Then to add to the growing setback, a good ole farm boy driving a big Dodge pickup truck with two rifles slung across the rear window spotted the antique auto climbing up his truck bed and decided to do a little funnin' to keep the Stutz from passing.
Every time Pitt pulled over the center line to overtake the Dodge, the wiry oily-haired driver, who grinned with half a mouth of vacant teeth, just cackled and veered to the opposite side of the road, cutting the Stutz off.
Mancuso pulled his little automatic from its ankle holster. "I'll put one through the clown's windshield."
"Give me a chance to bulldog him," said Pitt.
Bulldogging was an old-time race driver's trick. Pitt eased up on the right side of the Dodge, then backed off and came at the other. He repeated the process, not trying to force his way past, but taking control of the situation.
The skinny truck driver swerved side to side to block what he thought were Pitt's attempts to pass.
Holding the Stutz at bay after numerous assaults, his head began to swivel to see where the old classic car was coming from next.
And then he made the mistake Pitt was hoping for.
He lost his concentration on a curve and slipped onto the gravel shoulder. His next mistake was to oversteer. The Dodge whipped wildly back and forth and then hurtled off the road, rolling over in a clump of low trees and bushes before coming to rest on its top and crushing a hornet's nest.
The farm boy was only bruised in the crash, but the hornets almost killed him before he escaped the upside-down truck and leaped into a nearby pond.
"Slick work," said Mancuso, staring back.
Pitt allowed a quick grin. "It's called methodical recklessness."
The grin vanished as he swerved around a truck and saw a flatbed trailer stopped on the blind side of a curve. The truck had lost part of its cargo, three oil barrels that had fallen off the trailer. One had burst and spread a wide greasy slick on the pavement. The white limousine had missed striking the truck but lost traction in the oil and made two complete 360-degree circles before its driver incredibly straightened it out and darted ahead.
The Stutz went into a sideways four-wheel drift, tires smoking, the sun flashing on its polished wheel covers. Mancuso braced himself for the impact against the rear of the truck he was sure would come.
Pitt fought the skid for a horrifying hundred meters before the black tire marks were finally behind him.
Then he was into the oil. He didn't touch his brakes or fight the car but shoved in the clutch and let the car roll free and straight over the slippery pool. Then he eased the car along the grass shoulder beside the road until the tires were rid of the oil, then resumed the chase only a few seconds now behind the Lincoln.
After the near miss, Mancuso was amazed to see Pitt blithely carry on as if he was on a Sunday drive.
"The helicopter?" Pitt asked conversationally.
Mancuso bent his head back. "Still with us. Flying above and to the right of the limo."
"I have a gut feeling they're working together."
"Does seem strange there are no markings on the bird," agreed Mancuso.
"If they're armed, we could be in for a bad time."
Mancuso nodded. "That's a fact. My pea shooter won't do much against automatic assault weapons from the air."
"Still, they could have opened up and shut off our water miles back."
"Speaking of water," said Mancuso, pointing at the radiator.
The strain on the old car was beginning to tell. Steam was hissing from the filler cap under the sun goddess, and oil was streaking from the louvers of the hood. And as Pitt braked before a tight turn, he might just as well have raised a sail. The brake lining was overheated and badly faded. The only event that occurred when Pitt pushed the pedal was the flash of the taillights.
Pitt had visions of Loren tied and gagged in the plush rear seat of the limousine. Fear and anxiety swept through him like a gust of icy wind. Whoever abducted her might have already murdered her. He pushed the terrible thought from his mind and told himself the kidnappers could not afford to lose her as a hostage. But if they harmed her, they would die, he vowed ruthlessly.
Driving as if possessed, he was consumed with determination to rescue Loren. Using every scrap of his stubborn spirit, he pursued the Lincoln relentlessly.
"We're holding on to them," Mancuso observed.
