we’ve got a little farther on the right. We get there, we’re out of sight. Plus
we can take a motorboat to the mainland if we need to.” His voice was composed,
masterful. “See that little path to the right? Turn on it—now.”
Janson drove past it.
“Goddammit, Janson!” Collins bellowed. “That marina was our best chance.”
“Best chance to get blown to bits. You imagine they won’t have thought of it?
They’ll already have lobbed a time-delayed explosive device there. Think like
they do!”
“Turn around!” Collins yelled. “Goddammit, Paul, I know this place, I live here,
and I’m telling you—”
A loud explosion from behind them drowned out the rest of his words: the marina
had been blown up. Part of a rubber dingy was thrown high into the air and
landed on the side of the road.
Now Janson depressed the accelerator pedal farther, barreling down the narrow
road faster than would ordinarily be safe. At eighty miles per hour, the tall
grass and thorn trees zipped past in the rearview mirror. The roar of the motor
seemed to grow ever louder, as if the muffler was cutting out. Now it seemed as
if he were floating in the bay, as the spit narrowed to little more than sixty
feet across, some beach, some low, scruffy vegetation, and the road, half
covered in drifting sand. Janson knew that the sand itself reduced traction like
an oil slick, and he reduced speed slightly.
The sound of the motor did not subside.
It was not the sound of his motor.
Janson turned to his right and saw the hovercraft. An amphibious military model.
It was skimming along the surface of the bay, a powerful fan keeping it aloft, a
couple of feet above the surface of the water and the flat nets stretched
beneath. It was unstoppable.
Janson felt as though he had swallowed ice. The lowlands of Chesapeake Bay were
perfectly suited for the hovercraft’s capabilities. The land would not provide
them shelter: unlike a boat, the craft could move almost as easily over dry
surfaces as over wet ones. And the powerful engine enabled it to keep pace
easily with the Corvette. It was a more dangerous foe than the gunboat, and now
it was gaining on them! The sound of the fan was deafening, and the small
convertible swayed precariously in its mechanical gale.
He sneaked another glance at the hovercraft. From the side, it had some
resemblance to a yacht, with a small forward windowed cabin. Mounted at the
other end was a powerful upright fan. Heavy-duty antiplow skirts were mounted to
the fore of the craft. As it zipped along the placid waters it gave an
impression of fluid effortlessness.
Janson floored the accelerator—only to realize, sickeningly, that the hovercraft
was not merely keeping pace; it was passing them. And, perched just below and to
the left of the rear fan encasement, someone wearing ear protectors was fumbling
with what looked like an M60 machine gun.
Janson aimed his M9 with one hand and emptied the magazine—yet the relative
motion of the car and his target made accuracy impossible. The bullets simply
clanged off the massive steel blades of the fan.
And now he had no more ammunition.
Bouncing lightly on its bipod, the M60 produced a low, grunting noise, and
Janson remembered why it was known as the “pig” when he was in Vietnam. He
hunched down as low as he could in his seat without losing control of the car,
and the car’s body jarred to a jackhammer rhythm as a spray of bullets, two
hundred 7.62mm rounds per minute, sledgehammered the yellow Corvette, tearing
into its steel body.
There was a momentary pause: A jammed bandolier? An overheated barrel? It was
customary to replace the barrel every hundred to five hundred rounds to prevent
overheating, and the overzealous gunman may not have realized just how quickly
those barrels became hot. Small consolation: the pilot of the hovercraft used
the interruption to shift direction. The craft eased back, even with the racing
Corvette, and suddenly up onto the beach, and then to the cambered road itself.
It was just a few yards away, and the powerful sucking propellers seemed to loom
over the tiny sports car. He heard another noise—a whooshing, bass-heavy thrum.
