24
THE DUST AND THE
DARKNESS gave cover as Kurt led Katarina across a grassy field on
the cliff side. The approaching cars moved slowly, picking their
way along the gravel road. Both cars had front-end damage, and one
of them had only a single working headlight. The little game of
chicken had worked out in Austin’s favor, both damaging the
vehicles and delaying them.
As they approached,
Kurt imagined the drivers wondering where their comrades had gone
to. Or, for that matter, where their prey had gotten to and how
they’d escaped in the underpowered little rental car.
Lying flat in the
grass, Kurt waited for the cars to pass. Once they had, he and
Katarina resumed their move across the grass, arriving at a cyclone
fence.
Kurt looked through
the fence. A small hangarlike building stood dark and quiet on the
other side. A sign read “Ultralight Charters $50 Per Half
Hour.”
“Climb over,” he said
to Katarina. “Quietly.”
She put her hands on
the top of the fence, stuck her toes into one of the diamond-shaped
spaces, and scaled up and over in two quick steps. Kurt was glad to
be on the run with an athlete.
He followed, dropping
down quietly beside her.
“Where are your
shoes?” he asked.
“You mean my
expensive Italian stilettos?”
“Yeah. Your
shoes.”
“They kind of fell
off when you threw me out of the moving car.”
He noticed her dress
was torn, and she had bleeding abrasions on her bare elbow and
forearm. His own knee and shoulder were bleeding as well, and he
could feel the small particles of gravel that had been ground into
the palms of his hands. Still, it was better than being
dead.
“I’ll buy you a new
pair if we get out of this alive,” he said. “Keep
moving.”
They sprinted across
the grass and ducked behind a large exposed tank like one might see
at a propane filling station. From the smell, Kurt knew it
contained AvGas, 100 octane fuel for small propeller-driven
aircraft like the ultralights.
Hidden behind this
tank, Kurt watched the two remaining Audis crawl toward the cliff.
They stopped near the spot where the cars had gone over, leaving
their remaining lights on. Two men got out of each car. One of them
carried a flashlight; the other three carried short-barreled
assault weapons of some type.
“Let’s get out of
here,” Katarina whispered.
“Don’t move,” he
said. “They can’t see us here. I don’t want them to hear us
either.”
The men with the guns
moved toward the edge of the cliff and peered over. A fire must
have been burning down below because the smoke and dust were lit
up, turning the men into silhouettes.
“Looks like they went
over,” one man said.
Kurt couldn’t hear
the initial reply, but then the man with the flashlight moved to
the edge.
“Get me a scope,” the
man with the flashlight said. When the order was not followed
rapidly enough, he barked louder. “Come on, we don’t have all
night.”
As the man spoke,
Kurt recognized the voice as belonging to the thug on the
Kinjara Maru.
“So you’re not dead,”
Kurt mumbled. He’d thought there was something suspicious about the
explosion on the water that took the hijackers’ boat. It had seemed
a little too convenient. A little too perfect of an ending for what
appeared to be a sophisticated operation.
“You know these
people?” Katarina asked.
“I know that man’s
voice,” Kurt said. “He was part of a hijacking that took place a
week ago. We thought he’d blown himself up by accident. But
obviously it was a trick meant to make us think he
did.”
“So these men are
after you?” she said.
He turned to her.
“You didn’t think they were after you, did you?”
She seemed offended.
“They could have been. I’m a very important member of the Russian
scientific establishment. I’m quite certain they’d get more ransom
money for kidnapping me than they would for you.”
Kurt smiled and
fought back a laugh. She was probably right about that. “Didn’t
mean to offend you,” he said.
She seemed to accept
that, and Kurt turned back toward the thugs at the cliff’s edge.
They were perfectly backlit in the smoke. If he’d had a rifle, he
could have taken them all right now, knocking them down one after
the other like ducks in an arcade. But all he had was the metal
pipe and the knife that the thug now hunting them had left behind
on the Kinjara Maru.
Kurt watched as the
man stepped to the edge with a scope in his hand. He stared through
it for a long moment and then changed angles a bit. Kurt guessed he
was now looking at the second car.
“They’re dead,” one
of the other thugs said. “All of them.”
“Don’t be so sure,”
the lead man said.
“That’s a long way
down,” the thug replied. “No one’s going to survive
that.”
The lead man turned
and pushed his subordinate back against the car in a menacing
fashion. A pretty ballsy move, considering he was the only one
without a weapon. Obviously these men did not question
him.
“You’re right,” the
leader said. “No one could have survived such a fall. Unless they
didn’t take it.”
He slapped the night
vision scope in the man’s hand. “There are no bodies in or around
that car,” he said.
“Damn,” Kurt
whispered. Where their biggest problem had seemed like a long walk
back to civilization, they now had a much more pressing issue:
these thugs would not leave the plateau until they’d found him and
Katarina or until police units came—perhaps half an hour away or
more.
He doubted they could
hide that long.
As the lead thug
turned and began spraying his light across the grassy field, Kurt
ducked back down behind the fuel tank. When the beam of light
pointed off in another direction, Kurt grabbed Katarina’s hand
again. “Hope you’re not afraid of heights.”
They scrambled across
the open space and made it to the dark hangar. After quietly
forcing the lock with the pipe, they slipped inside.
“What are we going to
do?” Katarina asked.
“You got fifty
dollars?” he said, sneaking over to one of the ultralights and
unscrewing the gas cap.
“Not on me,” she
said. “Why?”
“We’ll have to leave
an IOU,” he said, grabbing a helmet and handing it to
her.
“We’re going to fly
out of here?” she guessed.
He
nodded.
She smiled so
broadly, he swore it lit up the room. “I always wanted to try one
of these things,” she said.
He checked the tank
to make sure it held some fuel. Seeing it was half full, he screwed
the cap back on, moved to the hangar door, and began pushing it
open slowly.
OUTSIDE NEAR THE
CLIFF, Andras and his men were fanning out. Andras had grabbed a
Glock 9mm that he now held in his left hand, and the flashlight was
in his right. One of his men was making his way along the edge of
the cliff, another going in the opposite direction.
Andras guessed his
quarry had moved inland. It opened up the terrain and would force
him and his men to consider many more hiding places. It would be
the better tactic, he thought. And having encountered this man from
NUMA once, Andras knew that, if anything, he was very
smart.
It would make it all
the sweeter when he killed him.
His light played
across the ground. Had Andras feared they were armed, he would have
been walking in the dark using the night vision scope. But his
targets had shown no weaponry during the chase except for a lead
pipe and their own wits, so he knew he could safely
proceed.
He was rewarded when
something caught the light: a woman’s shoe, dusty in places, but
the red patent leather was unmistakable. Ten feet away, he saw
another one. He whistled to his men, and as they gathered he shone
the light around, spotting the cyclone fence and the building
beyond.
“Surround the
building,” he said. “They’re inside.”
His men dashed to the
fence and began to climb. As they did, a sound like a lawn mower
starting spilt the quiet of the night.
Andras hopped the
fence and shone his flashlight toward the building just in time to
see one of the ultralights come rumbling out and begin accelerating
across the grass.
“Shoot them,” he
ordered.
Two of his men
dropped down and opened fire as the buzzing ultralight sped away.
In a moment, it exploded, and flames engulfed the nylon
wing.
Too easy, he thought. And he was
right.
AS THE FIRST
ULTRALIGHT began to zoom across the grass, Kurt and Katarina
climbed into a second one and started it up. Kurt hoped the noise
and movement of the first one would mask their departure in the
other direction.
He sent the decoy to
the right and seconds later turned his own craft to the left. Even
as he pushed the throttle he heard the gunfire. A moment later he
saw a flash cross the grassy plain that served as the ultralight’s
runway. Just enough light to see by.
He gunned the
throttle, realizing the time for stealth had ended. The little
fifty-horsepower engine buzzed like a swarm of angry bees, and the
small wooden prop spun up to full rpms in a second.
The gangly craft sped
forward, accelerating down the grass strip and lifting off in a
hundred feet or so. Kurt turned out toward the cliff, trying to put
the hangar between him and the men with the guns. He heard a few
sporadic shots and then nothing. By then he and Katarina were gone,
out over the cliff, accelerating into the darkness and heading for
the lights of Vila do Porto.
ON THE GRASSY RUNWAY,
Andras realized his mistake. They’d been had by a stroke of
misdirection. He turned just in time to see the other ultralight
take off. He fired at it and then ran to the hangar with his
men.
Inside was a whole
fleet of the flying contraptions. Four of them looked to be in
working condition.
“Get in,” he shouted
to his men. “We’ll shoot them down from the air.”
As his other men
climbed into a second aircraft, Andras went to hop into the front
seat of the lead craft and stopped. A familiar object stood
vertically on its point, stabbed straight down into the
ultralight’s padded seat.
Andras recognized the
matte-black finish, the folding titanium blade, and the holes in
the handle. It was the knife he’d plunged into the crane operator’s
seat on the Kinjara Maru after cutting
the hydraulic lines.
So the man from NUMA
had taken it and kept it. And now he’d returned it. There had to be
a reason. Clearly, he was showing Andras that he knew who was after
him, but Andras suspected something more.
He stepped out of the
ultralight, looking for danger.
“Don’t start them,”
he ordered as one of his men reached for a key.
Andras moved to the
engine of the machine he’d been about to pilot. He checked the
hydraulic lines and the fuel lines, thinking those would be poetic
targets for his adversary to strike—and probably deadly, had he or
his men started the aircraft in the confines of the barnlike
hangar. He found nothing wrong with the exposed sections of the
tubing and saw no liquids dripping onto the floor
below.
He looked
up.
The wings had huge
cuts in them, long, clean slices that were not easily seen. From
the look of it, they’d been carefully made to avoid leaving the
nylon in obvious dangling strips. The damage might not have been
enough to keep the craft on the ground, but Andras had no doubt
that, once airborne, the fabric would have frayed in the airstream,
shredding in minutes. Had they taken off, he guessed, they would
have discovered it shortly after making it out over the
cliffs.
“We should check the
others,” one of his men suggested.
Andras allowed them
to do so, but he knew there was little point. They would all be the
same.
He pursed his lips,
disappointed, but sensing something new in his heart: admiration.
The kind of thrill a hunter feels when he realizes his prey might
be bigger, stronger, more fierce and intelligent than expected.
Such a thought never brought anger, only a greater exhilaration. So
far, he’d given this man from NUMA some grudging respect, but he’d
still underestimated him. A mistake he wouldn’t make
again.
“It’s been a long
time since I faced such a challenge,” he whispered to himself. “I’m
going to enjoy killing you.”