weaved the truck as best he could. Even empty the rig was top-heavy and tippy. More guards were alerted and it seemed that no matter where he steered, soldiers were waiting in ambush. The windshield had taken a dozen hits or more. He could feel that several tires had been shredded. He found cover by steering toward a parking area littered with ranks of shipping containers.
It was like running a maze, he thought. The containers had been stacked in rows that intersected at right angles, creating canyonlike lanes that seemed to lead nowhere. He couldn’t see far enough to know if he was heading in the right direction. The track was too narrow to turn the vehicle, so he pressed deeper into the labyrinth of containers, hoping to spot an outlet down any one of the numerous side branches.
“Oh, my God!” Lauren pointed ahead with a trembling hand.
Slicing through the air as if by magic, a bright green container swooped down the chasm directly at the dump truck. Above it Mercer could barely see the grapple carriage of the cable crane. The container had been lowered to just a few feet from the ground on stiff hawsers. There was no way he could avoid the head-on collision. Although their arrival from an unexpected corner of the facility had escaped notice, Mercer realized bitterly that surveillance cameras had tracked their escape in the ten-wheeled truck.
Standing on the brakes so the smell of burned rubber became overpowering, Mercer intentionally crashed the truck into one wall of containers, making sure the rear end broke loose and completely blocked the road. The flying container was fifty feet away, silently speeding toward them.
“Out your door and run toward it.”
“Are you nuts?” she shrieked.
“Do it.” Mercer reached across her lap and threw open the passenger door. As roughly as he’d pushed her into the cab, he tossed her back out, jumping to the ground on her heels.
He took her hand and ran at the cargo box, now just ten feet from them. The gap between the container and the pavement was only a couple of feet, and if the unseen technician remotely operating the cable crane realized what they were doing he could drop the box on them with the force of a hydraulic car crusher. Mercer held his breath and dove for the ground, pulling Lauren after him.
The bottom of the box hurtled an inch over his face, its passage stirring dirt from the asphalt. The air became fouled with the smell of stale rust. And then it moved beyond them. Mercer jumped to his feet and didn’t look back at the collision about to take place.
The container was traveling at thirteen miles an hour when it hit the truck, but it was its forty tons of mass that did the damage. The box barely swayed at the first impact. It crushed through the corner of the big rig, tore the front wheel off its suspension and then ripped the sixteen-cylinder engine off its mounts. Fountains of diesel from severed fuel lines ignited like oil-well blazes. Inertia tossed the motor through the cab an instant before the huge crate sliced it from the chassis like an enormous blade. Only when the container struck the dump body did it begin to push the twenty-ton truck across the pavement, rolling it over and over once the back axle had snapped. A lake of burning fuel spread like a flickering veneer. Gravel drizzled from where the container’s skin had split.
By running at the container, Mercer had saved them from being caught up in the carnage.
They turned two corners and put a hundred yards between themselves and the collision before pausing. Mercer was more winded than Lauren, his body not as recovered from the dysentery as he’d believed. She recognized that his strength was flagging and immediately took point, leading them from the high walls of the container maze.
“Look.” She pointed ahead to where the port’s perimeter fence stretched across a field of waist-high grass.
“How are we going to get over it? It’s electrified.” Even as Mercer said this, bullets sparked against the trailer providing their cover.
They dashed to a maintenance shed, swinging around its far side. Lauren unscrewed her pistol’s silencer to get better accuracy and took a two-handed stance, her body hidden, her eyes expectant. A moment later, two guards ran from their cover position. She triggered her weapon twice. One dropped and remained still while the other managed to drag himself behind a pallet of roofing shingles.
“He’ll have a radio,” she panted. “We’ve got to go now.”
“The fence?”
Lauren took off without answering. Mercer struggled to keep up. He felt like he was wading through molasses, his legs were so rubbery. A fifty-foot strip had been mowed on each side of the chain-link fence, creating a killing lane patrolled by the Panamanian guards who once did Manuel Noriega’s dirtiest work. At the edge of the strip, Mercer and Lauren both saw four camouflaged men studying their patrol sector over the sights of their M-16s. Keeping to the tall grass, they tried to find an area not so well defended, their route taking them farther from the main part of the facility. After three hundred yards it was apparent that the ex- Dignity Brigade troopers were perfectly spaced and disciplined enough to remain at their posts despite the gunfire they must have heard.
There was no way out of Hatcherly Consolidated.
“We have to go back and try to get on board the ship at the pier,” Lauren suggested in a ragged whisper.
Mercer looked back at the glow from the quay, now a half mile distant. He spotted three vehicles speeding toward them, each armed with a light machine gun on a pedestal mount. They were trapped against the fence. He turned to her, his voice grave. “We’ll never make it.”
The pronouncement collapsed Lauren’s determination. She seemed to deflate. They hadn’t been spotted yet, but the trucks drew closer and the gunners swept the grass with spotlights secured to their weapons. They had seconds.
Without warning a section of the twelve-foot fence exploded inward. The broken electric field arced and hissed before the whole stockade shorted out and fell silent. Automatic fire raked the two Dignity Brigade guards not blown flat by the detonation. The pursuing trucks skidded to a halt and the three gunners opened up. Streams of tracers cut like lasers. A flaming streak shot from the darkness beyond the fence and one of the trucks somersaulted as the shoulder-fired rocket impacted on its hood.
In the seconds before the two remaining gunners recovered, dark shapes slipped through the breach in the stockade. Their gunfire cut down a pair of Panamanians running along the ribbon of mown grass. In less than a minute, the unknown gunmen had secured a beachhead in the facility. Without knowing who their saviors were, Mercer and Lauren scurried toward the gap.
“
The extraction was well choreographed. The mysterious commandos fell back in twos but always kept Mercer and Lauren moving toward the fence. There were at least ten of them, each moving silently except when their high-tech guns barked. They maintained cover fire until reaching a dark van parked across the deserted road that abutted the Hatcherly port. The side door was open and a driver waited in his seat. Half the commandos followed Mercer and Lauren into the vehicle while the others ran ahead to another van. The two trucks became anonymous after driving a couple of blocks.
“Thank you,” Mercer said after everyone had untangled themselves and found a seat.
“
That was when Mercer realized the troops were speaking French.
“They say the Foreign Legion was always a moment too late for a rescue,” the man joked. “I think maybe they did all right this time.”
Mercer just stared at the man responsible for saving his and Lauren’s life-Rene Bruneseau, the security director from Jean Derosier’s Paris auction house.
Hatcherly Consolidated Terminal Balboa, Panama
It was raining by the time Liu Yousheng’s Mercedes reached the secure warehouse, a constant pounding of water that struck the asphalt like hail. The rain looked like Christmas tinsel streaming through the coronas cast by
