When he shoots at you, I kill him."

"That sounds like a good plan," I said sarcastically. But we didn't have much time. "Okay."

Svetlana let out a long breath. "Now."

Despite my brain telling me not to, and every fiber of my being screaming no, I stood, ran to the side, and dropped. No shot came.

"Did you see him?" I gasped.

"No. Do it again."

"What? No. Screw that."

"Not from same spot. He will blow your brains out from there. Crawl first. Then move when I tell you."

Son of a b.i.t.c.h. I started low-crawling, slush moving up my sleeves and down my shirt.

"Now."

Aw man. I stood, and it took my brain a split second to process that the burning sensation I felt across my scalp was a hot piece of lead moving at just over 3,000 feet per second. My legs buckled without me even telling them to.

Her big rifle roared.

"Got him," Svetlana said as she worked the bolt. "Lorenzo, are you alive?"