“We’ll go to that big hotel,” he said, “then split up. Enya, you book a room with your credit card, but take a taxi back to Las Vegas. Go to the Irish Consulate and tell them you’ve lost your passport and your credit cards and ask for help. Take the laptop. But give the hard drive to Leila.”
“I don’t have the files on the laptop. Only the drive.”
“But you know the cloud server address and login. You can download it again.” He glanced back at Leila. “You need to call your network from a public phone at the hotel and get them to order an air taxi to take you back to LA.”
“And what are you going to do?” Leila said.
“Me and deserts go way back. I’m going to take these guys for a detour.”
“No way,” Enya said, “I’m not going to do it and you can’t make me. I’m not giving that hard drive to anyone until I know for sure that it will end up spread like the plague on TV, online, everywhere.”
“I don’t know the password anyway,” Leila said.
“No,” Enya said. “And you’re not getting it either.” She turned to Leila. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. Don’t think that.” She turned back to CJ. “As for you, I’m never going to leave you. So forget it. We can check into the hotel, barricade ourselves in the room, then use their Wi-Fi to start posting this stuff online. We’ll blast it out like a shotgun all over social media. That’s how the web works. Once the virus is out, you can never get it back.”
CJ was quiet, wondering how to get everyone back on the same team. But he didn’t have to wonder long. The road ahead had gentle curves winding downhill to a plain. It was empty except for a cloud of dust oozing out of the landscape and creeping towards them. That was a clue. But it wasn’t the clincher. That was the sound. The roar of big-bore V-8s screaming, upstaging the Rover’s discreet supercharged gurgling.
He slammed his foot on the brakes, skidding off the blacktop onto its shoulder. This time the U-turn was not broken. He just spun a loop in the gravel on either side of the road and they were heading back towards the hills at speed as their pursuers emerged from the cloud. Enya and Leila looked from each other to CJ but said nothing. The new reality was obvious enough. They must have been spotted when they’d turned off the freeway, or back at the gas station. Leila twisted around and posted watch out the rear window, holding on with both hands as CJ flung the SUV around snaking bends.
“There’s two,” she said. “A big truck and an SUV. They’re still a ways behind yet.”
CJ’s eyes were dancing back and forth in the mirrors, and he caught them taking a bend back down the hill. Maybe a thousand yards. Maybe less.
“Still got that thirty-eight?” he said.
“You bet,” Leila said.
“Can you shoot a nine-mil?”
“I can shoot a Kalashnikov.”
“Pity I don’t have one. An RPG would be handy too.” He pulled out one of his 9mm pistols and passed it to her. “Give the thirty-eight to Enya.”
She hesitated. But then she took the revolver out of her purse and handed it over. Enya took it like it was a wet fish, and one that didn’t smell too good.
“I had the trigger smithed,” Leila said. “It’s got an eight-pound pull on double action, but only four on single. Smooth as butter. So take it easy.”
Enya looked down at it laid flat across her palms.
“I’ve never even touched a gun,” she said, her face floating up towards CJ.
“Put it in your satchel. Only use it if you’re real close. Just point it at the middle of their body and squeeze the trigger.”
“Amen,” she said, sliding the gun into the satchel next to the laptop.
“Can we outrun them in this?” Leila said.
“We’ll never get the chance. In these hills we’re protected by all these bends. They can’t get a shot off. Besides, they’re too far back. Even with M4s or Kalashnikovs, they’d be out of range.”
CJ took another bend before he broke the bad news.
“But this is the A-team. They’ll have sniper rifles and people who know how to use them. When we make it over these hills, we’ll be heading down into a valley. The fastest vehicle will continue the pursuit. The other one will pull over and set up. Elevated position. Perfect visibility. Little or no wind. That’s not too hard. And even if they miss and we escape the pursuit vehicle, it won’t be for long. They’ll send a chopper and pick us off from the sky.”
