Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 96

Omar Nazad could not remember ever having been this exhausted in his entire life. They’d been digging and shoveling for more than an hour and a half in twenty inches of wet snow that had gotten more and more like a massive block of ice as the temperature in DC had plunged and bottomed out at five degrees above zero.

They’d opened a path almost six feet wide and nearly sixty-five yards long.

“I can’t go on,” Mustapha bitched in Arabic. “I must drink, brother.”

“Five yards,” Nazad said, gesturing at the short distance that separated them from M Street, which was unplowed but crisscrossed with tracks. “That’s all that separates us, brother. Put your back into it and we go on. Quit, and it all has been for nothing.”

Saamad was drenched in sweat, but he raised his pick and began chopping at the remaining snow, breaking off big hunks of it that Nazad and then Mustapha shoveled from the path. After about the third shovelful, it dawned on the Tunisian that there was another way, a better way.

“Stop,” he said. “We’re done. We’ll get the van going like hell and just plow through it.”

“What if we get stuck again?” Saamad asked.

“We won’t,” Nazad said. “I won’t allow us to get stuck.”

“But what if we do?” Mustapha insisted.

“We’ll dig it out!” Nazad yelled, wanting to brain the man with his shovel. “We’ll do whatever it takes.”

A minute later they were all in the van, back where they’d left it so it would not be seen from the road. The Tunisian debated whether or not to turn on his headlights, opted to go with running lights, just enough to see the way forward.

He stepped gingerly on the gas, heard the dreaded whine of the tires spinning, and then the treads caught and they crept forward, first at a crawl, and then faster.

“Here we go!” Nazad said, cocking his head to see with his good eye.

“Brother! Stop!” Saamad cried, pointing to their left, out onto M Street and the flashing red and yellow lights coming their way.

Nazad slammed on the brakes and shut down the running lights.

Two snowplows struggled down their side of the street, one trailing the other, throwing all the snow in two lanes toward them, leaving a compacted wall of snow and ice six feet high and fifteen feet deep.