Chapter 102
The decision came in the absence of alternatives. The soldier’s rifle was aimed at the rock. In seconds, he would circle, or his companions would flank, and the cover protecting them would become a trap. Charlotte had Claudia’s knife, the terrain, and more to lose than they did.
“Stay here,” she said. “Flat against the rock. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.”
He nodded. The dog whined softly and pressed closer.
Charlotte touched its head, brief and firm, and the animal seemed to understand.
She moved along the boulder’s western face where granite met scrub pine.
The trees broke her silhouette, and she dropped to a crawl, knife in her right hand, left finding purchase on stone and root.
The lead soldier had advanced within thirty yards of the boulder.
His attention was fixed on the rock’s eastern face where he expected his target to emerge, and the carbine stayed shouldered in the posture of a man scanning rather than firing.
Charlotte came around behind the scrub pine twenty feet from his position.
She could see the second soldier advancing from the southeast while the marksman held back at the meadow’s edge.
She took him from behind. The knife went in below the plate carrier where the armor ended, and she drove it upward with both hands and her full weight behind the thrust. The man made a wet exhale and went rigid against her. When his knees buckled, she lowered him with her free hand over his mouth.
The second soldier heard something and turned toward the scrub pine, carbine rising, but Charlotte was already moving through the trees ten yards to his left.
He found the body. Charlotte heard a sharp intake of breath, then the radio at his belt came to life.
The transmission died when she emerged from behind the nearest outcrop and closed the distance in four steps.
Charlotte held the knife and rode the motion, pinning his torso while his legs kicked and his hands clawed at her forearms through the hazmat suit.
The radio crackled at his belt, then the thrashing weakened and stopped.
She rolled free. Blood covered the front of her hazmat suit, and her hands shook on the knife handle with an adrenaline tremor she couldn’t control.
What struck her wasn’t horror or triumph but the absence of feeling.
The marksman had taken position behind a fallen log at the meadow’s eastern tree line.
Charlotte could see him through a gap in the aspens, prone and scanning the meadow with methodical patience.
She knew she needed to flank him. The direct approach was suicide, so she moved back into the trees along the meadow’s northern edge, where the canopy was thickest.
The dog emerged from the scrub pine twenty yards from where she crouched and pressed briefly against her leg before turning back toward the boulder where Mason waited.
He was still there, and the dog meant to keep him safe.
She circled north, then east, keeping to the trees where the ground was softest. The marksman hadn’t moved.
His attention remained fixed on the meadow and the granite outcrop where he believed his targets were hiding.
Charlotte came up behind the fallen log from the northeast. The marksman lay six feet away, cheek pressed to the rifle stock, breathing even behind his gear.
She took him the same way she’d taken the first. The knife went in below the plate carrier, angled upward, and she drove it home with both hands and her weight behind it.
He fought harder. He bucked beneath her, the rifle discharging into the log with a crack that echoed across the meadow, and his elbow found her ribs hard enough to drive the air from her lungs.
She held on. The knife stayed where she’d put it, and she rode his thrashing until it weakened and the forest went quiet again, except for the ringing in her ears and her own breathing inside the mask.
Three men were dead. It had taken less than five minutes from the moment she’d left Mason at the boulder.
She didn’t feel what she expected to feel.
There was no horror or satisfaction, only a hollow clarity.
She had killed three men to protect a child, and her mind accepted the math without asking emotion to justify it.
The blood on her hazmat suit had begun to dry, stiffening the material at the chest and sleeves, and she wiped the knife clean on pine duff before returning it to its sheath.
She searched the bodies with methodical detachment.
The lead soldier carried extra ammunition.
The second had a better water filter than the one in her pack.
The marksman’s rifle was beyond her skill.
On the marksman’s belt, she found the radio.
Military-grade and compact, with a frequency dial and encryption settings she didn’t understand but recognized as sophisticated.
The handset was warm from the man’s body heat, and when Charlotte pressed the transmit button, the unit lit up with a green status light and emitted a faint hum.
A voice came through. Distant, distorted by encryption, but unmistakably belonging to the same organization that had just died in a meadow in West Virginia.
Charlotte released the transmit button. The radio went silent, and she stood still with it in her gloved hand while the implications arranged themselves into something she could understand.
The SNA was communicating. They had working radios, encrypted channels, and a command structure that extended beyond the three men now lying dead in the pine duff.
She was holding one of their radios, which meant that somewhere between them and Colorado, someone was waiting for a transmission that would never arrive.
Or worse. Someone had already heard the rifle shot, and the encryption settings on the radio in her hand were the only thing standing between visibility and pursuit.