The Disposable Man

Chapter 18

We walked in long strides toward Rarig’s car, my jacket swinging heavily with its cargo of weapons, until Lew faltered and stopped, pointing up the curving drive that connected the parking lot to Route 30 above. “That is the same car. The man who shot Andrei.”

Ruefully missing the two bodyguards we’d just left behind, I caught the small of his back with my hand and propelled him forward. “Keep going, Lew. One problem at a time.”

But the car had me worried. It was poised motionless on the crest of the drive, as a lookout, which implied a number of things, all of them bad. Kyrov’s men had probably followed Lew to the arts center-after flushing him outside the Geonomics building-and waited for Padzhev or his people to make an appearance. Now that we’d made a hash of that plan, things were likely to become a whole lot less subtle.

My newfound self-determination had lasted all of two minutes.

They waited until we’d climbed into Rarig’s car, probably because they preferred us contained and possibly, I hoped, because they were slightly confused, Padzhev’s men having mysteriously vanished from the equation. In any case, immediately after I started the engine, I saw a second vehicle slowly nosing down the road to our east, cutting off the only other exit from the parking lot.

“Look,” Lew said from behind. Rarig and I both turned, expecting him to be pointing out the new car. Instead, he was staring at several men on foot, coming from around both ends of the building, a couple of whom had cell phones held to their ears.

I looked around, reading the terrain. It was mostly flat and open, lending itself to a cross-country run, but there were ponds and ditches and clusters of trees scattered about-and no doubt other obstacles lying just out of sight. Any errors now, I knew, might well prove the end of us.

I reached into my jacket and extracted Willy’s radio. “Willy-you see what’s happening here?”

His reply was immediate. “I see a black car at the top of the drive.”

Sammie’s voice followed. “And I’ve got a couple of guys walking along the front of the building toward your parking lot.”

“I think we’re in trouble here,” I told them. “Better put out a Mayday to the locals.”

“Where do you want us?” Sammie said.

“I don’t want you anywhere. I’m about to move-fast. I don’t know where and I don’t know how they’ll react. Just stay out of the way and see what happens.”

I was suspiciously surprised by her ready acceptance. “10-4.”

I put the car into gear. “Fasten your seatbelts, gentlemen.”

To confront either vehicle seemed counterproductive. The men on foot, however, were fairer game. I hit the accelerator and aimed straight for the two coming around the back of the arts center.

They were halfway across a broad pedestrian promenade spread out like an apron from the center’s rear entrance, and, as I bore down on them, my intentions now clear, they stopped, pulled guns from under their jackets, and prepared to fire.

“Get down, get down,” I shouted, veering back and forth to provide a poorer target. I didn’t hear the gunshots over the roaring engine and the bone-jarring thuds as we jumped the curb, but a couple of crystalline holes suddenly appeared in the windshield like flattened bugs, and I felt a fine shower of glass sprinkle across my face. Through the web-like cracks, I saw both men jump out of the way at the last moment, their pistol muzzles still flashing. As we tore past, one of our side windows blew up with a crash, provoking a scream from Lew in the back.

“You okay?” Rarig shouted to him.

His voice was feeble over the wind now whistling through the various openings. “Yes, yes. I think so.”

I heard Sammie’s tinny voice, slightly muffled by my having returned the radio to my pocket. “Joe, top car’s in motion, moving south on Route 30 to cut you off.”

That was just one of my problems. Ahead, where I’d been hoping for a clean shot at the building’s far end and the service road beyond it, I saw a low retaining wall barring my way, with only one narrow gap in it. I wrenched the wheel and headed in its direction.

Rarig yelled, “They’re coming up behind us.”

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that the second car had followed us onto the promenade and was moving to cut us off before we could reach the opening.

Rarig began pawing at my jacket. “Give me a gun.”

Without looking, I swatted at him, hitting him on the side of the head. “Back off. You start shooting now, you’ll probably kill one of us.”

We reached the gap almost simultaneously, but my angle was better. The other car careened into my front left fender, pushing us up against the wall, but then it bounced away, thrown off course. I slammed on the brakes, hooked a right, and spun through the opening, heading for several playing fields and the golf course beyond. Out of the right corner of my eye, I saw the first car closing in from the southern service road with another vehicle in close pursuit. Sammie had yielded to instinct.

“How’s the car we hit?” I asked.

“Still moving.”

