Plague Ship (Oregon Files 5)

“I don’t know how you did it,” Linda called from the driver’s seat. She was hunched over the wheel and looking at the side rearview mirror. “You hit the shooter in the chest.”

“Did I kill him?” Eddie was slamming home fresh magazines.

“Can’t tell. A guy in the back is taking his gun. Hold on!”

Linda hit the brakes and swerved into the jeep’s lane. The two vehicles came together with a sickening crash, the van riding up onto the jeep’s bumper for a moment before coming back down with a hard bounce. The limp passenger was thrown from the jeep, while the men in back crashed into the roll bar.

Hitting the gas again, Linda bought them a hundred-yard head start before the guards could regain the hunt.

“Oregon, how far are we?”

Eric Stone answered immediately. “I have you in sight from the UAV. You’ve got another six miles.”

Linda cursed.

“To make matters worse,” Stone continued, “there are two more jeeps coming up behind the first. One’s maybe a quarter mile back and the other a little farther.”

The jeep came up on them again, but rather than get too close, it hung back, and the armed guard started firing at the van’s tires. Linda worked the wheel to foul his

aim, but she knew it was only a matter of time. “Any bright ideas back there?”

“I’m afraid I’m out.” Eddie admitted, but then his face brightened. He tapped his radio mike. “Eric, crash the UAV into the jeep.”

“What?”

“The drone. Use it like a cruise missile. Hit the passenger compartment. It should still have enough fuel on board to blow up on impact.”

“Without it, we won’t be able to pick up the Chairman,” Stone protested.

“Have you heard from him in the past five minutes?” The question hung in the air. “Do it!”

“Yes, sir.”

NO SOONER HAD CABRILLO hit the pavement in front of the jeep, its driver hit the gas. Juan had a fraction of a second to flatten himself and reach up, as the bumper loomed over him. He grasped its underside, with the jeep picking up speed, dragging him down the road. He reached up higher to get his backside off the rough pavement, while rubber was chewed off his boots.

He hung on like that for a couple of seconds to catch his breath. He’d lost the mini-Uzi but still had a Glock in a holster at his hip. He doubled his grip with his left hand and used his right to grab his earbud and set it in place in time to hear the last exchange between Eddie and Eric.

“Negative on that,” he said, his throat mike easily negating the engine roar inches from his face.

“Juan,” Max shouted in jubilation, “how are you?”

“Oh, I’m hanging on.” He tilted his head back so he could look up the road. Even with everything upside down, he saw two sets of car taillights and the unmistakable flicker of rifle fire from one of them. “Give me thirty seconds and the van’ll be in the clear.”

“That’s about all the time we have left,” Linda cautioned.

“Trust me.” With that, Cabrillo tensed his shoulders and pulled himself higher, so that he was lying across the bumper just out of the driver’s view. Clutching the grille as tightly as he could, he cross-drew the Glock from its holster with his left hand. He pushed off with his right to vault over the hood.

He drew down as he came up, double-tapping the driver in the chest. At this range, the plastic bullets would have been fatal, had the driver not worn a Kevlar vest. As it was, the two slugs hit with the kinetic energy of a mule, blowing every molecule of air out of the driver’s lungs.

Cabrillo scrambled across the hood, clutching the wheel as the driver released it, his face already a deathly white as his mouth worked soundlessly to draw air. Cabrillo kept to the middle of the road by looking back at where they’d been rather than forward where they were heading. It didn’t help that the driver kept his foot pressed to the gas pedal.

Juan had no choice but to reach over the dash with his pistol and shoot the man in the leg. Blood splattered the dash, the driver, and Cabrillo, but the shot had the desired effect. The driver’s foot came off the gas and the jeep began to slow. When they were down to twenty miles per hour, Cabrillo leveled the pistol between the driver’s pain-seared eyes. “Out.”

The driver jumped clumsily, falling to the macadam, clutching his bleeding thigh and coming to a stop in a heap of abraded skin and broken limbs.

Juan swung over the lowered windscreen, settled into the driver’s seat, and started after the first jeep. In his mirror, he could see a set of headlights barreling down the road and rightly assumed it was another contingent of Responsivist guards. The tenacity of their pursuit set off all sorts of alarm bells in his mind, but that was something to think about when they were well away from here.

The men firing at the van had no reason to suspect Juan’s jeep as he came up behind them, even as the third jeep narrowed the gap. They flashed under a sign announcing in both Greek and English that they were fast approaching the entrance ramp for the New National Road and its vital bridge over the Corinth Canal, so it was the timing, not the execution, that worried him. It would have to be perfect. The ramp was coming up on their right. The third jeep was fifty yards back, and bullets continued to ping off the side of the van ahead.