With equal abruptness, the shooting stopped. Amid the smell of cordite, weighed down by Duncan, Cavanaugh groaned from a pain in his left shoulder. From the trees, he heard a scrape of metal that sounded like someone trying to free a shell stuck in an assault rifle's firing chamber. The approaching blaze dispelled shadows. Astonishingly, it revealed Prescott crouched among bushes. Glancing wildly toward the fire, Prescott held an AR-15, presumably Roberto's, and furiously worked to pull back the knob on the side.

"Duncan," Cavanaugh managed to say.

No answer.

The pain in his shoulder intensifying, Cavanaugh squirmed out from under Duncan's weight. He smelled the nauseating coppery odor of blood.

"Duncan, move!"

He hoped desperately that Duncan's wounds weren't serious. But then he saw Duncan's mangled face, where at least half a dozen high-powered rounds had made him unrecognizable.

"Duncan!" Forced to drop his rifle, Cavanaugh dragged his friend back toward the bunker. He struggled to get inside before Prescott freed the jammed cartridge. The closer Cavanaugh got to the doorway behind him, the more heat pressed against his back.

The scrape of metal ended.

"No!" With one last desperate effort, Cavanaugh pulled Duncan through the doorway. Another furious volley sent bullets zipping above Cavanaugh's head. They struck the corridor's ceiling and cracked against the concrete above the door. Cavanaugh slammed the door shut just before Prescott corrected the barrel's upward tug, forcing down his aim as Cavanaugh had taught him, sending bullets walloping against the metal door.

"Duncan." Cavanaugh's left shoulder ached worse. Coughing from the smoke and the heat, he concentrated on Duncan, feeling for a pulse, but it was obvious he would never find one.

"Duncan!"

11

Anger fought with grief. Too busy raging to fear for his life, wanting only to hammer Prescott's face until it was as unrecognizable as Duncan's, Cavanaugh scrambled back. After one last look at his friend, he ran in a crouch toward the living room. He couldn't go out the rear door. The passageway was like a shooting gallery, funneling bullets toward the target. As long as Prescott keeps his aim down, I don't have a chance, Cavanaugh thought. The only reason Cavanaugh was alive was that Duncan had been ahead of him and had taken almost the full force of the barrage.

Racing through the living room, Cavanaugh fought not to choke on the smoke. A round had hit an exposed area at the top of his left shoulder, between the vest's strap and his neck. As he charged bent over through the kitchen, his hand came away smeared with red from where he'd touched the meaty portion between his collarbone and his neck. Blood welled.

He dropped to his knees and gasped whatever relatively smoke-clear air was near the floor. Stung by the heat from the burning ceiling, he hurried to the munitions room. To leave the bunker, he needed to use the front exit, but as the camera in that passageway had shown, the burning trees and bushes out there blocked his way. The arsenal had a trapdoor that led to a concrete tunnel connected to an exit near the landing pad, but since that was the area where the fire was most intense, Cavanaugh wasn't sure he could use the tunnel as an exit.

Amid spreading smoke and heat, he shoved away the table on which the Kevlar vests had been piled. He kicked away a carpet, exposed the tunnel's trapdoor, and lifted the handle. Wafts of smoke drifted up, confirming his suspicion that the tunnel wouldn't protect him. If he tried to avoid the flames by climbing down there, the fire would suck out the tunnel's oxygen, asphyxiating him before it cooked him.

Cavanaugh's shoulder was stiff with greater pain. He felt lightheaded.

Need to stop bleeding. Need to do it fast. Cavanaugh thought. He lurched toward a shelf that contained several red-colored pouches: Pro Med trauma kits favored by emergency service organizations. Among other things, each kit contained a fist-sized gauze wad called a "blood stopper" because it could soak up as much as a pint of blood. But as the fire worsened, Cavanaugh didn't have time to open a kit, pull out a blood stopper, apply it, and tape it down.

All he had time for was the tape. Not surgical tape. Instead, he grabbed a roll of silver-colored tape that was next to the trauma kits and was considered part of the first-aid supplies. Duct tape. The gunfighter's friend. He couldn't count the number to times he'd seen wounds sealed with duct tape. He ripped his collar open and used his right sleeve to wipe blood from the meaty part where his shoulder met his neck. He tore off two sections of tape and pressed them crossways onto the wound. Then he pressed them harder, wincing from the pain but feeling the thick tape's sticky underside grip his skin and adhere to it.

Staying closer to the floor, Cavanaugh ran from the arsenal and into a farther smoke-filled room-a bathroom-where he climbed into the tub and turned on the shower, dousing his hair and his clothes. He soaked a towel and tied it around his head. Dripping, he scrambled into the kitchen, where he grabbed a fire extinguisher from under the sink. The bunker's lights flickered, then failed as he ran into Duncan's office and grabbed another fire extinguisher from a corner of the room.

Staggering now, he crossed the living room, which was lit only by flames, and managed to reach the corridor at the bunker's entrance. He set down the fire extinguishers and took a third one from a closet. As with the rear exit, the front door had a knob and a lever for a dead-bolt lock. After freeing the lock, he tested the knob and jerked his fingers back when he felt heat on it. Wavering, he tugged down his jacket sleeve and protected his hand as he again tried the knob, still feeling heat but no longer caring, desperate to escape from the bunker.

He pulled the door open and stumbled back, aware of the intense heat behind him but unable to resist the backward motion because of what faced him-hell.

12

The roar of the flames blocking the passageway was matched by the howl of the wind they created. The heat was intense enough to suck the remaining oxygen from the bunker, causing a fierce wind from the interior that stopped Cavanaugh's reflexive backward motion and instead pushed him forward.

Now!

As a boy in Oklahoma, Cavanaugh had once seen a fire on an oil rig that his father had worked on. Cavanaugh had never forgotten how high the flames had gushed and how powerful the heat had been. The fire had started at sunset and had raged all night, making the area around the oil rig shimmer like noon in August. It had resisted the full force of five high-pressured water hoses, until finally Cavanaugh's father, dressed in a fire-retardant suit, complete with a head covering, had driven a bulldozer close to the upward-surging blaze. The bulldozer's blade had been raised to try to protect Cavanaugh's father from the heat. A metal pole had extended from the blade, a container of explosives dangling from it, asbestos-covered wires leading back from it. Cavanaugh's father had dumped the explosives near the heart of the gushing flames, had hurriedly backed the bulldozer away, and then had leapt down, taking cover behind the bulldozer as someone else had pushed a plunger that detonated the explosives. The wallop of the blast had nearly knocked Cavanaugh down, even from a distance. The din had made his ears ring for hours, although his hands had been clamped over them. But most impressive of all, most amazing, the explosion had blown out the fire.

"Because of the vacuum the blast created, because it sucked air away from the blaze," Cavanaugh's father had explained.