The Plagues of Pandora

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The team threw themselves left and right. The rocket scorched the air as it passed through, exploding against a nearby tree. Trent turned his face away from the sudden heat. A creak and a rustling of branches signaled the next threat — the falling tree itself. Radford squealed and Collins cried a warning as they both scrambled away. Trent half rose and crabbed his way clear, whipped by branches and twigs as the tree’s extremities still beat down on him. Silk didn’t manage to escape the felling, ending up prone beneath a rough layer of tree limbs. Trent and the others struggled over to help.

“Go,” Silk said as he pushed his way clear. “Just go.”

Trent broke into the open. Ahead, the truck had stopped and men were swarming around it. Trent knew that this cemetery opened out north and south onto other roads, no doubt a fact the mercenaries were counting on. Already exposed, he wasted no time in firing off shots, hoping to slow the mercs down. Men dropped to their knees and fired back, bullets whizzing far and wide through the darkness.

And then another dreadful noise. The howling approach of one of the other three trucks, storming through the graveyard behind them. Headlights chopped at the night behind him like demonic light-sabers, and then the truck was bearing down. Again Trent found himself rolling to the side, coming up hard against a grave with Collins rolling across his feet.

“Christ,” she swore. “Found myself on my bloody back more times in the last fifteen minutes than in the past week.” She grinned up at him. “And that’s saying something.”

Trent stayed attentive, ignoring her. Collins had always been about the job when she was working, saving the play for later. Since they’d got together though, her outlook had started to change.

Silk and Radford joined them. The second truck swerved in to join the first, carving great furrows through the grass. Trent could already see flashing lights approaching the scene, but with such an extensive, unfenced cemetery to cover they might as well try to stem the Pacific tide.

Forward again, the team ate up the ground between themselves and their enemies.

Trent was able to use the huge trucks’ blind sides as extra cover, bringing him right into the enemy camp. Trained to kill by the CIA, he was not a man prone to leaving anything but bodies behind before the Razor’s Edge were disavowed, but this scenario suited him just fine. Mercs rose and fell before him. He ducked behind an outsize tire as gunfire erupted. Silk took the man out. Radford, always the team member most likely to break something in combat, ran for the first truck with Collins at his side.

Trent saw logic in that. The samples these mercenaries had collected would surely already have been loaded by now.

He took off in pursuit, climbing onto the side of the truck by way of the wheels. As his fingers found their grip the truck started to move. Silk, alongside him, emitted a knowing grunt.

“Shit, this is gonna be bad.”

The truck roared. Trent clung on as best he could. Most of the mercenaries were on the other side, largely unaware of their presence. Any passenger with more than half a brain would see them immediately, but they still had a chance.

Trent climbed, finding hand and footholds protruding from the vehicle’s uneven bodywork. Within a minute he slipped over the top, staying low. Bullets strafed the truck’s side, aimed at Silk, but the wiry man made it just in time. Collins, still below, took out the shooter with a single shot.

Trent shuffled forward as the vehicle gained speed. Only now did an unhappy memory return of its frantic, destructive journey through the first part of the graveyard. He swiveled to left and right, searching for a place to hold on to, then felt his body sliding backwards as the behemoth picked up speed.

“The good news is that the samples have to be on board,” Silk called over from his precarious position near the edge. “Bad news? We forgot our metallic grappling hooks.”

Something about what Silk said sent a prickle of unease the length of Trent’s spine. On board?

“Shit!” Of course they don’t have to be on board, dammit! What would the cops chase — the three-hundred-ton, weapon-stacked ogre or the single backpack-toting individual?

Trent rested his gun on the roof, gripped what he could of an exterior ridge, and scrabbled into his pocket for his cellphone. In predictable style he came up with chewing gum, his wallet and a set of keys before grabbing the plastic casing and wrenching it free. By now the truck was motoring and a steady breeze was getting acquainted with his face. One sharp dip and his body lifted clear of the roof, jouncing down again with a bang and a crunch of compacted flesh and bones.

Silk groaned. “This was a bad idea, man. A bad idea.”

