Scarecrow (29 page)

And then Schofield saw Knight: saw the long-nosed Mack rig rumbling up the slope, moving quickly.

With a loud shriek of its brakes, the Mack shuddered to a stop beside the WRX.

Knight threw open the door, and Schofield lifted Gant and himself in. Knight jammed the truck back into gear and hit the gas a bare moment before the snub-nosed Kenworth rig appeared around the bend behind them, coming at full speed, its engine roaring.

The Mack jounced and bounced over the wreckage of the Mirage fighter strewn across the road, picking up speed. The second rig just barged right through the Mirage's remains before ramming hard into the back of Knight's still-accelerating rig.

Knight, Schofield and Gant were all thrown forward by the impact.

Knight and Schofield turned to each other and said at exactly the same time: ‘There are two rally cars coming at us from in front!'

They both paused. Mirror images.

‘What happened to her!' Knight said.

‘She got shot by a fighter plane,' Schofield said.

‘Oh.'

The two trucks charged up the hill, their exhaust stacks belching black smoke.

Then suddenly the two yellow rally cars that had gone ahead came into view, rounding a wide bend
right in front of
Knight and Schofield's rig, roaring
down
the same slope—both cars featuring men leaning out their passenger windows, holding AK-47 machine-guns.

They might as well have been firing pea-shooters.

The giant Mack rig blasted right through the left-hand Peugeot, blowing it to smithereens, while the second Axon rally car just fishtailed out of the way, side-swiping the rock wall on the landward side of the roadway before skidding to a jarring halt, the two rigs rumbling past it.

The Mack reached the top of the hill and rejoined the flatter main road at a fork junction.

The snub-nosed Kenworth was right behind it, closely followed by the last-remaining Peugeot. Rejoining the chase, the rally car leapt up onto the main road a split second before—
SLAM!
—the entire fork junction erupted in a cloud of dirt, hit by a shell from the ever-present French destroyer.

The two big rigs flew around a bend, the ocean dropping away to their left, when suddenly they were confronted by the yawning entrance to another cliff-side tunnel. This tunnel bent away in a long curve to the right, hugging the cliff-face, and was clearly longer than any of the previous tunnels.

The Mack thundered into the tunnel doing ninety, just as behind it, the Peugeot pulled alongside the Kenworth and the gunman in the rally car's window unleashed a volley of fire at the Mack's rear-most tyres.

The Mack's tyres were blasted apart, started slapping against the roadway, and the big rig's rear-end started fishtailing wildly.

Which was when the Kenworth rig made its move, and powered forward.

‘They're coming alongside us!' Schofield yelled.

In the confines of the tunnel, the snub-nosed rig pulled up next to the Mack's right-hand flank.

‘I'll take care of it,' Knight said. ‘Here, take the wheel.'

With that, Knight jumped out of the driver's seat and charged aft into the Mack's sleeping compartment where he quickly fired two shots into its rear window, a window which opened onto the rig's flat trailer-connection section. Within seconds he had disappeared out through the window, into the roaring wind.

The two rigs rushed through the curving tunnel side-by-side, whipping past its ocean-side columns.

Schofield drove, glancing at the wounded Gant beside him. She was hit badly this time.

There came a loud aerial boom from somewhere nearby, and Schofield snapped round to see the second Mirage fighter whip past the blurring columns on his left, shooting ahead of the chase.

Not a good sign
, he thought.

And then the snub-nosed rig came fully alongside his own on the right. He saw two ExSol men inside its cabin, and as it drew level with the Mack, he saw the gunner climb quickly across the driver and throw open the door closest to the Mack.

He was going to come across.

Schofield raised his Desert Eagle pistol in response—
click
.

No ammo left.

‘Crap!'

The Executive Solutions man leapt across the gap between the two speeding semi-trailer rigs, landing on the passenger step of Schofield's Mack. He raised his machine-gun, pointing it in through the window, an unmissable shot—

—at the same time as Schofield drew his Maghook from his thigh holster, aimed it at the thug and pulled the trigger—

Ppp-fzzz
 . . .

