Support and Defend

by Tom Clancy

  Now they were back on the main road, and Dom flipped off the headlights as he made the turn, and a hundred yards ahead or so they caught occasional glimpses of brake lights.

  Dom said, “That’s got to be the Russians. No way we got between the two SUVs.”

  Adara looked back but saw nothing. The light was getting better by the minute now, but under all the vegetation it was still too early in the morning to know for certain whether or not a dark colored truck could be running without headlights behind them. After a minute like this, however, they came up a hill and out of the trees. Adara leaned her head all the way out of the Expedition to scan the road, a quarter-mile of it was visible for a split second before they made a turn.

  “Nobody. Those are the Russians in front of us. I don’t know how far ahead Ross is, but he can’t be too far.”

  Just then the Expedition made a hard right turn and took off to the south.

  Adara said, “If they knew to make that turn, they must have Ross in sight ahead.”

  Caruso banged his hand on the steering wheel. “The Russians will catch him, and they have some sort of extraction plan on this island. A helo or a boat. We’re gonna lose him.”

  “I can try to shoot out the Russians’ tires.” Adara asked.

  Dom glanced at her for an instant. “Can you make that shot in this light, at this distance, in this moving vehicle?”

  “Probably not. Can you?”

  “Nope.” Another sigh. “Any more shortcut levies on that map?”

  “Nothing. The road straightens out here to the south for a while before going crazy again in the hills, about one mile ahead.”

  Dom flattened the gas pedal to the floor, taking advantage of the straight road and the gentle downward slope. As a result he had the Russians no more than eighty yards ahead now. There was no indication they knew they were being pursued. Dom presumed they were completely focused on their own pursuit.

  “You’re catching them!” Adara said.

  “Just on this stretch. We won’t catch them before the turns come, and their vehicle is faster than ours.”

  “Not on the turns.”

  Dom turned to her quickly, then his eyes went back to the road. “What do you mean? They can corner twice as fast as we can, plus I have to downshift.”

  “You don’t have to downshift if we don’t plan on turning.”

  Dom looked at the speedometer. He was going sixty-five, and this was the absolute top speed of the truck. “If you’ve got an idea, I need to hear it.”

  Adara put her finger on the map. “A half-mile ahead is a hairpin to the right at the bottom of this hill. There is nowhere for them to turn off before we get there.”

  “So?”

  “They’ll have to slow down to nothing to make that turn. They’ll have to. But we keep on going full tilt down the hill. We can catch up to them.”

  “But . . . how do we stop?” As he asked the question he thought he knew the answer.

  “We stop when we slam into them. We just plow right into the passenger side on the turn and knock them off the road.”

  “Holy shit,” Dom muttered. “What’s the terrain like on the far side of the hairpin?”

  “It’s jungle. This whole island is jungle, Dom.”

  “I know that. I want to know if we’re going to go tumbling down a hill if I miss the truck.”

  She looked at the image. “It’s difficult to tell on the sat photo.”

  Dom sighed. “Try really hard, Sherman. Play like our lives depend on it.”

  She gave it another glance. “It’s not a cliff or anything like that. It’s just rainforest. Maybe descending away.”

  “If I don’t time it right, we’re going to shoot off the road and into the jungle at more than sixty miles an hour.”

  “Then time it right.”

  Dom shrugged. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Sherman reached over and tightened Caruso’s seat belt, then she did the same with her own.

  Dom said, “After we crash, we’re going to have to get out and shoot those guys.”

  “I know.” Adara then asked. “How much ammo do you have?”

  “I have an MP7 I got off a dead Russian. Thirty rounds. I’ve got a couple rounds in the pistol.”

  Adara clutched her M16. She’d fired only one round, so she knew she had twenty-nine left. “We might run out of ammo in the gunfight, but at least we don’t have to worry about reloading.”

  Dom chuckled through the tension as he fixed all his attention on the vehicle ahead. “Lucky us.”

