“And seeing you conk his friend out convinced them of that.”
“Apparently.”
“Where are we going?” López asked.
“We’ve got an extraction rendezvous five miles from here,” Linc said. “Can you make it?”
“Car?”
“We’ve got three motorcycles waiting in the parking lot.” They’d planned on that mode of transportation since they knew López was an experienced rider and getting through the dense after-match traffic would be much easier than with a car.
López shook his head as he hobbled along. “I don’t think I could handle a bike.”
“He can ride with me,” Raven said. “You provide us cover.”
That made sense to Linc. She was good on a cycle, but Linc was the most experienced biker on the Oregon. He even had his own, heavily customized Harley-Davidson that he occasionally brought out of the ship’s hold for rides during R & R. He could fire a gun while driving through traffic if needed.
They were at the north exit of the stadium when two men spotted them from across the concourse.
Linc and Raven hustled López to the exit while their pursuers tried to get through the swarm of people between them.
Three BMW motorcycles were waiting in the parking lot where they’d left them. While Raven helped López on her bike, Linc opened the storage case on the back of his and withdrew a Glock pistol. He turned and saw the two men bolt from the exit with weapons in hand. One was talking on his phone as he ran.
Linc didn’t wait for them to fire. He took each of them down with a single shot as they came toward him.
The sound of the gunshots would surely draw police attention. Linc took a backpack from the motorcycle case and put it on, then got on the bike and started it up. None of them took time to put helmets on, using sunglasses only. López leaned against the backrest of Raven’s motorcycle, one hand around her waist and the other pressing on his wo
und to stem the blood loss.
As he flipped up the kickstand, Linc saw three vehicles screech around the corner. The phone call from the bad guy must have gotten through. Two men on red Ducati racing bikes were followed by a black Porsche SUV with men hanging out of the windows holding MP5 submachine guns.
“Go! Go! Go!” Linc shouted.
Raven’s rear tire squealed as she took off, and Linc was close behind. They sped onto the relatively empty boulevard.
“We’ve got to lose them before we get to the bridge,” Raven said, her voice in his head as clear as if she were right next to him despite the wind rushing past.
“Working on it,” Linc replied.
Their destination was the midpoint of the Rio–Niterói Bridge. If they didn’t put some distance between themselves and the pursuers, they’d never live long enough to make the rendezvous with Juan.
15
When MacD got back down the Sugarloaf Mountain trail with Jessica Belasco, the monkeys chattered to announce their presence to Hali. Belasco abruptly stopped at the sight of the equipment he had been prepping.
“You’re kidding me,” she said.
“Jessica Belasco,” MacD said. “Meet Hali Kasim, our resident expert on paragliding.”
A gold and white semicircular parachute wing was spread on the ground, its suspension lines converging on a harness tacked to the ground to keep the chute from taking flight early. The canopy, as the wing was called, constantly threatened to rise into the air as the breeze took hold of it.
MacD was beginning to enjoy paragliding almost as much as Hali, who had fallen in love with the sport during a stop in Jamaica when he went parasailing. In that case, the parachute had been dragged by a boat and winched out from the stern as it rose into the air. That’s what usually was done with uninitiated tourists.
But Hali had become such an enthusiast that he learned how to paraglide by launching from a high cliff and soaring freely through the sky, eventually becoming an expert. His record for duration and distance riding thermals was two hours thirty-eight minutes and forty miles, still far short of the three-hundred-fifty-mile record. They’d even rigged a winch at the back of the Oregon so Hali could be towed by a launch behind the ship like an airborne water-skier.
“Nice to meet you.” He was busy unrolling the second parachute, so he nodded to a helmet and said, “Brought that for you.”
She walked over to it in a daze and picked it up. “I can’t fly one of these things.”