Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire (32 page)

Kyle was just starting to wonder if Callahan’s courage and determination had somehow failed him when the T-700 standing in front of them abruptly disintegrated in a burst of dimly heard automatic gunfire.

Kyle twisted his head around. There, swooping in on them like an avenging angel, was a Resistance helicopter, its door-mounted machineguns blazing away as it spat destruction at the two Terminators.

A second later, Kyle stumbled into Callahan’s outstretched arm. A second after that, he found that same arm wrapped around his shoulders as Callahan gripped the two of them, Kyle on one side, Zac on the other, with the released tension of a man who has just faced certain death and then had that doom snatched from him.

Kyle had cheated death too many times, him and Star, to go all sentimental that way. Still, his knees were suddenly feeling a little weak. Probably because he hadn’t had anything much to eat since breakfast.

The chopper set down near the demolished Terminators. A half-dozen men armed with heavy weapons jumped out and headed to the machines’ rat hole to see what else might be lurking down there.

And waiting behind them in the chopper, her face bright with relief, was Star. She raised her hand toward Kyle and the others and waved.

Kyle waved back... and as he did so, the tension of the day started to fade away, leaving only fatigue, hunger and thirst.

But that was all right. Because they’d made it through, and John Connor was safe.

And all was finally right with the world.

* * *

The area around Bear Commons wasn’t the best battlefield position Barnes had ever seen. Even so, there were a good half-dozen places in and around the clearing’s rim that should work well enough as defensible positions.

Skynet had other ideas. Barnes and Preston had just reached a big rock outcropping right at the edge of the clearing, when Preston spotted the broken T-700 dragging itself determinedly through the grass toward them. They stumbled from behind the rock to a wide tree trunk, only to have the Terminator change direction and again launch itself into a slow-motion charge.

Three moves later, the damn thing was still chasing them.

It would be easy enough to simply blow the machine back into its component parts and be done with it. Barnes had no doubt that Skynet was hoping he would do exactly that.

But Barnes knew better than to give in to that temptation. They had Barnes’s rifle and the Terminator G11, with only around forty-five rounds left between the two weapons. Barnes had no intention of spending any more of them on a T-700 that was already half broken and of no serious threat. Not with Jik still skulking around somewhere out there in the woods.

Barnes frowned into the gathering darkness. Back when they were by the wrecked cabin and had been distracted by the T-700’s attempted sneak attack, Jik had tried one of his own, running toward them across the clearing. He’d backed off when his ploy failed, but the fact remained that Skynet had sent him into enemy fire without hesitation.

And why not? He was a Theta, very tough, very hard to kill. He’d already taken on Halverson’s hunting force, after all, and killed all of them.

So why was he still hanging back instead of going on the offensive? Had Skynet actually calculated that Barnes could take him out with forty-five rounds before he could kill the two of them?

Or could something have happened that had suddenly made Jik’s survival more important than it had been earlier?

That question was obviously on Preston’s mind, too.

“You think he went back to where he killed everyone to look for a better weapon?” he murmured.

Barnes shook his head. “If there’d been any working guns back there, he would already have them.”

“What about bows?” Preston countered. “Maybe he went back to get one of those.”

Barnes grimaced. That one hadn’t even occurred to him.

“Yeah, good point,” Barnes grunted. “Well, whatever he’s got, my guess is that he’s waiting for full dark. You’re the expert hunter—how close could he get to us without us hearing him?”

“Probably not too close,” Preston said. “But if he’s got a bow and some arrows, he can probably get close enough.”

And then, faintly in the distance, Barnes heard a familiar sound.

“We may not have to find out the hard way,” he said. “Hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That,” Barnes said, nodding his head to the southeast and the sound of a Blackhawk’s rotors. “That’s Williams in our chopper.”

“It may be your chopper,” Preston said ominously. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean Williams is the one flying it.”

Barnes scowled, a flicker of doubt darkening his new confidence. Could Preston be right? Could that be Lajard and Valentine in there, coming in to pick up Jik and head off on whatever new killing spree Skynet had planned?

