Race's eyes went wide as he realized who it was.
It was the man who had taken the idol from Frank Nash back at Vilcafor, it was the leader of the terrorists.
Holy shit.
Strangely, the man was holding a telephone in his hand, a cellular phone.
'Get down from there!' Race yelled.
At first, Bittiker didn't move, he just stared at Race in a kind of slack-jawed wonder—stared at this bespectacled man dressed in blue jeans and a filthy T-shirt, a battered New York Yankees cap and a black kevlar breastplate, ordering him around with an MP-5.
Bittiker glanced at the open loading ramp behind Race, saw the little Goose seaplane hovering in the air about twenty yards behind the Antonov, trying vainly—but unsuccessfully—to keep up with the giant cargo plane as it rose higher into the sky.
Slowly, Bittiker stepped down from the turret of the tank, until he stood in front of Race.
'Give me that damn phone,' Race said, snatching the cellular phone from the terrorist. 'Who the hell are you talking to anyway?'
Race held the phone to his ear as he kept his eyes and gun trained on Bittiker. 'Who is this?' he said into the phone.
'Who am I?' a nasty little voice snapped back at him. 'Who the fuck are you is the more appropriate question.'
'My name is William Race. I'm an American citizen who was brought to Peru to help an Army team get a sample of thyrium to put inside a Supernova.'
There came a loud shuffling from the other end of the line.
'Mister Race,' a new voice said suddenly. “My name is Special Agent Demonaco of the FBI. I am investigating the theft of a Supernova from the offices of the Defense—'
'You can't stop it,' Bittiker said to Race, his voice laced with a slow Texan drawl—'you cain't stop it.'
'Why not?' Race said.
'Because not even I know how to disarm it,” Bittiker said.
'I made sure that my people only knew how to arm it. That was once it was set to go off, no-one could stop it.'
“No-one knows the disarm code?'
'No-one,' Bittiker said. 'Except, I imagine, some Princeton-luck scientist up at DARPA, but that ain't gonna help us now, is it?'
Race bit his lip in frustration.
The alarm klaxons were still ringing. Any second now, more Texans would come out to see what was going on—
Gunfire.
Loud and sudden.
It slammed into the deck all around him, kicking up sparks. Race dived out of the way, rolled across the deck, jammed the cellular phone into his back pocket and looked up—and saw Troy Copeland standing on the catwalk overlooking the cargo bay with two other Texans beside him, all three of them firing their Calico pistols down at Race.
Bittiker saw the chance and ducked behind the forward corner of the tank, out of Race's sight.
Race pressed his back against the massive tracked wheels of the tank, out of the line of fire, at least for the moment.
He was breathing hard, his heart pounding loudly inside his head.
What the hell are you going to do now, Will?
And then suddenly, he heard someone shouting his name.
'Is that you, Professor Race?' It was Copeland. 'God, you're a persistent little son of a bitch.'
'It's better than being a complete asshole,' Race muttered under his breath as he popped up from behind the tank and fired a short burst at Copeland and the other two terrorists, missing them by miles.
Damn it, he thought. What did he do now? He hadn't really thought that far ahead.
The Supernova, a voice said inside his head.
Disarm it! That's what you have to do.
After all, he thought, he'd already managed to disarm one Supernova on this trip.
And with that, Race leapt to his feet, and jammed down on the trigger of his MP-5, firing wildly up at the catwalk as he clambered onto the skirt of the Abrams tank. Then he climbed up onto the tank's turret and jumped down through the hatch and into the belly of the massive steel beast.
He was met by the stunned faces of the two Freedom Fighter technicians in charge of the Supernova.
'Out! Now!' he yelled, pointing his MP-5 at their noses.
The two techs hurried up the ladder and out through the hatch in the turret, banging it shut behind them.
