Let’s be pessimistic, Young had said. Assume forty-five effectives. That put maybe fifteen troops about three miles east of them, dropped at the archos lab to prevent a retreat, to secure any files or gear they’d missed, to help Major Hernandez and in effect become reinforced by his Marines — and Cam had assumed the other thirty or more all took part in the ambush.
Leadville, however, correctly figured that twenty riflemen in a box could decimate their small, lightly armed party. And as they drove into the waiting guns, the remaining ten troops had already been hustling toward their plane.
The three men wounded by Sergeant Olson were likely the difference between a squad pursuing them now and Leadville deciding instead to regroup. The wounded needed care. The trailer needed to be guarded and moved. And why bother risking more casualties in a building-by-building mouse hunt? Leadville knew they’d run out of air. Leadville also knew exactly where they were. The spy satellites must have tracked them since they’d left the lab.
It was over, all of it, and the feeling was like carrying Erin as she bled out with four thousand feet of elevation still between them and the barrier.
Cam saw the same weary dread in Ruth’s flushed, sweating face as she blinked up at Young. Todd had also frozen, his expression locked in a grimace, one glove at his helmet as if to fidget with the minor scarring on his nose.
But Young was shaking his head. “Update me on high ground.”
“Why don’t you give it up?” the pilot said, gently now. “There’s no way—”
“Update me on high ground!”
A code name. Did they have more planes heading in from the breakaways or maybe Canada? The entire fucking world was going to be here on top of them soon, until the fighting became a small war and cost a hundred lives, a thousand.
Cam was willing to take it that far to win.
“Last call was affirmative but I cannot confirm,” the pilot said. “They jammed my downlink as soon as the F-15s showed on radar. Either way it’s no good, man, they got us, we’re opening our doors—”
“Radios off!” Young shouted. “Everyone shut your radio off, they’ll track our broadcasts.”
Cam was willing but Todd was more rational.
“Sir,” Todd said carefully, “they’ve got us.” He did not obey the order, holding both hands wide now in a shrugging motion. “What difference—”
Ruth turned on her friend. “If there’s any chance—”
“Radios off,” Young repeated and Newcombe echoed it, checking their belts. “Radios off. Radios off.”
Todd was patient, as if speaking to madmen. He was, Cam realized, still trying to protect them. “Even if you bring in another plane there’s no way we’re going to sneak off somewhere to meet it. They can see everything. They can—”
“The satellites are down,” Young said, and the spike of exaltation that Cam felt was new energy and strength.
High Ground.
* * * *
Six hundred miles away in the heart of the fortress that was Leadville, a man — or maybe two, maybe a woman — had taken action that was almost certain to be traced back to its source. The number of technicians monitoring the spy sats was too small.
Maybe their co-conspirator was already on the run. Maybe he had already been identified and shot.
Sometime in the past hour, corrective sequences had been sent to the five KH-11 Keyhole satellites still under Leadville’s control, deliberately misfiring their jets, pushing the sats down into Earth’s atmosphere where they tumbled and burned.
* * * *
“Leadville is blind,” Young said, leading them farther south. A clump of skyscrapers rose from that horizon.
Ruth also seemed to have discovered some reserve of stamina. She kept up the pace but Todd needed prodding. Newcombe, still at the rear, repeatedly pressed the stock of his M16 against Todd’s air tanks with a mute chiming.
“But they’re not,” Todd argued. “They still have radar. Even if your plane comes in below this side of the mountains all the way from Canada, they have fighters—”
Young said, “Nobody’s flying in for us.”
“What?” Ruth slowed abruptly. “Then what are we—”
Young waved them close to a panel truck before he paused and swung around. His cheek had swollen, and the fine crack through his faceplate seemed to split his right eye into unmatching halves. “There are three hospitals and a med center right in this area of town,” he said. “We can find air, enough to get us to the mountains.”
“Christ.” The word was out before Cam knew it, an honest reaction but one he wished he’d suppressed.
“I know it’s a long shot,” Young said.
“Long shot!” Todd glanced at Cam for support. “Even if our tank fittings match up, even if you figure out how to make the switch without contamination—”
“We can rig something.”
“Even if you filled a car with a hundred extra tanks—”
Young did not use physical intimidation, although it would have been easy for him to gesture with his pistol or merely to lean too close. He did not even raise his voice. “You want to talk yourselves into giving up? Five of my guys are dead.”
“It’s just not feasible,” Ruth said, reluctantly, and she also turned to Cam. “How long do you think it would take us to reach elevation from here with the highways jammed?”
Cam didn’t answer — there was an idea in him — and Todd said, “It’s too far. It would take us days. I don’t know if we could even drive out of the city.”
“We have an hour,” Young told them. “Two or three hours before we really have to give up.”
Todd’s hand went to his faceplate again, his nose.
“Maybe we can take over the plane,” Newcombe said.
“We gotta try something.” Young studied each of them in turn. “We gotta see what we can do.”
“I, no—” Todd visibly shuddered. “They’ll know the hospitals are our only option! They’ll be there anyway just to raid for oxygen while they’re down here, medicine, all of—”
“Bullshit. They’re gonna have their hands full collecting their people and getting the lab equipment on board.”
“What if they leave us here?”
“It’s better if we give up,” Ruth said, slowly. “Better than if we get caught. And you were smart about Major Hernandez. They won’t hurt us.”
“They won’t hurt you,” Young corrected her.
“The vaccine,” Cam said. “Let me at least try to—”
Behind them, a high screech of metal echoed up the street like a living thing in flight.
* * * *
The paratroopers loped by in two pairs, the second trailing the first at an interval of nearly sixty seconds. What the noise had been Cam could only guess, the shriek of a damaged car door pushed out of the way, some other wreckage. It saved them.
So did Young, again, motioning for everyone to keep quiet after the first men had gone. The next two were well positioned to catch anyone emerging from hiding, thinking it was safe. Young seemed to expect them and he was right.
The optometrist’s office was a lousy place to disappear, down on the ground floor with a big window — a broad waiting area that doubled as display space, lined with mirrors and revolving stands of glasses. But the entrance was locked and the film of dust over the front room was undisturbed. They’d found their way inside through an open side door after taking cover behind a Dumpster.