“If the others can be helped, minutes probably count.”

Danica nodded, took a deep breath, steeled herself.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Dryden shoved open the door.

They found the first of the FBI personnel a minute later: a woman with short black hair, lying on her side in the dead leaves. Her M4 rifle lay a foot away.

Dryden knelt fast and put a finger to her carotid artery pulse point.

Her pulse was strong and regular.

So was her breathing; her chest expanded and contracted in the steady rhythm of a sleeper.

“I see some others,” Danica said.

Dryden stood and followed her gaze: there were three men down beside the nearest house. He and Danica ran toward them, but they had covered only half the distance when Dryden saw Jack Grace off to the right, thirty yards away. He had collapsed sitting upright, his back against a standing section of picket fence.

They sprinted to him and dropped to his side. Like the woman, he was breathing well with a strong heartbeat. His rifle lay across his lap, and his open windbreaker exposed a holstered Glock.

The radio on his belt beeped, and the chopper pilot’s voice came through. “Air to point, say again, please acknowledge. Anyone on this channel, please respond.”

Dryden could hear the chopper somewhere close by, maybe hovering above the northern edge of the subdivision. He unclipped Grace’s shoulder microphone, pulled it toward himself and keyed the switch.

“This is Dryden. All FBI personnel are unconscious but alive. No idea of their condition. You need first responders in here as fast as you can get them.”

“Already in contact with dispatch. First emergency units are twenty minutes out.”

Still holding the microphone on its cord, Dryden stood up and scanned the woods. From this position, he could see at least a dozen other fallen agents, spread out roughly along the route they had been running on before the gas hit them: a line leading northwest toward the parked motorcade. All the rest must be somewhere farther along in that direction, lost to sight beyond the intervening trees.

Dryden keyed the microphone to respond to the pilot, but froze—somewhere out of view, far away along the scattered line of unconscious bodies, a man had begun screaming. The sound was high-pitched and primal—maybe expressing pain, or simply fear.

Danica stood up fast, her body going rigid.

The scream came again, followed by a burst of automatic rifle fire.

PART SIX

LOS BAILARINES TERRIBLES

JULY 1989

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO