Twice a Spy

wheel and stomped on the accelerator. The Amphibus chugged to seven or eight kilometers per hour.

Drummond rose too, heavy-lidded and irritable, as if he’d been rudely awoken.

“You okay?” Charlie asked.

Drummond grumbled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason.”

As the truck reached the end of the alley, something thudded against the passenger side of the cargo hold.

“I was afraid of that,” Drummond said, eyeing his side mirror.

Checking the mirror, Charlie saw du Frongipanier improbably clinging to one of the flotation devices dangling from the Amphibus.

“Hang on,” Charlie said. “Tight.”

Drummond braced himself against the control panel. Charlie crushed the brake pedal. The tires shrieked to a halt while the chassis and Charlie’s stomach hurtled onward.

The customs man ought to have been flung thirty feet ahead.

But he hung on and, what’s more, managed to point his revolver at the passenger window and line up Drummond’s head in his sights.

Charlie shifted back into gear, costing du Frongipanier his aim. Mashing the gas pedal, Charlie hoped to gain enough speed to shed the unwanted passenger.

Rapid acceleration was not one of the Amphibus’s features.

Three successive rounds pounded through the wall behind Charlie and Drummond. The air filled with particles of seat-cushion foam. More shattered windshield fell inward, scraping Charlie’s face and sticking in his wig. Rolling out of the alley, he saw no choice but to duck again and hope that no planes or fuel trucks were in his path.

Shielding his eyes from the continuing influx of glass, Drummond sat up and jerked one of the levers beneath the control panel. With a rush of air, a pontoon shot away from the Amphibus-a horrified du Frongipanier aboard.

The flotation device thumped against the tarmac then reversed course, the rope tethering it to the Amphibus snapping back to the vehicle. Despite repeated bumps and asphalt burns, the customs official not only hung on but also raised his revolver.

Another glaring muzzle flash and a bullet penetrated the steel door dividing the cab and the cargo hold, ricocheting around like a mad bee.

“Any chance there’s another lever you can use?” Charlie asked.

Drummond brightened. “Yes, thank you! That is what I was trying to remember.”

He leaned forward, jerking another handle.

A red life ring disengaged with a feeble click and floated backward, like a frisbee.

It clipped du Frongipanier in the shoulder with a disheartening pfft. But enough force still to knock him off the pontoon. He tumbled backward along the tarmac, his revolver bouncing along with him. Right into his hand. As he slid to a stop, he fired again.

The bullet sparked the tarmac well wide of Charlie’s door. The Amphibus bounced, Charlie along with it, his head striking the roof liner. “What the hell?”

“Grass,” Drummond said.

Now Charlie saw it. The Amphibus was crossing the strip of lawn that paralleled the runway. A moment later the heavy vehicle clomped onto the runway itself.

Charlie looked up, bracing for impact with a descending 747.

The sky was empty, but a trio of police cars was converging on the Amphibus.

Extraordinarily composed, or perhaps just drained of panic, Charlie focused on the Caribbean, outlined by the moonlight, a mile up the runway. He tried to turn the Amphibus, wrestling gravity for control of the wheel. The tires howled. Whines and groans suggested the vehicle was about to collapse into a mass of spent automotive parts. It careened toward the water with the exception of a cylindrical tank-a fire extinguisher? — which burst through the rear door and bounced down the runway, leaving a comet trail of sparks.

The first police car slalomed to avoid being struck, then accelerated, closing to within a city block of the Amphibus. The two other police cars fell behind the first, forming a triangular formation, suggesting to Charlie that they intended to “T-bone” the truck, or disable it by ramming its flanks.

Although the engine roared like a blast furnace, the Amphibus seemed to have maxed at seventy kilometers per hour.

The police cars closed to within striking range.

The water was half a mile ahead.

“Now would probably be a decent time to figure out how to turn this thing into a boat,” Charlie said.

Drummond stared across the cabin as if Charlie were the one with lucidity issues. “Turn this into a boat?”

13

One of the police cars was now close enough that Charlie could make out the driver’s mustache-the traditional Burt Reynolds model. He also saw the gun that the man’s partner braced on the passenger side window. Getting closer. The options were to get rammed, get shot, both, or to stay the course to the Caribbean at the runway’s end.

“Dad, this thing is an Amphibus,” he said. “If we can’t make it live up to its name, when we reach the water”-seconds away-“we’re literally sunk.”

“Oh, that. We could always retract the wheels. The power train will shift from driving the wheels to driving the jet propulsion system.” Charlie exhaled. “You’ve been in one of these things before.”

“I don’t recall. On the other hand, once, back in the early seventies-”

“How do you retract the wheels?”

“Push this.” Drummond pointed at a big button on the console. Pictured on the peeling decal directly above it were a tire and an arrow that curved upward.

The police car closest to Drummond slammed into his side of the Amphibus. Charlie felt the crunch of metal in his teeth. Impact with any more force would knock the ungainly vehicle onto its side.

His eyes went to the blur outside his window. The second police car was charging straight at his door. He clenched head to toe in anticipation of the blow.

The police car suddenly slowed, braking close enough that Charlie could read the lips of the man at the wheel: “Merde!”

The runway ended, and the Amphibus took off into the sky, or so it seemed.

An instant later, it belly flopped into the Caribbean. And began sinking. Seawater rose above the windows, darkening the inside of the cabin save for a few faint white circles on the instrument panel.

Charlie groped for the button that turned the thing into a boat, found it-he hoped-and hammered down.

The wheels ground inward, and the inboard engines roared to life, bringing the water around it to a boil.

The craft popped back to the surface.

And, incredibly enough, floated.

As far as Charlie could tell, just one problem remained: “How do we make it go?”

“Just keep doing that.” Drummond indicated the accelerator, which Charlie still had pressed all the way to the floor.

Indeed the Amphibus continued to function, distancing them from the runway. But at a turtle’s pace.

“You sure about the ‘jet propulsion’ part?” Charlie asked, watching the cops spring out of their cars, all with sidearms drawn except for the last man, who had a shotgun.

“An interesting piece of information is that it took ten million man hours to develop amphibious vehicle technology,” Drummond said.

The shotgun roared and a round barreled into the cargo hold, creating a fist-sized hole in the wall behind