“Perfect for what?” Charlie asked. “Ramming the gate?”
“I think you’d need a tank to do that.” Drummond hurried toward the vehicle.
Charlie trailed him, thinking this was no kind of exit plan: If they managed to start the behemoth, the police cars would catch them in seconds.
Drummond darted to the front of the vehicle, which was shaped like a ship’s prow. Bold metallic letters on the grille proclaimed AMPHIBUS. Charlie guessed it was used for rescues when planes landed in the water, short of the runway.
Drummond grasped the driver’s door handle and tried to get into the cabin. The door didn’t budge. Charlie added his weight to the footlong handle. The creak of the hinges was masked by the sirens, fortunately.
Drummond dove upward, landing prone on the driver’s seat. He flipped onto his back, reached under the control panel, and went to work on the ignition barrel.
Usually he needed to find a way to pry loose the panel. With a nothing tap, this one clunked to the floor. A mass of wires spilled onto his face. Although they all appeared black in the dark alley, he somehow knew which two were the reds-or at least he appeared confident as he touched two ends together.
The engine hiccupped.
Then fell silent.
Maybe for the best, Charlie thought.
A patrol car crept even with the mouth of the alley.
Charlie resisted an impulse to dive out of sight. Even in the shadows, his sudden movement would have the effect of a signal flare on the policemen’s peripheral vision. So too would the contour of a man pressed flat against the side of a vehicle, but the Amphibus had a wild outcropping of tires, life rafts, and rescue devices. Charlie blended in.
The patrol car continued past.
A moment later Drummond tried the wires again, this time pressing the accelerator with his palm. The engine coughed, six or seven bursts, the intervals between them decreasing in duration and culminating in one pleasing grumble.
Drummond scrambled to the passenger side of a front bench larger than most couches. Charlie jumped in, taking the wheel. Despite the obvious antiquity of the vehicle and the sour stench of old seawater, the cabin was in pristine condition. Evidently the Amphibus hadn’t seen much action.
Perched at the edge of the bench, Charlie needed to stretch to keep hold of both the gear shift and the steering wheel. “So do you think we should try for a diversionary tactic? Or just gun it for the water-assuming this thing guns?”
Drummond made no reply.
Charlie looked over to find his father shaking his head as if to stave off sleep. Over the past week the experimental medication had slowed Drummond down in general, a function of the p25 protein booster’s beta-blocker component, which brought his metabolism to a crawl. The brief flight from the customs official seemed to have drained him.
“Any thoughts, Dad?”
With a forearm that seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, Drummond pointed ahead.
Customs official Maurice du Frongipanier strode around the corner and into the alley, eyes blazing with fury, revolver locked on Charlie.
12
The customs man took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger.
Charlie imagined that he heard the click over the clamor of sirens. A white muzzle flash lit the alley and the report drowned out all other sounds.
Like Drummond, Charlie ducked, not just beneath the window line but to the nonskid metal floor, his instincts overriding his awareness that even the monster’s metal plating offered little protection against a bullet traveling near the speed of sound.
The bullet drilled through the windshield, spider-webbing much of the surrounding glass and blasting shards against Charlie’s hands, which he was using to shield his head. The round continued its course through the vinyl seat just above Drummond’s head, disappearing through the door to the cargo hold.
With his raw left hand, Charlie punched the clutch, meanwhile ramming the gearshift into first and pressing the accelerator, sending the Amphibus lurching forward. He pounded the horn.
The customs official jumped, sending his subsequent shot high. It struck one of the spotlights on the vehicle’s roof. Orange fragments of glass bounced down Charlie’s window.
Emboldened by the sight of the official scurrying out of the way, Charlie sat up so that he was even with the wheel and stomped on the accelerator. The Amphibus chugged to seven or eight kilometers per hour.
Drummond rose too, heavy-lidded and irritable, as if he’d been rudely awoken.
“You okay?” Charlie asked.