"They're toying with us," Pitt replied, eyeing the road between the sun goddess hood ornament and the rear bumper of the white limousine racing only fifty meters ahead. "They should have enough power to leave us in their fumes."
"Could be an engine problem."
"I don't think so. The driver is a professional. He's maintained an exact distance between us since the oil spill."
Mancuso looked at his watch as the sun's rays flashed through the trees branching over the road.
"Where in hell are the state police?"
"Chasing all over the countryside. Giordino has no way of knowing which direction we took."
"You can't keep up this pace much longer."
"Al will smell out our trail," Pitt said with complete confidence in his longtime friend.
Mancuso tilted his head as his ears picked up a new sound. He rose up on his knees and looked back and upward through the overhanging trees. He began waving madly.
"What is it?" Pitt asked, decelerating around a sharp turn and over a short bridge that spanned a narrow stream, his foot pushing the near useless brake pedal to the floor.
"I think the cavalry has arrived," Mancuso shouted excitedly.
"Another helicopter," Pitt acknowledged. "Can you see markings?"
The speeding cars raced out of the trees and into open farmland. The approaching helicopter banked to one side, and Mancuso could read the wording on the cowling under the engine and rotor blades.
"Henrico County Sheriff's Department!" he yelled above the heavy thump of the rotor blades. Then he recognized Giordino waving from an open doorway. The little Italian had arrived, and not a minute too soon. The Stutz was on its last breath.
The pilot in the strange copter flying above the limousine saw the new arrival too. He suddenly veered off, dropped low, and headed northeast at full throttle, quickly disappearing behind a row of trees bordering a cornfield.
The Lincoln appeared to slowly drift to one side of the road. Pitt and Mancuso watched in helpless horror as the long white limo angled onto the shoulder, soared over a small ditch, and surged into the cornfield as if chasing the fleeing helicopter.
Pitt took in the rapid change of scene in one swift, sweeping glance. Reacting instantly, he twisted the wheel, sending the Stutz after the Lincoln. Mancuso's mouth hung in shock as the dry and brittle cornstalks, left standing after husking, whipped the windshield. Instinctively he ducked down in the seat with his arms over his head.
The Stutz plunged after the limousine, bouncing wildly on its ancient springs and shock absorbers. The dust clouds flew so thick Pitt could hardly see past the sun goddess, yet his foot remained jammed flat on the accelerator.
They burst through a wire fence. A piece of it clipped Mancuso on the side of the head, and then they were out of the cornfield almost on top of the limousine. It had shot into the open at an incredible rate of speed in a direct line toward a concrete silo with the Stutz right behind.
"Oh, God," Mancuso murmured, seeing disaster.
Despite the shock of witnessing an approaching crash that he was helpless to prevent, Pitt jerked the steering wheel violently to his right, throwing the Stutz in a spin around the other side of the silo, and missed piling into the Lincoln by an arm's length.
He heard rather than saw the convulsive crush of metal tearing apart followed by the crackled splash of shattered glass against concrete. A great cloud of dust burst from the base of the silo and shrouded the devastated limousine.
Pitt was out of the Stutz before it stopped and running toward the crash site. Fear and dread spread through his body as he came
around the silo and viewed the shattered, twisted car. No one could have lived after such a terrible impact. The engine had pushed through the firewall and was shoved against the front seat. The steering wheel was thrust up against the roof. Pitt could not see any sign of the chauffeur and assumed his body must have been thrown to the other side of the car.
The passenger compartment had accordioned, raising the roof in a strange peak and bending the doors inward, jamming them shut so tightly nothing less than an industrial metal saw could cut them away.
Pitt desperately kicked out the few glass shards remaining in a broken door window and thrust his head inside.
The crumpled interior was empty.
In numbed slow motion Pitt walked around the car, searching under it for signs of bodies. He found nothing, not even a trace of blood or torn clothing. Then he looked at the caved-in dashboard and found the reason for the vacant ghost car. He tore a small instrument from its electrical connectors and studied it, his face reddening in anger.
