by Tom Clancy
Fisher got up and kept running.
HE put another half mile between himself, Ernsdorff’s estate, and Hansen’s team, then stopped. He needed to process what had just happened. Unless he’d made a huge mistake at some point in the last two days, Hansen and company shouldn’t have been able to track him here. Fisher mentally retraced his steps, starting with his boarding of the train in Tétange and ending with his arrival at the campsite outside Scheurerof. His credit cards and passports were sanitized; he’d given no one specifics of his plans; his comm protocols were streamlined and compartmentalized. . . . So how had they known to come here? Only one answer popped into his head, and the thought of it made his stomach churn. It didn’t seem possible; at the very least she wouldn’t have been that sloppy. If he were wrong, however, he’d just uploaded the contents of Ernsdorff’s server to the one person who shouldn’t have it.
HE crossed the bridge adjoining the camping grounds thirty minutes later, found the trail, and made his way back to his site. Through the trees he saw a glimmer of light and realized it was a car’s dome light. Fisher crouched down and got his bearings. He was in the right place. He got up and crept closer. When he was within twenty feet of his Range Rover, he knew there was no mistake: The tailgate was open. Fisher drew his pistol. Silhouetted by the dome light, a figure was leaning into the Range Rover, rummaging through Fisher’s belongings. The figure turned his head, and in the dim light Fisher saw a red, green, and yellow knit cap on the person’s head. One of his campsite neighbors. The idiot was pillaging his vehicle. Fisher couldn’t help but smile. If this didn’t take the prize, he didn’t know what would. He barely survives a hairy exfiltration only to find himself being burglarized by a Luxembourgian hippie, probably so high he was simply looking for Twinkies. So surreal was the situation that it took Sam a couple of moments to wrap his mind around it.
He pulled the Nomex balaclava down over his face, tucked the SC next to his leg, and stepped from the bushes. “Stop right there,” he said in rough but passable Luxembourgish. “Police.”
The hippie froze.
“Hands up. Turn around.”
The hippie complied, and Fisher saw what looked like a bayonet in his right hand, but in the next instant realized it was a lock shim. The hippie had some skills; opening automatic locks with a shim took a fine touch.
Suddenly, to Fisher’s right came a woman’s scream. He flicked his eyes that way—saw another flash of red, green, and yellow—and thought, Hippie girlfriend.
The woman ran screaming in the direction of the main road.
For a split second Fisher’s instincts took control, and he brought the SC up and around, drawing a bead on her back. He caught himself and turned back to the hippie boyfriend, who hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Leave,” Fisher said.
The hippie hesitated.
“Go!” Fisher barked.
The hippie took off, sprinting after his girlfriend.
Damn it.
FISHER checked the Pelican case; thankfully, it was unmolested. In addition to miscellaneous bits of gear, the case contained all his credit cards and passports. He had little to worry about, actually. As with everything it modified, DARPA had engineered the case not only to be tamperproof but also to withstand a remarkable amount of abuse.
He slammed the tailgate shut, got into the Range Rover, and started the engine. He reached the site’s main entrance a few seconds after the hippie couple and caught a glimpse of them pounding on the door of the caretaker’s cabin as he swept past them and turned onto the dirt tract. Thirty seconds later he reached a blacktop road, rue de Sanatorium, turned east toward Scheuerof, drove fast for a quarter mile, then slowed down to the speed limit. He wasn’t happy about heading into town, as the Scheuerof police department would be the first to get the call from the distressed hippies, but his only other choice was to backtrack through Vianden, an even larger population center. The sooner he could get through Scheuerof and onto the rural roads that ran along the German border, the safer he would be.
As he passed through the center of town, he saw the flashing lights of a police car heading in the opposite direction down a parallel street. A couple of minutes later, as Fisher reached the northern outskirts, he saw a second police car, which he hoped made up the entire complement of Scheuerof cops.
He approached a slope and a gentle turn to the east, and soon the road was hemmed in by thick stands of fir trees. The lights of Scheuerof faded behind him, and he took a deep breath and let it out.
