Flashpoint (Alex Mason Book 9), page 17
I got to my feet, tucked the Glock in my waistband and scrambled for the kitchen and the block of kitchen knives that invariably sits by the cooker in most houses. I was relieved to find this one was no exception and pulled out the large vegetable knife. After that I slipped back into the hall and flattened myself against the wall beside the living-room door. On the other side of it I could hear two men expostulating. I figured they didn’t often find Nissan trucks in people’s living rooms.
I heard the front door handle rattle and somebody called out. One of the guys in the living room yelled back, “Voy! Voy!” I’m coming, I’m coming.
I watched the living room door handle turn gently. There was a pause. Then the door opened all the way. A Guardia Civil stepped through, into the hall. At first he was just a dark shape, less than two feet away from me. But as he moved on toward the front door I recognized his green uniform. I waited. He wasn’t my target. He took another step and his partner moved through the door behind him. I could just see his shoulder and part of his head. The first guy kept moving, took another two steps, and my target took one more. It was the last step he ever took.
My left hand went over his mouth and with my index finger I sealed his nose. Before he could make a noise, I drove the point of the kitchen knife into the side of his neck, cutting through his carotid artery and his jugular. Then I punched forward hard, slicing right through his windpipe. The blood sprayed like a hose under pressure all over his pal’s back as he jerked and quivered like crazy. I let him go and he dropped to the floor. His partner was turning, his eyes wide and his mouth open.
I stepped forward fast, gripped the barrel of his automatic in my left hand and levered down savagely as I drove the blade of the kitchen knife had through his throat. I felt it split the vertebrae at the back of his neck and he dropped straight to the floor. As he did so I heard a loud crack out front and knew the remaining two had shot out the lock. I had to act fast. I ran two steps, dropped to the floor as the door opened and put six shots blind into the two hulking shadows framed in the doorway. They both went down screaming. I scrambled to my feet, ran and grabbed the sports bag, jumped over the dying men and out onto the veranda.
I could have run. I should have run. I could have taken their Range Rover and got the hell out of there. But I didn’t know how many of them there were, if they were all dead or if there were enough of them left to come after me. And that was something I really didn’t need. So I made a run for the back of the house and sure enough, as I flattened myself against the wall, I saw the two remaining Guardia, just as they were peering in through the wrecked glass doors.
I don’t often miss a shot, but I was exhausted and probably still in shock. I aimed, held my breath and squeezed, but as I did so my target stepped into the house and his partner stepped into my line of fire. Shit happens. The bullet went in through his right side and must have punched a hole right through his heart. He staggered and dropped.
I stepped forward intending to take down the first guy, but in that moment he stepped back out, saw me and leveled his automatic. He fired as I dropped and emptied my magazine in his direction. He fell, but he fell into the house and I didn’t know how badly hurt he was.
I decided not to compound my mistake by going after him, jumped to my feet and ran. I made Montilla’s Mercedes as the wounded cop hobbled around the veranda. He squeezed off two shots that went wide and I reversed like crazy toward the road. The last I saw of him he was talking into a radio. That was exactly what I had wanted to avoid. As I hit the gas, I was swearing profanities that hadn’t been invented yet.
I plowed through the gate in reverse. Made the brakes scream as I spun the wheel, slammed in first, surged forward in a spray of gravel and dirt, second, third and fourth, burning rubber toward the blacktop.
All the while I was shouting at myself in my mind: What’s your plan? God damn it! What’s your plan? What the hell do you do now?
But I knew. It was simple. There was only one possible plan. Gibraltar was impossible. The wounded cop had got on his radio, so not only would the border be crawling with cops and soldiers all looking for me and my sports bag, I had not heard from Gallin, which meant there was a good chance they had been stopped and arrested. I had to get the evidence in my sports bag to an American embassy, fast. The only way to do that was to head north and cross the front line. The assault from Spain had not started yet, with just a little luck I might make the border before it started.
Head north and try to get across the lines into Spain. That was the plan. Head north.
