Paradise Burning (40 page)

They were, Peter noted with relief, taking
the northern route. Although the road would take them through the
small enclave of homes east of the river, it was by far the
shortest way out. Shirazi had wisely decided to brave civilization
rather than attempt the long road to Pine Grove. It also meant
turning toward the worst of the fire, toward the shimmering red sun
rising in the north. Toward ground that glowed like a bed of coals,
underbrush that leaped with flames, dancing in a grotesque
nightmare ballet. But to the north they could be over the natural
firebreak of the Calusa River in less than ten minutes.

As they approached the gate Mandy had seen
the first day she explored this side of the river, Karim punched in
the numbers to open the gate. Nothing happened. The cavalcade
ground to a halt. Obviously, in the last few minutes the fire had
breached the electrical wires. Around them the glow beneath the
black plumes of smoke was growing brighter as Florida’s short dusk
gave way to night. They were poised at the gate to hell, and Mandy
found herself almost absurdly glad it wouldn’t open. Behind them,
to the south, the night was dark. Behind them was the footpath to
the river. Surely now . . .

“
Don’t move!” the Iranian ordered,
drawing a 9mm pistol from his belt. “Misha and the Yuri have orders
to shoot on sight. Believe me, they will do it.”

“
Misha wants to shoot you,” Nadya
confided to Peter as Karim and Grisha left the car and ran toward
the gate. “He says with police gone it makes no difference. No one
stay out in the storm, so they not know you dead. But Karim, he not
like that. He has honor, you see.”

“
Yeah.” Peter hoped he didn’t sound as
skeptical as he felt. Nadya was basically a good kid. Women
couldn’t help being crazy about the men they loved. Look at Mandy.
She was actually considering taking him back.

The Mac-10 and the 9-mil made short work of
the gate’s coded lock. Karim and the young guard strained at the
gate, pulling it open just far enough for the vehicles to squeeze
through. The fire was mostly on their right, but, suddenly, hot
embers drifting on the wind ignited a series of blazes to their
left, the flames growing, licking out, soaring up. They were only a
half mile from the house when the world in front of them exploded.
On both sides of the road the fires crowned, soaring into the
treetops in a howling burst of fury that sent flames leaping across
the road.

Brakes squealing, the two vehicles ground to
a halt. Mandy stared open-mouthed, heart pounding. Fear of fire was
a primal threat, impossible to control. Someone was banging on the
window. A face appeared out of the gloom. “Drive through!” Misha
yelled at Grisha.

“
No!” Karim jumped out of the car to
stand nose to nose with his boss. “It is too dangerous. We go
back.”

“
The other road is too
long!”

“
We will see. There is always the
river.”

“
He’s right,” Peter urged, leaning
across Nadya to be heard by the two men outside. “There’s no way to
tell how thick the flames are ahead. They could be twenty feet wide
or twenty miles.”

It wasn’t only the glow of the fire that
turned the Russian’s square face to crimson, Mandy thought as Misha
and Karim glared each other down. A sharp crack. A shower of sparks
cascaded over them as a branch fell from a pine tree onto the road
not fifteen feet in front of them. Heat from the fire enveloped
them, leaving little doubt their section of the road was the next
to be engulfed. Mandy longed to be in the back seat with Peter. If
they were going to die in this horrible way, at least they should
die in each other’s arms.

Karim’s 9mm rose black and menacing, pointing
straight between Misha’s eyes. “I am chief of security,” he said.
“The business is your job. This is mine. We go where I say. Get
back in the van.” Mandy held her breath. The heat intensified.
Sweat beaded Misha’s brow. With an angry flick of his shoulders the
Russian turned and stalked toward the van. Karim windmilled his
arm, ending with his finger pointing back the way they had come
before jumping back into the Buick. Yuri, the lean-faced guard,
unable to turn around on the narrow road, jammed the van into
reverse and promptly demonstrated a remarkable ability to drive
backwards. At speed. Grisha, not to be outdone, grimly
followed.

