Page 27 of Flames and Blood

“Alive?” Kent asks.

“Alive if that’s quicker. Dead if it isn’t. I’m not spending time on it either way.”

“Understood.”

I point up at the shelf of rock on the left side of the road, twenty feet above where I’m standing.

“You’re up there. You can see the road coming up the grade, and you can see the turn.”

Then I point across.

“Meyer, the other side. That ledge where the wall steps out. Same view, other angle.”

Meyer looks at it and nods once.

“Neither of you makes a move until that vehicle stops rolling. Avoid gunfire, if you can. And nobody shoots at the vehicle at all. Not the box, not the tires, not the cab. There’s a woman chained inside, and a round through that wall goes somewhere I can’t control.”

“And if there’s a second vehicle?” Meyer says.

“Then it’s yours. Both of you. Anything that comes around that turn behind the transport is your problem, and you keep it behind the transport. You pull it back down the road, away from the box. You don’t let it come up level with the box, and you don’t fight it standing next to the box.”

“Why not level with it?” Kent asks.

“Because if they open fire, they’ll be endangering the van. Draw their fire away.”

“Away from her,” Kent says. “Whatever happens. Got it.”

“That’s the one rule underneath the whole thing. Whatever happens, she’s not to be harmed.”

“What if you’re the one in the way?” Meyer asks.

“Then I’m in the way.”

He accepts that faster than I should be comfortable with.

“Once they’re out of the way, I go to the back of the box and get the door open,” I say. “You two are still working while I do it. Nobody comes up that road behind me.”

“How long do you need at the door?”

“I won’t know until I’ve got my hand on it.”

Kent looks up at the rock shelf, then back down the road, then at me. “And what if we miss them? Do we get another go further on?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because when they’re out of this pass, the road opens up and their destination is a clear drive from there. Once they arrive, I’m betting things will be a lot tighter.”

“So this is it,” Meyer says.

“This is it.”

“And once you’ve got her?” Kent says.

“Then we’re carrying her off a mountain in the dark.”

He laughs, once, and it’s mostly nerves, and that’s fine. Nerves before is better than nerves during.