To paraphrase the old Yiddish proverb, men make plans so that the gods can laugh. The gods may well have been laughing, but I sure as hell wasn’t. The Merc gripped the road like it had claws on its wheels. I was driving like I was demented, screaming around the mountain roads, cutting the corners on the hairpins, shaving the edges, inches from the black ravines. trusting fate destiny karma or old One-Eye Odin himself that I would not meet a vehicle coming head-on.
I met no traffic, but pretty soon I began to hear a crazy screaming overhead. And as I slowed to peer out the window I saw what it was. They were fighter-bombers, whether they were Andalusian or Spanish I couldn’t tell, howling toward Almeria. It had started.
Soon afterwards the choppers started, circling overhead, playing their searchlights over the roads and the woodlands below. I knew they were hunting for me, and I knew it was just a matter of time before they found me.
I switched off the headlamps. As long as I was in the mountains, in the dark, I had a chance. But even as I thought that I knew that If I was going to head north through the mountains I had to go through the Zafaraya Pass, and that meant two things. First it meant taking the A-402 and crossing the Valley of La Viñuela. The A-402 was a major road and for about ten miles I would be totally exposed, especially with the total absence of anything but military traffic at the moment.
It also meant getting through the Zafaraya Pass. It was not strategically vital, but it was strategically important because it gave access from the north to Malaga, which was a vital port. It would be heavily guarded, and getting around the roadblock at the pass would mean ditching the Mercedes and doing some serious mountain climbing. The pass was wild, high and steep.
I had no idea how I was going to do it, and in the end I decided all I could do was make it up as I went along, one objective at a time.
My first objective was getting through the Valley of the Viñuela without get shot to pieces by a chopper. That was fine as far as it went, but by the time I started my descent toward the Valley and the A-402, I still had no damned idea what I was going to do. And to make matters more interesting, not only were there fighter-bombers streaking over head, and choppers making grid-pattern searches of the area, now the northern horizon was lighting up like there was an electric storm going on. Two got you twenty that as the fleet was steaming in from Majorca, a major artillery push had started in the northeast, in Extremadura, driving down the E-803, and another from Albacete, in Castille, pushing down the Guadalquivir Valley, driving through Jaen and Cordoba, forming a pincer movement closing on Seville, the capital.
The building chaos could work for me or against me. Once I reached the bottom of the winding mountain road I would lose my cover. I’d be exposed for maybe ten miles in the open ranges before I reached the mountains again and started to climb toward the pass. But if the fledgling Republic of Andalusia was being pounded from the north, the east and possibly even the south, they might just have too much on their hands to search for a single vehicle.
I knew it was wishful thinking, because that single vehicle was transporting the evidence that could kill the bid for independence overnight, and it was being transported in what was probably the only luxury Mercedes Benz on the road that night.
Then two things happened simultaneously. I saw a checkpoint up ahead, half a mile away with a Defender parked beside it, and I had a flash of inspiration.
Coming down the winding mountain road I had been hitting the gas in third and fourth, moving fast but controlling the engine. Now, on the final straight, I switched the headlamps onto full beam, opened the windows, shifted to fifth and sixth and floored the pedal. The powerful car surged and I watched the needle climb to a hundred and eighty kilometers per hour and keep climbing. Ahead of me there were a couple of soldiers waving their arms like crazy. For an insane moment they took aim with their rifles, but I was moving at one hundred and sixty-five feet per second—that’s fifty-five yards every time you said, “And one.” They chickened and scattered as the Merc hit the barrier, I slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel, scattering wood, gravel and terrified guards.
By the time the car came to a halt its beams were glaring on the two huddled soldiers who were shielding their eyes with their arms. I stepped out of the Mercedes and shot them dead where they crouched. I didn’t like doing it. In any other situation they would probably have been nice college kids you’d be happy to have a beer with. But right then they would have shot me dead without hesitation. Life sucks, but that’s not news.
