The truck was heading out toward the main road. Once it got there, it would accelerate to sixty or seventy, and that would be the end of her. She had to stop it now.

With her hand braced against an exhaust stack—the heat intense even through her gloves—she knelt above the driver’s seat, drew her pistol, and aimed the barrel straight down.

She knew the consequences. The Fixer was wearing body armor, and there was every chance it was going to blow up if she scored a kill shot. Could she kill him and have time to get clear?

The roof of the cab was thirteen or fourteen feet in the air, and the truck was now going at least forty miles an hour. The jump would probably break every bone in her body.

“Yeah,” she said, “well, you can kiss my ass.”

And she fired. The Sig Sauer P226 had a twenty-round extended magazine, and she fired every last bullet she had. The slide locked back, and the truck instantly began to slew sideways. Mia had to let go of the empty gun to hold on. There was a patch of grass coming up fast on the right, and she scrambled to the passenger side, tensed to spring, and …

Her first bullet had punched down through the top of the driver’s head, stopping thought, control, breath, and life. His body armor reacted to the sudden drop in pulse, and it blew up.

The explosion punched backward, blowing out the rear of the cab and killing four of the Fixers in the back. Their suits blew as well. Mia never made it off the roof of the cab. She was caught inside a thermobaric fireball that lifted the entire semi, the crated and uncrated fighting machines, all the Fixers, and three-quarters of an acre of road and forest, and threw it all burning into the air.

At virtually the same moment, in one of those cosmic coincidences that seem to be part of the life—and death—of tier-one special operations, there was another explosion nearly three thousand miles away. Two blasts, really, seconds apart as a pair of AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles hit the Fixer troop transport planes. One missile struck just as the first K-110 was trundling toward the cargo hatch, ready to drop into the concert stadium.

Eighty-eight Fixers and sixteen fighting machines, along with the planes and flight crews, filled the sky with fireballs that could be seen for fifty miles in every direction.

Belle walked out of the woods, her rifle raised but no one left to shoot.

Top Sims sat on the ground, his back to the pump house wall, with an unconscious Andrea leaning against him. Except for skin color, they could have been father and son. Belle checked on them and was relieved to find out that, though hurt, they were still alive.

It took longer to find Bunny.