Warrior (Freelancer Book 2) (28 page)

Damn. It stinks.

I can't breathe. Jeez, look at that. There's got to be a thousand dead PAVN out there.

All rotting in the sun.

Well, a stink never killed anyone—even if this feels like it could be the first time.

I'm staying right here. These tree roots are good cover.

What?

Moving west? Yes, sir.

Fucking shit.

Doesn't Captain Wales realize that LZ Albany is way the hell over to the east?

I'm safe here.

I'm not going to move

I'm just going to stay right here.

"Rick! Rick!"

Rick heard the voice but tried to pretend he didn't.

Smack!

The slap rocked his head to the left, and one eye opened in reflex. Steve was kneeling beside him and winding up for another slap.

Rick held up a hand.

"Wait." There was pain across his chest, and moving his arm had made it explode into true agony. Steve looked like he was about to hit him again. "Stop. If you hit me again, I think my head is going to fall off."

Steve seemed to collapse in relief. "Good. Hitting people has always been one of my worst skills."

"I'd hate to see one of your better skills. What the hell are you hitting me for anyway?"

"You don't remember?" Steve sat back on his heels. Rick started to sit, but another wave of pain washed across him, and Steve pushed him down with a gentle shove. "Stay down for a second. I think you've been shot, but there's an anomaly."

"A what? Listen, I've been shot, so I'll just lie here quietly and bleed out."

"That's the anomalous factor," Steve said. "You're not bleeding."

Slowly, Rick brought a hand up and began to run it gently across the leather jacket over his chest. There was a hole right over the breast pocket. He slid a finger into it and found another hole in the other side. "I seem to have a bullet hole in the jacket here. That's usually a bad sign."

Steve began to unzip the jacket. "It is a bad sign. That's what I don't understand." He paused as he slowly pulled the jacket open. "Nope, you've got a hole in your shirt as well."

"Well, you know what they say, 'A sucking chest wound is God's way of telling you you've been ambushed.'"

"I would say that the ambush is a given. I'm not so sure about the chest wound."

Pain tore through Rick's chest again, and he drew in a breath and gritted his teeth. The pain rose to a peak.

Steve held up a small object. "Did you develop invulnerability recently? This is definitely a bullet but it's not inside you."

Rick let out his breath. "That's good. Isn't it?"

"Definitely good." Steve gently explored Rick's chest again. "Wait. Did Scotty give you that bogus vest?"

"You mean the Kevlar thing? Yeah. I ran out of clean shirts and put it on a day ago."

Steve shook his head. "What do you know? It's not bogus after all. At least, that's what the available evidence points to. None of us agreed with the force and deflection equations, so we never experimented with it."

"Tell you what. Keep right on avoiding those experiments." Rick managed to sit up this time but couldn't stand. He sat, propped against the wall and panting from the effort.

"There are distinct drawbacks to this invention."

"On the positive side, you aren't dead."

"Yes." Rick suddenly went rigid and looked around the room. "Eve. She was here. Is she OK?"

Steve stood and put out a hand to help Rick to his feet. "She's not here. I came in through the basement escape hatch when I couldn't get through on the phone. All I found was…well, what I thought was your corpse."

"A reasonable assumption." Rick dug out his pack of Winstons, felt in his breast pocket, and slowly brought out the Zippo. There was a shiny gouge in the stained and weathered steel. "This look like a bullet scrape to you?"

Steve leaned closer. "Yes. That must have taken off most of the momentum of the bullet, the vest kept it from penetrating, and your bulked up chest muscles did the rest."

Rick turned the lighter over and examined both sides, then whipped it in the up-down motion on his pants leg. He lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and immediately started alternating coughs and groans. "Damn! That hurts!"

Steve was heading for the kitchen. "I'd bet you have deep muscle bruises and probably some cracked ribs. You might want to cut down on the cigarettes."

"Don't be silly." Rick got the coughing under control and took a less powerful drag. "There are no problems that can't be solved with nicotine. So where's Eve?"