I killed the lights on the Merc and drove it into the ditch, under the cover of some almond trees. Overhead a chopper thundered across the sky, a few hundred feet up, obscuring the stars and playing a spotlight over the almond and olive groves. They knew, like I did, that sooner or later I was going to have to break cover and move into that valley. But they’d be looking for a black Mercedes, and I’d be driving a military Land Rover.
I fished the keys out of one of the soldier’s pocket, grabbed their two HK G36 assault rifles, climbed into the cab, slammed the door and drove fast the last few hundred yards down to the bottom of the valley. There I found a T-junction and fishtailed onto the A-402, then floored the pedal. It didn’t take long for one of the choppers to notice me. He came in low and buzzed me twice. I made like he wasn’t there, and pretty soon I guess he decided I wasn’t a black Mercedes Benz and he went away, back into the mountains.
After five minutes I came to a convoy of trucks hurtling south toward the coast. Some general somewhere had decided the Mediterranean coastal defenses needed shoring up, so maybe the Russian and Algerian support hadn’t been as effective as they’d hoped. Or maybe they were just being careful. I thundered past them and a couple of minutes after that I was climbing up into the mountains again, toward the Zafaraya Pass.
The higher I went the tighter the hairpin bends became, and the steeper the mountainsides. I was forced to slow down to no more than fifty miles per hour, if I wanted to make it to the front lines.
By the time I sighted the pass, about half a mile up ahead, the mountains rising above the road were near vertical. I had no idea how many guards I was going to find at the checkpoint. The optimist in me told me they’d be deploying as many men as they possibly could to the fronts. The realist in my told me that’s not how armies work. War has very little to do with logic.
I checked the magazines of the various weapons I’d collected, and approached the checkpoint at a steady speed. Pretty soon a guy in uniform emerged from a red and white hut and started waving a flashlight at me. I slowed. Two more guys emerged from the hut. They were carrying weapons but they didn’t look like they were about to shoot anybody. I guess if I had been coming from the north it might have been different. But I was coming from the inside, and I wasn’t a crazy, speeding black Mercedes, so I was not an immediate threat.
The two guys with the rifles stayed at the barrier while the guy with the flashlight signaled me to come closer. I did, at a crawl. Behind the three men at the barrier, I now saw two more guards at the door of the hut. One was holding a cup in both hands and sipping from it. Five men. I wondered if that was the total. It seemed right, but who knew?
I let the truck crawl forward while I picked up the first of the Heckler and Koch rifles. I double-tapped the guy with the flashlight and shattered my windshield in the process. As he went down I sprayed the two guys with rifles behind the barrier. For a moment I was blinded by the shattered windshield and they returned fire. But their first target was my headlamps, which were blinding them. And by the time they got around to me, they were already dead.
I hit the gas. And smashed through the barrier. I’d noticed the two uniforms at the hut had dashed inside, probably to fetch their weapons. I didn’t let them do that. I slammed on the brakes and, snatching up the other Heckler, I sprayed the cabin from halfway down to the floor. When I was done, I dropped the rifle on the blacktop, walked up to the hut and opened the door. There were three guys in there, not two, and they were all dead.
My Land Rover was bleeding steam from several bullet holes in the radiator. So I searched the dead soldiers for another set of keys and took a Spanish Santana Anibal, which is basically a Land Rover Defender with a different name. I clambered in, fired her up and hurtled through the small, sleepy town of Zafaraya, where all the windows were closed and dark, hiding the terrified, peering eyes of the villagers, wondering how much longer I could keep going before they caught me.
The answer wasn’t long in coming.
Twenty-Four
Someone in the village must have made the call. Because it was only fifteen minutes later that I heard the thunder of the choppers closing in behind me. I was doing nearly eighty on the mountain roads. It was a miracle I hadn’t killed myself already. But when I heard the choppers I hit the gas and looked in my wing mirror. Not for the first time that night I swore violently. There were two Russian Mil Mi 24P gunships on my tail with their spots glaring, and that meant exactly one thing. I was already dead.
