Moments later, Lyons’s rental Impala rolled onto the tarmac and headed after the rolling luxury jet. As best he could, Lyons waved one arm and signaled toward the runway. He knew the driver couldn’t hear him but shouted nonetheless, “Try to get in its way!”
The Impala responded by shifting course. Instead of chasing the jet to where it would make its turnaround, the Chevy ventured the other way, heading for the runway itself. Lyons, meanwhile, continued to inch toward the passenger cabin. By the time he reached it, the jet was making its turn. The Stony Man warrior rose to a crouch and peered in through one of the portals. Vishnevsky and the flight attendant were standing near the cockpit. The Russian had put away his gun and the woman gave no indication that she feared for her life.
She’s in on it, Lyons thought.
Suddenly the wing shuddered beneath Lyons and he was half-deafened by the overhead roar of the jet’s twin turbo-fans. He dropped back to his knees, then was forced to lie flat again as the jet lurched forward down the runway, preparing for takeoff. Up ahead, Lyons saw the Impala turn and face the oncoming jet. Once it had lined itself up, the Chevy accelerated, trying to get to the Cessna before it could leave the ground. Lyons could see that it was going to be close. He also realized there was little more he could do, so he eased backward, then relinquished his grip on the vibrating wing. He landed hard on the tarmac but rolled on impact to minimize the pain.
Moments later, as he slowly staggered to his feet, Lyons watched helplessly as the Cessna lifted off. Its landing gear retracted a split second before the front wheel would have otherwise clipped the Impala’s roof. Thwarted, the officer behind the wheel slammed on his brakes and bounded out, swearing. Lyons jogged over to him and they both watched the jet streak away from them.
“One more second!” Sheriff Officer Willie Matte moaned angrily. “Another second and I would’ve had them!”
“You tried. No use beating yourself up.”
“Maybe not,” Matte said. “Better we take it out on those bastards still here.”
“Did you get a look at who nailed the truck?”
Matte nodded and pointed past the far end of the runway. Petenka Tramelik was pulling away from the commercial building farther down the road. “There’s at least two snipers along with the guy who fired the launcher.”
“Let’s get them,” Lyons said, breaking for the Impala. “I’ll drive.”
The Stony Man warrior ducked into the driver’s seat. As soon as Officer Matte got in the other side, Lyons gunned the engine. The quickest route to the main road was diagonally across the runway, which took the men in the direction of the terminal. When they reached the officers huddled around the ravaged truck and the body of Officer Zimmer, Lyons slowed to a stop alongside them.
“Find somebody who knows how to fly Orson’s chopper and follow us!” he told them. “We’re going to make sure somebody pays for this!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Tramelik knew there was still police activity on the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, so once he’d pulled back on the main road he backtracked as far as the nearest junction and then turned left on Route 522, heading north out of Taos. The Impala following in pursuit took the same turn and slowly began to gain on the Vympel op’s Land Rover.
“Drop down!” Vladik Barad shouted to Gustavo and Khartyr as he shoved another HEAT warhead into his RPG-7. “I’ll fire through the back window and take them out!”
“No!” Tramelik screamed at his colleague. “The smoke will blind me and you could blow us all up instead. Use the sunroof!”
“Much better idea.” Barad reached for the controls, and the tinted sunroof slowly eased open. As Barad began to stand up in his seat, Tramelik bore down on the accelerator. Within two miles they’d left behind the nearest housing and were out on the open highway, flanked on either side by raw, undulating terrain gashed by deep trenches and aspiring canyons.
“Wait a second!” Gustavo called out to Barad, reaching into the rear storage area. “Let me give you a little diversion before you show yourself!”
Gustavo fetched one of the RGD-5 frag grenades Tramelik had brought from Glorieta. His window was already down, and once he’d pulled the pin he leaned out of the SUV and heaved the projectile. The grenade hit the median well shy of the Impala, but its 110 g TNT payload gouged the roadway and added flying asphalt to its frag load. A puff of smoke given off by the grenade further screened Barad as he rose up through the sunroof and prepared to fire at their pursuers.
