“I need the glasses,” he told Payton. “Hurry.”
The techie didn’t answer. He seemed oblivious to Scarborough, paralyzed with shock.
Scarborough reached out to take the binocs, but Payton’s grasp was unyielding. He pulled harder, snatched them from Payton’s petrified fingers, wiped the frost off them.
A glance through the eyepieces immediately told him what had induced Payton’s mental disconnect.
The cloud was not smoke but a storm of powdery reddish-brown sand. And the object kicking it up as it raced ever closer was something that should not have been in the pass, the valleys, nor anywhere on the continent. Not for any conceivable reason.
A storm, that’s it. Scarborough’s thought burst through the door of his memory with haunting irony. The fear arrived an instant later. A desert storm.
“Alan, talk to me.” Bradley had inched close, her arm brushing against him. “Tell me what you see out there.”
Scarborough held up a hand.
“Wait,” he said. “I need to be positive.”
But that was a lie. Scarborough knew what he saw in spite of his initial disbelief. What he really needed was to pull himself together.
When he’d served with the Corps in the Persian Gulf War, special forces units had used tricked-out dune buggies called Fast Attack Vehicles in advance recon and hit-and-run combat missions. Stripped down to their welded tubular frames and roll bars, their low-slung carriages left virtually no discernible signature for enemies to sniff and chase, which led to their reputation as the earthbound equivalents of Stealth bombers. Accommodating two riders in front and a third in an elevated rear gunner’s chair, they held various configurations of roof-mounted antitank tubes, forward and rear machine guns, grenade launchers, and side compartments for gear, small arms, and ammo storage. Back in the day, Scarborough and a buddy had taken an FAV for a workout in the desert and gone belting over dunes and trenches at an uninterrupted eighty-five miles per hour.
Scarborough inhaled sharply, all nerves. He was sweating under his innermost layer of apparel. Sweating torrents in the below-zero cold. The wagons had since been redubbed Light Strike Vehicles and given a bunch of munitions upgrades that made them even deadlier, but call them whatever you wanted, one of those swift automotive killing machines was highballing straight at him. He had no time to wonder who had launched it. The vehicle was fully manned and armed. That was enough for him to know his party was in desperate trouble.
He lowered the binocs, looked urgently around for cover.
Cerberus’s steep grade was banded by a thirty-foot zone of loose, pebbly scree. No protection on that side. A large block of stone heaving up out of the sand near the fractured left slope was their only bet.
Scarborough grabbed Bradley’s elbow. “We have to move, get to that outcrop.”
She eyed the oncoming assault vehicle, emitted a breathless gasp of confusion and horror. The LSV had almost reached them. Long kerchiefs of sand streamed back from its spinning tires. The crewmen wore crash helmets, face masks, snow goggles, and wind-resistant camouflage outfits that melted seamlessly into the terrain. Scarborough made the heavy weapon sandwiched between the antitank tubes on its roof as an M-2.50-caliber machine gun. The man in the gunner’s station was gripping its black metal handlebar triggers. In front of the passenger seat’s occupant was a pintle-mounted M-60 machine gun — smaller but no less capable of blowing a human being to bits and pieces.
“My God.” Bradley was frantic. “That car… Alan… the guns on it…”
“Just come on!” Scarborough tugged hard on her arm, looked over at Payton. He was still a blank, lock-limbed mannequin. “Both of you, let’s go or we’re dead!”
His shouted warning finally snapped Payton out of his daze. Scarborough motioned him toward the outcrop and then broke for it, clinging to Bradley’s arm, half dragging her along at his side. A slight woman, she weighed about 115 pounds under the bulk of her packs and clothing, and would be unable keep pace without help.
Scarborough and Bradley had almost reached the big protuberance of rock, Payton trailing by a step or two, when their attackers opened fire. The rattle of the machine gun was deafening as its ammunition slapped the ground at their backs. Scarborough shoved Bradley behind the outcrop, dove after her, landed on his belly. He heard another crackle of gunfire on the other side, a grunt, and pushed himself to his knees, dirt spilling from his trouser legs. A hurried glance around the rock’s edge confirmed what he’d feared. Payton was sprawled on the ground, his garments ruptured with bullet holes, steam rising into the air from his wounds. There was blood on him, around him, everywhere.
Warm red blood flowing from his gaudy red coat into the parched-red cold-desert sand.
Scarborough dropped back into cover, looked at Bradley.
“You okay?” he whispered.
She stared at him wordlessly as if the question hadn’t registered. Then a shadow fell over their huddled forms. The LSV had jolted to a halt just beyond the rock, practically on top of them.
He reached out and gripped her arm again. “Are you okay?”
This time she nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Listen, Shevaun. We’ve got to surrender to these people.”
Bradley seemed astonished by the idea. She rejected it with a shake of her head.
“No, no, we can’t,” she said. “We don’t even know what they want.”
“Doesn’t matter. We want to live.”
She hesitated. “Payton… did you see… is he…?”
“It’s too late for him.” Scarborough heard the LSV’s engine purring with soft, certain threat. “Giving ourselves up is our only chance. But I won’t make the call. We both need to decide this.”
She took a couple of sharp, agitated breaths.
Scarborough waited. He could hear the engine purring. It sounded like an eager jungle cat.
“All right,” she said. “I’m with you.”
He saw her start to tremble, reached out for her hand, held it. “When we stand up, put your arms above your head. And keep them there. Okay?”
Bradley nodded.
“Don’t let go of me,” she said. “I can do this. But don’t let go.”
Scarborough eased his head above the edge of the rock. The vehicle had stopped not five feet away, its crew facing him in impassive silence. Sunlight glinted off the four racked headlamps on its impact bar. He tried to keep his eyes off the machine guns positioned above them, off Payton’s limp body on the ground below. Tried to tunnel his gaze onto the man in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t sure he could continue suspending his panic otherwise.
“We’re American researchers!” he shouted. “We have no weapons!”
More silence except for the steady idling hum of the vehicle’s engine.
Scarborough swallowed past a lump in his throat. “Do you understand? We’re unarmed!”
There was another tick of silence. Then the LSV’s driver turned to the man in the passenger seat, spoke to him in a language Scarborough didn’t understand, turned back toward the outcrop.
“Move away from the rock,” he said. His English was thickly accented. “Now.”