Support and Defend (33 page)

D
OM OPENED HIS EYES
when he heard the thud of a man falling onto his back on the dirt gravel driveway.

The Venezuelan was dead, the Beretta dangling from the trigger finger of his slack right hand.

Dom spun around and looked out at the lawn near the water behind him. Adara Sherman stood with her M16 held high up to her sightline. Her black knit cap hid her blond hair, and she wore a black zip-up raincoat, but her Virginia sweatpants gave her away.

She lowered the gun and approached while Dom felt his knees weaken. It was just now setting in how close he’d come to having his ticket punched by some government gunman in Central America.

Dom fought the urge to fall over, then dropped the empty G3 on the ground, and turned to pick the Beretta out of the dead man’s hand. As he did so, Adara Sherman shined a flashlight on him. “You’re hit!”

Dom looked quickly down at his body, feeling over his chest and arms. “Where?”

“Your back.”

Dom reached behind and rubbed his free hand on his shirt. He breathed out a long sigh. “A bird shit on me.”

“That looks like blood.”

“I think he was eating berries or something.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Dom had the pistol now, and he shoved it into his pants.

Adara scanned her rifle around the back of the house, looking for any more targets. There was no sound, as if everyone inside was dead. She said, “The boat is only a couple hundred yards east. I tied up next to a little beach. There’s a footpath through the trees. Let’s go.”

“I’ve got to go forward, not back.”

Adara was scanning. “Really?”

“The Russians took off in pursuit of Ross. I can’t let them get the scrape and the password.”

“Okay,” she said. “This is your op. Lead the way.”

“We need a vehicle.”

“Over by the kennels there is a truck with a dead guy behind the wheel. It’s running.”

“Good. You grab that and bring it back here. I’m going in the house to get a weapon.”

Adara took off back around the front of the house.

E
THAN
R
OSS KEPT CHECKING
out the back window of the Expedition, but even though dawn had lightened the sky a little, he could see nothing under the thick jungle canopy. The road, while muddy and narrow, was in surprisingly good repair, and as they wound up a series of hills the Expedition’s V8 engine roared with power, giving the three passengers confidence that the attack would soon be far behind them.

Mohammed spoke on his phone, he kept the words hushed, although Ethan doubted anyone in the truck spoke Arabic. Ethan closed his eyes for a moment, trying his best to force himself to pick out some of the words. He was by no means fluent in the language, but had spent some time in the Middle East and learned some words and phrases. He was getting nowhere with Mohammed’s quick, soft conversation.

Suddenly Mohammed began shouting. Ethan thought he was yelling into the phone, but almost immediately he saw that the young Lebanese man was screaming at Leo.

Ethan leaned forward and he understood the reason for Mohammed’s agitation.

Leo’s eyes were closed, his head hung down, and his hands had dropped from the steering wheel into his lap. He was breathing in short wheezes, and he appeared to be unconscious.

“Fuck!” Ethan shouted. “Get the wheel!”

Mohammed dropped his cell phone and grabbed the steering wheel, but he was unable get his foot on the brake across the center console of the vehicle. He looked ahead, steered with his left hand, and passed his G3 rifle to Ethan.

“Take the gun! Push on the brake! Hurry!”

Ethan did as Mohammed instructed, he pushed over half his body through the space between the front seat and jammed the barrel of the rifle between Leo’s legs, and after a few misses he found the foot pedal and pressed down.

The Expedition skidded to a lurching stop in the middle of the dirt road, just before a sharp turn to the right.

Mohammed was able to put the vehicle into park, then he leapt out, moved around to the other side, and opened the door. He yanked the Venezuelan intelligence officer out and let him fall in the mud. Leo groaned as he hit the ground but did not move.

Mohammed climbed behind the wheel. Both Gianna and Ethan knew the man was still alive, but neither said anything to Mohammed about leaving him bleeding to death on a jungle road. They were both more concerned about their own predicament.

Ethan still held the rifle in his hands, and he climbed into the front passenger seat.

Mohammed retrieved his phone and started talking. Again, softly and in Arabic.