Drummond grumbled. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason.”
As the truck reached the end of the alley, something thudded against the passenger side of the cargo hold.
“I was afraid of that,” Drummond said, eyeing his side mirror.
Checking the mirror, Charlie saw du Frongipanier improbably clinging to one of the flotation devices dangling from the Amphibus.
“Hang on,” Charlie said. “Tight.”
Drummond braced himself against the control panel. Charlie crushed the brake pedal. The tires shrieked to a halt while the chassis and Charlie’s stomach hurtled onward.
The customs man ought to have been flung thirty feet ahead.
But he hung on and, what’s more, managed to point his revolver at the passenger window and line up Drummond’s head in his sights.
Charlie shifted back into gear, costing du Frongipanier his aim. Mashing the gas pedal, Charlie hoped to gain enough speed to shed the unwanted passenger.
Rapid acceleration was not one of the Amphibus’s features.
Three successive rounds pounded through the wall behind Charlie and Drummond. The air filled with particles of seat-cushion foam. More shattered windshield fell inward, scraping Charlie’s face and sticking in his wig. Rolling out of the alley, he saw no choice but to duck again and hope that no planes or fuel trucks were in his path.
Shielding his eyes from the continuing influx of glass, Drummond sat up and jerked one of the levers beneath the control panel. With a rush of air, a pontoon shot away from the Amphibus-a horrified du Frongipanier aboard.
The flotation device thumped against the tarmac then reversed course, the rope tethering it to the Amphibus snapping back to the vehicle. Despite repeated bumps and asphalt burns, the customs official not only hung on but also raised his revolver.
Another glaring muzzle flash and a bullet penetrated the steel door dividing the cab and the cargo hold, ricocheting around like a mad bee.
“Any chance there’s another lever you can use?” Charlie asked.
Drummond brightened. “Yes, thank you! That is what I was trying to remember.”
He leaned forward, jerking another handle.
A red life ring disengaged with a feeble click and floated backward, like a frisbee.
It clipped du Frongipanier in the shoulder with a disheartening pfft. But enough force still to knock him off the pontoon. He tumbled backward along the tarmac, his revolver bouncing along with him. Right into his hand. As he slid to a stop, he fired again.
The bullet sparked the tarmac well wide of Charlie’s door. The Amphibus bounced, Charlie along with it, his head striking the roof liner. “What the hell?”
“Grass,” Drummond said.
Now Charlie saw it. The Amphibus was crossing the strip of lawn that paralleled the runway. A moment later the heavy vehicle clomped onto the runway itself.
Charlie looked up, bracing for impact with a descending 747.
The sky was empty, but a trio of police cars was converging on the Amphibus.
Extraordinarily composed, or perhaps just drained of panic, Charlie focused on the Caribbean, outlined by the moonlight, a mile up the runway. He tried to turn the Amphibus, wrestling gravity for control of the wheel. The tires howled. Whines and groans suggested the vehicle was about to collapse into a mass of spent automotive parts. It careened toward the water with the exception of a cylindrical tank-a fire exting
uisher? — which burst through the rear door and bounced down the runway, leaving a comet trail of sparks.
The first police car slalomed to avoid being struck, then accelerated, closing to within a city block of the Amphibus. The two other police cars fell behind the first, forming a triangular formation, suggesting to Charlie that they intended to “T-bone” the truck, or disable it by ramming its flanks.
Although the engine roared like a blast furnace, the Amphibus seemed to have maxed at seventy kilometers per hour.
The police cars closed to within striking range.
The water was half a mile ahead.
“Now would probably be a decent time to figure out how to turn this thing into a boat,” Charlie said.
Drummond stared across the cabin as if Charlie were the one with lucidity issues. “Turn this into a boat?”
13
One of the police cars was now close enough that Charlie could make out the driver’s mustache-the traditional Burt Reynolds model. He also saw the gun that the man’s partner braced on the passenger side window. Getting closer. The options were to get rammed, get shot, both, or to stay the course to the Caribbean at the runway’s end.