  THE FOUR RUSSIAN NAVAL Spetsnaz men readied their weapons in the rear Expedition. They’d closed to within thirty yards of Ethan Ross and his protection detail, and the driver told his lieutenant he would be able to overtake them in the next series of turns. He watched the SUV in front of them fishtail through a hard muddy turn to the right that hairpinned down a hill to the west, so the driver slowed his own vehicle down in plenty of time to make the turn.

  One of the two men in the back seat yelled out, “Vehicle behind us!” and then he and his mate in the back spun around and raised their weapons, pointing them at the rear window and the truck beyond it. The green Expedition began its turn to the right, and the vehicle was fully in the curve, when a burst of rounds from the pair of HKs in the back seat blew out the glass.

  “He’s not slowing down!” shouted one of the Spetsnaz men. “Watch out!” screamed the other, just as the big dark truck looming slammed broadside into the Expedition. The SUV crumpled and spun, the front end whipped all the way back around and hit the side of the truck, and it backward into the dense jungle. The flatbed jolted hard to the left with the impact, the front tires left the road, and it ripped through the trees just feet away from the Russians’ SUV.

  39

  ETHAN HAD BEEN TRYING to keep his eyes on the truck chasing them, but he’d turned away for a moment when suddenly the headlights shining on him turned to the right. Ethan looked back and in the dim morning glow he saw mud and leaves and other debris kicked up in the jungle at the turn, as if the tropical vegetation had swallowed the Americans’ vehicle whole. “They crashed! The Americans just crashed making that turn!”

  Bertoli stared back in shock with her hands to her mouth. Mohammed took a turn himself, this one to the left. He tried to look back over his shoulder, but he saw nothing. “Good. That is good,” he said, then he switched back to Arabic and continued talking in his mobile phone.

  THE SMELL OF RADIATOR fluid mixed with the earthy sent of the jungle. Dominic felt a sticky wetness on his face from his hairline all the way down to his neck. There was next to no light here in the cab of the truck; they’d come to rest upright, somewhere off the road in the rainforest. The hood of the truck was smashed and up in the windshield, and there was broken glass all around.

  Before he checked on what he assumed was a gaping wound to his head, he looked to his right to see if Adara was okay. But he couldn’t see her. A fat and lush ficus tree had crashed through the windshield, and now all Dom could see next to him were leaves and broken branches. He reached out through the greenery and felt for Adara. He grasped her left shoulder and was glad to feel movement; she was in the process of unbuckling her seat belt.

  “You okay?” he asked. As he spoke, he reached to his face and he was relieved to find the source of the dampness there. A large wet palm frond covered the entire left side of his head. He pulled it off and then unsnapped his own belt.

  Adara didn’t answer. Dom grabbed the small HK MP7 Personal Defense Weapon he’d jammed between his seat and the door, and turned to find Sherman. In the low light and thick wreckage of foliage he had a hard time pushing his way toward her, but before he could even call out to her again, she shouted at the top of her lungs.

  “Contact right!” Sherman opened fire with her M16 through the passenger-side window.

  Dom didn’t hesitate. He opened his door and climbed out, then stood on his seat. Looking over the roof, he scanned the impossib
ly thick jungle on Sherman’s side of the truck. He didn’t see anything at first, but then muzzle flashes erupted in the thick undergrowth forty feet away.

  Dom snapped the fire selector switch to fully automatic, and he began spraying bursts at the sources of fire. Between bursts he shouted. “Bail out! My side!”

  He’d fired more half a magazine in six three-round bursts before he felt Adara move past his feet and then drop out of the truck and onto the jungle floor. He turned and leapt off behind her, and as he did so he saw her yank her rifle off the ground and point it toward the rear of the flatbed truck. In the wasted space of torn trees, flattened undergrowth, and uprooted plants, Dom saw a man spin around the back of the truck with a weapon high at his shoulder.

  Adara Sherman shot the man before Dom got his gun up. Blood blasted from the man’s skull and splattered on the greenery all around, and he dropped facedown into the brush.

  Dom grabbed Sherman by the shoulder and pulled her with him, and they moved away from the vehicle, deeper into the jungle, in the opposite direction of any surviving Russians. As they retreated they fired a few rounds in the general direction of the threats, covering their withdrawal.