Ethan shouted at him, “We can’t stay here! Where are we going? We don’t even know where Leo was taking us. The Americans might be just behind us!”

Mohammed looked to Ethan. “See if there is a map in the glove box.”

Ethan found a weathered map of the entire archipelago in the glove compartment, and hand drawn lines over the island of Bastimentos indicated the road system. Mohammed took it from Ethan’s hand and began looking it over carefully, using the interior light in the cabin.

“Hurry up,” Ethan shouted, and he looked back over his shoulder, certain the Americans were closing fast.

A
FAINT HINT OF SUNRISE
in the east glowed as Dom climbed into the driver’s side of a large and very old flatbed farm truck. Adara moved over to the passenger side, and she rested her M16 muzzle down between her legs.

Dom grinded the old gears as he got the vehicle moving, but it became immediately obvious the truck was built to haul big items around the island, not for its ability to chase down other vehicles.

Adara registered his disapproval. “The Maserati dealership was closed. This was the best I could do.”

“The Russians are in a four-wheel-drive Ford SUV. They are going to catch up to Ross.”

Adara reached into her jacket. “I brought the EagleView printout of the island. I’ll see if we can figure out where they are going and find a shortcut.”

Dom had turned pessimistic about their prospect for stopping the Russians from capturing Ross. His plan to grab the American traitor himself was only a distant fantasy now. “A shortcut? This thing won’t float or fly, so there’s not going to be a shortcut.”

“You may be right. But the good news is this road continues on for the next five miles. Then it keeps going to the west, but there is a turnoff that leads to the south. We just have to be close enough to them to see which direction they are going. They can’t be more than a mile and a half ahead.”

“We won’t catch them before the turn. We’ll have to guess which way they went.”

Adara looked closer at the satellite picture. “Hang on a second. There is a levy up ahead. It should be dry and flat and solid enough for this truck. It connects to the road on the other side of some twists and turns. If we take it and don’t get stuck it, we’ll make up some time.”

Dom thought it over. “We’re desperate. I’ll give it a shot. Lead me to it.”

Mohammed folded the map and stuck it under his leg, then he put the Expedition in gear and started driving with the phone to his ear. The tires had just begun rolling when the headlight beams from a vehicle on the road behind filled up the cab.

“The Americans!” Gianna shouted.

Mohammed floored the truck, spinning the tires, but he picked up speed quickly.

The vehicle behind couldn’t be more than two hundred yards back, and it was closing fast.

D
OM WAS ASTONISHED
that they’d both found the levy in the night and negotiated its distance without crashing. Twice Dom almost rolled the truck off the side and into the jungle when his wheels got too near the edge and the wet earth began to give way.

Now they were back on the main road, and Dom flipped off the headlights as he made the turn, and a hundred yards ahead or so they caught occasional glimpses of brake lights.

Dom said, “That’s got to be the Russians. No way we got between the two SUVs.”

Adara looked back but saw nothing. The light was getting better by the minute now, but under all the vegetation it was still too early in the morning to know for certain whether or not a dark colored truck could be running without headlights behind them. After a minute like this, however, they came up a hill and out of the trees. Adara leaned her head all the way out of the Expedition to scan the road, a quarter-mile of it was visible for a split second before they made a turn.

“Nobody. Those are the Russians in front of us. I don’t know how far ahead Ross is, but he can’t be too far.”

Just then the Expedition made a hard right turn and took off to the south.

Adara said, “If they knew to make that turn, they must have Ross in sight ahead.”

Caruso banged his hand on the steering wheel. “The Russians will catch him, and they have some sort of extraction plan on this island. A helo or a boat. We’re gonna lose him.”

“I can try to shoot out the Russians’ tires.” Adara asked.

Dom glanced at her for an instant. “Can you make that shot in this light, at this distance, in this moving vehicle?”

“Probably not. Can you?”

“Nope.” Another sigh. “Any more shortcut levies on that map?”

“Nothing. The road straightens out here to the south for a while before going crazy again in the hills, about one mile ahead.”