I was on a straight road running which ran through a flat highland. The truck was no match for the choppers even on a winding road, but in a straight line it was game over. Pretty soon they had drawn level. One of them settled on my right and the other took up a position in front of me. I knew the next thing would be to riddle me and the truck with heavy machine-gun fire. So I figured I had nothing to lose. I swung the wheel left and careened into the field on my left, bounding and skidding among the olive trees.
I had no idea how far I’d get. I knew for a certainty that I was going to die. But I also knew I was not ready to go down yet. So I bounced and hurtled across the dirt, skidding and sliding among the trees, occasionally smashing and scraping the sides against the ancient trunks, spraying dirt wide into the night air, and all over the windshield.
The gunships were behind me now, rising above the trees. I swung left and right, missing the trees. The guns on the chopper on my left opened up and a fountain of dirt exploded beside me, spraying across my windshield and leaving me blind.
I hit the windshield wiper which made it worse and ended up shooting out the windshield. I sideswiped one tree on my left, bounced and hit another on my right. The shattered windshield fell away behind me as I watched the searchlights closing in on me. I heard the violent crackle of machine guns and a second later heavy slugs tore through the rear of the truck. I skidded sideways and just before I started to roll I grabbed the sports bag, kicked open the door and jumped. Somehow, by some miracle, I wasn’t killed.
Rocks, stones and trees made a pretty good job of tearing me apart, but after five or six seconds that felt a hell of a lot longer, the old truck hit the bottom of the slope and exploded into flames, as I staggered to my feet and ran, limping, for the darkness.
It was a forlorn hope. It might have been a rock, a stone or the root of an olive tree. Or it might have been sheer exhaustion. I tripped and fell flat on my face. I lay a few seconds gasping with long shards of pain piercing my back and chest. Finally I looked up and behind me and struggled to my feet.
I was standing in the full glow of the spotlights. From one of the choppers I saw ropes unfurl and soldiers begin to descend. I backed up a few steps, then turned and ran. Though more than running it was plowing painfully and slowly through the loose, dry earth. My back and chest were screaming with pain from the crash, and from the pounding they had taken before. My legs were trembling and they muscles were seizing up with every step. I kept telling myself if I could make it over the next hill, disappear into the undergrowth and the wilderness, I might just be able to make it to the front line. I was dragging my legs forward, not running but hobbling, and I was aware that I was stumbling in the unwavering light of a spot. I was moving so slowly that, whatever I did, there was no way I could shake it. I was not so much a sitting duck, as a stumbling duck, waiting to be shot.
Then I was at a bank, where the field fell away into darkness. Over the thud of the rotors I could hear men shouting behind me. They were telling me to stop or they would shoot. I fell. I let myself fall into the void. For a moment there was stillness and darkness and quiet rest. But it was less than a second and then I hit dirt and stones and rocks, and pain again. I tumbled and rolled, hit trees and rocks and finally came to a halt and lay staring up at the black sky, where cruel, indifferent specks of ice looked back at me and just didn’t care.
My throat was raw with panting and gasping for air. I didn’t want to run anymore. I knew I was about to die and I had always promised myself I would not die fleeing. I was going to turn and face them, and die fighting. I saw myself get to my feet and start to climb the hill, realized I was dreaming and forced myself up onto one elbow. I watched the glow of the spots illuminate the hilltop. The roar and thud of the rotors filled the air and I watched the black silhouettes of the olive trees bow and dance in the downdraft. I roared out loud as I forced myself onto one knee and the downdraft started to batter my face, tearing at my hair as the dust and dirt were whipped up into a storm around me.
Some madness inside me told me this gave me an advantage, as they would not see me as I crept up on them and killed them, one by one.
I staggered a couple of feeble steps back the way I had come. The searching circles of the spots were fifty or a hundred yards away from me. Ahead, at the top of the hill I could see the silhouettes of maybe six or eight soldiers advancing toward the illuminated areas as the spots swept this way and that.
