Off to his right there was another way down the hillside. A sheep trail, not more than four feet wide and incredibly steep, dropped more or less in a straight line through the forest towards the meadow on the other side. But the grade was far too sheer for the snowmobile to negotiate.
Even trying it would be suicide.
Now Court heard voices below him. Shouts of men, wild in the frenzy of the hunt.
They were moving up the road to him, closing on his cornered position.
—
“He’s got nowhere to run!” shouted number One. He didn’t bother with his radio. The noise from the explosion and the gunfire had withered his and his men’s hearing for the rest of the night. He just shouted out to the three men around him jogging up the slippery road. Number Three had been left behind at the cabin. He’d wrapped bandages over his injury, and he was lucid and ambulatory, even if out of the fight.
The four Libyans nearing the crest of the rise above them quickly dropped their magazines from their Skorpions and checked them for sufficient ammo. Professionally theyreseated the clips and clicked them back into place. Their night vision goggles covered their eyes. The steady snowfall gave movement to the green view ahead. They slowed as they neared the top, spread quietly across the road without waiting for instructions to do so.
Suddenly the engine noise of the snowmobile screamed again. It revved higher and grew louder and then in front and above the four Libyans a single headlight appeared, glowed like a green specter in their night vision optics as it barreled down towards them.
“Open fire!” screamed number One with a shriek. The four assassins knelt into crouches and poured rounds at the oncoming vehicle. Twenty rounds a second of hollow-point ammunition sprayed from each of the four braying guns. Tracer rounds arced and struck and bounced into the sky like rocket-powered fireflies.
At thirty meters distance the vehicle left the ground. It floated to twenty-five meters and then came down hard, bounced again into the air, and then landed on its side. The light stayed on as the machine slid down the hill past the four Libyans and came to a stop twenty meters behind them.
The engine idled.
Hot gases poured from the motor and hazed the men’s optics.
Number One ran to the snowmobile after reloading his weapon. He slipped on ice and fell to his knees. Number Two passed him as he got back up. A quick scan around the road by all four men confirmed their suspicions.
“He’s not here!”
—
There was a moment when Court thought he might have been sliding at fifty miles an hour. Everything seemed faster at ground level, of course, and the snow and ice and crunchy bits of stick and grass that flew into his face no doubt added to the perception of speed.
But whatever the actual velocity, Gentry knew he was descending the sheep trail way too fast.
It was hard to part with the second duffel worth of gear, but he’d seen no alternative. He’d dumped the weapons and the grenades and the binoculars up there on the ice. He lashed the sawed-off shotgun to the handlebars to keep them straight and then used a length of cord to tie the throttle open. He watched the machine leap over the ledge and down the road, then he ran as fast as possible across the snow along the shelf, along the granite wall, to where the sheep trail began and led down at nearly twenty degrees through the forest, through the lower meadow, and then to the little village, still dark, still an hour from the first hues of dawn over the mountains to the east.
At a full sprint, Gentry leapt through the air, his injured feet first, holding the big canvas duffel bag behind his backside, and landed on the snow. The grade was especially sheer at the beginning. He’d lost control almost immediately but found his position again at a slightly less severe stretch of trail that proved to be all too short.
On the hillside to his left he could hear the gunfire and sense the flashes of light, but he did not turn his head away from his feet and what was in front of him.
For nearly a hundred yards he’d been happy with his plan. He sledded quickly out of the kill zone. And in truth, itwasn’t a bad plan really, but, as it turned out, its execution was wanting. When he skidded into the woods, the pine roots crossed the sheep trail, and he was sliding too fast to stop.
He went airborne at an ice patch over a root knob, and his body flung ninety degrees in the air. He landed on his side, perpendicular to the direction in which he was traveling, and this sent him spinning, rolling over and over. His bandaged knees took his body weight in a glancing blow as he spun, his feet caught a snowdrift, and this jerked his body around ninety degrees more. He found himself headfirst, his duffel bag sled was long lost behind him now, and he shot out of the forest and into the meadow above the old village of Guarda with his hands out in front of him like Superman and with absolutely no control over his momentum.
The slide, in its entirety, lasted just over forty-five seconds. To Gentry it seemed like a lifetime.
When it was over, he lay on his back in the snow. After taking a few seconds to control his vertigo, he sat up, checked his body for functionality, and then stood unsteadily in the black morning. He took stock of his pain. The bullet wound in his right thigh throbbed more than usual; he was certain he’d reopened any flesh that had rejoined in the last two days. His knees stung; they were likely bleeding. His ankles hurt but seemed to be operational. His rib cage on the right side flared with ache when he sucked in a breath of the cold mountain air. He thought it likely he’d cracked one of his floating ribs, which would be painful but not particularly burdensome. His left elbow seemed to have hit something, or a series of somethings, or every goddamn something on themountainside, and the area along his funny bone was stiff and swelling.
With all that taken into account, the Gray Man knew he was fortunate to find himself in such good condition. Sliding, rolling, and bouncing down a steep hillside in the dark could have gone much worse, even without the gunmen firing machine guns at him.
Then he took stock of his belongings. His buoyed spirits sank anew. He’d lost everything but the small Walther handgun in his ankle holster, his wallet snapped shut in his back pocket, and a folding knife in his front pocket. Everything else—sat phone, medical equipment, extra ammo, guns, grenades, binoculars—all gone.
It took him another twenty minutes to get to the bottom of the valley, down to the one road and the one railroad track, to the one-room train station. The snow had turned to sleet, and he shivered, his ungloved hands buried deep in his pockets.
He saw a minivan, the only vehicle parked in the tiny lot. He took this as the kill squad’s vehicle. He broke the driver’s-side window and climbed in quickly, then smashed the steering column apart with two kicks of his boot heel. In seconds he had the ignition barrel out, and in under a minute he’d sparked the ignition wires. But the van would not start. Hurriedly he felt around under the dash for a kill switch. Finding none, he climbed back out of the van, slammed the door shut, and jabbed his knife into each of the tires. He knew sabotaging it would show the gunners he’d made it down this far and was certainly on the road by now but, he decided, they would have to leave Guarda immediatelyanyway. The police would be arriving within minutes. The kill team wouldn’t be able to search the forest for him all morning, so there was little use in trying to mislead them that he was still on the mountain.
As it stood, he figured they were no more than ten to twenty minutes behind him now, depending on how concerned they were about being detected by the villagers or how nervous they were about bumping into the first police cars coming up the hillside.
Court broke a small windowpane in the door to the train station, reached around, and opened the latch. First he checked a schedule on a wall, a timetable for all the trains in the country. Then he pulled a heavy brown coat off a coat stand. Gentry slipped it on. It was a little tight at the shoulders, but it would keep him alive. A woman’s bicycle with thick tires leaned against a wall, and Gentry took it, closed the door behind him, and winced along with the flare-up of pain in his lower rib cage when he kicked a leg over to mount it.
