by Kyle Mills
"What the hell is going on?" she said, slamming a hand down on the ground and raising a small cloud of dust. "Where are we?"
"Not on some tropical island waiting for the navy," Brandon said.
"You don't sound very surprised. Did you have something to do --"
"Come on, Catherine. Get real. Somebody screwed us. This would be an example of why you don't get involved in shit that doesn't concern you."
The man hovering over her shouted an unintelligible order and seemed a bit perplexed when she ignored him.
"So what are you trying to say, Brandon? That Richard's sold us out to --," she pointed at the man hovering over her. "To him? No way."
"And yet here we are," Brandon said. "Take it from me. Loyalties can get a little murky when numbers get into the nine digits."
"Bullshit!"
She was an odd sight sitting there in the rocks with her hair in her face and still wearing the heavy parka she'd had on in the plane. He was still wearing his, too, and he could feel the sweat starting to run down his sides.
"This isn't going to happen," she shouted. "There's no way I'm going to allow this to happen!"
Brandon let out a long breath, but otherwise remained motionless in deference to the man aiming a gun at him. He didn't want this, either. He didn't want to die. He didn't want to watch her die -- or worse. And he sure as hell didn't want to see these psychos drive off with twelve nuclear weapons in the back of their cars. But what could he do? The truth was that he was completely out of his depth. How stupid had he been to agree to do this? What had he been thinking?
The man guarding Catherine was yelling again, apparently wanting his new toy to stand. Incredibly, she continued to completely ignore him.
"What do we do, Brandon?"
He looked along the barrel of the rifle aimed at him and into the eyes of the man at the other end. Like the man hovering over Catherine, he was registering their conversation, but clearly he didn't understand any of it. And their compatriots were all busy unloading the plane under the watchful eye of that scumbag, double-crossing pilot.
Brandon had to raise his voice to be heard over the man still shouting at Catherine. "I'm not Danny. I don't know what to do."
"I assume you agree that we're going to be dead in an hour."
"I guess."
"Then if I were to do something stupid, you wouldn't have a problem with that."
He didn't answer immediately. He was a person who needed time to think, to plan. To consider every contingency. Now she was asking him to make life-or-death decisions without so much as a coin toss. "I don't know," he said finally. "Are we talking just dumb, or really moronic?"
The man standing over Catherine was screaming now, obviously losing a fair amount of face by being defied by an unarmed woman. She looked up at him, took a deep breath, and screamed back. "Would you shut the fuck up? I can't hear myself think!"
That was the last straw. The man switched his rifle to his left hand and grabbed hold of Catherine's arm. She offered some token resistance but in the end let him get a good grip and start pulling.
Brandon was the only one who seemed to notice that she wasn't letting go of the softball-sized rock her hand was resting on. She allowed herself to be yanked upward, adding to the momentum of the rock that was already moving in a smooth arc toward the man's head. Oddly, he didn't even flinch. Thousands of years of women cowering at the feet of his ancestors had left him unable to process even the possibility of this attack.
Brandon's relationship with women had been a little less one-sided, and he shifted his attention to the gun aimed at him.
The crack of stone against skull prompted the man in front of him to hesitantly adjust his aim toward Catherine.
Brandon charged, ducking low and driving upward with his legs, trying to lift him off the ground and dump him on his back.
It turned out not to be as easy as the jocks at his high school had made it look. While the man's feet did briefly leave the ground, when they came back down they were still under him. The blow to Brandon's back felt like it came from the butt of the rifle, and though it mostly just glanced off, it was enough to send him sprawling facedown in the dirt. Every muscle in his body seized when he heard the brief burst of automatic gunfire, and then he went completely slack. So this was where it was going to end. Bleeding to death in the middle of --
"Brandon! Get up!" Another short burst of fire. Then another.
He turned his face out of the sand and opened his eyes only to find himself staring at the bleeding body of the man who had been guarding him.
"For God's sake, Brandon! Get up!" Catherine shouted again. She sounded farther away this time.
It took another few seconds for him to realize that he hadn't been shot. He was alive. In fact, other than a little sand in his mouth, he felt fine.
A sharp burst of adrenaline dissipated the lingering effects of his brief death and he wrestled the rifle from the dead man's hands. Instead of standing, though, he rolled into a position that allowed him to aim the gun in the direction of the plane.
Amazingly there was another man down near the landing gear and three more scrambling for cover. Catherine was moving sideways at an oddly casual pace, inching toward the line of parked cars while peering intently through her rifle's sights. She seemed to have figured out how to switch it to semiautomatic and was delivering extremely accurate fire in the direction of anyone who exposed even a few inches of skin.
Brandon used the faint glimmer of hope he felt to force himself to his feet and start a stumbling sprint toward the vehicles Catherine was so methodically closing in on.
By the time he crossed behind her, she had adjusted her aim from the open door of the plane to a stack of rifles leaning against the landing gear -- the existence of which explained why no one was shooting back. Yet.
The first vehicle he came to was an old canvas-covered army truck and he dove through the missing passenger-side door, sliding behind the seat and finding the keys dangling from the ignition. It started on the first try and he ground it into gear, popping the clutch and flooring the accelerator.