He was still standing by the wreckage as the chopper landed and Giordino ran up, trailed by Mancuso, who was holding a bloodied handkerchief to one ear.
"Loren?" Giordino asked with grim concern.
Pitt shook his head and tossed the strange instrument to Giordino. "We were hoodwinked. This car was a decoy, operated by an electronic robot unit and driven by someone in the helicopter."
Mancuso stared wildly about the limo. "I saw her get in," he said dazedly.
"So did I," Giordino backed him up.
"Not this car." Pitt spoke quietly.
"But it was never out of your sight."
"But it was. Think about it. The twenty-second head start when it left the track and drove under the stands to the parking lot. The switch must have been made then."
Mancuso removed the handkerchief, revealing a neat slice just above his ear lobe. "It fits. This one was never out of our sight once we hit the highway."
Mancuso broke off suddenly and looked miserably at the demolished limo. No one moved or said anything for several moments.
"We lost her," Giordino said as if in pain, his face pale. "God help us, we lost her."
Pitt stared at the car unseeing, his big hands clenched in anger and despair. "We'll find Loren," he said, his voice empty and cold as Arctic stone. "And make those pay who took her."
<3>AJIMA ISLAND
October 12, 1993
Bielefeld, West Germany
<<31>>
The fall morning was crisp with a biting wind from the north when August Clausen stepped out of his half-timbered house and gazed across his fields toward the slopes of the Teutoburg Forest near Bielefeld in North Rhine-Westphalia. His farm lay in the valley, bordered by a winding stream that he had recently dammed up. He buttoned up his heavy wool coat, took a few deep breaths, and then walked the path to his barn.
A big hardy man just past seventy-four, Clausen still put in a full day's work from sunup to sundown.
The farm had been in his family for five generations. He and his wife raised two daughters, who married and left home, preferring city living in Bielefeld to farming. Except for hired hands during harvesting, Clausen and his wife ran the farm alone.
Clausen pushed open the barn doors and mounted a large tractor. The tough old gas engine turned over and fired on the first revolution. He slipped the transmission into top gear and moved into the yard, turning on a dirt road and heading toward the fields that had been harvested and cultivated for the next spring planting.
Today he planned to fill in a small depression that appeared in the southwest corner of a lettuce field. It was one of the few outdoor chores he wanted to get out of the way before the winter months set in. The evening before, he had set the tractor up with a front-end scoop to move dirt from a mound near an old concrete bunker left from the war.
One section of Clausen's land was once an airfield for a Luftwaffe fighter squadron. When he returned home after serving in a Panzer brigade that fought Patton's Third Army through France and half of Germany, he found a junkyard of burned and destroyed aircraft and motor vehicles piled and scattered over most of his fallow fields. He kept what little was salvageable and sold the rest to scrap dealers.
The tractor moved at a good speed over the road. There had been little rain the past two weeks and the tracks were dry. The poplar and birch trees wore bright dabs of yellow against the fading green.
Clausen swung through an opening in the fence and stopped beside the depression. He climbed down and studied the sinking ground close-up. Curiously, it seemed wider and deeper than the day before. He wondered at first if it might be caused by underground seepage from the stream he had dammed. And yet the earth in the depression's center looked quite dry.
He remounted the tractor, drove to the dirt pile beside the old bunker that was now half hidden by bushes and vines, and lowered the scoop. When he'd scraped up a full load, he backed off and approached the depression until his front wheels were on the edge. He raised the scoop slightly with the intention of tilting it to drop the dirt load, but the front of the tractor began to tip. The front wheels were sinking into the ground.
Clausen gaped in astonishment as the depression opened up and the tractor dove into a suddenly expanding pit. He froze in horror as man and machine fell into the darkness below. He was mute with terror, but he instinctively braced his feet against the metal floor and clutched the steering wheel in a tight grip. The tractor hurtled a good twelve meters before it splashed into a deep underground stream. Huge clods of soil struck the water, churning it into a maelstrom that was soon blanketed by clouds of falling dust. The noise echoed far into unseen reaches as the tractor sank into water up to the top treads of its high rear tires before coming to rest.