At the clearing by the gate, each driver
turned his vehicle toward the southeast. The white van was now in
the lead. By the time they passed the old house, the sky had become
dark enough that Peter could see the glow of the spotty fires on
the Amber Run side of the river, the smoke inky black against a
pewter sky. The sun had given up, leaving only leaping flames to
light the night. There was no way Peter could see through the woods
to the river, to see if the firefighters had arrived. If there was
hope for his house . . . for Brad Blue’s dream of elegant old style
Florida homes along a jungle river.

Mandy’s attention was on the road in front of
them, the long meandering trail to Pine Grove, which they had
traveled a little more than twelve hours earlier. The glow of fire
was distinct—closer, brighter than it had been when she’d first
seen it from the bedroom window. But how close? Moving how fast?
With scant hope, Mandy turned her eyes to the south. The woods
behind the old house were dark. Blessedly dark.

“
Look, there’s no fire behind the
house,” she said, turning toward the occupants of the back seat. “I
think we could still make it to the river.”

“
We will try the road first.” Karim at
his most intransigent after his clash with Misha.

“
I don’t think we’re going to make it,”
Peter interjected. “It’s a hell of long ways. Do you hear the
noise, Shirazi? Fires scream and roar. At the moment it may be a
dull roar, but what I’m hearing isn’t all coming from behind
us.”

“
The women cannot swim.”

Peter choked off a hot response. Bastard that
he was, the Iranian had a point.

“
I swim,” Nadya said stoutly. A swift
patter of Russian, while Karim’s face never eased from a dark mix
of fierce and stubborn. “He asks do all the girls swim,” Nadya
explained to Peter and Mandy. “I tell him no. We talk about it
once. Only two besides me swim. And they are afraid of the
alligators.”

“
I’d rather drown than burn,” Peter
declared darkly.

Mandy fished in her pockets, searching for a
tissue for her watering eyes. How much longer would the drivers be
able to see the road? Her hand encountered the AirLite. What would
happen if she trained it on the driver, tried to get them to stop?
She could almost hear Karim’s laughter. Her peashooter against a
9-mil and a Mac-10.

Mandy bit her lip, forgot to breathe. They
were moving far too fast for the narrow dirt road. There was no way
the headlights could adequately penetrate the growing whorls of
smoke and ash. A sharp command from Karim. Grisha slowed, opening
space between the van and the Buick.

The crash came hard and fast. A towering
slash pine toppled to earth directly in front of them. The white
van, with no room to stop, rammed into the tree, did a tailspin,
and ended nose down in the drainage ditch at the side of the narrow
road. The Buick skidded to a halt. In front of them the first
moments of shocked silence were suddenly broken by screams and sobs
from the tilted van. Karim barked an order and Grisha plunged into
the ditch, attempting to free Misha and the driver from the crazily
canted front seats. Karim and Peter heaved on the sliding side
door. When it finally shuddered back a few feet, Peter boosted the
Iranian inside. Karim began to hand the women out. Peter grabbed
the first girl, the quietly sobbing Kai from Thailand. Mandy helped
one of the Mexican girls, who appeared to be in shock, a fine
trickle of blood running down her forehead. Nadya had to wrestle
with Anya, who was hysterical, until Peter hustled the sobbing girl
away to a spot of safety behind the Buick.

The smell of gasoline was strong. Hot embers
flitted through the air around them like a swarm of fireflies.
Peter and Karim exchanged a look, redoubled their efforts. In a
matter of minutes the van was empty, the entire group huddled
together on the hard-packed sand behind the Buick. Except for three
girls who simply stood and cried, everyone stared at the van, at
the pine tree blocking the road . . . and at the glow of several
separate fires behind it which seemed to be closing on each other,
forming a giant fire front, which was moving slowly but inexorably
in their direction.

“
It’s blowing up in your face,
Shirazi,” Peter pointed out, not without a certain amount of
satisfaction. “Literally,” he added, grinding his point home. “Face
it, it’s over, done,
kaput,
fini
.
Sauve qui peut.
Anyone ever teach you that one, major? That’s French for get
the hell out any way you can.”

“
I understand the phrase, Mr.
Pennington. My education was of the finest.”

“
Then why are we fiddling while Rome
burns? If you’ll pardon the cliché.”

“
Because he knows I will not agree to
swim the river straight into the arms of the police.” Misha had had
time to catch his breath and re-arm himself. In the glow of the
fires the squat Mac-10 seemed larger, uglier, even more menacing.
It was pointing directly at them.

