The Sword of God - John Milton #5 (John Milton Thrillers) (43 page)

He tightened his grip on the airline.

He was stuck.

“SIR?”

The pilot had given them a lead on the semi and then turned back to face it. Ellie had watched with fear and admiration as Milton had uncoupled the trailer. The road ahead was straight for three miles, and they had seen it scrape to a halt. It hadn’t detonated, not that it would have mattered out here.

Now all that was left to deal with was the tractor.

Denuded of its trailer, it had raced ahead.

She had watched Milton clamber around the side of the cab and had seen the muzzle flash and the sparkle of glass as Lundquist had fired at him. She had watched as he held on with one hand and then swung back around the back. She found that she had been holding her breath.

The tractor was two miles away from them now and it was closing fast.

“Sir?” the gunner said. “What are your orders?”

“When it’s in range, shoot it.”

“What more can he do?” Ellie protested.

“We don’t know if that maniac has explosives in there with him. Can’t take the chance. If your friend has got any sense in him, he’ll jump and get clear.”

The tractor kept rolling.

“Jump? He’ll kill himself.”

“Give him a warning,” Maguire said.

The gunner settled in behind the M-60 and squeezed the trigger. A dozen rounds tore through the darkness, the tracer describing a diagonal trajectory that blew up the road twenty feet in front of the speeding tractor.

Lundquist kept coming, the tractor rushing over the fresh potholes and through the cloud of pulverised asphalt.

Maguire looked at Ellie, his expression apologetic, then at the gunner.

“Do it.”

MORTEN LUNDQUIST looked at the Black Hawk. The chopper was hovering above the road two hundred yards away, directly ahead of him.

He didn’t know how he had done it, but Milton had decoupled the trailer. The airlines must have been torn out. Every time he touched the brakes he would be depleting the air tanks, and, when they were empty, the spring brakes would stop the tractor, too.

So he didn’t brake.

He accelerated.

Sixty.

Sixty-five.

The chopper waited for him.

He closed.

One hundred and fifty yards.

One hundred yards.

It was no good.

The game was up.

He had been mistaken.

Maybe he hadn’t been listening.

God's word?

It wasn’t what he had thought it was.

He had a different plan for him.

Thy will be done.

He could see it now, everything that he had done wrong. He had let Milton distract him. He had allowed him to fill his thoughts, his voice drowning out God’s voice.

It was obvious, now.

Milton
was
an agent of Satan.

And Lundquist needed to stop him.

Perhaps that was what God had always wanted him to do.

He looked up at the helicopter as its powerful searchlight swung across the road and raced towards him, filling the cab with its blinding glow. He blinked, taking his hand off the wheel and shielding his eyes with it just as the muzzle of the big machine gun sparked a vicious starburst.

The rounds detonated into the asphalt and then reached up into the chassis of the truck, shredding the hood, pulverising the radiator and the engine. Flames leapt out, and then a thick pall of black smoke started to rise up.

Lundquist yanked the wheel to the left.

The disabled tractor was doing sixty as it left the road.

ELLIE GRIPPED the side of the chair as the rattle of the machine gun overlaid the roar of the turbines.

“Shit!” the gunner cursed.

The tractor passed out of sight.

“Pull up,” Maguire said. “We need a better view.”

They gained altitude, opening up the dark vista of the woods. The forest around here was crisscrossed with the same access roads and firebreaks, and it was one of these into which the tractor had plunged. She could see the glow of its headlamps pulsing orange through the trunks of the trees. The pilot kept the chopper behind the tractor, and they watched as it gradually decelerated before it smashed a path through the trees that fringed the road and came to a sudden stop.

“I can’t set down there, Colonel,” the pilot reported. “There’s nowhere to land.”

“Keep us on station and call in our position. How far away are the units on the ground?”

“Ten klicks.”

“How long can we stay here?”

The pilot checked his dials. “We’ve got a quarter tank. Fifteen minutes if we want to get back again.”

