Two more shots cracked. The driver’s-side mirror shattered, its electrics hanging like spilled guts as a warning to Morgan.
“Lewis! Get back in here!” he shouted, but the police markswoman was already firing steady single shots, Morgan chancing to look from the track as sparks flew from the Defender’s metal.
Lewis’s fourth shot smashed into the passenger window.
“I think I got him!” she shouted, her triumph cut short as Morgan pulled hard on her belt, yanking her down savagely as a low branch swiped hard across the Range Rover’s roof.
“Thanks.” She grinned, knowing that she had been a second from death.
“I think you did get him,” Morgan replied—no more fire was coming from the Land Rover, and it pulled ahead of Morgan, both four-by-fours now on the same narrow track. Outside, the rain began to pour harder, cascading through the Range Rover’s open roof and lashing against its windshield.
“Can you get a plate?” Morgan asked the officer.
“I can’t. I can’t see a bloody thing.”
He was about to say that it was likely covered up anyway, when Cook’s voice came from the back seat—she had found a signal. She was straight onto Private London, coordinating the police’s response. “Pass me the map,” she told Lewis, who retrieved it from the dirty footwell. “I need to send them grid references.”
Confident that there were reinforcements on the way, Morgan knew it was time to play the endgame.
“Next time the track splits, we get ahead of them and box them in.”
“Can’t we just follow them out to the main roads?” Lewis asked. “Let the uniforms take over?”
Morgan shook his head. “They’re armed, and the last thing these roads can handle is a high-speed pursuit. People will get hurt.”
Lewis nodded her head, understanding. Those people would be innocent, unwitting of the game they had been caught up in. Their families would lose loved ones, and never understand the reasons why.
Not so Morgan, Lewis and Cook. Each had made a decision to serve, be it the Marine Corps, police force or army. Each had chosen a life that put others’ needs before their own. Each had chosen a job where the possibility of sacrificing yourself for the good of strangers was a well-known requirement. Cook and Morgan were out of uniform now, but such things were embedded in their characters.
“We’ll keep them bottled up until the cavalry gets here,” Lewis said, accepting what could happen to them in that attempt.
“The next break in the track,” Morgan confirmed.
“They’re scrambling the police helicopter,” Cook told them from the back, the map in her hand. “Jack, the track breaks left in a hundred meters.”
Through the rain and the dirt kicked up by the speeding Defender’s tires, Morgan saw it. He let the shooters pull further ahead, waiting for them to choose their path. They stuck to the trail, so Morgan gunned the engine hard and turned up onto the parallel track. Within moments, they were pulling abreast, separated by nothing but trees and rain.
“Shoot across me!” Morgan commanded.
Lewis pushed the weapon out in front of the American, snapping a double tap, the empty cases hitting Morgan’s jaw. He had no idea what impact Lewis’s shooting was having, but the passenger in the Defender showed themself to be alive, rounds beating the Range Rover’s skin like a drum. Cook barely covered her eyes in time as shards of glass shattered inward.
“Get ahead, Jack, get ahead!” she shouted, and Morgan pushed the Range Rover harder, throwing a backward glance at the Land Rover, desperate to see the faces of the shooters—the faces of the people that wanted him dead.
“Jack!” Cook cried.
“Are you hit?” he called.
But his eyes saw the reason for her shout as his eyes turned back to the track, and the piled logs that lay across it.
“Jack!” Cook shouted again as Morgan hit the brakes hard. The Range Rover slid forward into the wood. Timber went bouncing and breaking into the air as Morgan and his team were slammed into the steering wheel, dashboard and seats.
Morgan’s first instinct was to bail out of the car, certain that at any second bullets would begin to rip into his flesh as the shooters stopped to finish the job.
But the danger passed by them—the shooters were not firing, and the Land Rover was gone.
Chapter 34
FURIOUS THAT THE shooters had escaped, Morgan thumped his fist against the Range Rover’s mud-splattered bonnet. “What’s the ETA on the police helicopter?”