The van was two minutes from the convoy when the System spoke.
[Warning. Warlord has deployed reserve forces. Seven hundred men moving on the general's residence. Twelve hundred men moving into the woods. Both deployments were made before the signal went down, using landlines, not radios. You were not warned because I could not see them. I see them now.]
Kin sat forward in the seat.
"What?"
[The residence is under threat. The woods are under threat. The counter force on the eastern road is intact, but it is no longer enough. The warlord has done what you would not expect him to do. He has split his strength, and he has split it wide.]
"Odile," Kin said.
"I heard," Odile said in his ear. Her voice was flat. "Seven hundred at the residence. Twelve hundred in the woods. The veterans are already inside the second deployment and the rebels are already in the trees. If we pull them out now, the warlord will know something is happening and he will turn the convoy around and flee to a hideout !"
"And if we leave them where they are, they are going to be cut to pieces by a force three times their size."
"Yes."
Kin closed his eyes.
"Where is the counter force."
"On the overpass. They have not engaged. They were waiting for your signal."
"Do not signal them. Tell the rebels to hold their position and to stay off the comms. Tell the veterans to do the same."
"And the residence."
"The residence is not ours to protect. The suite is empty. The general is still in the interrogation room. There is nothing there for the warlord's men to find."
Silence.
Then Odile said, "Fine."
Kin looked at the screen.
The convoy was ahead of them now. Close. He could see the tail lights of the SUVs through the windshield.
The lead guard turned in his seat.
"We are close," he said before an explosive projectile hit the van. Kin did not see it come, he just felt it hit. The van lifted off the road and came down hard on two wheels and the windscreen blew inward and the lead guard took the blast in his chest and was gone before the van landed. The driver's hands went slack on the wheel and the van veered left and Kin threw himself over Nia and covered her head and the van hit the barrier and spun.
Everything went sideways.
Nia was shouting something. Kin could not hear her. His ears were ringing and the world around was a white blur , the van came to a stop against the barrier with the engine screaming and the driver slumped over the wheel.
Kin pushed himself up and noticed the road behind them was on fire.
Three vans from the general's convoy had been hit. Two were burning. One was upside down. The men who had been inside were scattered across the asphalt, some of them moving, some of them not. The warlord's convoy was still moving ahead, all intact quickly pulling away.
And behind them, on the road from the east, two armoured trucks were coming and behind those, three SUVs with their lights on and their sirens off, moving fast.The general's men were surrounded.
Kin turned to Nia.
"Take it off."
"What?"
"Take it off. The face. The uniform. All of it. You are not the general anymore. There is no general left in this fight, he has died in that blast"
She reached up and peeled the mask away. The general's face came off in her hands and she dropped it on the floor of the van and the general's uniform was still on her but her own face was underneath and that was what mattered. She looked at Kin with her own face and her own eyes and she was breathing hard. She slowly pulled down the generals uniform and Kin covered his eyes, "Don't, I have my body suit underneath and no boobs to look at currently," Kin's face turned red with embarrassment.
"System," Kin said. "Is there another projectile coming."
[Yes. Nine seconds.]
Kin grabbed her.
He put his shoulder down and drove through the shattered windscreen of the van and out onto the road, and Nia was in his arms and the cold air hit them both at once and he rolled with her across the asphalt and into the ditch on the far side. The projectile hit the van behind them and the van came apart.
Kin lay in the ditch with Nia under him and gravel in his hands.
"Are you alive," he said.
"I am alive."
"Stay down."
The road was chaos. Half the motorcade was gone. The survivors from the general's men were pulling themselves out of the wreckage and trying to form a line, and the two armoured trucks from the east had stopped in the middle of the road and disgorged their troops, and the three SUVs were closing from the other direction, and the men from the general's convoy were caught in the middle.
Odile was in his ear. Her voice was no longer flat. It was loud.
"Baros would have seen this. Baros would have seen this from the beginning. He would not have put the convoy on this road. He would have split them. He would have staged the ambush from the shoulder, not the overpass. I am cursing him and he is not even alive to hear it."
"Odile."
"I am cursing the man because I miss him. Let me miss him."
Kin looked at the road.
The survivors were going to be wiped out. The warlord's convoy was gone. The general's men were outnumbered and exposed and the armoured trucks were already opening up with their mounted guns and the men in the ditch were going to die where they stood.
And then the firing stopped.
Not stopped but slowed and dimmed. The sound went thin and far away, the way sound goes when you are underwater, the way sound had gone once before the street on the other side of the town with sixty-two men and a white fire that ate the bodies.
Kin looked up.
The Gravedigger was walking toward them from the far end of the road. He was not hurrying as he never hurried. He walked in his slow steady way with his hands at his sides and his face unreadable, and the road in front of him cleared as he walked, because the men who saw him coming stopped firing and stared. One of the armoured trucks turned its mounted gun toward him and the gunner did not fire. The gunner was staring.
The warlord's men were staring.
The general's men were staring.
Kin was staring.
"System," he whispered.
[Yes.]
"Did you summon him."
[No.]
"Did you."
[I did not summon him. I have not summoned him at any point in this campaign. He is not on this operation. He should not be here.]
"Then why is he here."
[I do not know.]
An attack helicopter came in low from the west.
It had been trailing the convoy from a distance and now it came down over the road with its searchlight on and its gun already swinging, and it saw the man walking on the asphalt and it did what attack helicopters do. It opened fire.
The Gravedigger raised one hand.
He did not snap his fingers. He did not do any of the things Kin had seen him do. He simply raised his hand the way a man raises a hand to brush away a fly, and swung it once from left to right, and a flame came out of him. White, the same white as the fire that had eaten Baros, the same white as the circles on the road in the city, but wider now. The flame crossed the distance between the road and the helicopter in less than a heartbeat, and it did not hit the helicopter. It went through it. There was no explosion. There was no debris. There was no fireball, no rotor noise, no wreckage falling out of the sky.
There was one moment of white light, and then there was the sky, and the helicopter was not in it. The whole road went silent.Not the guns. Not the men. The air itself.
Even the System did not speak.
Kin looked at the man walking toward them and said nothing.