Lying on the leather-covered dash, I dropped my head back and looked at the rain striking the Plexiglas. “What did we hit—or what hit us?”

Omar gave the flap of flesh one more quick pinch and wiped the blood away with a GORE-TEX sleeve. He put his hat back on, then grabbed a high-intensity flashlight from a console and pulled the lever on the door. “Let’s go find out.”

The Cheyenne Nation piled out his side with the Benelli, and as comfortable as I was just lying there, my sense of duty called and I dragged myself off the comfy shelf, fell into Omar’s seat, and slid out after them. They were looking at the chopper, but, like them, I couldn’t see anything beyond the bending of the runners and a little cosmetic damage to the front of the fuselage.

“It looks fine.” I glanced at the multimillionaire but noticed he was pointing up.

“Not really.”

Henry and I followed his eyes and the beam of the flashlight and could see large chunks broken from the rotors. “I’m no aviation engineer, but that looks bad.”

“It is.”

“I don’t think the county can cover this.”

“I’ve got insurance.” Omar walked behind me around the stabilizers as the Bear and I, saying nothing, looked at each other in the rain. After a few seconds, our pilot came back and held out a shredded piece of what looked like rubber-coated cable.

“Power line?”

He nodded. “An old one, copper.” He glanced around. “Probably a rural electrification feed from back in the thirties.

“Who the hell would be running electric lines all the way out here back then?”

“Let’s go ask them.”

“I was thinking you should stay here with the helicopter.”

“Like hell.”

I turned to look at Henry as he pulled up the hood of his poncho again. I watched as he studied the rotors and then looked over our heads toward the hillside behind us where there was a square outline of a lit, framed window that could be seen on the ridge above us, in what I could only assume was the lineman shack.

“Good job.” I punched Omar’s shoulder with my fist. “You found it.”

He reached back into a storage section of the Bell and pulled out another shotgun exactly like the one he’d given the Cheyenne Nation. “Indeed.”

We walked toward the light. “So, how many of those things do you have onboard?”

Omar tucked the second Benelli under his arm and wiped the rain and more blood from his face. “In my experience, you can never have enough AsomBroso tequila or shotguns.”

The Bear held back as the pilot stopped for a moment, holding his nose. “The Reserva Del Porto?”

Omar shrugged. “Of course.”

Henry called back to him, “The bottle looks like a penis.”

He looked up and sniffed. “At eleven hundred dollars a bottle it’s fucked me up enough times.”

As I pulled up beside him, Henry placed a hand on my chest. “Just as a precaution, I think you should know that I believe someone may have been shooting at the helicopter.”

“You see something in the rotors?”

“Maybe.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I am still not sure; it is possible that it was ball bearings, but since the engines are bearingless, I am thinking it could have been a shotgun.”

“Sure about what?” Omar had caught up with us.

“Henry thinks we might’ve been shot at.”

He shook his head. “Bullshit—it was the power line.”

The Bear didn’t say anything.

“Could it have been both?”

Omar shook his head. “I’ve been shot at before, and the results are similar but different.”

I knew Rhoades’s background and was pretty sure he hadn’t been in the military. “Where?”

“Kyrgyzstan, hunting Argali sheep. We were in the Batken Oblast near the Kyrgyz-Tajik border where the land mines are like paving stones. The only way you can get the sheep is with a helicopter, but with all the political and ethnic violence, you’re constantly flying into one tribe’s or another’s airspace—so they shoot at you, and sometimes they get lucky and score a hit.” Omar started climbing, and we followed. “Really sucks getting shot down in a minefield.”

“I bet.”

“Saved my life one time with a bag of bite-size Snickers bars.” He paused, tipping his head down and letting the rain run off the brim as I had done numerous times in the last seventy-two hours. “We were able to land this piece of shit Hind and avoid the land mines and what happens? This patrol of Issyk-Kul partisans came marching up to us like the minefield doesn’t exist.” He shook his head. “I swear, there wasn’t a one of them with hair between their legs. They were gonna shoot us, but I happened to have that bag of candy and I swear that’s what saved our lives.” He laughed and moved ahead. “There was a guy at the Transit Center in Manas near the airport close to Bishkek who gave me the tip. Spooky fucker, but he said you could offer these teenage soldiers your Rolex and they’d look at you like you were an idiot, but pull out candy or soda and you had friends for life.”

I stepped back on the shelf a little, remembering the light in the shack’s window. “If we cut the power line, how come they still have electricity?”

Henry nodded and started after Omar. “From the quality of the illumination, I would say propane.”

I trudged in the mud after them. “From that distance in these conditions you could tell that?”

“Yes.”

Omar laughed and called over his shoulder. “Bullshit.”

Suddenly, there was an unmistakable blast of a 20-gauge, and shot ricocheted off of everything. I covered my face with an arm as Omar fell onto the ground next to me. “Well, bullshit.”

I asked the question you ask in like situations, which always sounds like bad dialogue in a B war movie: “Are you hit?”

He grimaced and clutched at his leg. “No, I was just tired and thought I’d lie down and take a nap.”

I sat him on the deer trail and examined the wounds, two small holes that appeared to have struck to the left of center on the femur and lodged in the thigh. “You’re lucky—eight inches higher and you’d be singing soprano.”

He gritted his teeth and spit out the words, “Well, it hurts like a bitch.”

I pulled a bandana from the inside pocket of my jacket underneath my slicker and carefully wrapped it around his leg, tight enough to stem some of the bleeding. I helped him up. “Can you walk?”

“I think so . . .” I released him, and he immediately fell. “I guess not.”

Sitting him upright, I looked at the hill, but from this vantage point I couldn’t see where the shack was or where the shooter might be. Henry had moved to the right and was studying the rim of the ridge above us. “See anything?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you want to go ahead and clear the way, and I’ll bring Omar up with me?”

Without answering, he slipped up the side of the hillside like a black ribbon.

I turned back to our wounded comrade. “I’ll help you up the hill and out of the rain.”

“What if they keep shooting at us?”

“They’ll probably hit me first. Anyway, I’ve got faith in the Bear’s abilities in counterinsurgency.” Rhoades strung the shotgun over his shoulder, and we trudged up the trail. “But stop saying bullshit; it’s bad karma.”

“Bullshit.”

I had lost track of Henry and just hoped that the shooter had lost track of us. That hope was short-lived, and pellets ricocheted off a rock outcropping to our left but I was less worried when three consecutive rounds from the Benelli M4 riot gun returned the fire.

“Jesus . . . It sounds like Beirut up there.” Omar’s voice was right in my ear, just as it had been in the chopper.

I kept working us up the path and almost hoped to be shot so that I could take a rest. When we made the small break in the rocks and the flat area at the precipice of the ridge where the shack sat, there was no one around, and light was cascading from the open doorway.

“I don’t see a large Indian with a shotgun, do you?”