Ahead, the lay of the land again dictated my choices. To my front, all that open ground turned out to be hemmed in by trees, leaving only the right and left as possible escape routes.

“Go left,” Rarig yelled, as if reading my mind. “Head for South Street.”

That much was obvious. Speeding across the almost flat grassy surface, the second car was already closing in fast from the right. Sammie seemed to realize our predicament. She peeled away like a sheepdog, cut across behind me, and prepared to run interference between me and the first car, which was rallying to shut me off on the left.

The terrain, as we all swerved away from the edge of the golf course, began to roughen, making control that much more difficult. I was now paralleling the edge of a wooded outcropping. To my rear, I could see the second car closing in; to my left, Sammie and the first car were jockeying for room, occasionally colliding as Sammie fought to keep my narrow slot open. Ahead, since we’d now almost completed a full loop, lay the lower access road off the art center parking lot, and beyond it a grouping of houses, fences, and more trees. Whichever route I chose, I realized, the end result was going to be a mess-possibly a terminal one.

Sammie was losing ground. All of us were leaping and skidding badly by now, hitting small depressions in the ground, rocks, and hillocks. My seatbelt was cutting into my lap every few seconds. But Sammie’s car was lighter than her opponent’s, and I could see her profile, tense and focused, as she struggled to maintain both position and control.

It was becoming a simple matter of time-and Sam’s suddenly ran out.

The second car sideswiped her just as all three of us catapulted up and over the access road, sending her into a pirouette and yanking her from my sight as if she’d been attached to a cable that had suddenly played out.

Keeping my eyes front, I shouted, “How is she? She okay?”

Rarig twisted around in his seat. “She’s over on her side, but I think she’s all right. The spinning took most of the steam out of it.”

He turned back and looked at me, speaking surprisingly calmly, and added, “I think we’re in trouble, though.”

That, I already knew. With one car tailing me by only a few feet, and the other one so close I could see the expressions of its occupants, I saw my only hope was to negotiate a path through the houses ahead and to the street beyond, losing both escorts along the way. I didn’t hold out much hope of success.

“There’s the cavalry,” Rarig suddenly yelled, pointing to the right.

Through the side window, I could see the bright flickering of blue lights approaching from the south-out of town-presumably from backup units called in for mutual aid.

We’d run out of open ground. Our speed abruptly magnified by the proximity of trees, bushes, and outbuildings, we all three smashed through a fence, flew off some carefully landscaped terracing, skidded across the broad backyard of an enormous house, ricocheting off a shed and a swing set, and finally exploded onto the street between another house and its garage.

It was too much for the Ford. My steering wheel was wrenched from my hands as the car’s front end plowed into the opposite curb, we spun around in a dizzying, weightless circle, surrounded by a medley of breaking metal and glass, and finally came to rest up against a tree, covered with icicle-like shards, enveloped in a sudden, deadening silence.

Not an absolute silence, however, since approaching at a fast rate was a screaming siren, bolstering what shred of hope I had left.

I should have known better.

Shaking my head to clear my vision, I saw men already clustering around our car, guns out, pulling open the doors, giving orders I couldn’t understand. Beyond them, down the street, as I, too, was jerked clear by the scruff of my neck, I saw a state police cruiser come slithering to a stop, acrid smoke curling from under its shuddering tires.

The two officers inside never had a chance. Before their vehicle had even come to a complete stop, its surface began to implode under a torrent of bullets, its windshield becoming snowy white, its lights disintegrating and dying, its tires sagging onto the rims like horses shot in battle. In the deafening staccato of automatic gunfire, I reached for my own pistol, felt a shattering blow to the back of my head, and saw the Ford’s seat come sailing toward me as my knees buckled.

Dazed and numb, my feet stumbling as if asleep, I was stripped of my weapons, hauled by my armpits to one of the pursuit cars, and thrown into the back next to Rarig and Lew. Without further fanfare, and with the south end of the street now blocked by the destroyed cruiser, both cars took off, tires screaming, toward the heart of the village.

South Street, broad and flat, is aimed at downtown like the straightest tine of a crooked, three-pronged fork, the other two extensions being Route 30 and College Street. Since Middlebury is like the hub of a wheel, however, with roads heading out of it to every cardinal point, logic dictated our doubling back on either one of those alternatives to avoid the village center.

But logic didn’t entail Willy Kunkle. Screaming down Route 30, his blue dash-light flashing, Willy bore down on us like vengeance personified, forcing both our cars to swing right onto Main Street.

