Chapter 53 - The Blackout Highway
"Give me the knife," Leah said.
David turned, his heart hammering against his ribs. The spotlight was sweeping across the mud leading directly into their tunnel entrance. "What?"
"Cut it off," Leah whispered, tears freezing on her cheeks as Maya writhed against her collarbone. "Cut the bracelet off him, David! If you don't, they'll kill both of them!"
"It’s wired directly into the radial artery, Leah! If I slice it blind in this ditch, he’ll bleed out in thirty seconds!"
The spotlight hit the mouth of the culvert. Above the roar of the helicopter blades, a voice crackled through an airborne PA system, distorted and deafening:
*DAVID. LEAH. STEP INTO THE CLEARING. SURRENDER THE BIOLOGICAL ASSETS AND YOU WILL BE GRANTED RAPID EXTRACTION. NON-COMPLIANCE WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE THERMAL TERMINATION.*
It was Cassandra’s voice. Smooth. Unbroken. Calculated. She had survived the rotunda explosion without a scratch.
"There's an access road across the drainage ditch," David said, his tactical instincts overriding the panic threatening to paralyze him. "There's an abandoned highway salt shed two hundred yards down the treeline. On my mark, you run. Don't look back. Don't stop for anything."
"David, no—"
"I’m drawing the light!" David yelled.
He tore off his soaked jacket, leaving him in only a blood-splattered thermal shirt in the twenty-degree cold. He pulled Asset 409 tight against his chest with his left hand, sheltering the baby with his own skin, and bolted out from beneath the concrete pillar into the wide-open ditch.
The blinding xenon spotlight instantly locked onto his chest.
*Crack! Crack-crack!*
Suppressed high-caliber fire chewed through the frozen mud at his heels, kicking up plumes of dirt and shredded ice. The helicopter's side door was open; two snipers in tactical winter gear were leaning out of the harness, rifles leveled.
David didn't run away from the helicopter—he sprinted toward the embankment where the forest met the highway guardrail. He reached into his pocket, gripped the ceramic semi-automatic, slid behind a massive fallen oak trunk, and fired three rapid shots straight up at the spotlight.
The ceramic rounds struck the housing. The halogen bulb shattered in a shower of sparks, plunging the ditch back into gray morning gloom.
"Now, Leah! Run!" David roared.
Through the foliage, he saw Leah's shadow break from beneath the bridge and vanish into the dense pine thicket toward the salt shed.
The helicopter banked violently, its pilot fighting the rotor wash against the hillside. But on the ground, two hundred yards away on Interstate 84, two black Chevrolet Suburbans with tinted windows skidded across the median, their sirens silent, their heavy steel push-bars slamming through the snowbanks as they descended directly toward David’s position.
May you like
He was cut off.
***