A spray of sand and dust shot from beneath the tires as he twisted the wheel to the right, spinning 180 degrees and skidding to a stop in front of Catherine. She switched the gun to full automatic and emptied her clip into the rifles beneath the plane before jumping in.
"Go!"
He did as he was told, releasing the clutch and sending the truck fishtailing toward the open desert.
The sound of shots started a few moments later, and Brandon pressed harder on the accelerator, finally easing up when he started to worry that he was going to push it through the rusting floorboard.
"Jesus Christ!" he shouted. "You killed those guys! I knew it! I knew it the whole time."
She leaned her head out of the missing door and looked behind them. "What are you talking about? You knew what?"
"You're some kind of government super-spy!"
When he glanced over at her and saw her expression, he felt some of his hard-won hope slip away. "You're not?"
She shook her head. "We got lucky. They underestimated me because I'm a woman and they tossed their rifles to unload the plane."
"But you were hitting what you aimed at!"
"My dad was into hunting and he didn't have a son --"
"Oh, great! That's just fucking great," Brandon said, skidding around a large boulder and nearly putting the truck on two wheels. "So if we get attacked by a deer, I have nothing to worry about."
"Hey! Who just got you out of that?"
"Are you kidding? Who got me into it?"
She didn't seem to have a response for that, so she leaned out the door again. After less than a second she pulled herself in and slammed her back into the seat.
"What?"
"They're coming up behind us. Fast." "How many?"
"Just the Mercedes."
"Do you think the others are going to try to head us off?"
She
shook her head. "I doubt it. They've got a couple hundred million dollars worth of nuclear warheads sitting in a plane. They're going to concentrate on that. Can you go any faster?"
"I'm floored."
She grabbed the rifle he'd taken, checked the magazine, then sat there with it in her lap for a moment, thinking.
"Bear right," she said, pointing to a tilted ridge where the sand had blown away to reveal fissured, sun-baked earth, strewn with boulders.
"We could get stuck!"
"Not before a Mercedes does."
"How close are they?" Brandon asked. There were no side mirrors and the back of the truck's cab was a solid patchwork of wood and metal.
She peered out again, but as soon as her head cleared the edge of the door, a burst of automatic gunfire sounded. Brandon took a hand off the wheel and jerked her back inside, causing the truck to swerve violently.
"Brandon! What did you tell me in San Francisco? Drive the truck!"
"But they were shooting!"
"You let me worry about that! Two hundred yards."
"They're about to get a lot closer."
He braked, but not so much that all four wheels didn't come off the ground when they left the sand. The cracks in the hardened mud grew wider and the rocks larger as they continued forward, forcing him to slow even more.
It was at that moment the shooting started in earnest. Not the drone of automatic fire, but the much more frightening sound of careful, individual shots and the ring of metal as they hit the truck.
Brandon veered left, trying to keep the back of the vehicle to the men shooting at them. There was a loud crack of splintering wood behind him and a neat bullet hole suddenly appeared in the windshield.
"Shit!" he yelled, as he was forced to slow the truck even more in order to maneuver through a group of rocks big enough to do fatal damage to the underside of the vehicle. He glanced at the speedometer. Fifteen miles an hour. No. Kilometers an hour. What was that? Eight?
Catherine ducked her head outside and then immediately pulled it back. "They're either stuck or stopped."
"They're not hitting us anymore," Brandon said hopefully. The terrifying sound of bullets striking metal and wood no longer followed each shot.
"They're going for the tires."
"Of course," Brandon mumbled, downshifting and refusing to look again at the speedometer.
"You're gonna have to go faster, Brandon. They can catch us on foot at this speed."
"Hey! You think you can do better?"
She looked through the windshield at what he had to work with and let out a long breath between her teeth.
"Do not wreck this truck or get it bogged down," she ordered. "Better to go too slow than too fast, understand? When you get out of range or you find some cover, wait for me."
"What do you mean, wait --"
She swung her feet out the door and jumped to the ground, clutching the rifle in her hands.
"Catherine! What are you doing? Get back in the truck!"
But she was already in a crouched sprint, heading for a jumble of boulders about twenty yards away. Brandon took his foot off the accelerator when a puff of dust exploded only a few feet from her. She dropped to the ground and slithered the last few yards on her stomach, pushing the rifle in front of her. When she had her back pressed safely against a boulder she waved him on.
"Catherine! Come back! You're going to get yourself killed!"
She ignored him, spreading her parka on the rocks beneath her and peeking out through a narrow gap between two boulders. He kept creeping forward as she sighted carefully along her rifle and squeezed off a round. The Mercedes was close enough that the sound of shattering glass was clearly audible.
He shifted down again and stepped on the accelerator, the breath catching in his chest when he did. She was right -- their only hope was for him to keep going. But watching her disappear from his peripheral vision turned out to be harder than anything he'd ever done.