The impact drove the breath from Clausen's body. An agonizing pain shot through his back, and he knew it meant an injured vertebra. Two of his ribs, and perhaps more, cracked after his chest impacted against the steering wheel. He went into shock, his heart pounding, his breath coming in painful gasps.
Bewildered, he hardly felt the water swirling around his chest.
Clausen blessed the tractor for landing right side up. If it had tumbled on one of its sides or top, in all probability he'd have been crushed to death or pinned and drowned. He sat there trying to comprehend what had happened to him. He looked up at the blue sky to get a grasp of his predicament. Then he peered around through the gloom and the drifting layers of dust.
The tractor had fallen into the pool of a limestone cave. One end was flooded but the other rose above the pool and opened into a vast cavern. He saw no signs of stalactites, stalagmites, or other natural decorations. Both the small entry cave and the larger chamber appeared to have low six-meter-high flat ceilings that were carved by excavation equipment.
Painfully he twisted out of the tractor seat and half crawled, half swam up the ramplike floor leading into the dry cavern. Knees sliding, hands slipping on the slimy coating covering the cave's floor, he struggled forward on all fours until he felt dry ground. Wearily he hauled himself up into a sitting position, shifted around, and stared into dim recesses of the cavern.
It was filled with aircraft, literally dozens of them. All parked in even rows as if waiting for a squadron of phantom pilots. Clausen recognized them as the Luftwaffe's first turbojet aircraft, Messerschmitt-262
Schwalbes (Swallows). They sat like ghosts in their mottled gray-green colors, and despite almost fifty years of neglect, they appeared in prime condition. Only mild corrosion on the aluminum surfaces and flattened tires suggested long abandonment. The hidden air base must have been evacuated and all entrances sealed before the Allied armies arrived.
His injuries were temporarily forgotten as Clausen reverently walked between the planes and into the flight quarters and maintenance repair areas. As his eyes became adjusted to the darkness, he became amazed at the neat orderliness. There was no sign of a hurried departure. He felt the pilots and their mechanics were standing at inspect
ion in the field above and expected back at any time.
He entered a state of rapture when it struck him that all the wartime artifacts were on his property, or under it, and belonged to him. The worth of the aircraft to collectors and museums must have ranged in the millions of deutsche marks.
Clausen made his way back to the edge of the underground pool. The tractor looked a sorry sight with only the steering wheel and upper tires rising out of the water. Once more he gazed up at the hole to the sky. There was no hope of climbing out on his own. The opening was too high and the walls too steep.
He wasn't a tiny bit worried. Eventually his wife would come looking for him and summon neighbors when she found him standing happily in their newly discovered subterranean bonanza.
There had to be a generator somewhere for electrical power. He decided to search out its location.
Perhaps, he thought, he might be able to fire it up and light the cavern. He squinted at his watch and figured another four hours would pass before his wife became curious over his prolonged absence.
He hesitated, thoughtfully staring into the far end of the cave that sloped into the forbidding pool, wondering if maybe another cavern waited in the darkness beyond the flooded depths.
<<32>>
"If the public only knew what goes on behind their backs, they'd burn Washington," said Sandecker as the Virginia countryside flashed past the heavily tinted and armored windows of the customized mobile command center disguised as a nationally known bus line.
"We're in a war right up to our damned teeth," the MAIT team's Deputy Director, Donald Kern, grumbled. "And nobody knows but us."
"You're right about the war," said Pitt, contemplating a glass of soda water he held in one hand. "I can't believe these people had the guts to abduct Loren and Senator Diaz on the same day."
Kern shrugged. "The senator stepped from his fishing lodge at six o'clock this morning, rowed out into a lake not much bigger than a pond, and vanished."
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