A pair of headlights appeared on the road behind him, almost a mile back but gaining ground quickly. He saw no flashing lights. An unmarked police car, perhaps? He doubted it, not in such a small town. So, either a local in a hurry or . . . Fisher felt his belly turn over. He had to assume the worst. He jammed the gas pedal to the floor and the Rover’s engine revved. The speedometer swept past 115 kph and kept climbing. With one hand and one eye on the road, Fisher took the OPSAT off standby, called up the map screen, and touched the keys: RECENTER, ZOOM 4×, and TRACK. He needed something and he wasn’t sure what. But if, in fact, it was Hansen and his team on his tail, he needed to end the chase sooner rather than later. As the speedometer climbed past 130 kph, Fisher watched the OPSAT screen reorient itself, auto-scrolling with the movement of the Range Rover. The German border was a mile to his left, and given the rolling hills and thick vegetation he doubted there would be fencing. The nearest border checkpoint would be where? . . . Probably Bettel, about six miles ahead. He had to make his move before then.
The headlights reappeared over a crest behind him, a half mile back. Fisher looked again: two sets of headlights. They’d cut his lead by a half mile in four minutes, so whatever they were driving had some horsepower. Some model of Audi, Fisher suspected. He glanced at the OPSAT. On the screen, a thread of a road appeared two miles ahead and off to his left. He zoomed in on it and traced its zigzagging course deeper into the forest, along the German border, and then across. It was unnamed. A fire road or construction site? It didn’t matter. He would take it. The Range Rover’s higher clearance and four-wheel drive would hopefully negate his pursuers’ advantage in speed. The problem was, they would catch up to him before he reached the turnoff.
Fisher switched the OPSAT map to topographical view. The two-lane road had turned into a series of humps and dips a few hundred yards apart. Each time he topped a crest, he saw that his pursuers had shaved a little more off his lead, until a mile from the side road they were only a crest behind. The slope before the side road was steeper, at least thirty degrees, which meant the downward slope would be just as dramatic.
Time to throw a wrench into the works.
Fisher reached the trough and started up the incline. When the Range Rover’s engine began to protest and he began bleeding speed, he downshifted hard and stomped on the accelerator. The Rover lurched ahead, topped the crest, and started down the backside. Fisher let himself get a third of the way to the bottom, then slammed on the brakes. The steering wheel shuddered in his hands and the Range Rover yawed, first left, then right, before straightening out. He came to a stop. The side road was a hundred yards ahead, marked merely by a gap between the trees. He turned off the headlights and waited.
Fifteen seconds. No more. He started counting.
At twelve seconds, the first set of headlights popped over the crest. As soon as the headlights angled downward again, Fisher flipped on his headlights, tapped the brake lights twice, then shifted into reverse and jammed the gas pedal to the floor.
The tires let out a squelch, and then the Range Rover began accelerating toward the oncoming headlights.
12
FISHER’S gambit was a double-edged sword. If his pursuers were not quick enough to react, they would rear-end him, and if they reacted quickly but poorly, they might lose control and crash into the trees bordering the road. He wanted them off his trail, not dead.
He’d closed to within fifty feet of the car before its driver reacted, sendi
ng the car into a skid, turning it broadside as it slewed past the Range Rover and onto the right shoulder. Fisher could now see that the car was, in fact, an Audi, a black A8 twelve-cylinder model, which explained how it had gained so much ground so quickly. Just as the Audi slipped off the dirt shoulder and down into the ditch, the driver corrected, got the nose pointed back toward the road, and accelerated back onto the blacktop and screeched to a stop. Fisher slammed on his brakes, shifted into drive. Behind him, a second Audi crested the hill. This driver reacted just as quickly as the first, braking hard but then overcompensating, sending the car into a flat spin that took the Audi down into the left-hand ditch. As its taillights disappeared over the berm, Fisher punched the accelerator and aimed the hood of the Range Rover at the first Audi, which sat at a forty-five-degree angle, front tires on the blacktop, back tires on the shoulder.
