Ignoring the renewed pain in his arm, he cleared his thoughts and put himself into Leonard’s head. I’ll take the high ground on the opposite side of the canyon with the sun to my back. The enemy knows I’m here, he heard my shot. McBride will double back to check on the woman and Ernie. When he approaches the helicopter, I’ll nail him from a bench rested position on the southern rim of the canyon.

Wrong, Leonard. Sorry to disappoint you.

Secured in deep shadow, Nathan slowly brought his rifle up, shouldered the weapon, and flipped the front and rear lens caps up. Three hundred yards distant, Grangeland was down. Her back was to him. He steadied his rifle and tried to determine if she was breathing. He couldn’t tell. She looked like a lifeless heap. Wait… Movement. A slight motion of her left arm. Her hand lifted above the sand for a moment before falling. Nathan kept watching until he saw her move again.

She’s alive.

And of course Ernie was gone. Anger began to flare, but he forced it aside and slowly pivoted his rifle through an arc covering a one-hundred-yard radius centered on the helicopter. Nothing. No movement at all. Approaching the helicopter was suicide, an obvious trap. He couldn’t make a mad dash to Grangeland and tend to her. Not against a trained shooter like Leonard.

Gritting his teeth at the fire in his arm and leg, and at Grangeland’s situation, he backed away from his current position and tucked himself behind a fallen log offering solid cover from the south rim of the canyon. He couldn’t leave Grangeland. Nor could he save her. He could almost feel Leonard’s rifle scope sweeping back and forth past his location.

Two can play this game….

Moving with a caterpillar speed, Nathan maneuvered himself into a cross-legged position and bench rested his cloth-wrapped weapon atop the log. He began slow, sweeping scan of the canyon’s opposite rim beyond the helicopter, zigzagging back and forth from the ridge down, concentrating on rocky spots with deep recessed shadow.

There. A flash of white.

Possibly Ernie’s T-shirt. He swung his rifle back and focused on a spot where two huge slabs of fallen limestone formed a narrow triangular area of shadow.

There it was again.

“Got you,” Nathan whispered.

Through his Nikon scope, Nathan watched as Ernie slowly ducked up and down with a pair of field glasses in his good hand and a handheld radio in the wounded hand. The white flash Nathan had seen was the gauze wrapping on Ernie’s hand. Good ol’ Ernie had wisely removed his white T-shirt, but overlooked the gauze.