"I heard what I suppose was the shot that hit you as I came in through the basement wall, and then there was quite a bit of banging and yelling—mostly Eve's voice—and a car burned rubber out in the driveway." Steve gave it a moment's thought. "It took a couple of minutes to wake you, so I'd say she was taken four to five minutes ago. Do you know who it was?"

"Yeah, it was Cloyes." Rick frowned and then looked out the kitchen window. "And I guess since it's no longer here, he's driving a black Avis rental with 'We Try Harder' bumper stickers."

Steve looked up. "Avis? That helps a lot." He picked up the kitchen phone, listened for a second, and began dialing.

"Why does that help?" Rick asked. "And why is the phone working?"

"Second question first. Remember we routed it through that old lady in SE who never used it? Well, I listened in when I was in the basement, and her grandson just got out of Jessup and apparently has girlfriends in every ward of the city. It must have been tied up for two days."

Someone on the other end of the line answered, and Steve started speaking rapidly in a technical lingo that might as well have been a foreign language as far as Rick was concerned.

Steve hung up. "We've got him."

"How?"

"Avis is helping out with Project 621B and the MOSAIC System," Steve began, and then stopped. "Listen, you don't need to know all that. What you need to know is that Cloyes—or at least his car—is heading north on Wisconsin right now."

Rick started for the front door.

"Wait a second." Steve grabbed his arm.

Rick groaned. "Sorry. Listen, while you were out West, I did a little research, and Cloyes has a second place—a safe house, really—down along the river just past National Airport. The cops are still swarming all over the place in Leesburg, so he'll almost certainly head south."

Rick thought for a second. "Fastest way there is down the George Washington Parkway."

"Right, and you can cut the angle on Nebraska Avenue by taking River—"

"And catch his ass." Rick interrupted. "Thanks.

Now, where did I put that tire iron?"

"You mean the one in your left sleeve?"

"Yep.”

The Vincent Black Shadow sliced through the turns and down the ramp to the Beltway at the River Road interchanges. Bending it hard, he shaved a few seconds by cutting down the bypass at the Clara Barton Parkway exit and then on to the main Beltway just before the Potomac River. Steve had done some fast trigonometry in his head and calculated that the rental car would be within 300 feet in either direction, depending on the traffic lights on Wisconsin Avenue.

Rick hadn't stopped for any lights so it wasn't relevant to the equation.

Playing the odds, Rick twisted the throttle and ran the bike up above 200 kph, weaving through the relatively few cars and trucks spread out on the three lanes of blacktop. If he sped up and didn't find Cloyes, he could always pull over down by Spout Run and wait until they passed. After he crossed the Potomac River, he put the black speedster almost flat going through the 240 degree turn onto the George Washington Parkway—never touching a brake—and then wound it back up again.

As Rick had expected, there was a Park Police car squatting on the median just after the Beltway entrance. They didn't have a lot to do at night so they picked off the unwary drivers who didn't realize that the speed limit dropped from 65 to 50 inside the national park.

Red and blue lights exploded as he passed, but he knew even a Ford Police Interceptor wasn't going to catch him tonight, and, in seconds, the lights were just dim reflections in his rear view mirrors.

He passed two cars before he spotted the black rental with the bumper stickers just after the Turkey Run Park exit. He didn't want to give Cloyes another chance to shoot him, so he flicked off his headlight. On a racing bike like this, it was more of a legal formality than a useful light source anyway. He could see the road surface by the light of the stars, and very soon he was pulling up along the other car and using its lights for guidance.

Slowing dramatically, he came up on the left side of the car, matching speed just behind the driver's head. He made out Eve's head poking up above the passenger seat and was relieved to see it snap into profile as she clearly said something to the driver. Cloyes backhanded her viciously, and she slumped back in her seat.

“That's my girl,” Rick thought.

