Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

“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.