Chapter 4
Forty minutes after Morrison's team began moving through the broken ground below, I saw the heat signature.
It was northeast of their route, and it was not moving the way heat signatures move when they belong to animals. It stopped twice in open ground where no animal stops in that kind of heat. Then it held position.
I keyed the radio. "Heat signature northeast of your route. It is not an animal."
Vance's voice came back with the specific tone of a man who wants to challenge something but hasn't decided yet whether he can afford to. "You're sure?"
"It stopped twice," I said. "And now it is waiting. Animals do not wait like that in open heat."
Morrison rerouted the team south. It cost eleven minutes, and I heard Vance's jaw tighten in the silence that followed the route change, the particular quality of silence that a man produces when he disagrees but doesn't have the counter-argument to say so out loud. I logged the heat signature, watched it shift as the team's new route took them out of its detection range, and kept looking.
That was when I started finding the others.
A shooter on a secondary structure, already oriented toward the approach vector Morrison's team had just abandoned. Two men flat in the drainage channel where the alternate route would have deposited my team if the heat signature hadn't sent them south. A man on the roof of the main building, half-covered by a canvas that matched the concrete's color almost exactly, transmitting in irregular bursts that I now understood were coordinated to our movement.
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This was not a compound waiting to be extracted from. This was a kill zone waiting to be occupied.
I gave Morrison the full picture over comms, position by position, azimuth by azimuth. The radio went quiet while he spread the map in the dirt below. I watched the shadow line moving across the rock face that was currently hiding them and I did the calculation. Twelve minutes before the sun exposed them.
