Nighthawk (NUMA Files 14)

Emma watched the passenger emerge through the sunroof of the lead car, the upper half of his body visible. He brought out a long weapon with a pointed end.

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“Go faster,” she called out.

“Can’t go much faster,” he replied.

“Go faster, Kurt! They have an RPG.”

In the white Audi, Daiyu could see the Americans accelerating and weaving left and right, trying to present a difficult target. “That’s it,” she urged under her breath. “Speed up.”

She pressed a button on the headset she wore. “Push them,” she urged. “Push them harder.”

“We have no shot,” one member of the kill squad called back.

“It doesn’t matter,” Daiyu replied. “Push them to the limit. We’re almost there.”

The car ahead of them accelerated and Daiyu switched channels. “Thirty seconds,” she said. “Be ready to detonate.”

“Ready,” another voice replied.

“Blow the bridge as soon as they come out of the tunnel.”

Up ahead, Kurt was almost shocked to still be alive. Unfortunately, a long, straight tunnel loomed in front of them where this section of road had been carved into the side of the mountain. The overhanging rock closed down on the left and the road soon became dim and dark.

“They’re coming again,” Emma said as the lead car began to close the gap.

“I see that,” Kurt said.

“The road is getting narrower.”

“I see that, too.”

Emma put the empty .45 down and grabbed her Beretta, ejecting the empty magazine and reloading. Kurt kept the pedal down as they roared through the tunnel. The growl of the engines reverberated off the walls. Headlights blazed behind them, daylight appeared in the distance. At any second, Emma expected to see the flare of the rocket coming their way.

But they raced out into the sunlight again still in one piece. The wall to their right softened into a hilly slope and the road angled downward toward an iron bridge that crossed a narrow chasm and looked as if it had been built in the forties or fifties. As they charged toward it, a series of detonations erupted along the bridge. Two larger blasts followed, one at each end.

Iron bent, rivets exploded and the bridge buckled and fell, collapsing in on itself and dropping into the depths of the gorge.

Traveling slightly downhill, on loose footing, at high speed, Kurt knew instantly that they couldn’t stop in time.

He jammed his foot on the brake pedal, bled off half the speed and then turned up the embankment, skidding, bouncing and nearly flipping the Range Rover in the process.

Traveling uphill, the Rover slowed rapidly and Kurt regained control. What had been a desperate maneuver to avoid a thousand-foot swan dive now became a possible way out.

He dropped the transmission into a lower gear and kept climbing. With a deft touch, he turned away from the gorge and traversed the slope at an angle. The four-wheel drive kept them moving, spinning the wheels in the soft gravel, bouncing them over the rocks and powering through the thorny bushes that clung to the incline.

Emma held on in the backseat. They were climbing so sharply that it felt like she would slide out the back. But the engine of the Rover was in the front, which kept the weight forward, and every time Kurt felt the front wheels lifting, he pulled off the gas for just a second.

They were still climbing the hill when their pursuers came out of the tunnel at a much slower pace. Emma watched as they stopped in the middle of the road, looking up at their escaping prey.

At first, they appeared confused, and the man holding the rocket-propelled grenade launcher steadied himself and aimed, leaning against the back edge of the sunroof.

Emma was faster, raising the Beretta and raining a hail of bullets down on them. She emptied the entire magazine, peppering both cars with multiple shots and hitting the rocket man in the shoulder.

He twisted with the impact and squeezed the trigger.

The RPG fired. Its smoke trail stretched upward across the terrain, drawing a line from the road below directly across the top of the Range Rover and into the ridge above them. It detonated amid a wall of weathered rock.