Twice a Spy (12 page)

“Perfect for what?” Charlie asked. “Ramming the gate?”

“I think you’d need a tank to do that.” Drummond hurried toward the vehicle.

Charlie trailed him, thinking this was no kind of exit plan: If they managed to start the behemoth, the police cars would catch them in seconds.

Drummond darted to the front of the vehicle, which was shaped like a ship’s prow. Bold metallic letters on the grille proclaimed
AMPHIBUS
.
Charlie guessed it was used for rescues when planes landed in the water, short of the runway.

Drummond grasped the driver’s door handle and tried to get into the cabin. The door didn’t budge. Charlie added his weight to the footlong handle. The creak of the hinges was masked by the sirens, fortunately.

Drummond dove upward, landing prone on the driver’s seat. He flipped onto his back, reached under the control panel, and went to work on the ignition barrel.

Usually he needed to find a way to pry loose the panel. With a nothing tap, this one clunked to the floor. A mass of wires spilled onto his face. Although they all appeared black in the dark alley, he somehow knew which two were the reds—or at least he appeared confident as he touched two ends together.

The engine hiccupped.

Then fell silent.

Maybe for the best, Charlie thought.

A patrol car crept even with the mouth of the alley.

Charlie resisted an impulse to dive out of sight. Even in the shadows, his sudden movement would have the effect of a signal flare on the policemen’s peripheral vision. So too would the contour of a man pressed flat against the side of a vehicle, but the Amphibus had a wild outcropping of tires, life rafts, and rescue devices. Charlie blended in.

The patrol car continued past.

A moment later Drummond tried the wires again, this time pressing the accelerator with his palm. The engine coughed, six or seven bursts, the intervals between them decreasing in duration and culminating in one pleasing grumble.

Drummond scrambled to the passenger side of a front bench larger than most couches. Charlie jumped in, taking the wheel. Despite the obvious antiquity of the vehicle and the sour stench of old seawater, the cabin was in pristine condition. Evidently the Amphibus hadn’t seen much action.

Perched at the edge of the bench, Charlie needed to stretch to keep hold of both the gear shift and the steering wheel. “So do you think we should try for a diversionary tactic? Or just gun it for the water—assuming this thing guns?”

Drummond made no reply.

Charlie looked over to find his father shaking his head as if to stave off sleep. Over the past week the experimental medication had slowed Drummond down in general, a function of the p25 protein booster’s beta-blocker component, which brought his metabolism to a crawl. The brief flight from the customs official seemed to have drained him.

“Any thoughts, Dad?”

With a forearm that seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, Drummond pointed ahead.

Customs official Maurice du Frongipanier strode around the corner and into the alley, eyes blazing with fury, revolver locked on Charlie.

The customs
man took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.

Charlie imagined that he heard the click over the clamor of sirens. A white muzzle flash lit the alley and the report drowned out all other sounds.

Like Drummond, Charlie ducked, not just beneath the window line but to the nonskid metal floor, his instincts overriding his awareness that even the monster’s metal plating offered little protection against a bullet traveling near the speed of sound.

The bullet drilled through the windshield, spider-webbing much of the surrounding glass and blasting shards against Charlie’s hands, which he was using to shield his head. The round continued its course through the vinyl seat just above Drummond’s head, disappearing through the door to the cargo hold.

With his raw left hand, Charlie punched the clutch, meanwhile ramming the gearshift into first and pressing the accelerator, sending the Amphibus lurching forward. He pounded the horn.

The customs official jumped, sending his subsequent shot high. It struck one of the spotlights on the vehicle’s roof. Orange fragments of glass bounced down Charlie’s window.

Emboldened by the sight of the official scurrying out of the way, Charlie sat up so that he was even with the wheel and stomped on the accelerator. The Amphibus chugged to seven or eight kilometers per hour.

Drummond rose too, heavy-lidded and irritable, as if he’d been rudely awoken.

“You okay?” Charlie asked.

Drummond grumbled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason.”

As the truck reached the end of the alley, something thudded against the passenger side of the cargo hold.

“I was afraid of that,” Drummond said, eyeing his side mirror.

Checking the mirror, Charlie saw du Frongipanier improbably clinging to one of the flotation devices dangling from the Amphibus.

“Hang on,” Charlie said. “Tight.”

Drummond braced himself against the control panel. Charlie crushed the brake pedal. The tires shrieked to a halt while the chassis and Charlie’s stomach hurtled onward.

The customs man ought to have been flung thirty feet ahead.

But he hung on and, what’s more, managed to point his revolver at the passenger window and line up Drummond’s head in his sights.

Charlie shifted back into gear, costing du Frongipanier his aim. Mashing the gas pedal, Charlie hoped to gain enough speed to shed the unwanted passenger.

Rapid acceleration was not one of the Amphibus’s features.

Three successive rounds pounded through the wall behind Charlie and Drummond. The air filled with particles of seat-cushion foam. More shattered windshield fell inward, scraping Charlie’s face and sticking in his wig. Rolling out of the alley, he saw no choice but to duck again and hope that no planes or fuel trucks were in his path.

Shielding his eyes from the continuing influx of glass, Drummond sat up and jerked one of the levers beneath the control panel. With a rush of air, a pontoon shot away from the Amphibus—a horrified du Frongipanier aboard.