Swerving, cutting, driving up onto the sidewalk and scattering pedestrians, the three of us raced in a chaotic caravan, with Willy and our vehicle dueling like bumper cars. Through it all, the Russians were yelling at the top of their lungs and jumping in their seats like kids at a fair. Semiconscious, my hands still tingling and slow to move, I watched it all with a dreamy combination of clarity and distance, my brain shouting to do something-anything-but my body failing to act.

Across the Otter Creek bridge, where the town opens up beyond Merchants’ Row to form an oddly shaped, tilted commons, Willy, like Sam before him, ran out of luck. Bouncing off one parked car, he hit another and was stopped dead in his tracks. Uphill, just shy of the inn, was the spaghetti-like intersection Rarig and I had entered earlier. Only this time, traveling in the wrong lane at terrifying speed, it seemed less a tangle of roads and more a lethal obstacle course. From every approach, there were cars, trucks, and RVs, all pressing in on us, their angry horn blasts floating on a growing distant chorus of emergency sirens.

We took the easiest way out, steeply up and to the left, free of downtown’s clinging frenzy, onto the more open embrace of Route 7, heading north. From being surrounded by traffic and serried buildings, we were suddenly wedged between the forested slope of Chipman Hill to the right and the broad expanse of the Otter Creek valley to the left.

As soon as we’d broken loose, I felt my body press into the back cushion, the car’s engine digging deeper as we abruptly picked up speed. Captive and without the slightest idea of what awaited me, I nevertheless shared the sense of relief expressed by the three cheering men in the front seat.

All of which ceased as we topped the rise just beyond town. Ahead of us, clearly visible in the fading daylight, sputtering red flares lined the sides of the road like the approach to an airfield. But instead of a landing path, they led directly to two parked cruisers, engine blocks facing us at a forty-five-degree angle. I instantly recognized a “deadly force” roadblock, set up to stop us at all costs. The cruisers would be empty, officers stationed at a safe distance to either side, weapons locked and loaded. In those scant few seconds, my eyes also found the standard “out”-a narrow avenue, crossed with tire-deflating spikes, that fleeing cars were visually encouraged to take to lessen the overall mayhem.

But my present company wasn’t interested.

The front car almost leapt to the challenge, surging forward to push the two cruisers aside. It was a Hollywood moment-total testosterone fantasy-which our own driver was only too willing to follow, slamming on the accelerator.

The predictable results were more surreal than I would have imagined. Aside from the howling engine, there was total silence in the car, so what filled our windshield appeared as a silent movie. The lead vehicle, gunfire flickering from all windows, slammed into the cruisers, shoved them apart a few feet, and rose up on its rear wheels like a rocket taking off. Catapulting over the hoods of the police cars, deformed and blunted, it smashed down on the other side and skittered away, broken, twisted, and inert.

We burst through right behind in an eruption of sound. With metal tearing at metal, glass exploding like firecrackers, we, too, broke out onto the far side, slammed into the lead car, careened off it at an angle away from the hillside, and became airborne over the Otter Creek valley.

For an instant, the silence returned, to be split first by a single scream from the front seat, and then by a final convulsion of noise and destruction. We landed on our wheels, facing straight down the embankment, heading toward one hundred and fifty feet of near cliff-before we were stopped in our tracks by a single tree trunk. The door next to Rarig flew open, and like marbles in a chute the three of us were thrown farther downhill.

We had little time to assess whatever damage we’d incurred. Tangled in saplings and thick brush, hidden from the road above, we found ourselves dazed and cringing amid the random whine and thud of bullets flying just overhead, a result of the surviving Russians still shooting it out from the first car. Memories of war were so real in my brain, I thought myself back in battle.

I scurried over to where the other two were lying sprawled like sacks of coal, using any vegetation I could find as handholds against the steep slope.

“You okay? Lew-you okay?”

The old man passed his hand across his bloodied face. “I think so.”

“John? We need to get out of here.”

Rarig sat up, began to slide, and flipped over, grabbing some tufts of grass with both hands. He yelled out in pain.

“You all right?” I asked him.

“I hurt like hell.”

A couple of bullets smacked into a young tree overhead.

“It’ll get worse if we don’t move.”

“All right, all right.”

I pointed toward the valley floor. “Straight down, as fast as you can. We’ll stop when we reach better footing.”