The moment passed. Williams had gone to get the chopper, and she was better than that.

“Don’t worry, it’s her,” he assured Preston, looking upward at the camouflage canopy. It had been starting to open before the H-K wrecked the cabin, but it was still mostly in place above the clearing. “The big question is whether she’s going to be able to find us.”

“Yes,” Preston said thoughtfully. “You suppose that thing’s flammable?”

“No idea.”

“Let’s find out. You still have any of that aviation fuel on your boots?”

Barnes reached down and touched his boot.

“Maybe a little.”

“Give me a piece,” Preston ordered, slipping the bow he’d taken from Halverson off his shoulder.

Barnes pulled out his knife.

“How big?”

“The biggest you can get without cutting off any toes.”

Barnes nodded and set to work. A few seconds later, he had freed most of the upper toe section.

“Got it.”

“Stick it on here.” Preston handed Barnes one of his arrows and dug into his pocket. “Run it down to just below the arrowhead.”

Barnes did so. Preston took the arrow back and handed him a small object.

“My lighter,” he identified it as he set the arrow into the bowstring and drew it back until the wet leather was almost touching the fingers of his bow hand. “Gasoline fueled, so watch out for your fingers.”

Barnes wasn’t expecting much of the aviation fuel to still be left in the leather. He was wrong. At the first touch of the lighter’s fire the piece of leather blazed into bright blue-yellow flame.

Preston angled the bow upward.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” he murmured, and let it fly.

The arrow shot up, tracing a flaming arc up toward the camo netting. It hit, jamming itself into the mesh.

For a long moment nothing happened. The fire smoldered and faltered, looking on the verge of going out. Then the fire began to gain new life. It caught, brightened—

And abruptly roared back to life, burning and spreading across the net. A minute later, the whole circle was ablaze, the flickering flames lighting up the clearing below.

“Perfect,” Barnes said, picking up the G11 and returning his attention to the forest around them. “If she doesn’t see that, she’s gone blind
and
stupid.”

“Now what?” Preston asked.

“We wait for her to get here,” Barnes said grimly. “And we expect Skynet to make one last shot at taking us down before she does.”

Blair had the Blackhawk in the air when she spotted the first glimmer of light amid the forest gloom. Frowning, she started to turn to Halverson, strapped in at the portside M240, to ask what it might be.

And then, abruptly, the glow flared and spread out. By the time the Blackhawk reached the river, it had become a complete circle of blazing fire.

“That’s the place!” she heard Halverson shout over the wind buffeting her through the broken windshield. “That’s Bear Commons.”

Mentally, Blair threw Barnes a salute. “Get ready!” she shouted. “Hope?”

“I’m ready,” the girl at the starboard gun called.

Blair pitched the Blackhawk forward, sending the aircraft racing toward the circle of flame. Hope might say she was ready, but Blair knew better. She’d seen the look on the girl’s face after what had happened with Valentine and Lajard, and she was anything but ready to do that again.

Blair could hardly blame her. Shooting red-eyed metal Terminators was one thing. Shooting Terminators with human faces looking back at you was something else entirely.

They were nearly to the fiery circle now. Barnes and Preston were somewhere down there, Blair knew, hopefully still alive. Jik, another Terminator with a human face, would also be down there.

Blair would have to make sure that, when the time came to open fire, Jik was on Halverson’s side of the Blackhawk.

The fire was fading as Blair eased them into a hover directly above it. Much of the camo mesh itself had already burned away, revealing a network of slender cables anchoring the mesh to the treetops around the edge of the clearing.

“What now?” Halverson called.

Blair settled her hands on the controls.

“Hang on,” she advised.

Shoving the throttle forward, she sent the helo into a stomach-lurching drop straight onto the mesh.

Open-area camouflage nets were designed to support their own weight, the additional pressure of an occasional curious bird, and very little else. The mesh held the helo’s weight for maybe half a second before collapsing in a flurry of displaced sparks and snapped treetops. Blair was ready, hauling back on the throttle to kill the Blackhawk’s drop and bring it back up to treetop height again.

