In the same instant, Sam found his attention drawn elsewhere: the pilot had gotten out of the chopper, and seemed to be arguing with the men who had the third canister. He stood blocking them from putting it in the cargo bay, shaking his head and waving his hands. It was impossible to hear any voices over the distance, but all the same, it was clear the pilot was shouting, and the men were shouting back. For some reason, the pilot didn’t want that third canister loaded into the aircraft, though it looked identical to the first two.

At last one of the other men grabbed the pilot by the front of his shirt and shoved him backward, pointing angrily at the empty pilot’s seat. To Sam, the meaning was obvious enough: Get out of our way. Get back in there and do your job.

The pilot stood his ground for a second or two, then turned and clambered back into the front of the chopper.

The others hauled the last canister aboard and strapped it in, then climbed into the helicopter themselves—some into the cargo bay, others into side doors farther forward. They became a jumble of silhouettes, hard to tell apart from one another, though Sam knew there must be five of them—every man who’d been in the barn. He could see at least two in the bay, buckling themselves into little seats at the back. One of those men had a hold of Lauren by the upper arm. She had stopped fighting. She lay on the metal floor of the bay, curled up.

An ugly thought occurred to him for the first time: Lauren had almost certainly witnessed her father’s murder, at the hands—and feet—of these same men.

Maybe she expected the same would happen to her, whenever the chopper reached its destination.

Maybe she was right.

Inside the farmhouse, Pierce cursed and slammed the phone down. His footsteps thudded back out through the door.

“I can’t get anyone,” he said. “They could already be mobilizing, moving out.”

Far away across the fields, the chopper’s rotors cycled back up to full speed. By the time Sam turned to look at it again, it had lifted off. It pivoted sharply, climbing away from the lit-up barnyard, heading north again, the direction it had come from earlier. It leveled out around the same fifty-foot altitude it had flown at before—if anything, it was lower.

“Will the military be able to see that thing on radar?” Sam asked. “If it’s flying low like that?”

“I don’t know,” Pierce said. His voice was full of stress.

“We have to do something,” Dani said. “Anything. There has to be something you can think of.”

Pierce had no answer. His breathing had accelerated; he sounded like he’d just run a hundred yard dash.