Echo Burning
Chapter One
There were three watchers, two men and a boy. They were using telescopes, not field glasses. It was a question of
distance. They were almost a mile from their target area, because of the terrain. There was no closer cover. It was
low, undulating country, burned khaki by the sun, grass and rock and sandy soil alike. The nearest safe concealment was
the broad dip they were in, a bone-dry gulch scraped out a million years ago by a different climate, when there had
been rain and ferns and rushing rivers.
The men lay prone in the dust with the early heat on their backs, their telescopes at their eyes. The boy scuttled
around on his knees, fetching water from the cooler, watching for waking rattlesnakes, logging comments in a notebook.
They had arrived before first light in a dusty pick-up truck, the long way around, across the empty land from the west.
They had thrown a dirty tarpaulin over the truck and held it down with rocks. They had eased forward to the rim of the
dip and settled in, raising their telescopes as the low morning sun dawned to the east behind the red house almost a
mile away. This was Friday, their fift ... read full excerpt from Echo Burning ebook