The searchlight shone into the darkened trees. The operator trained it on the wreck of the tractor and then gave out a shout of surprise. “There he is!”

Ellie squinted down.

The figure of a man. Bulky, moving slowly, awkwardly. The spotlight tracked him, moving in a northeasterly direction as he struggled through the undergrowth away from the wreck.

“Is that Lundquist or Milton?”

“Lundquist,” she said.

“Fire at will.”

The gunner fired a barrage, and as he did, the searchlight lost the man. “Dammit.”

Maguire gritted his teeth. “He’s going to get away.”

Ellie looked back at the tractor.

Where was Milton?

THE TRACTOR had bounced and leapt, crashing through the smaller trees and tearing the scrub up by the roots. The firebreak was just barely wide enough for it, and then it had turned away and the tractor had kept going in a straight line, slicing through a stand of newly planted fir. The windscreen had shattered as the tractor splashed through a stream. It had eventually slammed to a dead stop against the trunk of an ancient oak.

Lundquist had been thrown around the cab like a puppet, and the final impact had crashed his head against the wheel. The jolt had made him bite clean through his lip, and now blood was running into his mouth and pouring down his chin. The seat belt had cut into the fleshy parts of his neck, and he could feel the bruises forming on his sternum, chest, and pelvis.

He had taken the M16 and kicked the door open. His foot slipped on the step and sent him crashing into a bush bristling with thorns.

He took a pause to catch his breath.

The tractor’s shattered engine ticked, its heat gradually dissipating.

Shards of glass fell like teeth from the broken maw of the window frame.

He looked up as the tremendous clatter of the Black Hawk came from directly overhead.

He ran.

The big machine gun opened up and rounds tore through the canopy overhead, stitching jagged holes in the sodden greensward. He tumbled out of the way, the splashing, muddy impacts stretching away from him and terminating in the trunk of another oak, sending a storm of splinters in all directions.

He scrambled up, burrowed deeper into the undergrowth, and then paused.

The forest was disturbed, filled with the complaints of birds and animals that had been roused by the tractor’s plunge through the trees.

The helicopter was somewhere overhead, close, its turbines roaring and the rotors cutting noisily through the air.

He heard something, saw a flash of movement.

A deer.

He saw the white-tail bob as it pranced out of danger.

Another noise?

He swung up the M16 and fired a burst into the bushes.

Blind fear, the searing white heat of terror, burned through his mind so fast and so fiercely and so thoroughly that he almost forgot his own name.

He remembered one name.

John Milton.

He stumbled forwards, the thorns ripping at his flesh, scratching his face and his hands and tearing his clothes, none of that as important as putting distance between himself and the tractor.

Between himself and the Black Hawk.

Between himself and Milton.

He ran.

MILTON PAUSED. Lundquist had barrelled across a space that had been cleared of trees. In spite of his urge to rush after him, he knew that he could not. The Black Hawk was overhead, the searchlight glaring down at them, its twitching light illuminating the space so well that there would be no way for Milton to pass through it unobserved. He had to wait until the chopper had passed over. Lundquist might not have been sprinting away; maybe he was pressed down on the ground, the M16 laid out before him, aiming.

Milton heard a metallic, amplified voice. “Morten Lundquist! This is the National Guard.”

Milton looked up. The Black Hawk was hovering fifty feet above the tree line.

“Lundquist! You need to surrender.”

Milton knew that there was little they could do. The clearing was much too small for them to land.

There came the strobe of gunfire from the other side of the clearing, and he saw the sparks of impact as bullets struck the helicopter’s fuselage.

The chopper slid away to the right and the clearing was plunged into darkness. Milton heard the crash of movement through the bushes and ran low and fast in pursuit. He stopped and listened and heard, not far up ahead, the sound of something crashing through more thick underbrush.

He followed, staying low. Lundquist wouldn’t run forever. There would come a point when he would grow tired or impatient, and then he would stop. He would try to lay out an ambush, and Milton had to be wary of that. But the noise kept coming, the rustling of the undergrowth and the sound of boots splashing through mud, and as long as he could hear him moving, he knew he could follow safely.

