THE LIVE OAKS WERE OLD, rooted in centuries, and most of their lowest limbs hung well above her head. The trick was to throw the stones hard and far, as high as possible to gain distance, but not so high that they were dropped short by an intervening limb. She stepped out from shelter, hoping he wasn’t looking this way. She threw one stone, the second, grabbed the Taser XREP, and plummeted downhill in long, wild strides, making some noise that perhaps was covered by whatever racket her two missiles produced, fearful of a bullet but exhilarated because action was better than paralysis.
She passed one tree and skidded to a halt behind the next. A foot in front of her, an inpour of sunshine pooled on a drift of dead leaves. She stooped and, with her butane lighter, set the leaves ablaze.
There was no danger of a catastrophic forest fire; only an isolated grove of thirty or forty trees leafed through the glen. They were old, magnificent. It would be sad if they burned beyond recovery. But if she had to devastate the entire woodlet to save herself and her son, she would have no regret.
She rose, pocketed the lighter, and drew her pistol. With Taser in her left hand and Heckler in her right, she moved fast through the shrouding gloom, before the fire could flare bright enough to reveal her. Running, she squeezed off four rounds, counting on the reports and their echoes to cover what other sounds she made, aiming west, at nothing, so the muzzle flare wouldn’t be evident to him where he waited to the east of her. The crack of gunfire echoed off the walls of the glen, off the trees, making it hard to determine from which direction the shots issued, encouraging him to believe that she’d spotted him and that he needed to keep his head down.
At the foot of the slope, on the floor of the glen, Jane looked back and saw reflections of the flames fluttering among the trees, pulsing shadows interleaved with those wings of light. The blaze was already bright enough to draw her enemy’s attention and distract him if he raised his head.
She hurried east, avoiding shafts of incoming sunshine, glad that she was wearing dark colors, staying low as she raced toward the Range Rover, firing another six rounds to the west.
28
SOMEWHERE EAST OF IVAN PETRO, the clatter of dislodged stones carries with it a rustling mass of dead oak leaves.
He steps out from the tree where he’s been sheltering and scans the shaded glen. In the direction from which the sound arose, the bosky murk is deep, pierced by a few thin golden stalks of sunlight illuminating little, like the stems of radiant flowers that rise through the oak canopy to bloom out of sight above the trees.
The crack of a pistol reminds him that Jane was at the top of her class in marksmanship at Quantico. He drops to the ground in a crackle of dried weeds, a disturbance of gnats swarming his nose and teasing from him a single, regretted sneeze. He lies flat through three more shots, the sounds ricocheting from glen wall to glen wall, the sound suppressed and diffused by the trees.
After a silence, Ivan is about to lift his head to reconnoiter when she starts shooting again. Six rounds in rapid succession. The large number of shots convinces him that he isn’t the target, that she doesn’t have a fix on his position. Supposing she prefers a pistol with a standard ten-round capacity, she has just emptied the magazine without a target in sight, which means her purpose must be to keep his head down while she moves from one place to another.
She has spare magazines.
Spare magazines and a plan.
As he rises to his knees, his attention is drawn at once to the fire. Fifty or sixty feet to the west. Midway between the bottom of the glen and its north rim. A low, bright riffle of flames spreads not because of a breeze, for the air is still, but because it feeds on the rich fuel of dead leaves and weeds. Suddenly the fire leaps as high as two feet, flailing the nearby trees with orange light, and a snake of pale smoke uncoils like a cobra swaying to a flute.
This is a distraction, just as were the ten shots she fired. Just as were the rattling stones and the slithering leafslide that had for a moment drawn his attention eastward.
Distraction from what?
29
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE GLEN, Jane crouched on the south side of the Range Rover, screened from her adversary, wherever he might be on the north slope. She put down the Taser XREP. She ejected the depleted magazine from the Heckler and snapped a fresh one into place and holstered the gun.
Success now depended on speed, disconcerting the big man with another development while he was still trying to decide what to make of the first fire and the gunshots, before he committed to some course of action that she didn’t want him to take.
She flipped open the small port on the rear quarter panel of the Rover and twisted the cap off the fuel tank. She withdrew the knotted socks from the front of her jeans and stuffed them into the gas tank filler neck, using the stiff plastic zip-tie to work them into the tank itself. When the gasoline began to travel by exosmosis through the socks, she could smell the fumes swelling in strength.
She waited until the fabric ought to be saturated. Gripping the dry end of the stiff plastic zip-tie, she pulled the makeshift torch out of the tank, being careful to avoid dripping fuel on herself, taking care not to get any whatsoever on her right hand. Shut the tank cap. Closed the flip door.
Turning away from the Rover, she peered into the darkest portion of the glen: the nearby section of the south slope leading upward under a dense thatching of limbs and leaves. The land seemed less steep here than on the north wall of the glen, but the footing could still be treacherous.
With the rim of the glen defined by a narrow, ragged band of light far ahead, with blackness close on all sides, she ascended, dangling the dripping mass of cotton socks at arm’s length, to her left side. There seemed to be no grass or weeds here where the sun seldom penetrated. Oak-tree sheddings crunched underfoot, but she thought her would-be captor must be too far away to hear. Although surface roots caused her to stumble, she kept her balance, quickly venturing forty or fifty feet.
She dropped the fuel-sodden socks in dry leaves and retreated ten feet and, with her right hand, touched the butane flame to yet more leaves downslope from the crude incendiary device. When this new fuel kindled, before the light could swell bright enough to reveal her, she hurried to the Rover and crouched there once more.
She watched this second fire quicken low and at first fitfully until it found the drizzle of gasoline that she had left when making her way up the hill, whereupon it flared into a bright zipper and sizzled directly to the source. Flames leaped high, like a demonic manifestation, and fell back, but then surged again, bits of burning leaves spiraling up on rising thermals, carried into darkness where they quivered like a swarm of fireflies.
She looked west and saw that the first fire was spreading toward the north rim but also downhill toward the floor of the glen, not yet climbing into the trees, though some limbs were festooned with smoke like beards of Spanish moss.
He was patient, certain that if he hunkered down and waited, she would make a mistake and reveal herself. His patience had given her time to upend the situation, rattle his expectations.
He was a very big man, and big men in his line of work tended to be overconfident, to have an unconscious belief that they were all but invincible. Some also had a tendency to conflate strength with wit, attributing to themselves greater intelligence and cunning than they possessed.