Part 4 (1/2)
”Ground Force Two, this is Black Dragon. Capture instructions are as follows: priority one is the Firestone priority two, the girl and West, both are to be captured alive, if possible. Any other captives are to be executed. There can be no witnesses to our doings here.”
Hearing this, West snapped to look over at Alby. Then he looked forward at Zoe, driving the lead car.
It was one thing to know that if everything ended badly, you were safe, but it was another thing entirely to know that those dear to you were not.
”You hear that?”Zoe said over the radio.
”Yep,” West said, his jaw tightening.
”Please get us out of here, Jack.”
AS JACK'S AND ZOE'S cars sped away to the east, a Chinese command APC was arriving at Jack's farmhouse, flanked by several escort jeeps.
As it skidded to a halt, two men stepped out of it, one Chinese, the other American. While the Chinese man was clearly older, both bore the rank of major on their collars.
The Chinese major wasBlack Dragon, the owner of the voice on the airwaves. Officious and intense, Black Dragon was known for his cold methodical efficiency he was a man who got the job done.
The younger American with him was tall and broad, powerful, and he wore the customized uniform of a US Army Special Forces operator. He had a sharpedged crew cut and the unblinking eyes of a psychopath. His call sign:Rapier.
”Secure the farmhouse,” Black Dragon ordered the nearest unit of paratroopers. ”But be wary of any improvised devices. Captain West is clearly a man who prepares for eventualities such as this.”
Rapier said nothing. He just stared intently at the abandoned farmhouse, as if absorbing every feature of it.
THE RIVER CROSSING.
The bridge was up ahead now, maybe a mile away-an old wooden singlelane bridge.
West saw it come into view, just as three APCs and five Chinese jeeps skidded to a halt in front of it, blocking the way. A roadblock.
They'd got there first.
d.a.m.n.
The lead APC lowered its turretmounted cannon ominously.
At that exact same moment, four Chinese jeeps caught up with West's cars from behind, two to each side.
The soldiers on the jeeps looked angry as all h.e.l.l and, buffeted and jostled by the uneven terrain, they tried to aim their rifles at West's tires.
”Jack!”Zoe called over the radio.”Jack...!”
”Stay on the road! Whatever you do, stay on the road till you reach the windmills!”
Two skinny windmills flanked the road up ahead, halfway between them and the bridge.
An explosion boomed out behind Jack's LSV-barely three feet behind it-tearing a crater from the road. A shot from the APC's cannon.
”Sheesh.” Jack turned to Alby. ”Do me a favor, kid. Try not to tell your mother about this part of your stay.”
Zoe's car came to the windmills flanking the roadway, shoomed between them, closely followed by Jack and Alby's LSV-still harried by the four Chinese jeeps.
Jack cut through the windmills, while the jeeps took them differently: one jeep swung onto the road proper and sped between the windmills, while the three others went wider, whipping around theoutside of the windmills and- Suddenly the first such jeep dropped from view. As did the jeep traveling immediately behind itand the one that had sped around the windmill on the other side of the road.
The three jeeps just fell out of sight, as if they had been swallowed by the Earth.
In fact, that was exactly what had happened. They had fallen into Indian tiger traps-large concealed holes in the ground next to the windmills, designed by Jack for an escape just like this one.
”Zoe! Quickly! Let me pa.s.s, then drive exactly where I do!”
Jack zoomed past Zoe's car and then abruptly shot left, off the road and out onto rough scrubland. Zoe followed him, swinging her LSV left, chased now by the sole surviving Chinese jeep.
Bouncing over the scrub, the river up ahead, the roadblock off to their right.
”Exactly where I drive!” West repeated into his mike.
He swept down an embankment toward the Fitzroy River-a suicidal course. There was no way he could possibly cross the fastflowing waters of the river in his lowslung LSV.
But into the river he went. At full speed.
The LSV plunged into the Fitzroy, kicking up spectacular fans of spray on either side as it sheared right through the water, unusually shallow water, across an uncommonly smooth section of riverbed: a concealed concrete ford.
As Jack's LSV skipped out the other side of the river, roaring up the far bank with a three foothigh jump, Zoe's car hit the near edge of the stream, at the same time as the last Chinese jeep came alongside it.
Zoe hit the ford, following Jack's path exactly. But the pursuing jeep didn't, and the ford was deliberately narrow, a submerged concrete bridge only one car width wide, and thus the Chinese jeep nosedived into the water and came to a jarring, splas.h.i.+ng halt, while Zoe's LSV just continued on, bouncing safely up the far side.
Seeing the two LSVs successfully cross the river to the north, the Chinese troops blocking the bridge leaped into their jeeps and APCs, and started across the bridge in pursuit.
Only to have the bridge collapse completely beneath the first jeep.
Amid a tangled mess of-precracked-wooden beams and struts, the jeep tumbled down into the river, leaving the remaining vehicles bunched up behind the void, now with no bridge to cross.
They hurried for the ford, but by the time they found it and negotiated its narrow span, Jack's two escape cars were already speeding onto the highway.
THE ESCAPE PLANE.
WHILE JACK and Zoe had been fleeing east, tripping nail traps and racing over concealed river crossings, Sky Monster had been busy, too.
He'd arrived in his pickup at the very south of the farm, where he disappeared inside a cabin set into the hillside, a hillside that-when seen from up close-was actually a giant camouflagenetted structure.
A hangar.
And in it was a giant black 747.
If one looked closely at the plane's underbelly, one could still make out an inscription in Arabic:PRESIDENT ONE-AIR FORCE OF IRAQ: HALICARNa.s.sUS.
It was a plane that had once lived in a secret hangar outside Basra, one of several such 747s that had lain in secret locations around Iraq, ready to whisk Saddam Hussein to safe havens in East Africa in the event of an invasion. Saddam, it turned out, had never been able to use this particular plane. But in 1991, cornered by enemy forces and abandoned by his own men, Jack West Jr. had.
It was now his plane, the Halicarna.s.sus.
The Halicarna.s.sus rumbled out of its hangar and down a wide dirt taxiway, which itself crossed the flowing Fitzroy River via a second submerged concrete ford a few miles south of the rigged bridge.