“Two trucks left, with the leadership. Aim at the door of the lead truck and put fifteen or twenty rounds through it, keep ten or so in case you need them. Visualize how they’ll be sitting inside. I’ll take the second truck. If it gets past me, dump the rest of your rounds into it.”
“Wonder where they are?”
“Coming . . . I can hear them . . .”
Hear them but not see them. The trucks were rolling down the hill without lights, both black, hard to see.
Kaiser said, “Here . . .”
Letty saw the lead truck creeping toward them in the dark, fifteen feet away. She half-stood, to clear the weeds around their hole, and, when the truck was directly across from her, began firing the AR, the gun leaping in her hands, bangbangbangbangbang, half a mag going out in three or four seconds.
The truck rolled to the left, rudderless, Kaiser’s shotgun banging along a few feet farther up the hill, louder but much slower than the AR, and then, her ears ringing and Kaiser shouting, “I don’t know, he may have bailed when you opened up . . . I’m going around the back of the truck, watch this side, watch this side.”
Letty shouted “Yeah” and pointed the AR at the front left headlight of the second truck, looking for motion. Five seconds later, BOOM, then Kaiser’s voice, “Never mind” and “Stay right where you are. I got a guy down here, I’m checking him . . . Okay, I’m moving up to the first truck . . .”
A moment later: “We got three down, no sign of Hawkes.”
Letty shouted, “Take care, take care, she was in the military . . .”
They moved around the truck, covering each other, and eventually heard Rodriguez shouting down the hill, “Who is that? Who is that down there?”
“We’re looking for Jael,” Letty shouted back.
“She’s gone. She’s gone. She ran down there . . .”
* * *
Letty took her phone from her pocket, turned on the flashlight app, shined it into the first truck. Duran and Crain were there, exceptionally dead. She’d put seventeen rounds through the pickup door and had shredded the two men.
Low lay in the dirt beside his truck. He’d been hit in the leg with a solid slug, but had managed to get out of the truck, gripping his pistol, when Kaiser came around the end of the truck with buckshot shells loaded and shot him in the stomach. He was dying as Letty came up, but wasn’t quite gone.
His now paper-white face, untouched by the violence, turned up at her and he groaned and said, “。 . . Can’t make it here.”
And he died.
* * *
Letty and Kaiser spent the next ten minutes moving around the bottom of the hill, one covering the other, until they decided that they were clear. Hawkes, Ochoa told them, had a violent argument with the three men about the bridge explosions, and left them to run down the hill to the gun range track, where they saw her catch up with one of the last departing pickups.
Letty said, “What about your satellite feed?”
Rodriguez said, “We can’t transmit, the fuckers shot out our cables to the dish. We can still record, though . . .”
Ochoa lifted her camera to her shoulder and turned on her light, and Letty said “No,” unconsciously gesturing with the Staccato. Ochoa put the camera down but turned away, smiling.
Kaiser said, “If the cops have pulled out that roadblock . . .”
“Then where are they?” Letty said.
They both looked up the road and saw no headlights coming toward them, only the taillights of people fleeing the town, well toward the top of the long hill.
Rodriguez: “Did you kill those guys?”