map. Then his plan to bring victory to Russia over America would be inexorably underway.
Colchev’s training kept him from shaking with anticipation, but his muscles ached from the tension he forced himself to contain. There was no going back now. Either he would succeed spectacularly or he would compound the failure that had brought him to this desperate position in the first place.
But that desperate position gave him strength. Nothing would stop him because he had nothing to live for if the mission was a failure. He had warned Nadia not to pursue him, but she had always been stubborn. He once thought he’d loved her, but he realized long ago that a man like him had no use for such feelings. Then she had shown up at the warehouse, just as he’d suspected she would but hoped she wouldn’t. It had been disappointingly easy for his men to catch her team in an ambush.
That had always been Bedova’s weakness, thinking she was better than Colchev was.
Now that he’d been forced to wipe out her team, he would become enemy number one to his former masters. But a successful mission would convince them that the deaths had been necessary, that they had resulted in a greater good. He would be able to return to his Mother Russia with honor. Any other outcome was unacceptable. Then he would remain an embarrassment to his country, a pariah consigned to a fate worse than death.
Colchev pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the present. The only thing that mattered was making sure the road train reached its destination. Once it did, the rest of the mission would be relatively easy, and he would have free rein to carry out the ultimate attack with impunity.
Through the windshield of the truck cab, he could see the white Ford sedan a half-mile ahead of the road train, providing escort until the truck exited from the public highway. Two men inside the car were on the lookout for any potential interference, primarily from the police. Once the truck made its turn, there would be no reason for the car to accompany it onto the private road. Colchev would then guide it the rest of the way.
He noticed on the GPS map that the gap between the truck and van was growing.
“Speed up,” Colchev said to Zotkin. “You’re falling behind.”
“Yes, sir,” Zotkin replied.
Colchev felt the van accelerate and turned back to the monitor. He was annoyed to see that his men’s pace car was decelerating.
He leaned forward. “Escort One,” he said into the mic to the car’s driver, Gurevich, “why are you slowing? Keep the interval at five hundred meters.”
“Sir, I don’t know how it happened,” Gurevich said, the concern in his voice evident. “We’ve been watching the entire time, and no vehicles have approached.”
“What are you babbling about? Is there a police car there?”
“No, sir. There’s a man on top of the truck.”
Colchev adjusted his earpiece. “What are you saying?”
“I can see someone walking along the top of the trailers. He just jumped from the second trailer to the first.”
Colchev shook his head in shock. This was not happening. If he was hearing Gurevich right, someone had stowed away on the truck. But when? All the trailer doors were locked, and the professor and his student had been injected with enough sedative at the CAPEK facility to knock them out for hours. The two men hadn’t been shot during the abduction because telltale blood splatters might have raised alarms at CAPEK. But Nadia Bedova and her men had come along and forced him to leave a mess behind.
Colchev suddenly realized the stowaway must be one of Bedova’s men. She was smarter than he gave her credit for.
“Send the order to stop the truck,” Gurevich said, “and we will kill him.”
“No. That truck stops for nothing. You will have to take the intruder out while it’s in motion.” The road train was only fifteen kilometers from the target, and with the bodies they’d left behind in the warehouse, they were committed. Any delay would make it easier for authorities to intercept the truck if the stowaway had called for help.
“Will we set off the explosives with a stray shot?”
Colchev thought that scenario was extremely unlikely. ANFO was a stable explosive, and a bullet impact would have no effect. Colchev was more worried about an errant round disabling the robotic truck’s control system.
“Do not shoot unless fired upon,” Colchev said. “Escort Two will have to get on the truck and eliminate him. You will not deviate until the task is accomplished. Understood?”
There was a pause on the other end. The Ford was now close enough to the road train that Colchev could see the men on his monitor, conferring in the car. The passenger, Lvov, didn’t gesticulate or get upset. He knew his job. Gurevich was just outlining the plan to him.
“Understood,” Gurevich replied to Colchev. “We’ll pull alongside the cab and Escort Two will climb on.”
Colchev saw the sign for the coming intersection a kilometer in the distance.
“You’re approaching the turnoff. The truck will slow to turn. Your best chance will be right before it speeds up again.”
“Acknowledged.”
The road train began to slow, and the nose of the cab dipped as the brakes were applied more abruptly than Colchev expected. It must have also been more sudden than the man on the truck expected because he fell onto the hood of the vehicle, filling the windscreen and blocking Colchev’s monitor view with the back of his leather jacket.
The man flipped over and clutched at the lip of the hood to keep himself from sliding off, bracing himself with his feet against the tubular bullbar, the Australian version of a cow catcher. At first all Colchev could see was the top of the man’s head, his brown hair whipped by the wind. To stretch the length of the hood, the man had to be at least six feet tall — big enough to pose a problem for Lvov.
The stowaway looked up, and Colchev saw blue eyes peering back at him through the video camera. Colchev stared in stunned disbelief when he recognized the man as Tyler Locke.
How had Locke had ended up here? Colchev wanted to reach through the screen and throttle him, but he was six miles away, helpless to do anything himself.
He leaned forward, his own eyes never leaving Locke’s. He spoke slowly and distinctly into the microphone so that Gurevich would have no doubt that dying would be preferable to failure.
“I don’t care how you do it,” Colchev said, “but get that bastard off my truck.”
TWENTY-ONE
Even as he was trying to keep himself from sliding off the hood and getting crushed by the road train’s eighty tires, Tyler couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the truck’s empty cab. Invisible hands made minute adjustments to the steering wheel.
Tyler marveled at the engineering involved in creating a two-hundred-ton remote-control truck. Then the howling wind reminded him he was in danger of becoming outback roadkill, and he looked for a way off the hood.
The situation hadn’t turned out exactly as he’d planned. It had been Tyler’s bright idea to jam the pliers of his Leatherman multi-tool into the trailer’s rear door track to hold it open while he gripped the door’s handle to pull himself onto the roof. Although Grant steadied him as he scrambled up, the abrupt encounter with the airstream nearly blew him onto the asphalt. Once Tyler was safely up and found his footing, he’d run along the trailer roofs, leaving Grant to implement their backup plan.
Tyler intended to climb down next to the cab’s door, but while he was still on its roof, the road train had unexpectedly slowed, tossing him onto the hood instead.
Tyler swiveled his head to see why the truck was slowing. He squinted at a white car that turned off the highway just in front of him. It looked like the truck would follow.
As the road train made its turn, Tyler used the momentum to swing his legs over to the side and down onto