Chapter FORTY-TWO
The rear wheels lost traction and the truck began an uncontrolled slide back down the hill before hitting a more solid section and jerking forward again. The slope was a treacherous mixture of rocks, crevices, and sand bogs, forcing Brandon to clear his mind of everything that didn't relate to gaining a few more feet of ground. Right now, there wasn't anything he could do about Catherine, or the gunmen behind him, or his role in Armageddon -- other than to try to keep the truck moving.
The front wheels finally cleared the top of the hill, launching briefly into the air and then slamming down on the small plateau. He heard the underside of the truck grinding against something and he slammed his foot to the floor, feeling the vehicle finally level out and accelerate over the gloriously open terrain. After about two hundred yards, he skidded to a stop, jumped out, and ran back through a blinding cloud of dust. The closer he got to the edge of the plateau, the lower he crouched, finally dropping to his knees and crawling the last few feet.
The valley below looked completely dead -- an endless expanse of brown and tan bordered by mountains so far away that they might have actually been a distant storm. The plane and the men swarming it were nowhere to be seen, lost in the gentle roll of the terrain.
Catherine, though, was easy to pick out. She was lying on her stomach about a half mile away, her rifle barrel resting between two boulders. The Mercedes was still there, too, and from his elevated vantage point, Brandon could see two men huddled behind it.
One of them suddenly popped up and there was a puff of smoke from the end of his rifle, followed quickly by the ring of the shot. Catherine didn't react at all. She just lay there, motionless. Waiting.
But for what?
He scanned the horizon again, looking for the telltale plume of dust that would signal the approach of reinforcements. Nothing. And with a little luck, it would remain that way. With almost two hundred million dollars' worth of nuclear warheads to worry about, the escape of a couple of captives wouldn't be much more than an irritation. Whoever was running that particular horror show was undoubtedly saying the same thing Brandon would have: Get the stuff loaded, split up, and get the hell out of Dodge.
The same man popped up again, but this time Catherine got a shot off and he jerked back, disappearing from view.
"Nice!" Brandon said aloud, thinking he'd been hit.
A moment later, though, he reappeared, pressing his back against the car and looking depressingly healthy. It must have been close, though, because after what looked like a heated discussion, both men crawled through the open passenger-side door. A moment later, they were speeding away, hunched down in their seats to keep clear of the rear window.
"Yes!" he shouted, and then looked back nervously. Nothing. Just the old truck and a million miles of sand.
When Catherine finally appeared at the edge of the plateau, Brandon already had the truck running. She jumped in and he took off, driving in the exact opposite direction the Mercedes had gone for want of a better plan.
She'd left her parka in the rocks and was now down to a pair of cargo pants and a sweat-stained turtleneck with the sleeves pushed up as far as they would go. Her breathing was too heavy to allow her to speak, but she did manage to check her rifle's clip before laying it down on the floorboard.
Brandon wanted to say something, but wasn't sure what you said to a woman who had thrown herself out into the middle of the desert and traded shots with a bunch of Arab terrorists so you could drive away.
"Thanks," turned out to be the best thing he could come up with.
She leaned forward until her head almost touched her knees and massaged the stitch in her side. When she sat upright again, her breathing was a little more under control. "You're welcome."
She pulled off her turtleneck, leaving her in just a jog bra, and wiped her face with it. "Watch the road."
"There is no road," he said, turning fully back toward the windshield and trying to hold the truck steady. "Any thoughts on where we are?"
"N
o."
"Aren't you supposed to be an expert?"
"On what? It's a desert, Brandon."
He dared a quick sideways glance. She didn't look scared at all. And the men she'd just killed didn't seem to be registering, either. Mostly, she just looked pissed -- like at any minute she was going to twist his head off. Better to just shut up and give her some space.
For the next fifteen minutes, she just stared out the open door, oblivious to the suffocating heat, the dust blowing in her face, the sun beating down on her bare skin.
In that time, Brandon confirmed that the fuel tank was full ten times, made certain that no one was following them twenty times, and looked around the empty cab of the truck at least fifty times. At half an hour, he felt like he was drowning in the silence between them.
The front of the truck suddenly slammed down, bouncing wildly and almost causing him to lose control. Catherine threw a hand out to steady herself and he leaned through the missing door, examining the vague outline of a dirt road stretching into the distance. He jammed his foot against the brake and twisted the steering wheel, spinning the truck 180 degrees.
"If those guys in the Mercedes come looking for us, it'll probably be on that road," he said. "But we don't have any food or water and we have no idea where we are. We can't just drive around the desert until we run out of gas."
She sat there motionless for a few moments, the life starting to slowly come back into her face.
"What the hell happened, Catherine?"
She shook her head. "It had to be the pilot. He must have cut a deal with a terrorist group."
Brandon frowned and flopped back in his seat.
"What?" she said.
"Come on, Cath. Why the hell would Scanlon even tell that pilot what our cargo was? And even if he did, why wouldn't the pilot just have taken the money? These aren't easy items to fence. You don't just post them on eBay or flash them to people walking by on the street."
"I know that you and Richard have your differences, but there's no way you believe that he just handed twelve nuclear warheads to a bunch of terrorists."