War Hawk: A Tucker Wayne Novel by James Rollins, Grant Blackwood

ceased as he and Kane took off. That lapse had allowed Kane to get a head start in his flight toward the factory. Still, gunfire rained down from above soon thereafter. First toward Kane’s path—then the drone’s deadly attention returned to Tucker.
    But Tucker had used the distraction to reach a small thicket of trees. Rounds tore through the canopy and pelted into the ground. Tucker dodged past trunks as shards of tree bark peppered his face.
    Don’t look back . . .
    With his heart pounding and his thighs burning, he focused on the goal ahead: a tall silo that speared into the night sky.
    Slipping and sliding, Tucker dodged from tree to tree, hoping to present less of a target.
    Crack!
    A branch above Tucker’s head snapped.
    Crack!
    Something tugged at his pant leg, but he ignored it and kept running and weaving. Moonlight brightened ahead, reflecting off water, warning that he had reached the end of the copse of trees.
    He didn’t slow.
    He burst out of the tree line and dove low across what appeared to be a shallow lake, likely a former industrial pond for the factory. He slid beneath the surface as a scatter of rounds spat around him, but then the fusillade suddenly stopped.
    Had the drone run out of ammunition?
    With no way of knowing, he surfaced briefly, listening for any telltale buzzing, but he heard nothing. He pictured the drone banking away, readying to come back around again for another run. Confirming this conjecture, the nattering whine returned as he swam, growing louder by the second.
    He searched for the enemy.
    There!
    Silhouetted against the moonlit sky, he spotted a fleeting, elongated shadow as it circled toward his position. It appeared to be a fixed-wing drone, but there was something off about it. The drone wasn’t quite a shadow, more like a fuzzy, mottled shape that seemed to blend into the stars.
    Some kind of stealth material , he realized.
    Tucker swam faster, aiming for a dark, diagonal line that rose from the pond’s far bank. It was an old rubber conveyor belt that climbed toward a door high up the neighboring silo. He had no better option, especially with the whine of the drone almost upon him again.
    Tucker dove back underwater, praying the pond’s reflective surface would hide him from the hunter in the sky. He kicked and paddled his way to the submerged end of the conveyor and ducked underneath it; only then did he risk coming up for air.
    He glanced over his shoulder, studying the sloping belt and the metal buckets that dangled from beneath it. His plan had been to climb up to that silo door, keeping to the underside of the conveyor. The scheme had seemed far better from a distance.
    But up close . . .
    Above his head, the scaffolding dripped with Spanish moss. Wrist-sized vines snaked around the crossbeams and angle irons. What little steel Tucker could see was scabrous with rust. Even the rubber belt was worn thin with multiple holes.
    He doubted the structure would hold his weight—and certainly not for long.
    Any further reservations came to an abrupt halt as a fresh spatter of rounds tore into the conveyor, pinging off the scaffolding and ripping through the belt.
    The drone must have spotted him after all.
    Tucker lunged up, grabbed a crossbeam, and began to climb along the bottom of the conveyor belt, doing his best to use the large metal buckets as shields. If the drone didn’t kill him, the ascent might. He lost his footing several times as pieces of the conveyor’s support scaffolding gave way under his weight.
    Still, he kept going.
    Another round punched through the belt and sparked off a crossbeam beside Tucker’s hand.
    He cursed brightly—but then the barrage abruptly stopped.
    The hunter must be circling around again .
    He started counting in his head. When he reached thirty seconds, the buzz of the drone’s engine returned. It seemed there was roughly half a minute from one pass to the next. Knowing this, he took shelter beneath one of the buckets as