Then she raised her head over the wing, swung the rifle up in a smooth, practiced movement, every reluctant hunting trip with her parents singing in her nerves, living in the memory of her muscles. Her dad liked her to practice things, like aiming a rifle, over and over again. Until the memory was deep inside her, had become physical. He’d kneel beside her, sweating from the pain in his knee: wanting her to be perfect, strong, the warrior he didn’t get to be anymore. It was a pain. Literally. Her mom was the same, obsessed with strength. Emily guessed it was one of the things that had drawn them together.
Still, that discipline was coming in useful now.
Emily looked down the scope, found the first man, twenty yards away. He wasn’t looking at her; the soot would keep any gleam from the flames off her scope, she hoped.
She didn’t want to kill him. She aimed at his leg, his thigh, tracked it as he moved. She let out the breath she’d been holding but didn’t breathe in again. Perfectly still. If she hit his femoral artery, he’d die, but his calf was too small a target.
Half squeeze on the trigger. Breath still held. She thought of something her dad had said: It isn’t until you’re right there, in the theater of war, that you find out if you can do it. Whether you could shoot a man; whether you had that coldness in the core of you. Whether all your training was for nothing.
This wasn’t war, but it was close.
She felt no hesitation, just calm.
She centered the man’s leg in the scope, dimmed by the ash but perfectly visible. She thought of Aidan, and getting him to Anchorage, and then to safety, forever. She thought of Pastor Norcross, quoting the Psalms. “Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the wicked.”
She was rescuing Aidan, wasn’t she?
Fire.
The gun was well looked after. It kicked, but the bullet flew true; the man went down with a shriek, the other three men swinging around to look at him instead of looking up toward Emily, which was a mistake.
Well, she thought. It turns out I can do it.
I’m cold.
I’m ice.
She just missed the second guy she took a shot at—he moved as she fired.
She allowed herself to pause, to think—but only for an instant. The other three men were running now, keeping low, moving up the hill toward her. Fast. She was impressed. Training over fear, after that initial confusion.
Through the scope, she could see a yellow tank attached to the struts of the helicopter, about the size of a big courier box. Preparation. A long search. Impossible to return to base and refuel. So they had brought fuel with them. It was a spare tank.
She let out another breath, held the scope steady, aimed at the yellow cube. And fired.
The explosion was a breath made manifest, the whole field of snow a lung: there was a crump! as it sucked in cold air, and then the shock of the exhale, the shivering boom! as the helicopter stopped being and became a ball of fire instead; a primary explosion and then an even bigger one, as the main fuel tank caught.
The rearmost of the three men in white was thrown to the ground, face-first; he didn’t move at all. Dead, Emily guessed, but she wasn’t sure. She felt a lurch in her stomach at the thought, like the world had come away from its hinges and was swinging wildly. The other two men turned in shock, guns waving uselessly at their sides.
Emily, ears ringing, ducked down next to Aidan and Bob.
“What the hell?” said Bob, face white and drained of blood, because of the pain, she imagined. “Who are they? Who turned you into Rambo Girl?”
“Later,” said Emily.
“What?” said Bob. “We’re getting shot at and you want to explain later?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because we’re being shot at.”
His eyes closed for an instant; then he opened them again. “OK…so what now?”
“I have no idea,” said Emily.
“But you…all of that…you just did…”
“I grabbed a gun. I didn’t have a plan.”
Aidan tapped her on the arm. “I do,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
“YOU DO?” SAID Bob, turning. Skeptical but hopeful too, deep down. That was Emily’s whole mode of being—the skeptical part anyway; it made her warm to him. She was working on the hopeful part, since Aidan. She still hoped, even now, that she could get him out of all this.
“The wing,” said Aidan. “Use it as a sled. To go downhill.” He was hugging the blanket around him, and Emily was horribly conscious that they were far from the warmth of the fire. She edged closer to him, pressed herself against him.
“That’s…that’s not bad,” said Bob. “If we can get it moving.”
Emily looked at him, then at the wing. It was big. Heavy. But the slope was steep—at least it was once you got past the fire. The wing was almost upright—they would have to push it over, so that its smoother side was against the snow. Damn it. Everything was going so fast, and it was the only plan they had. “I’ll fire twice,” she said. “Then we push.”
“Wait,” said Aidan.
“What?”
“I need something.” He started to move back toward the plane, away from the shelter of the wing.
“No—” began Emily, but it was too late; he was running now, hunched over, head ducked down. Shots streaked above him, turning by mechanical magic into bullet holes, like silver flowers, in the blue body of the plane.
Aidan disappeared into the torn opening in the fuselage. Moments passed. Emily couldn’t have said how long; the world was reduced to her breathing, in and out. She glanced once, over the wing, and saw that the two men still moving were only a dozen yards away, maybe a bit more. Then the small figure of her brother appeared at the gaping mouth of the plane, and began hurrying back to them.
“Thanks,” he said, hitting the snowy ground beside them in a surprisingly impressive knee slide. He must have seen it in a film or something.
Emily popped up. The first guy was too close for her to use the scope; she just fired in his general direction, and he ducked. Turned, fired again at the other.
“Now!” she said.
She and Bob got their shoulders against the wing. Emily thought she heard the man sobbing—one arm dislocated and the other with a bullet in it—though her hearing was not good now, everything echoing and muffled, as if the snowy mountains were inside her, their blurred acoustics, damped by frozen water.
They heaved, feet slipping in the snow, the effort turning Emily’s body into hard, taut sinew and muscle, something engineered. The wing tipped, then sloshed down onto the slush near the fire. They kept going—and it began to slip downhill.