“Dad, this thing is an Amphibus,” he said. “If we can’t make it live up to its name, when we reach the water”-seconds away-“we’re literally sunk.”
“Oh, that. We could always retract the wheels. The power train will shift from driving the wheels to driving the jet propulsion system.” Charlie exhaled. “You’ve been in one of these things before.”
“I don’t recall. On the other hand, once, back in the early seventies-”
“How do you retract the wheels?”
“Push this.” Drummond pointed at a big button on the console. Pictured on the peeling decal directly above it were a tire and an arrow that curved upward.
The police car closest to Drummond slammed into his side of the Amphibus. Charlie felt the crunch of metal in his teeth. Impact with any more force would knock the ungainly vehicle onto its side.
His eyes went to the blur outside his window. The second police car was charging straight at his door. He clenched head to toe in anticipation of the blow.
The police car suddenly slowed, braking close enough that Charlie could read the lips of the man at the wheel: “Merde!”
The runway ended, and the Amphibus took off into the sky, or so it seemed.
An instant later, it belly flopped into the Caribbean. And began sinking. Seawater rose above the windows, darkening the inside of the cabin save for a few faint white circles on the instrument panel.
Charlie groped for the button that turned the thing into a boat, found it-he hoped-and hammered down.
The wheels ground inward, and the inboard engines roared to life, bringing the water around it to a boil.
The craft popped back to the surface.
And, incredibly enough, floated.
As far as Charlie could tell, just one problem remained: “How do we make it go?”
“Just keep doing that.” Drummond indicated the accelerator, which Charlie still had pressed all the way to the floor.
Indeed the Amphibus continued to function, distancing them from the runway. But at a turtle’s pace.
“You sure about the ‘jet propulsion’ part?” Charlie asked, watching the cops spring out of their cars, all with sidearms drawn except for the last man, who had a shotgun.
“An interesting piece of information is that it took ten million man hours to develop amphibious vehicle technology,” Drummond said.
The shotgun roared and a round barreled into the cargo hold, creating a fist-sized hole in the wall behind them and boring into the dashboard. The radio spat out sparks.
More bullets rained against the vehicle, with such frequency that the dings and chimes formed one continuous peal. Too many bullets to count entered the cabin, kicking up a confetti of vinyl bits from the dashboard along with a geyser of sparks, and turning any remaining glass into gravel. The air filled with a salty mist.
Crouched as far down as possible, Charlie kept his hands on the accelerator. He tried to steel himself by remembering that he and Drummond had escaped worse.
That reduced the odds of their succeeding again, come to think of it. Better not to think, he decided.
The Amphibus reached thirty kilometers per hour, according to the speedometer, slashing through the waves.
The hail of bullets dwindled to a sprinkle, then nothing. The ruckus of gunfire and sirens receded and was soon drowned out by the inboard engines’ hums. Charlie felt safe enough to emulate Drummond and climb back onto the bench.
Through what remained of his window, he glanced aft at the policemen standing at the water’s edge, their heads lowered.
“Now what?” Charlie asked.
Drummond didn’t reply, fully attuned to the French chatter from the walkie-talkie pressed to his ear. After a moment, he said, “They’re dispatching two Coast Guard cutters.”
Charlie looked to shore. The airport now appeared the size of a dollhouse. Other than the engines, he heard only the patter of waves against the hull and a faint cry of a seabird. The moonlit seascape could have been used by the Martinique Travel Bureau.
“How about we get out and let this thing keep on chugging to sea, so that when the cops get to it, there’s nobody aboard?” Charlie said. “We can use one of the life rafts to get back to the island.” He thought back to what Bream had said: Anybody who wants to sneak onto Martinique can pull up in a million places by boat.
“They’re also sending a helicopter.” Drummond indicated the walkie-talkie.
“Super. With a searchlight?”
