It was quiet, barely loud enough to register over the other sounds, but she reacted to the snapping of twigs by turning slowly to her left. There, maybe ten feet away, was the dark silhouette of a woman moving toward her in a crouch. Punky raised the pistol and placed the front sight post on center mass, then began pressing back on the trigger.
But something didn’t feel right.
A little voice in the back of her head told her to wait.
She relaxed her finger off the trigger just as she heard another twig breaking, this time up the slope to her left. The person in her sights also heard the sound and spun, offering Punky a faint profile that confirmed what she’d feared.
Suddenly, the darkness was split open by muzzle flashes twenty yards to her left. Punky shifted her aim and squeezed the trigger repeatedly while lunging for the dark shape just in front of her. She stopped firing as her feet left the ground and her shoulder caught the person in their ribs. Punky could tell she had hit a woman, but she continued driving through the tackle until they were both on the ground with automatic fire raking the air over their heads.
“Don’t move,” she growled.
The woman whimpered.
She rolled to her side and leveled her pistol on the now silent submachine gun, searching for her target in the valley’s shadows. After several seconds, Punky looked down at the woman and asked, “Who are you?”
“Tiff… Tiffany,” she said. “I’m the park ranger.”
She must have been the one whose flashlight had taken away her element of surprise. Punky wanted to curse her incompetence but remembered they were all treading on new ground. To her knowledge, nobody had ever tracked a foreign agent to an island off the coast of Southern California. “Do you have a radio, Tiffany?”
The woman reached for a handheld radio clipped to her belt and handed it up to Punky. She took the radio and keyed the microphone, keeping her voice low as she continued scanning for a target. “Raptor Two Four, come in.”
“Go ahead,” the pilot’s voice answered.
“This is Special Agent King,” Punky said. “I’m here with Tiffany on the east side of the ridgeline.”
“Stand by.”
The sound of the helicopter grew louder and the echoes off the surrounding terrain overlapped as the Seahawk drew closer. She looked to her right and saw the shadowed outline of a helicopter approaching their position from the south.
“Raptor Two Four is visual two individuals,” the pilot said.
She gave a little shake of her head. “There should be a third,” she said. “We were taking fire from north-northwest at about twenty yards.”
The pilot was silent for a moment. “Negative contact. We only see you and Tiffany on infrared.”
Fifty yards north, Chen huddled next to a shrub while watching the approaching helicopter with some trepidation. She knew the helicopter likely had infrared search capability and its crew wore night vision goggles, but she hesitantly placed her trust in the clothing Wu Tian had brought for them to wear. The Ministry’s scientists had touted that the specially made camouflage would make them invisible on infrared, and she gambled her life on their competence.
The helicopter descended closer to the ground, hovering over her pursuers for a few moments before lifting and spinning to the east to disappear over Montañon Ridge. She knew it would likely return to resume its search, so she used the brief opportunity and scurried north, away from the two individuals hunting her and down a narrow draw that might lead her into Smuggler’s Canyon. From there, she knew she could reach the butte and escape north to the beach at Scorpion Anchorage.
At first, her movements were slow and methodical, but the deeper she went into the draw, the more she forsook noise discipline for an increase in speed. She had successfully escaped being caught in a pincer on the east slope, but with that treacherous part behind her, it quickly became more important to reach the beach than it was to stay and fight. The inflatable dinghy Wu Tian had stashed on the beach was her only lifeline to the sailboat at anchor off the coast.
And the sailboat was her only refuge.
As she made her way up onto the butte, she heard the helicopter several more times, crossing high overhead in a north-south zigzag pattern. Each time, she froze, listening to her ragged breathing and the blood pulsing in her brain, and she waited. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. It was pure agony waiting for the helicopter to retreat out of sight so she could continue her movement north, but each time her confidence in the clothing increased. If they had spotted her, they would have engaged. That she was still alive counted for something.