That could mean only one thing: an auxiliary Rotex engine and propulsion fan had
just now been activated. In the rearview mirror, Janson watched, bewildered, as
the blousing PVC flaps puffed out farther and the entire craft, which had been
flying about a foot above the ground, suddenly rose higher—and higher still! The
roar of the Rotex engines blended with the howl of the blasting air as a small
sandstorm materialized just behind them.
It was increasingly difficult to breathe without choking on the airborne grit.
The hovercraft itself was partly obscured in the swirling sand and yet from
behind the fore windshield he made out the goggled face of a powerfully built
man.
He could also make out that the man was smiling.
Now the hovercraft seemed to jump up another foot into the air, and suddenly it
was rearing and bucking like a horse. As the antiplow skirts struck the car’s
rear fender, Janson had a horrible realization: It was trying to climb over
them.
He glanced over to his right and saw Collins doubled forward in his seat, his
hands over his ears, trying to protect them from the immense din.
The hovercraft bounced and tipped again as the churning blades whipped air into
a punishing substance, like water from a water cannon. In the rearview mirror,
through the eddying sand, Janson caught a glimpse of the spinning auxiliary
propulsion blades mounted on the craft’s underside. If the side-strafing from
the M60 was not sufficient, the assassins wanted them to know that they could
easily lower the powerful blades of the undermounted propeller over them, like a
gigantic lawn mower, destroying the car and decapitating its inhabitants.
As the large hovercraft bucked against the rear of the Corvette, Janson swung
the steering wheel abruptly to the left, and now the car veered off the paved
surface, its wheels spinning into the sand and scrub as it rapidly lost traction
and speed.
The hovercraft zoomed past, its motion as effortless as an air-hockey puck, then
came to a halt and reversed course without turning around.
It was a brilliant maneuver: for the first time, the man with the M60 had a
direct line of fire at the driver and passenger alike. Even as he watched the
machine gunner seat a fresh link-belt of ammunition into the M60’s drive
mechanism, he heard the sound of yet another craft—a speedboat, crazily veering
toward the shore.
Oh Christ no!
And in the speedboat, a figure, arranged in prone firing position, with a rifle.
Aimed at them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The speedboat was equipped with an aircraft turbine engine, for it had to have
been traveling at upward of 150 miles per hour. It skimmed along the water,
leaving behind a slashing contrail of spume. The small boat became rapidly
larger, a mesmeric spectacle of death. Two miles from the cottage, the flat
netting was no longer in place; nothing protected them from the rushing gunman.
Nothing.
Where could he go? Where was safety?
Janson turned the wheels of the Corvette back onto the road, heard the chassis
scrape as it lurched from the sodden earth to the hard pavement. What if he
tried to ram the hovercraft, jamming his foot on the accelerator and testing its
lightweight fiberglass construction against the steel cage of the Corvette? Yet
the odds were slim that he could even reach the craft before the M60 had
perforated the engine—and him.
Crouching below the fan, the machine gunner grinned evilly. The linkbelt was
seated; full-fire mode was activated. Seconds remained before he served them
with a lethal fire hose of lead. Suddenly the man pitched forward, slack, his
forehead dropping like a deadweight against the bipod-propped gun.
Dead.
There was an echoing sound—on the waters of Chesapeake Bay, it sounded oddly
like a cork popping—and then another, and the hovercraft came to a rest just a
few feet from the car, half on the road, half on the shoulder. It was not how
anyone deliberately parked such a craft.
Like those of many military vehicles and devices, the controls must have been
designed to require continual nonpassive pressure—simply put, the grip of a
human hand on the tiller. Otherwise, in combat situations, a soldier in command
could be killed, and a driverless vehicle—like an unmanned automatic
weapon—might inadvertently cause harm to the wrong side. Now the craft
depowered, the engines shutting off, the churning blades growing slower and
slower, the craft’s skids setting firmly on the ground. And as the craft fell to
earth, Janson saw that the pilot, too, was sprawled, limp, on the windshield.
Two shots, two kills.
A voice called across the waters of Chesapeake Bay, as the engine of the