  Within moments they backed up into a rusty corrugated shack. It looked like it must have been some sort of storage shed, maybe a farm had been here before the rainforest reclaimed the area. Dom and Adara moved around to the back of the shed, doing their best to find cover from any Russians remaining in the jungle around them.

  They both took a knee, Dom covering one side of the shed and Adara the other. Back-to-back, Sherman said, “You okay?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Good enough. There could still be a couple—”

  Dom reached back and squeezed her arm, silencing her immediately. He heard movement in the jungle around his side of the shed, still several feet away but approaching quickly.

  He unseated the magazine in the grip of his MP7 and checked. He had only three rounds remaining. He replaced it and whispered to Adara. “Ammo?”

  He heard her drop her mag, check it, and then click it back into place. “Two.”

  Dom pulled the Beretta from his pants and handed it back to her. She took it without looking. He said, “Count to ten and empty the Beretta into the trees.”

  “Roger.”

  Dom rose, moved to the edge of the shed and peered around carefully. He saw nothing but thick jungle ahead, so he moved around the corner, then up to the southeastern corner. He stopped here, readied his weapon on his shoulder, and waited.

  Soon he heard Sherman open fire with the handgun. He hoped this would flush out anyone in the trees near the crashed vehicles, get them to return fire. With luck he would see the muzzle flashes and engage them by surprise.

  But as he spun around the corner of the little shed he was surprised to see a pair of men, themselves using the shed for concealment. As Sherman fired on the other side of the dilapidated building, one man lifted his weapon to fire through the rusty tin walls. The second man peered around the corner toward the source of fire, not fifteen feet away.

  Dom knew Sherman was a sitting duck. She had no idea these guys were here on the opposite side of the shack. He shot the first man just as he fired through the tin. The Russian wore body armor, and he absorbed the hit and spun toward Caruso, just feet away. Dom shot him twice more, the third round taking him in the jaw and killing him instantly, but Dom knew he was out of ammunition.

  As the last remaining Russian spun his MP7 around to Caruso, he leapt back around the corner of the tin shack, landing hard on his back in the overgrowth.

  Dom screamed. “Sherman! Hit the deck!”

  The Russian opened fire on the shack, spraying copperjacketed lead into it to kill the two threats around opposite corners.

  Dom felt bullets snapping just over his head, and from the sounds of cracking branches around him he could tell the man was sweeping his fire back and forth, trying to gun down Adara as well.

  For an instant Dom had no idea what to do, but then he remembered the diving knife. He reached to his right ankle, pulled the titanium blade from its sheath there, and, when the Russian stopped firing to reload his automatic weapon, Dom leapt to his feet. All around him leaves fell from the trees and bushes, all victims of the heavy gunfire the jungle had just endured.

  Dom raced around the corner of the tin wall, now pocked like Swiss cheese, and he caught the Russian just as he’d chambered his weapon with a fresh round from a fresh magazine. Dom dove for the man, who spun toward the movement, but Dom collided with him before he could get his gun up, and both men crashed into the brush. The Russian fought back for a short moment, but Dom drove the knife hilt deep into the man’s stomach below his body armor, and the fight stopped. When the last Russian lay dead under him, Dom shouted for Sherman between pants. “Adara? Adara? You okay?”

  He fought his way up to his knees, pushed off the tin shack to hurry around to check on his partner. “Coming around! Don’t shoot!”

  Dom saw Adara rolling on the ground, her arms and legs flailing. He assumed she’d been hit, but at least she was moving.

  “Adara!” he knelt down to her. “Lie still! Where are you hit?”

  She kept flailing. “I’m not hit. You told me to get down, so I dove for the deck. Landed on a damn anthill.” She reached under her black parka. “Little bastards got inside my jacket.”

  A wave of relief washed over Caruso, and he couldn’t help laughing.