“Look sharp,” she shouted as she set the helo into a slow clockwise rotation around its vertical axis. “They’re down there somewhere. So’s Jik.”

“There!” Halverson snapped. “That clump of birch trees. I can see someone.”

Blair craned her neck, angling the helo a bit so that she could look past Halverson out the portside door. But the fading fire wasn’t bright enough to give any clear light to the edges of the clearing.

Paradoxically, it
was
bright enough to throw flickering shadows across the ground, adding that much more visual confusion to the gloom already filling the forest.

“I don’t see anyone,” she called.

“He’s there,” Halverson insisted. “Crouching behind those birches.”

“Was it my father?” Hope called from the other side of the Blackhawk.

“I couldn’t tell,” Halverson said with an edge of impatience. “I need to get closer.”

Unfortunately, that was exactly what they couldn’t do right now. Like all Resistance helos tasked with hunting ground-based Terminators, the Blackhawk had a heavily armored underside. Hovering here at treetop height, they were reasonably safe from anything Jik could be waiting to shoot at them.

But once they headed down, all bets would be off. The main cockpit skin was much thinner and more susceptible to weapons fire, and Blair didn’t have even the modest protection of a windshield anymore. A single shot into her head, and all three of them would die.

“We can’t get closer,” she told Halverson. “Not until we know who that is.”

“How the hell do you expect me to figure that out from way up here?”

And then, almost as if on cue, there was a fresh flicker of fire from below them. Not from the birch trees Halverson had indicated, but from halfway across the clearing. The flame faltered a little, shifted position slightly—

And then flashed across the clearing to impale itself chest-high against the trunk of a big tree a couple of meters away from the birches.

“That’s a fire arrow!” Halverson shouted, a note of triumph in his voice. “That’s Preston—he’s marked Jik for us!”

“Can you see him?” Blair called. “Can you
see
that it’s Jik?”

“He’s there—he’s right there,” Halverson confirmed excitedly. “But I can’t—damn it, I can’t swing this thing far enough around.”

“Hang on,” Blair ordered, slowing the helo’s clockwise rotation and starting it turning back the other direction. “And don’t lose him.”

Suddenly, without warning, a burst of fire from the forest on the other side of the clearing shot across toward them. Reflexively, Barnes ducked—

And with a sharp
thunk
a flaming arrow buried its tip in a big tree two meters to Barnes’s right.

Preston gasped, dropping lower as a shower of sparks rained down.

“What the—? Barnes?”

For a fraction of a second Barnes just stared at the burning arrow. What the
hell
was Jik up to?

Tearing his eyes away from the fire, he looked upward.

The chopper, which had been slowly turning as Williams searched for a target, had come to a stop. He watched, with a surge of horror, as it started turning the other direction.

Moving around to bring its portside M240 into range.

“He’s suckering them,” he growled. “Jik saw you light the camo net with a fire arrow, figured we might be smart enough to try marking his position with another one, and decided to get there first.”

“How could we mark him?” Preston said, his voice bewildered. “We don’t even know where he is.”

“We do now,” Barnes said, looking across the clearing to where the arrow had come from. In the fading light from the smoldering camo net, he could just make out a figure standing motionless beside one of the bigger trees.

“Shoot him,” Preston urged. “Come on,
shoot
. That’ll show Blair who we are.”

Barnes sighed. Only it wouldn’t show Williams anything of the sort. If things had been reversed, if it had been Preston who marked Jik’s position with a flaming arrow, the Theta would certainly respond by opening fire toward his attackers with whatever weapons he had.

Williams would know that. Rather than getting her to hold her fire, an attack on Jik now would simply get her shooting at him and Preston that much faster.

He looked up again, his mind whirring as he tried to figure out a plan. The chopper was too high for Williams to be able to distinguish either of their faces well enough for a positive ID. Ditto for their clothing, Preston’s bow, or anything else they had with them.

Their only hope was to find cover.

Only there wasn’t any. Not from a machinegun firing from above.