The Maghook didn't fire. It just emitted a weak fizzing sound. It was out of propulsion gas.

‘Goddamn it!' Schofield yelled. ‘That never happens!'

But now he was out of options: he and Gant were sitting ducks.

The ExSol man in the window saw this, and he leered, his finger squeezing on his trigger.

At which moment he was squashed like a pancake as the Kenworth rig—his rig—rammed viciously into the Mack, hitting it so hard that both trucks were lifted momentarily off the road!

The hapless mercenary simply exploded, his body popping in a burst of red, his eyes bugging before he dropped out of Schofield's view and fell to the rushing roadway beneath the two rigs.

And as the man dropped from sight, he revealed the new driver of the snub-nosed Kenworth rig—Aloysius Knight.

For when the ExSol mercenary had jumped over from the doorway of the Kenworth to the doorway of the Mack, another figure had crossed over
in the other direction
, from the rear section of the Mack to the rear section of the Kenworth rig.

Knight.

Now the two rigs raced side-by-side through the long curving tunnel, pursued only by the last yellow Peugeot.

But with its blown-open rear tyres, Schofield's Mack was dangerously unstable. It slipped and slid wildly, trying to get traction.

Schofield keyed his radio. ‘Knight! I can't hold this truck! We have to come over to you!'

‘
All right, I'll come in closer. Send your lady over.
'

The Kenworth swung in next to the Mack, rubbing up against its side.

Schofield quickly secured the Mack's steering wheel in place with his seatbelt. Then he shuffled over, kicked open the passenger door, and started to help Gant move.

At the same time, Knight opened his driver's side door and extended his spare hand.

Abruptly, gunfire.

Smacking into both trucks' frames. But it was just wild fire from the trailing Peugeot.

Schofield made the transfer, handed Gant over to Knight—who pulled her across the gap into the Kenworth's cab, before laying her gently on the passenger seat.

With Gant safely across, Schofield started to step across the gap—

—just as a shocking burst of a zillion tracer bullets ripped horizontally through the air in front of him, creating a lethal laser-like barrier, cutting him off from Knight and Gant's rig.

Schofield snapped to look forward and saw the source of this new wave of gunfire.

He saw the end of the curving tunnel, saw the road bend away to the right beyond it, and saw, rising ominously into the air just out from the turn, the second Mirage 2000N-II fighter, its six-barrelled mini-gun blazing away.

And then, to Schofield's horror, the line of sizzling tracer rounds swung in toward his rig and—
bam!-bam!-bam!-bam!-bam!-bam!-bam!-bam!-bam!-bam!-bam!
—an unimaginable barrage of bullets slammed into the metal grille of the Mack, hammering it with a million pock-marks.

The Mack's engine caught fire, hydraulic fluid sprayed everywhere, and suddenly Schofield could see nothing through his windshield. He pumped the brakes—no good; they were history. Tried the steering wheel—it worked only slightly, enough for him to say to the fighter plane:

‘If I'm going down, you're going down with me.'

The Mack careered down the length of the tunnel, together with the Kenworth.

And still the Mirage's withering fire didn't stop.

The two rigs hit the end of the tunnel—separated now—and Aloysius Knight had no choice but to take the bend to the right, while Schofield's Mack—its bonnet blazing, its rear tyres sliding—could do nothing but rush
straight ahead
, ignoring the corner.

Schofield saw it all before it happened.

And he knew he could do nothing.

‘Good God . . .' he breathed.

A second later, the speeding Mack truck missed the corner completely and blasted
right through
the guardrail fence and shot out into the clear afternoon sky, heading straight for the hovering Mirage fighter.

 

The Mack truck soared through the air in a glorious arc, nose high, wheels spinning, its path through the sky traced by the line of black smoke issuing out from its flaming bonnet.

