The soldiers on the jeeps looked angry as all hell and, buffeted and jostled by the uneven terrain, they tried to aim their rifles at West’s tires.
“Jack!”Zoe called over the radio.“Jack…!”
“Stay on the road! Whatever you do, stay on the road till you reach the windmills!”
Two skinny windmills flanked the road up ahead, halfway between them and the bridge.
An explosion boomed out behind Jack’s LSV—barely three feet behind it—tearing a crater from the road. A shot from the APC’s cannon.
“Sheesh.” Jack turned to Alby. “Do me a favor, kid. Try not to tell your mother about this part of your stay.”
Zoe’s car came to the windmills flanking the roadway, shoomed between them, closely followed by Jack and Alby’s LSV—still harried by the four Chinese jeeps.
Jack cut through the windmills, while the jeeps took them differently: one jeep swung onto the road proper and sped between the windmills, while the three others went wider, whipping around the outside of the windmills and—
Suddenly the first such jeep dropped from view. As did the jeep traveling immediately behind it and the one that had sped around the windmill on the other side of the road.
The three jeeps just fell out of sight, as if they had been swallowed by the Earth.
In fact, that was exactly what had happened. They had fallen into Indian tiger traps—large concealed holes in the ground next to the windmills, designed by Jack for an escape just like this one.
“Zoe! Quickly! Let me pass, then drive exactly where I do!”
Jack zoomed past Zoe’s car and then abruptly shot left, off the road and out onto rough scrubland. Zoe followed him, swinging her LSV left, chased now by the sole surviving Chinese jeep.
Bouncing over the scrub, the river up ahead, the roadblock off to their right.
“Exactly where I drive!” West repeated into his mike.
He swept down an embankment toward the Fitzroy River—a suicidal course. There was no way he could possibly cross the fast-flowing waters of the river in his low-slung LSV.
But into the river he went. At full speed.
The LSV plunged into the Fitzroy, kicking up spectacular fans of spray on either side as it sheared right through the water, unusually shallow water, across an uncommonly smooth section of riverbed: a concealed concrete ford.
As Jack’s LSV skipped out the other side of the river, roaring up the far bank with a three-foot-high jump, Zoe’s car hit the near edge of the stream, at the same time as the last Chinese jeep came alongside it.
Zoe hit the ford, following Jack’s path exactly. But the pursuing jeep didn’t, and the ford was deliberately narrow, a submerged concrete bridge only one car width wide, and thus the Chinese jeep nosedived into the water and came to a jarring, splashing halt, while Zoe’s LSV just continued on, bouncing safely up the far side.
Seeing the two LSVs successfully cross the river to the north, the Chinese troops blocking the bridge leaped into their jeeps and APCs, and started across the bridge in pursuit.
Only to have the bridge collapse completely beneath the first jeep.
Amid a tangled mess of—precracked—wooden beams and struts, the jeep tumbled down into the river, leaving the remaining vehicles bunched up behind the void, now with no bridge to cross.
They hurried for the ford, but by the time they found it and negotiated its narrow span, Jack’s two escape cars were already speeding onto the highway.
THE ESCAPE PLANE
WHILE JACK and Zoe had been fleeing east, tripping nail traps and racing over concealed river crossings, Sky Monster had been busy, too.
He’d arrived in his pickup at the very south of the farm, where he disappeared inside a cabin set into the hillside, a hillside that—when seen from up close—was actually a giant camouflage-netted structure.
A hangar.
And in it was a giant black 747.
If one looked closely at the plane’s underbelly, one could still make out an inscription in Arabic:PRESIDENT ONE—AIR FORCE OF IRAQ: HALICARNASSUS.
It was a plane that had once lived in a secret hangar outside Basra, one of several such 747s that had lain in secret locations around Iraq, ready to whisk Saddam Hussein to safe havens in East Africa in the event of an invasion. Saddam, it turned out, had never been able to use this particular plane. But in 1991, cornered by enemy forces and abandoned by his own men, Jack West Jr. had.
It was now his plane, The Halicarnassus.
The Halicarnassus rumbled out of its hangar and down a wide dirt taxiway, which itself crossed the flowing Fitzroy River via a second submerged concrete ford a few miles south of the rigged bridge.
Once over its ford, Sky Monster brought the big 747 left onto the highway, pointing north.
The giant plane thundered up the desert highway, a great black behemoth speeding along the shimmering blacktop, until Sky Monster saw the two LSVs of Jack and Zoe swing out onto the bitumen a few hundred yards in front of him.
A ramp at the rear of The Halicarnassus lowered to the roadway, kicking up sparks as it did so, and—with the great plane still moving at considerable speed—the two LSVs swung in behind it and zoomed up the ramp into its