That was the talking done. Its aftermath was silence. Enya nursed her satchel. Leila checked the pistol. CJ looked for a venue. It was official. This was Plan E for Emergency. It was all down to a shoot-out. The only choice left was to pick the place. The road was still going up, but steeper, its shoulders gone, the hills squeezing up to the edge of the road. CJ was looking for an exit. They passed a trail heading off into the scrub on the right, but he let it go. The hills were too low on that side with no twists and turns. No place to hide. He needed a bolthole, a trail that snaked in and out of rocks and bluffs as soon as it left the road. And he found it. Just after the pass. A trail on the left.
He slewed the Range Rover off the road, its tires scrabbling stones and dirt. The trail was narrow and well worn, its route decorated with abandoned telephone poles that were now just spikes of wood, their wires long gone. CJ spun the wheel, cutting left and right around interlocking fingers of rock, and the road was soon lost from sight. When the V-8s were close—almost at the turnoff—CJ cut the engine and closed his eyes, following the sound as they roared on by. No pause. No second thoughts. The howl of their engines bounced off the rock walls of the trail and faded in waves as they twisted on down the road. They’d soon realize their mistake. The road would straighten out—no more twists and turns—and they’d get a clear line of sight across the valley. There’d be a few cars on the road, but no white Range Rover. CJ started the engine, a big decision looming. Life was all about choices. Good and bad. And in CJ’s world, the way they added up was called living or dying.
So which way?
Option one was the hotel. In minutes, they could be back on the road heading towards it. They might make it, too. But the odds were not good. They’d be out in the open for too long. And what if Tratfors had deployed a second team? They could be waiting down the road already. They’d end up in a shoot-out in the wrong place, outnumbered by trained killers. They’d be outgunned too. The Tratfors team would have long guns. Most likely full auto. The first rule of tactics is that the weapon dictates the movement, and in open country, their long guns and superior forces gave them control. Heading into wide-open spaces was playing to their strength. It was running in fear with the hounds at their heels. That was rarely the best choice. Ask any rabbit.
Option two was more snake than rabbit. Sneak down a hole and lie in wait. The Tratfors vehicles weren’t armored. Leila knew how to shoot, and they had hundreds of rounds. Close quarters. If they could only find cover and catch them in the open. With the range cut back to fifty yards, the odds would switch. That was a lot of ifs. But the goal had shifted. Escape was grand. But survival was essential. And squeezed in between these hills down the trail, there might be an ambush point.
CJ shuffled his deck of priorities, CPD reflexes kicking in hard. Close protection detail was a day at the office for him, a way of life he’d lived for years in the world’s most hostile environment. Getting ambushed was a constant risk and a frequent occurrence. Kalashnikovs, RPGs, IEDs and grenades. Name it. If the insurgents used it for killing, he’d been in its sights. But he’d survived. And so had all of his clients. At least, all except Declan O’Brien, and he’d already paid over the odds for that mistake. Outing Tratfors and going public with the data was a laudable goal, but CJ could make do with dreaming it. The same with Kowalski. CJ wasn’t going to trade vengeance for the lives of Enya and Leila. He had to save them, and that meant heading further into the hills. He’d read the writing on the trail, and those splintered telephone poles were a history book, signposts of a bygone era, frontie
r days when this trail had led somewhere worth going. He’d heard about Nevada ghost towns. Once-thriving communities, built around mines that had never fulfilled their promise. Either that or they’d gotten swept aside by the vagaries of economics and social change.
“What’s that?” He’d heard something. Not the V-8s. Something different. Super high revs. He checked the mirrors, but all he could see was dust.
“I got it,” Leila said, her face pushed up against the side window. “It’s a drone.”
“Oh God,” Enya said peering into the side-view mirror. “It’s a drone on steroids.”
CJ couldn’t see it, but he could hear it. There were two distinct frequencies. One high. One low.
“It’s a quadcopter,” he said. “Two engines. The blades are electric. Battery-powered. But they get charged by a fuel engine. Gasoline or hydrogen. Hours of flight time.”
“It’s getting closer,” Leila said, spotting it out the back window. “It’s carrying something… grocery bags. Those single-use plastic bags they banned in California. There’s a bunch of them hanging underneath.”
CJ saw it too. It was feet away from the rear window, a freak wasp with chainsaw wings, an escapee from an insectivore Jurassic Park with howling rotors and screeching motors.
And shopping bags.