Dom flattened the gas pedal to the floor, taking advantage of the straight road and the gentle downward slope. As a result he had the Russians no more than eighty yards ahead now. There was no indication they knew they were being pursued. Dom presumed they were completely focused on their own pursuit.

“You’re catching them!” Adara said.

“Just on this stretch. We won’t catch them before the turns come, and their vehicle is faster than ours.”

“Not on the turns.”

Dom turned to her quickly, then his eyes went back to the road. “What do you mean? They can corner twice as fast as we can, plus I have to downshift.”

“You don’t have to downshift if we don’t plan on turning.”

Dom looked at the speedometer. He was going sixty-five, and this was the absolute top speed of the truck. “If you’ve got an idea, I need to hear it.”

Adara put her finger on the map. “A half-mile ahead is a hairpin to the right at the bottom of this hill. There is nowhere for them to turn off before we get there.”

“So?”

“They’ll have to slow down to nothing to make that turn. They’ll
have
to. But we keep on going full tilt down the hill. We can catch up to them.”

“But . . . how do we stop?” As he asked the question he thought he knew the answer.

“We stop when we slam into them. We just plow right into the passenger side on the turn and knock them off the road.”

“Holy shit,” Dom muttered. “What’s the terrain like on the far side of the hairpin?”

“It’s jungle. This whole island is jungle, Dom.”

“I know that. I want to know if we’re going to go tumbling down a hill if I miss the truck.”

She looked at the image. “It’s difficult to tell on the sat photo.”

Dom sighed. “Try really hard, Sherman. Play like our lives depend on it.”

She gave it another glance. “It’s not a cliff or anything like that. It’s just rainforest. Maybe descending away.”

“If I don’t time it right, we’re going to shoot off the road and into the jungle at more than sixty miles an hour.”

“Then time it right.”

Dom shrugged. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

Sherman reached over and tightened Caruso’s seat belt, then she did the same with her own.

Dom said, “After we crash, we’re going to have to get out and shoot those guys.”

“I know.” Adara then asked. “How much ammo do you have?”

“I have an MP7 I got off a dead Russian. Thirty rounds. I’ve got a couple rounds in the pistol.”

Adara clutched her M16. She’d fired only one round, so she knew she had twenty-nine left. “We might run out of ammo in the gunfight, but at least we don’t have to worry about reloading.”

Dom chuckled through the tension as he fixed all his attention on the vehicle ahead. “Lucky us.”

T
HE FOUR
R
USSIAN NAVAL
Spetsnaz men readied their weapons in the rear Expedition. They’d closed to within thirty yards of Ethan Ross and his protection detail, and the driver told his lieutenant he would be able to overtake them in the next series of turns. He watched the SUV in front of them fishtail through a hard muddy turn to the right that hairpinned down a hill to the west, so the driver slowed his own vehicle down in plenty of time to make the turn.

One of the two men in the back seat yelled out, “Vehicle behind us!” and then he and his mate in the back spun around and raised their weapons, pointing them at the rear window and the truck beyond it. The green Expedition began its turn to the right, and the vehicle was fully in the curve, when a burst of rounds from the pair of HKs in the back seat blew out the glass.

“He’s not slowing down!” shouted one of the Spetsnaz men. “Watch out!” screamed the other, just as the big dark truck looming slammed broadside into the Expedition. The SUV crumpled and spun, the front end whipped all the way back around and hit the side of the truck, and it backward into the dense jungle. The flatbed jolted hard to the left with the impact, the front tires left the road, and it ripped through the trees just feet away from the Russians’ SUV.

E
THAN HAD BEEN TRYING
to keep his eyes on the truck chasing them, but he’d turned away for a moment when suddenly the headlights shining on him turned to the right. Ethan looked back and in the dim morning glow he saw mud and leaves and other debris kicked up in the jungle at the turn, as if the tropical vegetation had swallowed the Americans’ vehicle whole. “They crashed! The Americans just crashed making that turn!”

Bertoli stared back in shock with her hands to her mouth. Mohammed took a turn himself, this one to the left. He tried to look back over his shoulder, but he saw nothing. “Good. That is good,” he said, then he switched back to Arabic and continued talking in his mobile phone.