If he hadn’t switched his gaze back to the rocks he would’ve missed sight of the first guy, hurling his next grenade.
Moments like this sometimes came at him in an almost underwater slowness.
But sometimes they came in a hypersensitive way, as though the world were suddenly being fast-forwarded, the contrast jacked up to ten, every sense tingling — which was how he viewed the battle zone now.
He shouted to Lakota and they bolted around the rocks to the next ditch, where, at the foot of a palm, they dropped again, like baseball players diving for home plate.
A rumbling concussion shook the ground. Within the next heartbeat, shattered stone began raining over them in a moment that seemed torn from the Book of Revelation. The 99Z wasn’t quite as sophisticated as Ghost Recon’s grenades, but the device did have a nasty byproduct — if it didn’t kill you, it dusted you with nanobot trackers so the next grenade could better lock on.
Knowing this, Brent burst up from his cover and ran directly at the rock face behind which stood their attacker.
This wasn’t some foolhardy attempt at bravado, or some selfless act to earn himself a posthumous Medal of Honor.
Brent just knew how to kill this guy: Fight fire with fire.
He already had one of his own grenades in hand, so as the guy popped up to set free his next one, Brent’s bomb was already in the air.
The light of that tiny engine streaking away like a frightened firefly was enough to make Brent gasp, “Yes.”
It was the single-second moment of surprise that doomed the bad guy. He’d assumed he would finish his prey, came up, and realized he’d been had.
His mouth fell open before the missile-like grenade struck him dead-on in the chest. He exploded in a small conflagration, an arm tumbling here, a leg there.
“Come on!” hollered Lakota.
“On my way!” Brent answered, jogging back toward her.
“Captain, I just spotted the primary target,” said Schleck. “I know you said stick with the bad guys, but I just put the drone in tight — and it’s definitely her.”
The Snow Maiden reached the short wrought-iron fence that marked the perimeter of the hotel grounds. To her right lay the long, circular drive leading up to the valet station and the taxis. To her left stood the entrance to a labyrinthine series of walkways between clusters of bungalows not unlike those found at her own hotel. It was all quite posh and welcoming.
She paused a second, panting, heard the curious hum from above, then glanced up. She cursed in Russian as she frowned at the tiny UFO marking her every move.
No, this wasn’t Haussler’s doing, was it? The Americans liked to play with these little surveillance robots, but so did the Euros.
She drew her suppressed pistol, steadied herself, and then with a quick twist of her torso she aimed up, expecting the drone to engage in some evasive maneuver.
It didn’t.
She fired.
Only after she hit it dead-on did the thing veer left, its motor whining as though it’d been stripped of all grease. She took another shot, dead-on again, and the thing plunged unceremoniously behind the tree canopy. Thump. It crashed somewhere in the forest below. She gave a slight snort and sprinted up the driveway, toward the valet station.
There, she paid one taxicab driver to head to the airport, while she took another cab to make her rendezvous with Patti’s people, whom she’d call en route.
The cabdriver was a lean, dark-haired man who seemed more rodent than human. He glanced back and gave her a salacious grin. In broken English, he asked, “Are you on vacation?”
She almost smiled.
By the time Brent and Lakota reached the Lazare Picault hotel, Schleck had already reported that two cars had left approximately five minutes prior. One was heading toward the airport; the other had taken the beach road northward and had then turned into a heavily wooded area, at which time the satellite had lost it. He’d added that the remaining operators had fallen back toward the coastline, collapsing on the head operator, who’d gone south.
“Ghost Lead, this is Hammer,” called Dennison. “We’ve IDed the man in the Snow Maiden’s villa as Heinrich Haussler. He’s a German spy and double agent. He worked with the Snow Maiden at the GRU. We’ve reason to believe the GRU has hired him to capture her.”
“Wonderful. So now we’ve got competition. Is he a secondary target? Can I take him out?”
“Absolutely. However, if you can take him alive, he’d be another valuable asset to us.”
“Roger that. I’m thinking now she sent a decoy car over to the airport. She’d never go there, but now we’ve lost her in the forest up north. I don’t have any choice. We need to head up there and engage in a ground search.”
Brent ordered the rest of his team to pursue Haussler and his remaining men, save for Riggs, who was still holding watch over Warda. Meanwhile, he and Lakota slipped up behind one of the taxicab drivers at the hotel. Trembling over the sight of their weapons, the driver was more than happy to oblige.
They drove up the narrow road, the cab’s headlights playing over nothing more than thick foliage to their left, more dunes to their right. Were it not for work, Brent would’ve had time to admire a spectacular sheet of stars.
Instead, he kept his attention on his HUD and the images coming in from the others’ cameras. The foot chase down to the shoreline was going nowhere fast, and Brent realized that Haussler and his men had such an appreciable lead that if they were making a water exit, they’d reach their craft well before his people could close the gap. Still, you never knew, so he kept the bulldogs running.
He and Lakota eventually ordered the driver to pull over along a secluded part of the road. They zipper-cuffed his wrists and ankles and left him sitting in the sand. Someone would pick him up by morning. Brent even gave him some cash for his trouble, which raised the driver’s gap-toothed smile.
Brent and Lakota took off, reached the jungle near the Snow Maiden’s last location, and spent the next thirty minutes combing the area. They did, in fact, find her cab — or rather it and its driver found them as it rumbled down a narrow road and nearly ran them over. Brent took aim at the driver and ordered him to stop. Then he wrenched the guy from his seat and demanded answers. His gerbil-like face tightened into a knot. “I dropped her off at the end of the trail. That’s all I know. She paid me double.”
“Where does the trail lead?” Lakota asked.
“There’s a small boat launch.”
Brent and Lakota raced back to their taxi and roared off up the trail. The path was barely wide enough for a car, and large fronds dragged across their roof and doors.
Within five minutes they swung to the right and simply ended at a tall stand of palms. Beyond them lay a meager dock rising crookedly against the dark sea.
Empty. They’d missed her.
And Dennison confirmed that. The Snow Maiden had left in a small boat and was met by a larger, high-speed cigar boat that was now streaking away south toward Madagascar. They could follow the boat until it reached the coast, but after that, there was no telling where she’d go. Dennison said she’d seek authority to access one of the JSF’s space-based lasers to order a strike on the boat’s engine.
Meanwhile, Brent and Lakota would return to the hotel to pick up Riggs and question the woman.
The Snow Maiden was on the phone with Patti, and she’d learned that the second decoy had gone off without a hitch. At the moment, she was lying in the taxicab’s trunk. That close call with the Americans had left her breathless, but the cabbie had done his job and she would reward him handsomely, once they got back to the hotel.