CJ was slapping the Range Rover around the bends, scraping the rocks. A hard target. But the predator wasp was hanging in there, following every swing of its tail like it was tied to it with a tow rope. CJ had his eyes on it, keeping the trail ahead in his peripheral vision. He was studying the bags swinging underneath it. They were thin white plastic. Almost see-through. And so close he could make out the contents.
What was it Leila called them?
Single-use.
You betcha.
“Get ready.”
For what. He didn’t say, and Enya and Leila didn’t ask. They grabbed belts and handles and hunkered down as CJ coiled his body around the wheel. There was a sudden burst of revs, a crescendo that cut through them like a sound sword. Then the copter pounced.
Twenty-Three
In 2004, US Special Forces in Afghanistan used a drone called a Tarantula Hawk to drop grenades on the Taliban. That was a first. But good ideas make good travelers. And ten years later, ISIS were already making their own version. Improvisation. The insurgents were masters at it, and a canny student of conflict like Kowalski was never going to pass up a good trick. He’d even updated it with a quadcopter that wouldn’t be out of place in a new science magazine. But the bombs underneath were another story. They were cut and pasted right out of the insurgent’s make-and-mend playbook. Mason jars. The home accessory for preserving jam now had a new line of work. The important bit was to get the right size so that it kept a tight squeeze on the grenade’s lever after you pulled the pin and slid it into the jar.
CJ hit the brakes, spun the wheel and stamped on the gas all in the same second. No plan. No applicable page in the training manual. Just a roll of the dice. Sounds and images. Floods of terror. And all three of them got washed away with it, including CJ. But he had questions too. Not articulated. Not laid out neatly in a logical thinking process, but popping up like sparks amid the mayhem.
What type of grenades? Time-fuse or impact?
That’s a big issue when glass is shattering and levers popping. And hanging off those important unknowns were a bunch of more trivial concerns about their vehicle. With an old-fashioned rear-wheel drive, CJ could have controlled the skid, stopping the vehicle’s forward motion and sliding it off the trail and up the bank to one side. But this was a modern four-wheeler with a computer doing its own line of thinking and shifting power and traction according to a set of rules which certainly didn’t include evasive maneuvering when attacked by drone on rocky mountain trail.
Whatever he did, it was brave-new-world stuff.
The Rover hit a fist of rock as it spun up the bank, and a two-part explosion shattered a window and dinged holes in the roof. Leila yelped and keeled over, grabbing her face. Another sound. Tympanic. A jar bouncing on the roof. CJ watched it tumble down the windshield onto the hood and slide off the edge.
That was it. They were on solid rock. It was over.
But the flimsy plastic caught on the wipers, one of its handles snagging on a blade. They were perched at a precipitous angle at the side of the trail, pointing down, wedged up against that fist of rock.
The drone?
It was still there. He could hear it but not see it.
“Leila,” CJ’s voice barked out, cutting through shell-shocked ears.
She cried out. Not a word. That universal sound. Pain. Just enough to tell them she was still with the living.
CJ unbuckled his belt and tried to get out, but he couldn’t open his door. He slammed his shoulder against it and the Range Rover jolted, bouncing on its springs. All eyes went to the plastic bag hooked on the wiper.
How thick was that recyclable plastic?
CJ swung his legs up and laid them across Enya’s lap so they could reach the passenger door. He put his hands on the driver’s door and pushed by straightening his legs like a horizontal squat. The door burst open, and he ducked out, using the SUV for cover. The drone was about seventy to eighty yards away. He was about to reach for the plastic bag and secure it. But he stopped. The drone had to be relaying video. The Rover was pointing away from it. Maybe they hadn’t seen the bag snagged on the wiper. It wouldn’t be so easy in so much dust and smoke. The grenades had been dropped in front of them. They had time fuses with a four-to-five-second delay. So all they had to do was drop them from the right height and the right distance in front of the vehicle. They didn’t even have to guess its speed. They tracked it. That was why the drone was hanging off their tail. It wasn’t rocket science. But it wasn’t an exact science either, not with the split-second calculations involved.
