Devil's Gate

24

THE DUST AND THE DARKNESS gave cover as Kurt led Katarina across a grassy field on the cliff side. The approaching cars moved slowly, picking their way along the gravel road. Both cars had front-end damage, and one of them had only a single working headlight. The little game of chicken had worked out in Austin’s favor, both damaging the vehicles and delaying them.

As they approached, Kurt imagined the drivers wondering where their comrades had gone to. Or, for that matter, where their prey had gotten to and how they’d escaped in the underpowered little rental car.

Lying flat in the grass, Kurt waited for the cars to pass. Once they had, he and Katarina resumed their move across the grass, arriving at a cyclone fence.

Kurt looked through the fence. A small hangarlike building stood dark and quiet on the other side. A sign read “Ultralight Charters $50 Per Half Hour.”

“Climb over,” he said to Katarina. “Quietly.”

She put her hands on the top of the fence, stuck her toes into one of the diamond-shaped spaces, and scaled up and over in two quick steps. Kurt was glad to be on the run with an athlete.

He followed, dropping down quietly beside her.

“Where are your shoes?” he asked.

“You mean my expensive Italian stilettos?”

“Yeah. Your shoes.”

“They kind of fell off when you threw me out of the moving car.”

He noticed her dress was torn, and she had bleeding abrasions on her bare elbow and forearm. His own knee and shoulder were bleeding as well, and he could feel the small particles of gravel that had been ground into the palms of his hands. Still, it was better than being dead.

“I’ll buy you a new pair if we get out of this alive,” he said. “Keep moving.”

They sprinted across the grass and ducked behind a large exposed tank like one might see at a propane filling station. From the smell, Kurt knew it contained AvGas, 100 octane fuel for small propeller-driven aircraft like the ultralights.

Hidden behind this tank, Kurt watched the two remaining Audis crawl toward the cliff. They stopped near the spot where the cars had gone over, leaving their remaining lights on. Two men got out of each car. One of them carried a flashlight; the other three carried short-barreled assault weapons of some type.

“Let’s get out of here,” Katarina whispered.

“Don’t move,” he said. “They can’t see us here. I don’t want them to hear us either.”

The men with the guns moved toward the edge of the cliff and peered over. A fire must have been burning down below because the smoke and dust were lit up, turning the men into silhouettes.

“Looks like they went over,” one man said.

Kurt couldn’t hear the initial reply, but then the man with the flashlight moved to the edge.

“Get me a scope,” the man with the flashlight said. When the order was not followed rapidly enough, he barked louder. “Come on, we don’t have all night.”

As the man spoke, Kurt recognized the voice as belonging to the thug on the Kinjara Maru.

“So you’re not dead,” Kurt mumbled. He’d thought there was something suspicious about the explosion on the water that took the hijackers’ boat. It had seemed a little too convenient. A little too perfect of an ending for what appeared to be a sophisticated operation.

“You know these people?” Katarina asked.

“I know that man’s voice,” Kurt said. “He was part of a hijacking that took place a week ago. We thought he’d blown himself up by accident. But obviously it was a trick meant to make us think he did.”

“So these men are after you?” she said.

He turned to her. “You didn’t think they were after you, did you?”

She seemed offended. “They could have been. I’m a very important member of the Russian scientific establishment. I’m quite certain they’d get more ransom money for kidnapping me than they would for you.”

Kurt smiled and fought back a laugh. She was probably right about that. “Didn’t mean to offend you,” he said.

She seemed to accept that, and Kurt turned back toward the thugs at the cliff’s edge. They were perfectly backlit in the smoke. If he’d had a rifle, he could have taken them all right now, knocking them down one after the other like ducks in an arcade. But all he had was the metal pipe and the knife that the thug now hunting them had left behind on the Kinjara Maru.

Kurt watched as the man stepped to the edge with a scope in his hand. He stared through it for a long moment and then changed angles a bit. Kurt guessed he was now looking at the second car.

“They’re dead,” one of the other thugs said. “All of them.”

“Don’t be so sure,” the lead man said.

“That’s a long way down,” the thug replied. “No one’s going to survive that.”

The lead man turned and pushed his subordinate back against the car in a menacing fashion. A pretty ballsy move, considering he was the only one without a weapon. Obviously these men did not question him.

“You’re right,” the leader said. “No one could have survived such a fall. Unless they didn’t take it.”

He slapped the night vision scope in the man’s hand. “There are no bodies in or around that car,” he said.

“Damn,” Kurt whispered. Where their biggest problem had seemed like a long walk back to civilization, they now had a much more pressing issue: these thugs would not leave the plateau until they’d found him and Katarina or until police units came — perhaps half an hour away or more.

He doubted they could hide that long.

As the lead thug turned and began spraying his light across the grassy field, Kurt ducked back down behind the fuel tank. When the beam of light pointed off in another direction, Kurt grabbed Katarina’s hand again. “Hope you’re not afraid of heights.”

They scrambled across the open space and made it to the dark hangar. After quietly forcing the lock with the pipe, they slipped inside.

“What are we going to do?” Katarina asked.

“You got fifty dollars?” he said, sneaking over to one of the ultralights and unscrewing the gas cap.