We did as I’d suggested, in a haphazard sliding tumble, seeing the college’s distant lights across the valley, greeting the coming evening in blissful, Olympian serenity, perched on the far rise like a diorama of an era gone by. The contrast helped get me off autopilot. I looked for some landmark that might serve us once we reached bottom and found, poking above the trees, the pale shape of something that looked like a grain elevator, presumably lining the railroad tracks north of town.

A few minutes later, we reassembled amid acres of weed-choked gravel, the sound of distant gunfire almost stopped. I looked at my two companions in the coming twilight and asked them again how they were faring.

“I think I am not too bad,” Lew answered, smiling happily at this near miracle. “A stiff neck, perhaps.”

Rarig was less sanguine. He looked pale and winded, his eyes narrowed by pain. “I broke a rib or two. Hurts to breathe.” He held his right arm across his chest, as if carrying an invisible baby.

I peeled the arm back and gently prodded the area beneath it. His sudden intake of breath guided me to a single spot just below his nipple.

“There’s no deformity,” I told him. “It’s probably only a crack or a hairline fracture. Let me know if you feel like your lung’s filling up, though.”

“Swell,” he muttered. “What now?”

“Keep your fingers crossed.” I pulled Willy’s beaten radio from my pocket, turned it on, hesitated a moment, and asked, “You guys out there?”

“Hey, there,” was Willy’s laconic reply.

Sammie was less laid-back. “Jesus. You made it? How are you? Where are you?”

“Within striking distance of the railroad tracks north of town, east of Otter Creek. I took a visual on what looks like a grain elevator. I think we’ll head there.” I glanced at Lew and then added, “Hang on a sec.”

“Lew,” I asked him, “what’s the road closest to the tracks?”

“Exchange Street, but it connects to Route 7, so if you wish to not see all the commotion, perhaps another road might be preferable. A little farther west, there is a small covered bridge over Otter Creek, where Pulp Mill Road becomes Morgan Horse Farm Road. That is a far more discreet way of leaving town.”

I paused before keying the mike again. Twenty minutes ago, I’d told Rarig our little clandestine operation had come to an end. That ambition hadn’t changed, but I was acutely conscious of the mess we’d left behind. I was in no mood to deal with the Middlebury police, or anyone else who’d been shot at today.

I returned to the radio. “Are you both in the clear?”

“10-4.”

“With a vehicle?”

“I got mine back on its wheels,” Sammie said. “We’re in it now, laying low.”

“Good.” I gave them Lew’s directions and told them we’d meet them at the bridge in about half an hour-give or take.

It was slow going. Neither of my companions was in the prime of youth, and the longer we walked the more we all discovered just how pummeled we’d been. Rarig’s rib kept forcing him to stop and gasp for air.

In over the time I’d allotted, therefore, and after carefully pausing at both the railroad tracks and Exchange Street, which proved surprisingly busy, we limped across the small, two-way covered bridge Lew had mentioned and emerged to see Willy and Sam sitting in Sam’s dented car by the side of a small, grassy traffic circle, caught in the anemic halo of a nearby streetlamp. They were alone.

Feeling utter relief at last, not even curious why neither of them got out of the car to greet us, I escorted my two battered charges up to the back door and pulled it open.

A man with a gun was crouching in the rear seat. His accent made Lew’s sound nonexistent. “Put up hands.”

All three of us were too startled to follow orders. “What the hell?” I asked.

From behind me another voice, cultured and smooth, said, “Lieutenant Gunther, please do as he says. We don’t have time to waste.”

I turned around to face a tall, elegant man in a suit, flanked by two others, also carrying guns.

“Georgi,” Lew whispered in astonishment, half to himself.

The tall man nodded as his companions quickly frisked us. “Dimitri. It’s been a very long time.”

Corbin-Teich stiffened slightly. “It is not my name now.”

The other ignored him, addressing me with a slight bow. “I am Georgi Padzhev. You have no doubt heard of me.”

“Yeah.”

Padzhev raised his hand and signaled to someone in the darkness. An engine started up, a pair of headlights came on, and a large sedan rolled up behind Willy’s car.

Padzhev gestured to the three of us. “I think it would be a little less crowded if you joined me in this.”

I looked at him for a moment, studying his placid features. He, like Rarig and Corbin-Teich, appeared to be in his mid-seventies, but he carried himself like a man a good ten years younger.

“I take it we don’t have a choice,” I commented.

He moved to the other car and politely opened its rear door. “That is correct.”