CJ had his pistol out and targeted on the drone when they made him. The copter swooped to one side before turning tail and heading back up the trail gaining height. CJ’s arms were braced on top of the Range Rover. A tough shot. But the Sig Sauer was an intimate friend, and a drone is vulnerable. Even a feeble 9mm round exhausted at the end of a long trajectory has enough juice to damage it.
One hundred yards.
Two hundred and rising fast.
Bullet drop? Windage?
No time for arithmetic.
What did Alex call this?
Arkansas elevation and Kentucky windage.
In other words, pants it. And CJ did just that. He laid it down. The whole clip. Even though bullet number twelve did the job, catching one of the pods and knocking out its rotor. The drone lurched to one side, then swooped down skimming a rocky outcrop like a bird of prey on the hunt for game before shattering in splinters of metal and swirling blades. Silence. Then a hot wire found some leaking gas and flame trailed black smoke with a twirling finger up towards a blue sky.
CJ unhooked the bag hanging from the wiper blade and squeezed his way past the buckled door into the driver’s seat. He could hear the V-8s. They were back on the trail already. Enya was kneeling on her seat, leaning back over it to nurse Leila.
“She’s been hurt,” she said. “She’s got glass in her face.” Enya grabbed a handful of Leila’s hair to hold her head steady as she plucked a shard of glass from her cheek.
CJ reached into the bag and pulled out the Mason jar. Sitting inside it was a M67 fragmentation grenade with its spoon jammed up against the glass. That thick glass and solid metal lid, along with the angle of the Rover’s roof and its motion, had saved their lives. Like a stunt man rolling out of a fall, the force of the impact had been dissipated when it ricocheted off the roof and tumbled down the windshield. Not just a stroke of luck, but a seismic shift in fortune. A jackpot with a five-star bonus. Not only had they lived through a potentially lethal attack, but they now had a grenade.
“Are we good?” He checked Leila in the mirror.
“Good.” She was holdi
ng a bloody tissue against her cheek, her voice little more than a squeak. Enya turned around and fell into her seat as CJ backed off their savior rock and they slewed down the bank onto the trail in a scramble of wheels and stones. They headed deeper into the hills, snaking between banks of gravel and gnarls of chiseled rock.
“Can’t we just call the cops?” Leila was grabbing at straws, but when you’ve been on the wrong end of a grenade, that’ll happen.
CJ pulled out his phone and passed it to Enya. She checked the screen. “No signal. Maybe if we sit on top of one of these hills, a 911 call might go through. But I still vote no. Assuming we’re not already dead by the time they get here, these guys would kill the cops like they’re wiping their noses. And even if they didn’t and we all survived—two big and unlikely ifs—we’d have to explain things. CJ would get arrested. The hard drive would end up in an evidence locker and get sucked into a black hole. And all this assumes that Tratfors don’t have a local law enforcement officer in their pocket. In which case, Nevada’s finest will shoot us by mistake.” She offered Leila the phone, but Leila shook her head. So she turned it off and dropped it in her satchel. “Like it or not,” she said, “our world has been simplified. Survival. It’s all we have left to worry about. So cheer up. We’ve got the world record holder sitting right here at the wheel.”
They rounded a bend, and CJ swerved to avoid a concrete block sticking up out of the ground. They skidded to a halt in a clearing. The trailhead. An arena the size of a schoolyard cut out of the base of three mountains. CJ drove to the end of the clearing, then banged his way out through the Rover’s buckled door and scanned the lie of the land. It didn’t take long. This was the perfect spot for an ambush. That concrete block they’d almost crashed into was one of many by the entrance to the clearing, foundation stones of some structure built to house something heavy like a generator. At the other end of the clearing, there was a derelict building, a pile of wood bristling with blades of corrugated metal, the remains of its roof. A timber headframe arched over the debris, trailing broken cables onto a pulley system once used for hauling out ore on rails. Beyond the headframe was the main entrance to a mine, an adit, not a vertical shaft, but a horizontal tunnel burrowing into the mountain. Higher up the slope, all but hidden in a cluster of rocks, he caught the black wink of another adit. There was a third entrance too on the northern mountain halfway back towards the concrete blocks. It had two strands of barbed wire stretched between poles in front of it, and there was a sign clipped between them, announcing in red and black:
The Saint Of Baghdad Page 21