LYONS AND MATTE FLINCHED when incoming shrapnel bombarded the Impala. The windshield took nearly a dozen hits, all leaving dime-size craters connecting to one another by way of jagged cracks. Amazingly, the glass held in place but Lyon’s visibility, already impaired by smoke in the road, was further compromised. He had no choice but to let off on the gas and lean forward in hopes of spotting the road damage he would need to steer around. He sped over a large chunk of dislodged asphalt, which thumped against the undercarriage with a clamor that frayed his nerves still further. “Hang on!”
Lyons swerved sharply in hopes of avoiding the divot Gustavo had put in the road. He half succeeded, but when the Impala’s left front tire dropped into the cavity, the car jerked to one side and began to spin out. Lyons clawed at the steering wheel, but the road was still slick from the previous night’s rain and the Impala lurched off the road. A billboard saved him from vaulting the shoulder into an erosion ditch, but Lyons had clipped one of the wooden supports with enough force to activate Matte’s air bag, which lashed out with the might of an oversize boxing glove. Matte was KO’d and slumped across his seat, unconscious, nudging into Lyons, who finally brought the Chevy to a halt on a muddy slope extending down from the road’s shoulder. He was dazed himself but quickly shook it off. The Impala was aimed diagonally at the shoulder, and he wasn’t able to see the road. His window was down, though, and he could hear the distinctive sound of a car backing up toward him.
“That’s it,” Lyons murmured, unsheathing his Colt Python. “Try to come and get me.”
The Stony Man warrior quietly eased out of the vehicle and crouched behind his opened door. Beside him, Matte stirred, his face whitened with powder from the air bag.
“Stay down!” Lyons whispered to him without taking his eyes off the road. Soon he was presented with two targets. Franz Khartyr had left the Land Rover and advanced to the shoulder clutching his Bizon 2 subgun. A few yards ahead of him, the Land Rover itself was rolling into view. Barad was still propped up through the sunroof, readying his grenade launcher. He hadn’t spotted Lyons yet, so the Stony Man warrior took aim at Khartyr and fired two quick rounds. One slug glanced off the subgun’s barrel, but the other nailed Khartyr just below the neck. The Russian dropped the gun and keeled forward.
Lyons didn’t wait to see if the man was dead. He whirled toward the advancing Land Rover. Barad had the RPG-7 braced to his shoulder and was drawing bead when Lyons beat him to the trigger, this time getting the job done with one shot. Struck in the chest, Barad unleashed an errant shot that pulverized the billboard before slumping across the SUV’s roof. The RPG fell from his lifeless fingers and when Tramelik veered away from the shoulder, the launcher clattered across the roof and landed butt-first on the roadway.
Lyons stayed put a moment longer, scanning ahead up the road. No other shooters had left the vehicle. The Land Rover had moved out of view but once he heard its tires squeal, Lyons knew that its driver was about to resume his attempted getaway.
Lyons climbed back in the Impala. Matta had pulled himself upright, still trying to clear his head.
“I’m all right,” he told Lyons in a thick-tongued voice that suggested otherwise.
“Seat belt,” Lyons advised him. “We need to get back into the hunt.”
When he found himself stuck in the mud, Lyons cursed and jockeyed the steering column back and forth, shifting into Reverse momentarily, then putting the transmission back into Drive. He had to rock back and forth several times before he gained some
traction and was able to drive back up to the roadway. For the first time, however, Lyons noticed steam seeping up through the hood vents. Glancing at the dashboard controls, he saw the engine’s temperature gauge inching toward the red.
“Shrapnel must’ve got to the radiator,” Matta said.
“One way or another,” Lyons replied, “it looks like we’re in for a short chase.”
“THEY’RE AFTER US!” Gustavo called out, peering out the back of the Land Rover. They’d just driven past Khartyr, but Gustavo’s warning squelched any notion Tramelik might have had of stopping to retrieve the body.
“Grab Barad before he topples onto me,” the red-haired op told his lone-remaining cohort.
Gustavo leaned forward and grabbed Barad by the belt, dragging the slain warrior down through the sunroof and guiding him away from Tramelik. The corpse crumpled into the front passenger seat, one arm flopping out the window. Tramelik picked up more speed and raced down the empty straightaway. Glancing in his rearview mirror, he took heart at the sight of steam rising up from the engine compartment of the frag-riddled Impala. With any luck, the Chevy would overheat and have to abandon its pursuit.