“
The van is useless,” Karim said in a
remarkably mild tone. “Even if we could move the tree, it would
take a tow truck to get it out of the ditch. The Buick will not
carry us all. So it has to be the river.”

In spite of the Iranian’s irrefutable logic,
Misha nodded his head toward the road to the southeast. “We go that
way.” Behind him loomed Yuri, his Mac-10 also at the ready. Mandy
did a surreptitious sweep of the group, looking for Grisha. Whose
side would he be on? Undoubtedly, Misha paid his salary, but . . .
somehow the young Russian seemed more open to reason.

“
How?” Karim challenged, brows raised
as they all looked at the pine tree stretched out across the road.
A myriad smaller branches rose into the air above the trunk while
the lower branches splayed across the road.

“
We move it,” Misha
declared.

Karim, Peter, and Mandy snorted, almost in
unison.

The Mach-10s waved. Out of the corner of her
eye Mandy saw Grisha appear out of the smoky gloom. His face was
troubled, his Mac-10 held down at his side. Karim scanned the sky
to the southeast which was not quite as brightly red as the fire
behind them. He shrugged, nodded. “Very well, we will try,” he
agreed.

“
You’re nuts,” Peter
growled.

“
You will be needed too, Mr.
Pennington,” Karim snapped. “Come!”

“
We can’t all fit in the Buick,” Peter
protested. “Let him go, the rest of us need to make a run for the
river
now
.”

“
Move.” Once again, Grisha demonstrated
his English, his Mac-10 rising to poke Peter in the
back.

They were never going to move that tree,
Mandy was sure of it. This might be one of those times when men
needed to demonstrate their testosterone by playing hero, but it
was going to take a superhuman rush of adrenalin for this
particular miracle.

The tree trunk shouldn’t have moved, but it
did. Inch by agonizing inch until suddenly Karim gave a shout.
Straining backs dropped their burden, straightened. Smoke swirled
around their shadowy figures, wind whistled through the tinder dry
forest around them. In the distance, the scream of the fire grew
louder.

Suddenly, as the men caught their breath, the
argument was on again. Out of a swirl of smoke Misha suddenly
appeared like a creature out of hell, his face red, eyes bulging in
fury, an MP-5 clutched firmly in front of him. The guard Yuri
followed on his heels. For a moment Misha studied the seven young
women who had been rescued from the van. Still clutching the
pillowcases with all their worldly possessions, they were huddled
together in the middle of the road, some wide-eyed, some sobbing.
Anya, lost in the quaking aftermath of hysteria, was being
comforted by one of the Russian girls whose name Mandy didn’t
know.

“
You, you, you, and you,” Misha snapped
to Mila, the Ukrainian, Felicidad from Mexico who was only sixteen,
dainty Kai from Thailand, and Elena the Serbian who was his own
particular favorite. “Into the car.”

“
No.” “No way.” Karim and Peter, again
in unison.

“
It is too dangerous,” Karim asserted.
“The women go with us to the river.”

“
For God’s sake, we’re running out of
time,” Peter urged. “Let them go.”

“
The women stay. All of them.” Karim
glared at his boss.

Mandy surveyed the standoff. Grisha seemed to
have made his choice. He was standing to Karim’s right, his Mac-10
now pointed directly at Yuri. Peter, on Karim’s left, had somehow
swung around until he was almost touching Misha’s shoulder. Mandy
dug into her jacket pocket, slipped out the tiny S&W AirLite.
She stepped forward, gave Peter a surreptitious nudge, sneaking the
.22 into his hand from behind.

It took a moment for Peter to assimilate the
feel of the hard metal that Mandy had given him. A remarkable
woman, his wife. No time to think or analyze. He flicked off the
safety, raised the gun straight up to Misha’s ear.

“
Get in the car and go,” Peter ordered.
“The rest of us choose the river.”

Misha jerked once, went very still. He might
have doubted Karim or Grisha would shoot him. A gun in Peter
Pennington’s hand was a much more serious threat. From behind,
Mandy could only see Karim’s profile. The Iranian appeared bemused,
torn between exulting in the change of power and wondering how the
hell Peter had produced a gun.