A split second before he slammed into the Audi’s front door, Fisher gave the steering wheel a jerk to the left. His headlights filled the side window, and he caught a glimpse of Ben Hansen’s face squinting at the oncoming lights. The Range Rover hit the Audi broadside, side panel to side panel, shoving it sideways over the shoulder and down into the ditch. The Range Rover glanced off the Audi like a billiard ball as Fisher gave the steering wheel one more jerk; then he was accelerating again, straightening out and heading for the side road. As he drew even with it, he tapped the brakes twice, turned the wheel again, and shot into the gap between the trees. Within seconds the headlights of the Audis faded behind him.
NONE of the occupants was injured, Fisher guessed. Shaken up, yes, but uninjured. Having not seen how it came to a stop, he didn’t know if the second Audi was drivable, but the first one certainly was, and with any luck, they would spend some time trying to get the second car back onto the road rather than piling into the first and giving chase.
The road ahead was narrower than it had looked on the OPSAT screen—barely fifteen feet wide and slightly overgrown by tree limbs that slapped at the Range Rover’s hood and side panels. Fisher had the vague sensation of moving through a car wash. The rain had started falling again, light but steady. Ahead, his headlights illuminated a tree directly in front of him, and he spun the wheel, taking the left-hand turn too fast. The Range Rover’s wheels stuttered, then found purchase again, sending up a rooster tail of dirt and gravel. Over the next hundred yards the road zigged four more times, each turn at a right angle to its predecessor. Fisher glanced out the side window, and in the amber glow of the Range Rover’s side lights he saw a wall of dirt and foliage appear as he moved into a ravine. The branches that had been clawing at the windshield rose up and began scraping at the roof.
He caught a glimmer of light in the rearview mirror; then it was gone. He craned his neck around to look out the rear window. Nothing. Five seconds later the glimmer was back. Fisher turned again and saw headlights slicing through the trees; the lights blinked on, off, as the Audi negotiated the hairpin turns.
“Damn it!”
They’d recovered more quickly than he’d anticipated.
He depressed the gas pedal another inch, pushing the Range Rover harder. His headlights picked out a basketball-sized rock in the middle of the road. He swerved right. The Range Rover’s front right quarter panel plowed into the berm, coughing out a horizontal rut; mud and gravel and vegetation pressed up against the side window. His front tire bumped against the rock and he corrected, bringing the Range Rover back onto the center of the road. He glanced at the rearview mirror, saw headlights—two sets of them now—then returned his attention to the road.
Rock! This one was bigger, roughly the size of a lawn chair.
This time there was no time to swerve. Fisher slammed on the brakes. The Range Rover bucked. A cloud of dirt enveloped him, obscuring the road, then cleared in time for him to see the rock looming before the hood. With a crunch of fiberglass, the bumper hit the rock. Though Fisher was half expecting it, the pop-hiss of the air bag expanding caused his heart to lurch. He was pressed back against the seat. A plume of talcum powder effluent filled the car.
Knife . . . knife . . .
He groped with his right hand, down his leg to his calf, felt the sheath, then drew the knife and began hacking at the air bag, holding his breath and squinting against the powder. The air bag collapsed like a sun-warmed, partially deflated balloon, and Fisher kept slicing until it came free of the steering wheel. He tossed it aside and glanced at the rearview mirror. The Audis were coming on fast, only two hairpins behind.
Fisher shifted the Range Rover into reverse, stomped on the gas, then the brake, and then shifted into drive and accelerated around the boulder. Give them something else to think about. He slammed on the brakes, rolled down his window. He plucked the M67 fragmentation grenade off his harness and pulled the pin. He checked the rearview mirror. The lead Audi had cleared the second closest turn and was accelerating. This would be a lot easier with real bad guys, Fisher thought. He counted three more seconds, then let the M67’s spoon fly, let the grenade cook for one second, then hurled it into the dirt berm. He hit the accelerator and lurched forward. As he skidded into the next turn, the grenade exploded. Fisher heard the skidding of tires on dirt, then the familiar crunch of fiberglass.
Another deposit lost, Fisher thought with a grim smile.
HE pushed the Range Rover as hard as he dared on the dirt road, which was growing muddier with each passing moment. The four-wheel drive helped, but with the road so narrow, Fisher found himself glancing and bumping off the dirt walls, leaving sod and branches and shredded foliage in his wake.