Tramelik had never ventured this far north of Taos and knew little about where they were headed other than the fact they were five miles from the nearest town. If they could lose the Impala by then, Tramelik figured they could venture into Arroyo Hondo and ditch the Land Rover for another vehicle. Beyond that, they’d have to play it by ear.
Tramelik’s optimism was soon dashed when an elongated shadow swept over the Land Rover and continued to drift forward until he was able to trace it to Alan Orson’s experimental AirFox I. The chopper dropped closer to the roadway as it sped ahead of the Land Rover, giving Tramelik a good look at its twin rear propellers. They, along with the main coaxial rotors, gave the aircraft a deceptively clumsy appearance. If anything, it appeared to Tramelik that the prototype was as advanced in terms of maneuverability as it was in speed. Suddenly the copter did an about-face and lowered itself to within a few feet of the highway.
“Roadblock!” Gustavo shouted, eyes on the aircraft hovering directly before them. “No kidding.”
Slowing, Tramelik surveyed the uninviting landscape on either side of the highway. The terrain looked formidable, but less so than the prospect of trying to negotiate around the AirFox. He veered right, first leaving the road, then the shoulder. By the time he’d guided the vehicle down a steep incline, he’d activated the SUV’s four-wheel drive, a feature he knew wasn’t part of the Impala’s skill set. Out before him lay nothing of promise in terms of being able to elude the helicopter, but he saw no other choice than to forge ahead and hope for the best.
“That thing has armored plating,” he told Gustavo as he negotiated around the first of what he knew would be many shallow crevasses, “but if we can get to a point where we can make a stand, I’m trusting you to find its Achilles’ heel.”
“I’ll do my best,” Gustavo promised, grasping his subgun. “Just make sure you get us in a position where I have time to take aim.”
THE AIRFOX WAS ABOUT to head after the Land Rover when Lyons brought the Impala to a stop and leaned on his horn.
“I’ll take it from here,” he told Matte, bounding out of the Chevy. He waved frantically through the billowing steam to make sure he’d gotten the chopper’s attention. The AirFox lifted away from the roadway and banked slightly, then drifted toward Lyons. The Stony Man warrior ran clear of the Impala, meeting the copter halfway. At the controls was a short, solidly built African-American. Beside him was one of the plainclothes officers who’d been part of the standoff back at the airfield.
“Phil Ramon,” the pilot introduced himself once he’d powered down his window. “I run a flight school at Muni and did the test runs for this sucker.”
“Glad you were around,” Lyons said. “Let’s try to wrap this up.”
“Only room for two here,” Ramon countered.
“It’s a nice day,” Lyons said, climbing onto one of the AirFox’s landing skids. “How about if I hitch a ride outside?”
“Okay by me,” Ramon said. “Orson didn’t get around to arming this, so we could use a little firepower.”
“Speaking of little firepower,” the other man said. “You wanna upgrade that Python to something with a little more oomph?”
Lyons saw that the man was holding a 32-round 9 mm Colt submachine. He’d gone through nearly all of the Python’s ammo and firing on the fly would likely require a lot more rounds to hit his target, so he relented and stabbed the revolver in his waistband. “Well, it is a Colt,” he said philosophically as he took hold of the subgun.
“Damn straight,” said the other man.
TRAMELIK HAD GAINED nearly a quarter mile on the AirFox before the speed chopper left the highway and headed their way. He knew they were running out of time. He drove as fast as he could along the sodden terrain, sticking to a stretch of flatland between two twenty-foot-high hillocks stretching for at least another few hundred yards. Other than a few random clumps of tumbleweed, there was nothing in the way of cover.
“This isn’t going to work,” he told Gustavo, yanking on the steering wheel. He turned toward the hillock on his right, and the vehicle groaned up the steep-pitched slope. When they reached the crest, the Russians found themselves facing another, deeper trough thirty yards wide and glimmering with a few inches of collected rainwater. The next ridge consisted largely of rock, and halfway along its hundred-yard stretch the dark maw of a cave beckoned as a possible hiding place.