But its arc stopped abruptly as the massive trailer rig slammed at tremendous speed into the Mirage fighter hovering just out from the cliff-side roadway.

The truck and the plane collided with astonishing force, the Mirage lurching backwards in mid-air under the weight of the mighty impact.

Already on fire, the Mack completely blew up now, its flaming bonnet driving into the nose of the hovering French fighter. For its part, the Mirage just rocked—then swayed—and then
exploded
, blasting out in a brilliant blinding fireball.

Then it dropped out of the sky, falling four hundred feet straight down the cliff-face with the remains of the Mack truck buried in its nose, before it smashed into the waves below with a single gigantic splash.

And in the middle of it all, in the middle of the tangled mechanical mess, without a rope or a Maghook to call on, was Shane M. Schofield.

 

Knight and Gant saw it all from their rig as they sped away along the winding cliff-side road.

They saw Schofield's Mack blast through the guardrail and crash into the hovering Mirage after which came the fiery explosion and the long drop to the ocean below.

No-one could have survived such an impact.

Despite her wounds, Gant's eyes widened in horror. ‘Oh God, no. Shane . . .' she whispered.

‘Son of a bitch,' Knight breathed.

A flurry of thoughts rushed through his mind: Schofield was dead—a man worth millions to Knight
if
he could have kept him alive—what did he do now—and what did he do with this wounded woman who was worth absolutely nothing to him?

The first thing you do is get out of here alive
, a voice said inside him.

And then suddenly—
shoom!
—the last-remaining Peugeot rally car whizzed past his rig, heading quickly down the road.

Surprised, Knight looked ahead and saw the road before him.

It contained a strange but impressive feature: at the next curve, a small castle-like structure arched over the roadway.

Made of stone and topped with tooth-like battlements, it was a two-storey gatehouse which must have been as old as the Forteresse de Valois itself. Presumably, it marked the outer boundary of the Forteresse's land.

On the far side of this gatehouse, however, was a compact drawbridge, spanning a 20-foot section of empty space in the roadway. You only got over the gap if the drawbridge was lowered, and at the moment, it was.

But then the Peugeot arrived at the gatehouse and disgorged one of its occupants who ran inside—and suddenly, before Knight's eyes, the drawbridge slowly began to rise.

‘No . . .' he said aloud. ‘No!'

He floored it.

The Kenworth rig roared toward the medieval gate-house, picking up speed.

The drawbridge rose slowly on its iron chains.

It was going to be close.

The big rig rushed forward.

The bridge rose slowly:
one foot, two feet, three feet
 . . .

The men in the Peugeot opened fire as Knight's rig thundered over the last fifty yards.

Knight ducked. His windshield shattered.

The drawbridge kept rising . . .

. . . and then the rig roared in through the gatehouse's archway, whipping past the Executive Solutions men . . .

. . . and raced up the ramp-like drawbridge, easily doing a hundred, before—
voom!
—it launched itself off the leading edge of the bridge, shooting high into the sky, soaring over the vertiginous gap in the road beneath it and . . .

Whump!

. . . the big rig hit solid ground again, banging down on the roadway, bouncing once, twice, three times, before Knight regained control.

‘Phwoar,' he sighed, relieved. ‘That was—'

SLAM!

The road in front of the rig erupted in a mushroom cloud of dirt.

A shellburst from the destroyer.

Knight hit the brakes and his rig skidded sharply, lurching to a halt inches away from a newly-created hole in the road.

Knight groaned.

The
entire
road in front of him had simply vanished—the whole width of it vaporised—the distance across the chasm to the other side at least thirty feet.

He and Gant were trapped—perfectly—on the vertical cliff-face, bounded both in front and behind by sheer voids in the roadway.

And at that moment, as if right on cue, the Axon corporate helicopter—which had watched the entire chase from a safe distance high above the road—hovered into view beside them, its pilot speaking into his helmet radio.

‘Fuck,' Knight said.