Trent fiddled with his cell. One handed, and being older than fifteen, the process of making a call was tricky. Mikey could probably have handled it in seconds. The vehicle’s front end smashed through several gravestones, the concrete markers barely registering, but the ground was patchy and undulating. As Trent struggled he noticed Silk giving somebody a wave.

What the…?

“Collins.” Silk noticed his frown. “She started it.”

Trent instinctively ducked as more bullets struck the truck, then hung on as it swerved to the right. He watched his gun slide toward the edge then stop. Finally, he managed to jab the dial button.

Another tremendous jolt and the phone was sailing away over the side leaving Trent squeezing his eyes closed in frustration.

When he opened them a pair of eyes was staring back at him. It took him a moment to realize men had started to climb the sides of the truck even as it swerved and careened through the graveyard, and by then the rest of the man was sliding onto the roof. Trent shot forward, head down, then launched himself feet first. Sliding across the roof his feet struck the merc dead in the chest. A wild scream followed him to the ground.

“To your right!” Silk cried, struggling with his own man.

Trent whirled. These guys were three bullets short of a full mag. But then they were also trying to escape and would do whatever was necessary. And all the time the man with the backpack and Collins and Radford were getting further away.

Trent smashed his man full in the nose, seeing it break. The man windmilled a little, but was otherwise unfazed, still coming forward. Another man raised his head above the side. Trent was close enough to kick him full in the face and over the edge. He grabbed hold of his current assailant by the neck and used a violent spin to hurl him into full flight.

He turned again. Silk had just defeated his own opponent, leaving him prone on the roof, and looked unwilling to kick him into space. Trent understood his restraint. They may be paid mercenaries, but the Disavowed were not thugs. If you didn’t have to…

“Your cell,” Trent panted, trying to survey every angle at the same time. “Get Collins on the line.”

Silk dialed. It took a moment to connect but then the agent’s fruity tones bombarded them.

“What are you doing? Get the fuck down from there!”

Silk shrugged. “Believe me, I wish I could.”

Trent urged him on with a stern gesture.

“Oh and yeah, we figure that whilst everyone chases the big, noisy trucks the samples are getting away on foot. Probably with one or two men. It makes sense.”

Collins didn’t hesitate. “We’re sticking with you,” she said. “We’ll call that in but we’re with you all the way.”

Trent sent another man pinwheeling off the truck. By now the second metal mammoth had maneuvered its way alongside. Cop cars weaved through the graveyard in hot pursuit. With the sprawled men and the damage caused by the trucks and the cars, the place looked like a war zone.

Silk stared back at the vehicles. “Wonder if Susie’s out there?” His new girlfriend, the woman he had left his wife for, was a Los Angeles cop. The two were barely separable these days. Susie had helped him through the recent heavy trauma of revisiting his days as a child thief and recalling the people he had befriended and helped only to see them brutalized, loved and then lost. His greatest love had been murdered; his greatest mentor vanished without a trace. But they had caught the serial killer that haunted his past and although the ordeal had wrecked his marriage it had also given him a new lease on life.

“If not yet,” Trent said, “then soon. She knows where you’ll be.”

Silk barely kept his balance as the truck cleared a hillock. “Yeah, smack bang in the middle of the chase.”

Trent almost smiled. “Amen.”

Ahead, the cemetery was finally thinning out. Trent saw the wide concrete strip of road and knew immediately what was about to happen.

“Hang on!”

The dumper truck cleared the cemetery, shot across the sidewalk and swung out into the road. Whoever was driving was good, because the back wheels slid all the way, a hundred-degree drift, but he held it with composure and even poise. Trent and Silk clung onto whatever they could, the edge of the roof, the aerial mast, the rear machinery. Bodies flung from side to side, they kept their heads down until the vehicle righted itself, hearing shouts as climbing mercs were thrown off by their own driver.

“How many of them are there?” Silk shouted.

“Enough,” Trent said. “The Pythians don’t appear to underestimate.”

The dumper truck powered along the road now, its fellow tucking in behind. A swarm of power-sliding cop cars screamed in pursuit, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Trent looked back as their ride became easier.

“Ah, shit.”

Men had climbed the sides of the truck that followed them and were now drawing weapons and taking a bead on the Disavowed.

“We’re sitting ducks up here!”

The mercs opened fire.