As he sometimes did, Drummond massaged his temples, as if trying to trip the button that activated his memory. “Sorry,” he said in conclusion.
“Okay, how about a more basic survival question?” In this respect, Charlie thought, Drummond’s tradecraft was practically ingrained. “If you were now, hypothetically, a fugitive, what would you do?”
“Swim to shore.”
“But they’d still see you.”
“Not if I swam underwater.”
“It’s got to be a couple of miles at least.”
“Well, that would be my best course of action, if I were a fugitive.”
The distant cry, which Charlie had thought of as a seabird’s, grew louder, into a whine. He recognized it. Helicopter rotor.
He gripped his door handle. “Well, either way, we need to get out of here now.”
“This way,” Drummond said, unlatching the door to the cargo hold.
“What difference does it make?” Charlie asked.
Pushing open the door, Drummond pointed into the dark hold. The glow from the console outlined walls blooming with vests, masks, fins, and cylindrical tanks like the one that had flown out the rear door and onto the runway.
“I guess you’ve scuba dived off an amphibious rescue vehicle before too,” said Charlie, who had never even snorkeled.
Drummond pulled on a wet suit. “Maybe so.”
A minute later the whine of the rotor turned into a series of raucous thumps. The moonlight delineated the approaching helicopter from the night sky. Dressed like frogmen, Charlie and Drummond sat on the edge of the open cargo doorway.
“Some handicapper I am, thinking coming here would be simple,” Charlie said, effectively to himself.
With a splash, Drummond fell backward into the sea.
Charlie followed suit, sinking into water that was warm and, better, ink black.
14
In a preposterously small rented Peugeot, Stanley and Hadley raced to Les Trois-Ilets, a seaside village off the coast where the Amphibus had just been found.
Undercover as the well-heeled Atchisons, they checked into the five-star Hotel L’Imperatrice, a remnant of the 1960s’ embrace of garish opulence. The lobby was dominated by a lush rain forest replete with a three-story coral cliff enshrouded by luminescent mist, the result of a booming waterfall and a
s many filtered spotlights as a Broadway stage. At the frothy base of the fall was an emerald lagoon, populated by fish representing every shade of neon.
Stanley thought of the hotel as the perfect venue for the espionage fantasies of his youth, in which the Ritzes of the world constituted the everyday operational locale. In reality such accommodations had been far from the norm. Even in Paris, the job took him to the sorts of hotels that offered hourly rates. His agents weren’t just people willing to sell out their own countrymen; they were willing to do it for a pittance. Not quite habitues of the posh spots.
With a Serge Gainsbourg melody in his head, he walked onto the bamboo terrace that extended from the open-air lobby and overlooked the purple-black Baie de Fort-de-France.
“Hoping to spot our rabbits swimming ashore?” asked Hadley, joining him at the rail.
The inability to do anything frustrated him. “At least we’re close to the action in the event there is some.”
She checked her BlackBerry. “The local officials have come to the conclusion that Drummond Clark is an international money launderer and arms dealer named Marvin Lesser. Old cover, mistaken identity, or whatever, it’s working better as a pretext for a manhunt than anything we could have come up with.”
“So what can we do now?” Anything seemed preferable to sitting idly.
Hadley hesitated, then asked, “How about we get a bite?”
“I guess we can keep an eye on the bay.”
The hotel’s outdoor restaurant, Les Etoiles, was lit for the most part by candles and tiki torches, but also, as advertised, by the stars, beneath which the Baie de Fort-de-France was a mosaic, flickering from black to white. Along with a smattering of other late diners, Stanley and Hadley were serenaded by a calypso band in tuxedos the same turquoise as the pool. They both ate Colombo, Martinique’s national dish, a coconut milk curry of fish, served with spicy fried plantains, at a price probably close to the per capita income. Stanley would have happily quit after the salad course. Primed for a hunt, his body wanted no part of food.
Twice a Spy dc-2 Page 8
