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“I saw a fire extinguisher somewhere,” Sovern said. “But only one.”
They decided that Cartwrightwould climb the slope above the back of the motel, taking her M4 with her. Letty would go out to the highway at the end of the motel driveway, move back into the brush and watch the passing traffic for people who might be scouting the place. Kaiser would stay at the motel as the backstop.
Kaiser: “We’ve got those two Minis we took from the Russians at the SkyPort. We give one to Letty and one to either Jane or Patty, whoever is most familiar with them. Probably Jane—we’ll want Patty to stay with her cameras. That’d give us some heavy firepower all the way around.”
Letty: “Yes. If they walk in, if they try to sneak in, we’ll hear them. If they try to crash in, with vehicles, we’ll have automatic weapons on them from all sides. It’d be like a car wash, but with bullets.”
They all looked at her and Kaiser shook his head. “Sometimes...”
Cartwright: “Don’t say it. It’ll just piss her off.”
Letty: “What?”
For the first night’s watch,Letty, Cartwright, and Kaiser would carry three of the radios with their earbuds. Letty suggested they hitthe vending machines for something to eat until the shift change, which they decided should be at nine o’clock in the morning, giving Longstreet and Bunker a chance to get some decent sleep.
Cartwright and Kaiser were okay with the vending machines, but vetoed anything in crinkly bags, like potato chips: they wound up emptying Oreos into Ziploc bags, which could be opened silently.
After more talk about tactics, Cartwright left to climb the slope in back. “Letty, listen,” Kaiser said. “You don’t want to move, you don’t want to make any kind of artificial noise. Make sure the radio only feeds through the earbuds...”
“When I was a hunter, I had rabbits and deer walk up to me,” Letty said, interrupting. “You take care of yourself, I’ll take care of myself.”
Kaiser stopped, then said, “Sorry. Sometimes, that whole Stanford California-girl personality makes me forget where you come from.”
Letty left himat the motel and walked downhill along the edge of the driveway, until she got to the street. She found a sunken place between two slender trees, which gave her cover, but from which she could see down to the highway without moving her head.
The night wasn’t exactly silent; it was calm, a barely perceptible wind filtering through the trees, ruffling fallen leaves. Cars and pickups went by at irregular intervals, fewer and fewer as the night deepened. None seemed to be doing recon, as far as she could tell. At four o’clock, she had to stretch her legs; at five, she ate three Oreos, twisted the lid off a bottle of orange soda, and took a sip, wrinkling her nose at the sweetness. Would have gone for a root beer, but the machine didn’t have any.
At six, light was seeping into the woods. Usually, the hour before dawn was the time when you’d see small animals and deer up and moving around. She saw nothing, heard nothing out of place.
At six-thirty, dawn, more vehicles began passing by her hideout, almost all going east, apparently headed for jobs in Santa Barbara. That continued until nine o’clock; she hadn’t heard or seen anything worrisome on the roads. The radio buzzed, and Cartwright said, “Heading in. I think the hillside is good for now. We need to get Jane up here and Patty out where Letty is.”
Kaiser came up: “I’m not too bad, I could take either spot, for a while...”
“You need to sleep just like we do,” Letty said. “We need to be wide-awake all night.”
“All right. I know Jane’s up. I haven’t seen Patty. I’ll get them started out there,” Kaiser said.
Bunker showed uptwenty minutes later, carrying her handbag; Letty gave her the Mini Uzi and asked if she could handle it.
“I’ve seen them before, never shot one—but yeah, I can handle it. If worse comes to worst, it’ll scare the heck out of anybody who it’s pointed at. Get their heads down, give me a chance to run.”
“My exact thought,” Letty said.
With Bunker settled into the spot between the trees, Letty walked up the driveway to the motel. She was tired from the stress and motion of the past three days, and ready for bed. She met Kaiser and Cartwright in the motel lounge; they were talking to Sovern, who said, “We need food. Lots of it. I gotta work, but if we could get a couple people to run down there, hit a supermarket... we still got that microwave Paul bought.”
“Sooner the better,” Letty said. “We might still be good for a while.”
“I’ll go,” Kaiser said.
“I’ll ride shotgun,” Cartwright said. “Maybe check with the rest of the crew and see who wants what. Get a list going.”
They all went down to the yoga room, got a list; Baxter claimed to have lost eight pounds, said he was starving to death, and somebody else said Baxter had broken into the vending machine and free candy, cookies, and chips were pouring out. “It’s like the revolution is here.”
Baxter volunteered to go shopping with Kaiser and Cartwright. They left, and Letty went down to the room she shared with Cartwright; she’d just opened the door when she heard somebody shouting, “Yes! Yes! Woo-hoo!” in the yoga room. She thought about investigating, but similar explosions happened every couple of hours. When the tumult died away, she went to bed instead.
She was nearly asleep when there was a knock at her door. Sovern was in the hallway, and he said, “We got a break. Emmy located a train guy in Belarus, in Gomel, the town of Gomel, which is north of Kyiv. Big rail center. He apparently knows she was spear phishing, but it looks like he’s pro-Ukraine. He’s letting Jack download the guts of his whole system.”
“How soon will you be able to actually... you know, mess with trains?” Letty asked.
