“Got you, sir.” Waylon heard a hack of static in his ear, and wondered whether his own response had slipped through the parted wave of electromagnetic interference. “Can see the notch in front of me.”

And he could. It was an ugly, angular gash that looked like it had been hastily carved from the wall of the pass with a gigantic serrated butcher knife.

Waylon could also hear something of equivalent nastiness—the growl of a muscular engine at his rear, rising above the buzz of the two other Sword ATVs speeding along with him.

Something was coming on. And closing.

He tossed a glance over his shoulder at the man in his aft gunner’s seat.

“What kind of problem have we got?” he shouted over the blasting wind.

The gunner turned to look, spotted the Light Attack Vehicle in pursuit.

“Bad one,” he said.

Waylon eased off his accelerator and radioed out an urgent message to Sam Cruz.

Cruz didn’t pick up Waylon’s signal, but fortunately that wasn’t imperative.

He knew the plan.

In the lead slot of the three-ATV incursion team that had met Chinstrap Two in McKelvey—dropped there so they would enter Bull Pass behind Waylon’s men and guard their backsides—Cruz had spotted the Light Strike Vehicle up ahead moments after it launched from the pass’s crumbled west wall.

As he sped forward at maximum horsepower, pushing within range of the opposition’s militarized dune buggy, Cruz waved his accompanying vehicles into attack formation and hollered for his gunner to open fire.

The Light Strike Vehicle’s driver had been outwitted and he knew it.

The motor-pack of ATVs that had appeared from McKelvey were gaining behind him like angry hornets. Reymann swerved to elude their firing guns, his own rear gunner turned toward them in his elevated weapons station, swinging his .50-caliber in wide arcs, disgorging a torrent of ammunition from its link feed-belt.

The hornet vehicles continued to close distance nonetheless, two of them splitting to his left and right while the third stayed at his rear and dodged the lashing machine gun volleys. There was no room for his larger vehicle to maneuver in the tight-walled pass. No time to use his grenade launcher as the hornets nimbly hopped alongside his flanks, trapping him between them. Nowhere for him to go but straight ahead toward the leading trio of ATVs that had now molted speed before him, their tail guns pouring ammunition in his direction.

Boxed-in, caught in a vicious four-way cross fire, Reymann was cursing under his breath with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief when a sleet of bullets knocked him back in his seat, turning his head and most of his body into a crimson mire.

One of Pete Nimec’s biggest unanswered questions was resolved minutes after he entered the tunnel, Rice and the others following him down a metal stairwell into the darkness.