The quad had stopped. He could see Reyland’s heat signature light up white against the dark as he stood beside it. He seemed to be talking on his phone.

Gannon blinked in the scope, gauging the distance. Four hundred yards, he thought. Four-fifty, tops.

Gannon hurried to his left. He braced himself in against the rough trunk of a jutting palm tree trunk and clicked the scope’s range selector to four hundred and tucked the butt of the rifle tight into his shoulder.

He’d steadied the cross of the scope’s reticle on Reyland’s brainpan and had just begun pulling the trigger when he heard the chopping rumble behind him.

Gannon let off the trigger and turned with a mind-boggled expression on his face.

Back over the lighthouse ridge he’d just come down was the unmistakable metallic churning sound of a helicopter flying low.

A bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup sound of gunfire started up a split second later.

Gannon’s eyes almost bulged out of his head.

The six-round burst was followed by another.

Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup.

It was the rattle of a chain-fed machine gun.

“No,” he whispered.

It was a gunship, Gannon realized.

A helicopter gunship had arrived now, and it was shooting up his truck.

88

Gannon immediately strapped the M4 on his back and began scrambling up the rock and through the heavier vegetation of the ridge beside him as fast as he could. He was halfway up the promontory when the helicopter roared in over the tree line twenty feet to his right.

It was a gunship all right, Gannon saw as he pressed himself dead still against the shadowed rock with his breath taken. It was a large Bell helicopter like a news chopper, and there was the long black barrel of an M240 bristling sideways out the side of its open sliding door.

As it crested the slope toward the Atlantic-side beach, a blinding white spotlight shot out of the far side of it. The light was probing at the silver palm he’d just been hiding behind when Gannon finally reached the top brow of the ridge.

He was on his hands and knees tucking in under a rock overhang he’d found in the promontory about three minutes later when he heard the helicopter come back over to the Bahama Banks side again.

He crawled out from under the rock and stood and listened to it getting fainter and fainter. After thirty seconds, he saw its lights heading way to the north and west out over the water.

He was terrified that it might head back to attack Ruby and the others, but he realized that Reyland was evac-ing off the island.

Heading where? he thought, tracking the aircraft as it went west. To Nassau? Where else? Had to be.

He hurried quickly south to where he had left the truck.

He shook his head in wonder as he climbed up the sand toward it a minute and a half later. He’d been right. All the windows were shot to shit and the hood and bed had been Swiss cheesed.