“Not on me,” she said. “Why?”

“We’ll have to leave an IOU,” he said, grabbing a helmet and handing it to her.

“We’re going to fly out of here?” she guessed.

He nodded.

She smiled so broadly, he swore it lit up the room. “I always wanted to try one of these things,” she said.

He checked the tank to make sure it held some fuel. Seeing it was half full, he screwed the cap back on, moved to the hangar door, and began pushing it open slowly.

OUTSIDE NEAR THE CLIFF, Andras and his men were fanning out. Andras had grabbed a Glock 9mm that he now held in his left hand, and the flashlight was in his right. One of his men was making his way along the edge of the cliff, another going in the opposite direction.

Andras guessed his quarry had moved inland. It opened up the terrain and would force him and his men to consider many more hiding places. It would be the better tactic, he thought. And having encountered this man from NUMA once, Andras knew that, if anything, he was very smart.

It would make it all the sweeter when he killed him.

His light played across the ground. Had Andras feared they were armed, he would have been walking in the dark using the night vision scope. But his targets had shown no weaponry during the chase except for a lead pipe and their own wits, so he knew he could safely proceed.

He was rewarded when something caught the light: a woman’s shoe, dusty in places, but the red patent leather was unmistakable. Ten feet away, he saw another one. He whistled to his men, and as they gathered he shone the light around, spotting the cyclone fence and the building beyond.

“Surround the building,” he said. “They’re inside.”

His men dashed to the fence and began to climb. As they did, a sound like a lawn mower starting spilt the quiet of the night.

Andras hopped the fence and shone his flashlight toward the building just in time to see one of the ultralights come rumbling out and begin accelerating across the grass.

“Shoot them,” he ordered.

Two of his men dropped down and opened fire as the buzzing ultralight sped away. In a moment, it exploded, and flames engulfed the nylon wing.

Too easy, he thought. And he was right.

AS THE FIRST ULTRALIGHT began to zoom across the grass, Kurt and Katarina climbed into a second one and started it up. Kurt hoped the noise and movement of the first one would mask their departure in the other direction.

He sent the decoy to the right and seconds later turned his own craft to the left. Even as he pushed the throttle he heard the gunfire. A moment later he saw a flash cross the grassy plain that served as the ultralight’s runway. Just enough light to see by.

He gunned the throttle, realizing the time for stealth had ended. The little fifty-horsepower engine buzzed like a swarm of angry bees, and the small wooden prop spun up to full rpms in a second.

The gangly craft sped forward, accelerating down the grass strip and lifting off in a hundred feet or so. Kurt turned out toward the cliff, trying to put the hangar between him and the men with the guns. He heard a few sporadic shots and then nothing. By then he and Katarina were gone, out over the cliff, accelerating into the darkness and heading for the lights of Vila do Porto.

ON THE GRASSY RUNWAY, Andras realized his mistake. They’d been had by a stroke of misdirection. He turned just in time to see the other ultralight take off. He fired at it and then ran to the hangar with his men.

Inside was a whole fleet of the flying contraptions. Four of them looked to be in working condition.

“Get in,” he shouted to his men. “We’ll shoot them down from the air.”

As his other men climbed into a second aircraft, Andras went to hop into the front seat of the lead craft and stopped. A familiar object stood vertically on its point, stabbed straight down into the ultralight’s padded seat.

Andras recognized the matte-black finish, the folding titanium blade, and the holes in the handle. It was the knife he’d plunged into the crane operator’s seat on the Kinjara Maru after cutting the hydraulic lines.

So the man from NUMA had taken it and kept it. And now he’d returned it. There had to be a reason. Clearly, he was showing Andras that he knew who was after him, but Andras suspected something more.

He stepped out of the ultralight, looking for danger.

“Don’t start them,” he ordered as one of his men reached for a key.

Andras moved to the engine of the machine he’d been about to pilot. He checked the hydraulic lines and the fuel lines, thinking those would be poetic targets for his adversary to strike — and probably deadly, had he or his men started the aircraft in the confines of the barnlike hangar. He found nothing wrong with the exposed sections of the tubing and saw no liquids dripping onto the floor below.

He looked up.

The wings had huge cuts in them, long, clean slices that were not easily seen. From the look of it, they’d been carefully made to avoid leaving the nylon in obvious dangling strips. The damage might not have been enough to keep the craft on the ground, but Andras had no doubt that, once airborne, the fabric would have frayed in the airstream, shredding in minutes. Had they taken off, he guessed, they would have discovered it shortly after making it out over the cliffs.

“We should check the others,” one of his men suggested.

Andras allowed them to do so, but he knew there was little point. They would all be the same.

He pursed his lips, disappointed, but sensing something new in his heart: admiration. The kind of thrill a hunter feels when he realizes his prey might be bigger, stronger, more fierce and intelligent than expected. Such a thought never brought anger, only a greater exhilaration. So far, he’d given this man from NUMA some grudging respect, but he’d still underestimated him. A mistake he wouldn’t make again.

“It’s been a long time since I faced such a challenge,” he whispered to himself. “I’m going to enjoy killing you.”