TIJUANA
MONDAY, 12:23 P.M.
IGNORING THE PAIN THAT jolted through his arm every time his feet struck the ground, Faroe ran down the long tunnel. He dismissed the trail of blood flung from his slashed left calf and his right arm. A man could bleed a lot and still function if he wanted to bad enough.
Faroe wanted to.
The single strand of overhead electrical wire blossomed every hundred feet with a bare lightbulb. The lighting might have been primitive, but the walls were expertly shored with timbers. Wherever the miners had struck loose soil, the walls were lined with sheets of plywood to hold back the dirt. The footing was irregular, humped up with rocks and dirt.
The only sound Faroe heard was his own breathing-deep, harder than he wanted, and better than he had any right to expect. He was losing too much blood.
About every hundred yards, he ran past service rooms, narrow little chambers with a ceiling just high enough for a man to stand erect and repair the blowers that brought air down to the tunnel. He was reaching the last of those chambers when he heard Hector Rivas cursing as he climbed down a metal ladder.
Faroe flattened himself into the tiny service area, forced himself to breathe lightly, and eased his head forward just enough to see down the last hundred feet of tunnel.
Hector.
Lane!
For an instant, relief loosened Faroe’s knees.
There was a gag tied across Lane’s mouth and his hands were cuffed in front of him around the metal ladder.
So near.
And way too far for a pistol shot.
Not when he was shooting wrong-handed, light-headed, with an unfamiliar gun. Surprise was his only hope. If he crept close enough, he could put a bullet in Hector’s head.
A head shot was the only sure way to save Lane.
And Faroe had to be certain, because one shot would be all he got. For that level of certainty, he couldn’t be more than thirty feet from Hector.
So Faroe waited, breathing shallowly despite the aching of his lungs. Sweat cooled, but not the hot slide of blood down his right arm and into his left shoe.