  THE BLACK FORD EXPEDITION drove off the dirt road and right down the middle of an empty sandy beach at the southern tip of Bastimentos Island. Before Ethan or Gianna could ask what he was doing, Mohammed skidded to a violent stop at the water’s edge.

  He said, “Everyone out. Quickly, please.”

  Ethan looked out to sea. There, in the calm waters just fifty yards from the shoreline, a blue and white single engine de Havilland Beaver floatplane approached slowly, its propeller spinning just fast enough to give it some forward motion in the water.

  Mohammed said, “Please. We must hurry to the plane.”

  “Who’s plane is that?” Ethan asked. When no one answered, he looked to Bertoli, and quickly he recognized she didn’t have a clue where the hell the young hacker Mohammed managed to score an airplane, either. But he climbed out of the Expedition, followed Mohammed into the water, and now he counted three men with the aircraft. One sat in the pilot’s left seat. Another climbed out of the cabin and stood on the float closest to the beach, and a third jumped out of the other side, into the kneedeep water, and he began wading behind the floatplane, avoiding the propeller on his way to the shore.

  The two men outside the aircraft were tough-looking and olive-skinned, with short haircuts and khaki shirts and pants. Ethan looked to see if the men were carrying guns—at any other time a gun would have uneased him, but right now he would have been happy to see the people here to rescue him had some way to fight off the Americans who still might be only minutes behind them.

  He saw no weapons on them, but wondered if they had something concealed. They certainly looked like some sort of security force.

  Despite a list of misgivings a mile long, Ross took off his backpack and held it over his head. Then he followed Bertoli and Mohammed and crashed through the water on the way to the plane. He took the hand of one of the olive-complexioned men, who pulled him up and ushered him into the back of the cramped cabin without a word.

  Within seconds the Beaver’s engine roared, the interior of the aircraft rattled and shook as if it could fall to pieces, but the machine picked up speed and lifted off into the cool dawn.

  MOHAMMED MEHDI MOBASHERI PLACED a headset over his ears and brought the microphone to his mouth. The leader of the Quds Force men with him, Shiraz, did the same next to him right, behind the pilot’s seat.

  Mohammed was careful to speak in Arabic, in case Ethan Ross could hear any of his words. He knew Ross didn’t speak the language, even though the Middle East was his specialty at NSC.
/>   Mohammed said, “Good work.”

  “Thank you. We will have a jet waiting for us in San Salvador. We can be in Tehran in less than twenty hours.”

  Mohammed shook his head. “There is nowhere I would rather go, but we’re not finished yet. We’ll go to El Salvador, and then the woman will tell us where to go from there.”

  Shiraz stared back in disbelief. “Why are you letting her make the decisions?”

  “We want the intelligence on the drive, and we can torture the American to give us his passwords. My first choice would be to throw her out of the plane now and make him decrypt the files. But Bertoli’s organization is helpful to us. We will go back with her to Switzerland and spend the next few days working with her on Ross, we will persuade him to give us the information so we can categorize it or redact critical information so we can publish a portion.”

  “I don’t know, boss,” said Shiraz. “I like your first idea better. The woman complicates things.”

  Mohammed nodded. “Agreed. They have the tendency to do that. If she becomes too much trouble, forcibly removing Ross from the protection of the ITP will be the easiest part of this entire operation.”

  Shiraz nodded. “I’ll await that order.”

  ADARA SHERMAN and Dominic Caruso made their way back onto the dirt road a few minutes after engaging the Russians. They were a hundred yards away from where the firefight had taken place. They’d seen no evidence the Russians were still alive or still in the fight, but they didn’t know how many had been in the Expedition in the first place, so they couldn’t be certain. As they began walking south on the road, both of them stopped to watch a floatplane fly overhead, ascending into the early morning.

  Dom had pulled an MP7 from one of the dead men, and now he pointed it at the aircraft, placing its holographic red dot sight on the single engine.

  But he did not fire.

  Instead, he just muttered, “If I shoot it down, it won’t be Ross. It will be a group of nuns down here on a mission trip. But since I didn’t shoot it down . . . I’d bet money we just watched Ethan Ross slip away.”