with a shovel. The rest of his face below the brow line didn’t look too bad. Jack knew Neal had put the truck keys in his front pants pocket but he couldn’t remember which one so he patted them both down, feeling the keys through his right front pocket. It’s not so easy to pick a dead man’s pocket. Jack knelt beside the corpse, twisting his hand at an odd angle to get it inside Neal’s pocket. Neal’s body was warm with the life that had just been let out of it. Jack’s fingers fastened around the keys and fished them out.
A figure darted out from between the women’s barracks and the blockhouse holding the generator. The rifleman’s partner. He could have done some mischief if he’d thought to disable the Toyota, but the only thing on his mind was escape. He burst out into the open, running east across the oval toward the front gate.
It was a long shot for a pistol, too long, so Jack didn’t even bother trying. He started north, double-timing it. Caution and curiosity compelled him to pause to give the rifleman a quick onceover, drawing him to a halt beside the body.
The shooter was middle-aged with a lanky runner’s physique. He had short wavy hair, bushy eyebrows, and a mean face. His expression was one of intense irritation, as though he was extremely annoyed at having been shot dead. He wore no flak jacket, no bulletproof vest. Jack’s rounds had shattered his chest, one penetrating the heart, negating the need to deliver a coup de grace to the head.
His weapon was a hunting rifle, a scoped thirty ought-six. A standard telescopic sight, not a night vision rig. Jack snatched up the weapon, shouldering it, but the fleeing gunman was already below the crest of the rise. He put it down and got moving, running to the Toyota.
The triggerman was unknown to Jack, a stranger. No mean feat, since Jack’s access to information as SAC of CTU/L.A. made him cognizant of most of the top pro shooters currently active in the milieu.
He must have been one of Lobo’s devil men, part of the team that’d been searching the hills for him. The other half of the duo was fleeing the compound. That much of Lobo’s story had been true. And the rest?
Jack reached the pickup truck, jumping behind the wheel and starting it up. He made sure to fasten his seat belt harness, he was going to need it. He drove east, fast, toward the front gate.
Neal knew the area and had said there were no roads into or out of the sandstone piles west of the compound. The two killers couldn’t have driven into the compound without having been seen by the CTU agents. Therefore they must have parked their vehicle outside the front gate and entered on foot.
Jack tore across the short axis of the oval, making a beeline for the exit. He paused for an instant at the edge of the top of the slope, scanning the landscape. There weren’t too many places where another vehicle could be. It had to be on the access road or the blacktop road, or parked somewhere just off either road.
A pair of headlights flashed on behind a clump of brush on the shoulder on the east side of the blacktop road, north of where the access road met it. A dark-colored boxy sedan emerged from behind a screen of foliage. Jack thought it might be a Subaru from the quick glimpse he got of it, but that was only a rough guess. The sedan fishtailed along the shoulder and onto the blacktop, flashing north along it in a big, big hurry.
Jack took off after it. He first had to get to the bottom of the hill. He toyed with the idea of saving time by quitting the road and plowing straight down the hillside but discarded it. A big enough rock could bust a tire or an axle and stop the pursuit before it got started.
The pickup’s nose tilted downward as he began descending the dirt switchback road, whipping the steering wheel left and right, standing on the brakes at times, sliding into some of the hairpin turns, whipping through others, laying down fat, feathery plumes of dust as he powered his way down the dirt track.
A couple of heart-stopping instants threatened to see the pickup truck go sailing off the edge, but each time luck or skill or both saw him through, enabling him to thread the twisty course in a speedy blur.
There was a bounce and then a liftoff at the bottom of the slope as all four wheels left the dirt road. Jack felt like a paving stone had been dropped into the bottom of his belly.
A timeless swooping interval came to an abrupt end as all four wheels touched down on the pavement of the two-lane blacktop. The vehicle bottomed out, banging its underside on the roadway with a bone-jarring thud that set Jack’s teeth to rattling, but the shocks absorbed the impact and the tires held up without any of them suffering a blowout.
The wheels bit, gaining purchase, squealing as Jack whipped the steering wheel around to make a hard left, then burning rubber as he stomped the gas pedal and the machine bulleted northward, taking up the chase.
3. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 A.M. AND 6 A.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME
The road ran north-south, hemmed in by a river on the east and mountains on the west. It ran not in a straight line but in broad, sweeping curves molded to the contours of the river valley.
The pickup truck’s engine was well-tuned and possibly customized for speed; there was a lot of power under the hood, as Jack was happy to discover. It handled well on the curves, too.
The sedan ahead knew it was being chased and was doing its best to widen the distance between it and its pursuer. The driver had an advantage over Jack in that he presumably knew the terrain, while to Jack it was all unknown territory.
Jack was a veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, and while the bulk of his term there had been spent on the SWAT team, he was no stranger to hot pursuit driving. No matter what the locale, a road’s a road, and he was a quick study.
The fugitive had been handicapped by having to flee Red Notch on foot, scrambling down the hillside and across the road to reach the place where he’d hidden the sedan. That had cut down considerably on his lead. He was trying to increase it now, while Jack labored to whittle it down.
The scenery shot by in a blur. The river lay east of the road, to the right of Jack’s northward course. A thin line of trees stretched along the top of the embankment. Gaps in the tree line afforded glimpses of the river and the terrain beyond it, a long, shallow slope slanting upward for several miles to the ridgeline. The river was about an eighth of a mile wide and flowed southward. It looked fast, frothy and churning with latent power.
The sun was a long way from rising but the sky was lightening in the east, fading from purple- black to royal blue.
This predawn effect was suddenly negated as the pickup truck left Red Notch behind. The notch was just that, a gap between the mountains. The looming bulk of Mount Nagaii appeared to the north of it, a towering rock rampart that rose up and up to dizzying heights. The mountain blocked the low-hanging moon in the west, shutting off the moonlight and throwing the river valley into deep shadow.
A positive result was that the thickened darkness caused the sedan’s taillights to stand out more brightly, a pair of hot red dots gliding above the winding roadway.
Jack switched on his high beams, expanding his view of the road ahead. It was a help at the speed he was traveling. There were no crossroads or intersections as far as he could see, no place where the sedan could turn off in another direction.
Events had happened so quickly that Jack hadn’t dared risk losing a precious second to the distraction of communicating with Central. He could do something about that now that he was settling into the rhythm of the chase.
The mobile comm unit mounted on the dashboard was a variation of the standard model used by CTU/ L.A., so he could work it without too much trouble. He switched it on, its power light brightening to a glowing green bead.
He steered with his left hand, holding the hand mic in his right. He thumbed down the transmit button, said, “Central, this is Unit Three. Over.”
Central acknowledged the transmission. Civilian and military police authorities generally use a numerical code system as a kind of verbal shorthand for their radio communications. A “ten-ten,” say, means that the unit is going temporarily out of service. Other number codes stand for such things as robbery in progress, shots fired, officer down.
CTU wasn’t the police and except for specialized operations, such as those carried out by tactical strike forces, relied on plain speaking and the technological sophistication of their hardware systems to ensure the