“If we can reach it before they’re on us, we might have a chance,” Tramelik said.
“It’s worth a try,” Gustavo told him. He reloaded his Bizon 2, readying the carbine for what he saw as an inevitable last stand.
Tramelik powered his way downhill and through the shallow water. They were halfway to the cave when Gustavo saw the AirFox clear the ridge they’d just driven down. For the first time, he noticed someone standing outside the aircraft atop one of its skids.
“Keep going!” he told Tramelik as he moved to the front of the SUV and began to wriggle his way up through the sunroof. “I’ll pick up where Barad left off.”
AS THEY BORE DOWN on the retreating Land Rover, Lyons was glad he’d swapped weapons. Another shooter had just sprung up through the sunroof armed with an assault rifle.
“Throw it down!” Lyons shouted over the collective drone of the AirFox’s powerplants.
The gunman either hadn’t heard the command or chose to ignore it, and when he saw the Russian’s carbine angling his way, Lyons took aim and opted for the Colt’s full-auto mode. He decorated the Rover’s rooftop with a half-dozen rounds before the the bullets blasted into Gustavo. The Russian twitched as the slugs hammered into him, then began to sag from view, rattling off a few errant rounds. Bullets plinked off the AirFox’s armored plating just to Lyons’s right, stinging him slightly with slug frag. He ignored the superficial wounds, determined to put an end to things.
As the AirFox drew still closer, he strafed the waterline just below the Land Rover’s chassis, taking out both tires on the right side. The SUV tilted at a slight angle as Tramelik tried to compensate for the blown tires and continue toward the nearby cave. It was a futile effort, though, as soon the exposed wheel rims bit into the mud and slowed the vehicle to a halt. Tramelik quickly abandoned the driver’s seat and crawled into the back, then opened the far rear door, hoping to reach the cave on foot. He had one of the Bizon subguns and fired blindly behind him as he slogged through the shallow water.
Lyons was nowhere near the line of fire and he braced himself on the skid, then put the Colt back to work, directing a fusillade at the fleeing Russian’s legs. Tramelik spun as the shots struck him, then fell into the water and tried crawling the last few yards to the cave.
The AirFox circled the abandoned SUV and soon faced Frederik Mikhaylov’s right-hand man square on, just as it had back on the road.
“It’s ov
er,” Lyons shouted to the man. “Give it up already!”
As he closed in on the cave, Tramelik saw there was only a shallow recess in the rock wall. His attempt to reach the opening had been a fool’s errand. He cursed in his native Russian and stared down at his bleeding legs.
“The hell with it,” he muttered, resigned to his fate. Unwilling to let himself be taken into custody, Tramelik glared at Lyons and raised his subgun, inviting the rounds that soon bored into him. With his dying breath, he shouted back at Lyons, “I hope they’re all dead by the time you get to them!”
Lyons gestured for Ramon to drop a little lower, then jumped clear of the AirFox and cautiously approached Tramelik. The Russian was dead before he could get to him, but Lyons couldn’t help asking the man for answers. He knew Tramelik had been speaking about the Colt family.
“Where the hell are you hiding them?” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Cochiti Lake, New Mexico
Christopher Shiraldi had been right about getting walk-in business at his mobile AGA operation. Three times within the past twenty minutes passersby had stopped and come knocking at the door to Shiraldi’s motor home, ignoring the closed sign he’d posted out near the street as well as on the door itself. In all three cases, the would-be customers had presumed that since one of the hot-air balloons was inflated and ready for liftoff Shiraldi had merely forgotten to take down the signs.
After the fourth such interruption, Russell Combs had had enough.
“Okay, that’s it,” the cop said after Shiraldi had, as with the others, sent the fourth visitor away with a handwritten rain check guaranteeing twenty-five percent off the regular rate on a future ride. “Let’s go take that goddamn balloon down!”
The two men ventured out of the motor home, Shiraldi leading the way with Combs following behind, his SIG P-266 aimed at the former Roaming Bison executive from within the confines of his suit coat pocket. Even with the gun concealed Combs felt conspicuous and less in control of his prisoner, but he wasn’t about to court yet another intrusion while he waited for Captain Brown and Leslie Helms to show up.
Blood Play (Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan) Page 24