Suddenly the road widened into an oblong clearing covered in mulch and chopped tree branches. A loggers’ dumping ground, Fisher thought. Ahead, the road split—the center branch continuing straight, west, the other two heading to the north and the south. Though he’d seen no signs, he assumed he’d crossed the German border. The sooner he could find a major highway, the sooner he could widen the gap between himself and Hansen’s team. He slowed, letting the Range Rover coast, and checked the OPSAT map. The L1 highway, which ran north to Neuscheuerof and beyond and south to Obersgegen and Körperich, lay two miles down the center road. He needed a highway, and they probably knew he needed a highway. Take the road less expected, Fisher’s instincts told him.
He spun the wheel to the left and accelerated out of the clearing and onto the north road. Again he found himself immediately bracketed by trees. This road was narrower than the previous one by at least two feet but so far appeared less winding. He accelerated to 80 kph, just over fifty miles an hour, and didn’t slow for a quarter mile until the road veered right. He eased into the turn, then followed the road back to the right and onto another straightaway. Ahead, the road started up an incline. When the Range Rover was twenty feet from the crest, he took his foot off the gas pedal, bleeding speed; then the car was up and over and back on level ground. A wooden bridge loomed through the windshield. Even as his brain analyzed the structure and warned, Too old, too rickety, the Range Rover’s front tires were thudding over the uneven planks. He heard a soft crunch, like a hiker’s foot plunging through the crust of a rotted fallen log, and then the Range Rover was tipping forward and plunging into darkness.
FISHER felt the car go vertical and had a momentary wave of vertigo. The Range Rover stopped, tailgate jutting skyward through the bridge’s deck. Fisher had a split second to refocus, and then the car was moving again, plunging straight down. He felt his belly fill his throat. The headlights illuminated only blackness, but then Fisher saw a shimmer of water, wet stones, steep-sided rock walls. The hood crashed into the ground. Fisher was thrown forward against his seat belt. His chest slammed into the steering wheel. The horn began blaring. Shit! . . . He pushed himself off the steering wheel and pressed his back into the seat. The horn kept blaring. He switched off the ignition. The horn went silent. He switched off the headlights. Through the windshield he could see water rising over the hood. He turned around, looked out the tailgate window. The red
taillights were glowing eerily against the underside of the bridge.
Moving slowly, carefully, with the sound of gravel grating on steel, the vehicle was moving again, tail end tipping forward. With a surprisingly gentle crash, the Range Rover landed on its roof, rocking gently a few times before coming to a stop. Upside down, Fisher looked over his shoulder and saw the creek water begin rising against the tailgate window and trickling through the weather seals. He took stock of the Rover; the steel cage had done its job. Aside from a slight dent in the sheet-metal roof, the cabin seemed undamaged. Nor was the rising water a worry. The creek was shallow, a foot or two at most. His driver’s window was still open, and through it water had begun to trickle. It was surprisingly cold, almost instantly numbing the skin of his hand.
His big problem was the horn. As he had, upon reaching the clearing Hansen and the others would have probably stopped. Faced with no tire treads to follow in the mulch, they would have had to explore each road, if only for a few dozen feet to determine if the Range Rover had passed that way. The blaring horn had just negated that delay.
Right palm braced against the roof, Fisher unbuckled his seat belt with his left and eased himself down, then turned onto his belly and crawled into the backseat. Working from feel alone, he found the handle to the Pelican case and dragged it forward onto the passenger seat. He spun himself around again, stuck his legs out the open window, and began crawling backward, dragging the case out with him. Once clear of the car, he got up, stepped out of the water onto the bank, and found a clump of bushes where he crouched down.
He took stock of his surroundings. The ravine was no more than twenty feet deep, but the walls were nearly vertical, with only the sparest of weeds and plants growing from the dirt. It was climbable, Fisher decided, but he doubted he had the time. To his left, past the bridge, the ravine disappeared into the darkness. To his right, a hundred feet away, was something interesting: a clearly man-made concrete wall sitting at a forty-five-degree angle to the streambed. After a few more moments, his eyes adjusted and he could make out a darker rectangle set into the facade. A mine? he wondered.