As a racing bike, the Black Shadow was fitted with an illegal thumb lock on the accelerator that would keep it from slowing down if you took your hand off. Rick goosed the engine, jumped forward to just ahead of the black car, and set the thumb lock. He knew he only had a few seconds before Cloyes realized what was happening and attempted to knock him off the road.

He ripped off his helmet to increase his peripheral vision and let it thump off the windshield in front of the driver. Then he reached carefully to his left arm and grasped the fat, right-angled end of the tire iron. He let out his breath, centered himself for just a second so that he wouldn't put a disastrous sideways torque on the bike, and then whipped his head until he was almost facing backward. Trying not to aim but letting his eye find the target, he pulled the tire jack from his sleeve, whipped it around, and threw it straight at Cloyes.

The car's brakes screamed in the split-second Cloyes had to react.

It wasn't enough.

Rick watched Cloyes' face—an eerie blue in the lights from the dashboard—freeze in terror as the chiseled end of the heavy iron rod smashed through the windshield, between the spokes of the steering wheel, and sank deep into his chest.

As he'd prayed she would, Eve grabbed the wheel and, after one terrifying swerve, brought the car under control.

Rick slowed and paced her on the right as she guided the car to the gravel verge, and, with some difficulty reaching the brake pedal, brought it to a stop. Rick pulled the bike behind the car and up to the passenger-side door.

"Get on, fast!" he yelled. In the mirrors, he could see the blue and red flashes glowing off the trees.

Eve got out, swung up on the rear of the bike, and Rick sprayed gravel in an all-out racing start.

She was hugging him so hard he could see black clouds coming in from the edges of his vision. "Not so hard!" he called.

The pressure immediately lessened as she leaned forward so her mouth was closer to his ear. "Why aren't you dead?" she asked.

"Disappointed?" Rick answered. Then he quickly added, "And do NOT punch me. My chest has already taken a beating tonight."

She hugged him and buried her face into his jacket.

After a moment, she lifted her head. "I really don't mean to complain, but you do know there's no seat back here?"

"Yeah, well it's meant for racing," he answered. "Don't worry, we're going to get rid of it in a minute."

Ahead, a small green sign that said, "B.P.R." pointed to the next off-ramp. Rick guided the bike up the incline, cut right until he was hidden by thick woods, and parked on the gravel. They got off, and Eve turned for an embrace; but Rick grabbed her hand, spun her around, and headed back to the Parkway at a slow jog.

Seconds later, the Park Police car flew past, followed quickly by two more.

"OK, let's hurry." Rick said and led Eve south along the Parkway until they reached a low fieldstone wall. They tucked in behind it, and he said; "Now we have time."

He wrapped his arms around her and they kissed urgently, each seeking reassurance that the other was alive.

After another, slower, Park Police car came past heading North, Rick poked his head up and surveyed the road. "OK, it's going to be a long walk. We'll go south until Route 123 crosses over. We're going to have to hide whenever we see headlights, but we should be OK."

Eve stood up but didn't release her hold on his arm. She took a deep breath on his chest, drinking in his familiar scent. Then she shook herself, and they started walking quickly along the highway.

After a few moments, she said, "I do have some questions—the most important one being 'Why aren't you dead?' but let's work up to that. Why did you leave the motorcycle back there? Wouldn't it have been better to keep it?"

"Well, one of Steve's friends loaned it to me, and I wanted to make sure he got it back."

Eve looked back at the small green sign. "From the B.P.R. Whatever that is."

Rick smiled. "Well, the sign stands for the Bureau of Public Roads, but that's actually the entrance to the CIA's Langley Headquarters."

"And Steve's friend will find it there?"

"I think as soon as the CIA boys figure out where he works, they'll probably deliver it personally."

Eve slid her hand down and wrapped her fingers around his. "OK, the other questions can wait. I know you're alive and that's enough for right now."

Rick squeezed her hand, and the warmth seemed to run up his arm and gather somewhere inside his chest.