beautiful woman, maybe the most beautiful of his life. The plump, pillowy lips. The delicately upswept nose. The proportionate arrangement of the facial bones and the glowing skin of her cheeks. To look at her was to be swept into a current of almost unbearable sensuality. His mouth was suddenly dry.
“You’re tired,” she said.
The statement, utterly baffling, jarred him from his stupor. He was what?
“I said,” the woman repeated, “you’re tired.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Her face fell with puzzlement; it appeared he had disappointed her. Peter’s eyes fell to the object clutched in her hand. A metal box. With her free hand she withdrew a long, metal rod from its side.
Peter knew what it was.
He leapt toward her as her finger found the switch. A sheen of light and a crack of sound like the slamming of an enormous door: a wall of scalding heat blew him backward, off his feet. The bridge, Peter thought. Whoever she is, this woman has blown the bridge. Peter was on his back, blinking at the sky. Time had briefly slipped its moorings. Something large, on fire, was descending toward him from the heavens in a languid arc.
The burning road tie crashed to the ground a few feet from his head. As Peter rolled away he felt someone’s hands upon him, and suddenly he was on his feet again; Michael was pulling him toward the Humvee.
“Back up!” One arm wrapping Peter’s waist, Michael was yelling into the walkie. “Everybody back up now!”
Lights were blazing at them from all directions. Before Peter could fully process the information, a pickup barreled out of the brush, its great mud-choked tires bounding over the ditch. It swerved to a halt before them, angled sideways. Four figures rose like dark apparitions from the truck’s bed, simultaneously raising long, cylindrical objects to their shoulders.
“Oh, shit,” said Michael.
They flung themselves to the ground as the rockets, in a white burst, jetted from their tubes. Behind them, the sound of gunfire was instantly swallowed by the DS vehicles’ detonation. Flaming debris whizzed over their heads.
“Ceps,” Michael barked into the walkie, “get out of there!”
The figures in the truck had paused to reload. Ceps’s tanker would be next. Peter reached for his sidearm, but it was gone; he’d lost it in the first explosion. From the rear of the convoy came another tremendous bang. The oilers were leaping from their trucks, running, shouting. The attack was coming from both ends of the convoy now. They were trapped between the river and whatever was approaching from the rear, presumably more pickups with RPGs. Their fuel was forfeit, the only thing to do was run. Peter and Michael broke for the first tanker just as Ceps leapt down from the cab, tossing Peter a rifle. He snatched it from the air, swung around, took aim at the pickup, and released a barrage of strafing fire, sending the figures diving for cover. He’d bought them a moment, but that was all. Michael grabbed Lore by the wrist as she emerged from her cab and swung her to the ground. He was shouting, waving toward the rear of the convoy. “Get away from the trucks!”
The apparitional figures rose again. One clean shot at the first tanker and it would all be over. Three thousand gallons per truck, thirty-six thousand gallons in all. The entire convoy would go up, detonating like sticks of dynamite in a line. Peter realized that one of the figures was the cloaked woman. He lifted his rifle again and squeezed the trigger, only to hear the click of an empty chamber.
The woman raised her arms and spread them wide.
At the tail end of the convoy, an altogether different sort of vehicle had appeared. It swooped upon them at high speed, engine roaring, banks of sodium vapor lights blazing from the roof of its cab. A six-wheeled semi-tractor: daisy-chained behind it were two large cargo boxes constructed of galvanized metal buffed to a highly reflective finish. In the weeks to come, this curious aspect—it resembled nothing so much as two mirrored boxes rolling down the highway—would emerge as a matter of significance, a clue in a sequence of clues; but at the moment of the truck’s air-braking descent upon the scene, no one paid that much attention. Some of the fleeing oilers, their panicked brains washed clean of logic, and failing to notice that the smaller vehicles that had taken out the rear guard had conveniently vanished into the undergrowth, even permitted