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THEY WERE GOING TO round the knoll in a matter of moments. They were going to see where our tracks had split and where I had gone uphill.

I felt I had no choice at that point. I flipped off the safety and slowly swung the gun and scope to the lead driver; I saw the crosshairs cover his chest at two hundred yards and squeezed.

The trigger was crisp and light. The shot came as a surprise to him.

I knew he was dead even before I’d run the bolt and saw the second driver trying to get off his sled and find cover. I shot him through his left side before he could dismount.

The third driver sprayed bullets uphill in my direction, forcing me to duck while I ran the action again, and I started to ease up over the top of the stump. But then I heard his machine at my nine o’clock and realized he was trying to flank me, trying to come around the knoll.

I spun around and took five quick bounds back down the hill. I threw the rifle over the handles of my snowmobile and found the third driver in my sights. He saw me and tried to get his gun up.

But he was less than a hundred yards away. My shot caught him square and hurled him off his machine.

My heart slammed in my chest. My breath came in gasps.

I’d just killed three men. Or women. I didn’t know. And I’d been forced to do it for reasons I did not understand.

But then, standing there in knee-deep snow in the bitter-cold aftermath of a gun battle, it hit me. I did understand. And I knew who they were.

They had never been tourists. They were Maestro soldiers.

And they’re protecting that mine! I jumped onto my sled, shoved the rifle in the scabbard, and started the engine. I swung the nose of the machine around and gave it throttle, meaning to head straight downhill.

But it drifted sideways in the deep snow, pushing me toward the third driver’s snowmobile. I went with the drift, realizing I could get his weapon and ammunition. I stopped next to his idling machine and found him dead on his back.

I refused to raise my visor; I pulled a knife from a sheath on the harness and cut free the gun, a short-barreled H and K nine-millimeter, and three high-capacity backup clips. I’d no sooner returned to my snowmobile when I heard rapid-fire shooting.

My helmet radio crackled to life.

“Cross, they’re on me!” Fagan yelled. “I’m heading south.”

“Coming!” I twisted the throttle, spun southeast, and barreled that way through the loosely set trees toward another rise in the terrain, this one dominated by a massive, needleless snag of a fir tree.

I caught sight of Fagan about three hundred yards away at my ten o’clock, heading toward that dead tree that seemed to claw at the sky. Four Maestro sleds were suddenly at my eight o’clock at an equal distance, three hundred yards and closing on the Mountie.

They were too far to shoot at her with the short-barreled submachine guns. And they were moving at such high speed, I doubted I could hit one of them if I stopped to use the long rifle.

“I’m close to you, Fagan,” I said. “Off your right shoulder. Satellite phone?”

“Negative on the call. Batteries all but shot.”

One of the Maestro drivers sped up and started closing the gap.

“He’s right behind you, Fagan!”

I lifted the H and K and shot wildly at him left-handed while trying to keep the sled going. Fagan stopped behind a fir tree and fired the twelve-gauge twice at the driver.

She hit him both times with double-aught buckshot, once in the visor and once in the chest, hurling him off his sled.

“Turn back on them, Dr. Cross,” Fagan said. “There’s only three left.”

Before I could argue, she’d gotten her snowmobile turned around and was heading toward the other Maestro men. I struggled to do the same without losing the submachine gun. I finally just sat on it.

By the time I got turned around, the Mountie was cutting away hard northeast about one hundred yards from me with the remaining drivers flanking her, firing at her. She twisted in her saddle, trying to return fire with the shotgun one-handed, then seemed to realize her mistake.

Fagan swung her head around and dropped an F-bomb in the headset before she and her sled vanished off the rim of the canyon into the dying light.