When the noise stopped, he stopped, falling to the ground and inching forwards on his belly, his eyes searching ahead for any sign of Lundquist’s passage. The Black Hawk came back again, the searchlight probing for them, the solid shaft of its light absorbed by the canopy overhead, so bright that Milton could see the veins of the leaves lit up from above. He heard the sound of a curse, and then the running started again, so he got up and ran, too.

It must have been fifteen minutes before the noise stopped for a second time. Milton dropped back into the brush. He waited there, controlling his breathing, vigilant.

He looked around, recognising his surroundings.

Lundquist had been running in circles.

The noise of boots slapping through water came from up ahead, and he followed again. The pursuit continued through a dense thicket of trees and across another open patch of ground. Lundquist led him to a long stretch of dogwood, crawling beneath the branches through the dirt and the muck, and then down a loose slope of scree to a stream, across that and then along the opposite bank. Milton stayed within the margin of vegetation. It would have been faster to run through the water, but he would have made too much noise and would present a target that would be impossible to miss.

He would be patient.

Lundquist was losing it.

Wouldn’t be long now.

THE SLEEVE of Lundquist’s jacket snagged on the thorns of a bush, and the fabric ripped as he tore it loose. He ducked down and cursed, not because of the jacket, but because he was beginning to feel desperate. The Black Hawk was still overhead, the searchlight questing for him, but he could stay ahead of it, and he knew that eventually they would run low on fuel and have to leave. It wasn’t the helicopter that he was worried about.

It was the sure and certain knowledge that John Milton was behind him.

He pushed up and tried to scramble away. The brambles, which he had forgotten about, lashed him in the face. Their spikes scratched into him, tearing the skin on his cheeks and throat. He covered his eyes and pushed through them, feeling the blood on his skin and ignoring it.

He just needed to keep going. He had waited twice, settled down in deep cover, and turned the M16 to face the direction that Milton must surely be coming. But he did not come. The forest was full of noise, loud with panicked birds and animals and the noise of the Black Hawk overhead, but there was nothing that sounded like a man in pursuit. It was as if he had a sixth sense. Whenever Lundquist stopped, Milton stopped.

Or maybe he was wrong, maybe he was paranoid, maybe Milton wasn’t following him after all?

Lundquist stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He was winded, his knees were watery, and he had no idea where he was. He thought of just turning and firing in a wide arc, emptying out the magazine and trusting God, but he couldn’t do it. It would be suicide. He could fire for a week, and he wouldn’t hit him. And the muzzle flashes would just give him away.

He set off again, following the course of a stream to the south, but his legs felt empty, and he had no strength left. He dragged his foot, and his ankle was snagged by a bare root, his momentum arrested as he slammed down onto his hands and knees. He dropped the M16 and tried to withdraw his foot, but he was panicked, and every yank and jerk seemed to jam it in ever tighter.

Finally, he managed it. He scrambled backwards, to his rifle.

Now, he thought. Now he would make his stand.

He swallowed compulsively, his stomach an empty pit. He fumbled the M16 and aimed back down the stream, sweeping into the trees on the left and on the opposite bank to the right.

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.

He listened, but he couldn’t hear anything. Something was different. He realised what it was: the helicopter was gone. It wasn’t just away from him, for he would have been able to hear the engines from miles away, it was gone.

It was just him and Milton now.

But rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

He heard a crashing sound from the other side of the river, swung the rifle in that direction, and fired.

The noise was terrifyingly loud, the echoes cracking around the trees, and he got to his feet and ran again. His foot slipped off a moss-covered rock, and he went flying through the air, legs flailing, and then he pounded back down on his back. His head smacked against a rock, and his vision fluttered, then dimmed. The stream ran around him as he lay there, his eyes squeezed tight. He could feel the sharp pebbles on the bottom digging into his back.