The flotation device thumped against the tarmac then reversed course, the rope tethering it to the Amphibus snapping back to the vehicle. Despite repeated bumps and asphalt burns, the customs official not only hung on but also raised his revolver.

Another glaring muzzle flash and a bullet penetrated the steel door dividing the cab and the cargo hold, ricocheting around like a mad bee.

“Any chance there’s another lever you can use?” Charlie asked.

Drummond brightened. “Yes, thank you!
That
is what I was trying to remember.”

He leaned forward, jerking another handle.

A red life ring disengaged with a feeble click and floated backward, like a frisbee.

It clipped du Frongipanier in the shoulder with a disheartening
pfft
. But enough force still to knock him off the pontoon. He tumbled backward along the tarmac, his revolver bouncing along with him. Right into his hand. As he slid to a stop, he fired again.

The bullet sparked the tarmac well wide of Charlie’s door. The Amphibus bounced, Charlie along with it, his head striking the roof liner. “What the hell?”

“Grass,” Drummond said.

Now Charlie saw it. The Amphibus was crossing the strip of lawn that paralleled the runway. A moment later the heavy vehicle clomped onto the runway itself.

Charlie looked up, bracing for impact with a descending 747.

The sky was empty, but a trio of police cars was converging on the Amphibus.

Extraordinarily composed, or perhaps just drained of panic, Charlie focused on the Caribbean, outlined by the moonlight, a mile up the runway. He tried to turn the Amphibus, wrestling gravity for control of the wheel. The tires howled. Whines and groans suggested the vehicle was about to collapse into a mass of spent automotive parts. It careened toward the water with the exception of a cylindrical tank—
a fire extinguisher?
—which burst through the rear door and bounced down the runway, leaving a comet trail of sparks.

The first police car slalomed to avoid being struck, then accelerated, closing to within a city block of the Amphibus. The two other police cars fell behind the first, forming a triangular formation, suggesting to Charlie that they intended to “T-bone” the truck, or disable it by ramming its flanks.

Although the engine roared like a blast furnace, the Amphibus seemed to have maxed at seventy kilometers per hour.

The police cars closed to within striking range.

The water was half a mile ahead.

“Now would probably be a decent time to figure out how to turn this thing into a boat,” Charlie said.

Drummond stared across the cabin as if Charlie were the one with lucidity issues. “Turn this into a boat?”

One of
the police cars was now close enough that Charlie could make out the driver’s mustache—the traditional Burt Reynolds model. He also saw the gun that the man’s partner braced on the passenger side window. Getting closer. The options were to get rammed, get shot, both, or to stay the course to the Caribbean at the runway’s end.

“Dad, this thing is an
Amphibus
,” he said. “If we can’t make it live up to its name, when we reach the water”—seconds away—“we’re literally sunk.”

“Oh, that. We could always retract the wheels. The power train will shift from driving the wheels to driving the jet propulsion system.” Charlie exhaled. “You’ve been in one of these things before.”

“I don’t recall. On the other hand, once, back in the early seventies—”

“How do you retract the wheels?”

“Push this.” Drummond pointed at a big button on the console. Pictured on the peeling decal directly above it were a tire and an arrow that curved upward.

The police car closest to Drummond slammed into his side of the Amphibus. Charlie felt the crunch of metal in his teeth. Impact with any more force would knock the ungainly vehicle onto its side.

His eyes went to the blur outside his window. The second police car was charging straight at his door. He clenched head to toe in anticipation of the blow.

The police car suddenly slowed, braking close enough that Charlie could read the lips of the man at the wheel: “
Merde!
”

The runway ended, and the Amphibus took off into the sky, or so it seemed.

An instant later, it belly flopped into the Caribbean. And began sinking. Seawater rose above the windows, darkening the inside of the cabin save for a few faint white circles on the instrument panel.

Charlie groped for the button that turned the thing into a boat, found it—he hoped—and hammered down.

The wheels ground inward, and the inboard engines roared to life, bringing the water around it to a boil.

The craft popped back to the surface.

And, incredibly enough, floated.

As far as Charlie could tell, just one problem remained: “How do we make it go?”

“Just keep doing that.” Drummond indicated the accelerator, which Charlie still had pressed all the way to the floor.

Indeed the Amphibus continued to function, distancing them from the runway. But at a turtle’s pace.

“You sure about the ‘jet propulsion’ part?” Charlie asked, watching the cops spring out of their cars, all with sidearms drawn except for the last man, who had a shotgun.

“An interesting piece of information is that it took ten million man hours to develop amphibious vehicle technology,” Drummond said.

The shotgun roared and a round barreled into the cargo hold, creating a fist-sized hole in the wall behind them and boring into the dashboard. The radio spat out sparks.

More bullets rained against the vehicle, with such frequency that the dings and chimes formed one continuous peal. Too many bullets to count entered the cabin, kicking up a confetti of vinyl bits from the dashboard along with a geyser of sparks, and turning any remaining glass into gravel. The air filled with a salty mist.

Crouched as far down as possible, Charlie kept his hands on the accelerator. He tried to steel himself by remembering that he and Drummond had escaped worse.