Page 49 (1/2)

She dropped the canister of Vexxon into that natural run, and it slipped down halfway before halting

She took one of the Uzis fro car, which was now about seventy-five yards away, and opened fire She saw bullets punch at least two holes in the windshield The rest of the telass instantly crazed

The car-she could see now that it was a Toyota-spun out, turning a full three hundred and sixty degrees, then ninety degrees h a couple of still green tumbleweeds It came to rest about forty yards from the Buick, sixty yards from her and Chris, the front end pointed north Doors flew open on the far side Laura knew the occupants were scra low

She took the other Uzi from Chris and said, "Into the slide, kiddo When you reach the canister of gas, push it ahead of you all the way to the bottom"

He went down the wall of the arroyo, pulledto scoot along a couple of times when friction stopped him It was exactly the kind of daredevil stunt that would have raised a mother’s ire under other circumstances, but now she cheered him on

She pu to pierce the fuel tank and set off the gasoline with a bullet-ainst the far side But she eazine without the desired result

When she stopped shooting, they took a crack at her She did not stay long enough to give theet With the second Uzi held before her in both hands, she sat on the edge of the arroyo and shoved off into the slide that Chris had already used In seconds she was at the bottoulch frorayed lumber washed from the distant ruins of an old desert shack, and a few stones littered the powder-soft soil that fors offered a place to hide or protection frounfire that would soon be directed down at the: What now?

The arroyo would have scores of tributaries spread out across the desert, and many of those tributaries would have tributaries of their own The drainage netas like a maze They could not hide in it forever, but perhaps by putting a few branches of the systeain time to plan an ambush

She said, "Run, baby Follow the ht-hand branch you co to do?"

"I’ll wait for the to the top of the palisades, "then pick the the canister of Vexxon in plain sight, Laura returned to the wall of the arroyo dohich they’d slid She went to a different vertical channel, however, one that was carved deeper into the wall, had less of a slope, and was half-blocked at its midpoint by a mesquite bush She stood in the bottom of that deep hollow, confident that the bush overhead blocked their view of her from the desert above

To the east, Chris vanished around a turn into a tributary of the main channel

Atheone Then she stepped out from the erosion channel in the arroyo wall, turned, and swept the top of the cliff with bullets

Fourdown, and she killed the first two, but the third and fourth leaped backward, out of sight before the arc of fire reached them One of the bodies lay at the top of the arroyo wall, one ar over the brink The other fell all the way to the floor of the channel, losing his sunglasses on the way

March 16, 1944 The institute

When the bottle with the e did not bounce back to him, Stefan was reasonably confident that it had reached Laura before she had been killed, only seconds after he had first departed for 1944

Now he returned to the programmer’s desk and set to work on the calculations that would return him to the desert a few minutes after his previous arrival there He couldsubsequent to his previous hasty departure, and there would be no possibility of encountering hiain the calculations were not terribly difficult because he needed only to work forward froh he knew that the ti in equal er to rejoin Laura nevertheless Even if she had taken the advice of the e in the bottle, even if the future he had seen had been changed and she was still alive, she would have to deal with those SS gunmen, and she would need help

In forty raain he opened the panel on the jaunt recorder and tore the evidence off that spool of paper

Carrying the Uzi and the pistol, gritting his teeth as the dull throbbing in his half-healed shoulder greorse, he entered the gate

Lugging both the Vexxon canister and the Uzi, Laura joined Chris in the narrower tributary off the main channel, about sixty feet from the point at which they had descended into the syste at the corner formed by the two earth walls, she looked back into the primary arroyo from which she had co assassins shoved the dangling corpse off the brink, into the deep gulch, apparently to see if she was still i fire When there was no fire, the two survivors becaun, covering the other unman covered the second’s descent

When the second man joined the first, Laura stepped boldly around the corner and squeezed off a two-second burst Both of her pursuers were so startled by her aggressiveness that they did not return fire but threw themselves toward the deep, vertical erosion channels in the arroyo wall, seeking shelter there as she had sheltered while waiting for the opportunity to shoot them off the top of the cliff Only one of them made it to cover She blew the other one away

She stepped back around the corner, picked up the cylinder of nerve gas, and said to Chris, "Co the tributary, seeking yet another branch in theand thunder split the blue sky above

"Mr Krieger!" Chris said

He returned to the desert seven s with Churchill and Hitler in 1944, just two minutes after his initial return when he had seen Laura and Chris dead at the hands of SS gunmen There were no bodies this time, just the Buick-and the bullet-riddled Toyota in a different position

Daring to hope that his sche the brink, searching for so he saw the three dead men on the floor of the channel, thirty feet below

There would be a fourth No SS squad would have been coing arroyos that crossed the desert like a chain of jagged lightning bolts, Laura was still on the run from the last man

In the arroyo wall Stefan found a vertical channel that appeared to have been used already; he stripped off his book-filled rucksack, slid to the bottoainst the earth, and hot pain flared in the partly healed exit wound At the end of the slope, when he stood up, a wave of dizziness washed through him, and bile rose in his throat

Somewhere in the maze to the east, automatic weapons chattered

She halted just inside the naled Chris to be quiet