The helicopter shuddered and stood still in the air, rocking gently from side to side. He kept pulling and twisting his ropes. His skin burned from the abrasion, but he ignored it. The chopper settled into a straight but slow vertical descent. Abruptly, the whole craft pitched violently to the side. Jon lost his balance and toppled over, his shoulder thudding hard against the seat. Something sharp bit into his back. He heard shouts as the first few men jumped to the ground. More followed, and the chopper found its balance and touched down safely.
As the rotors slowed, Jon searched frantically for the sharp protrusion from the helicopter wall. He rubbed his back against the wall until again he felt the pain, and then a hot spot of blood on his back told him he had found it. Still lying on his side, he wiggled back against the wall, searching until his hands found the spot. He touched it gingerly. The wall’s padding had separated, and a piece of sharp metal from the chopper’s body was exposed when pressure was applied at the separating crack. Encouraged, he worked the ropes against it. As the engines cut back, a strange quietness settled into the craft and he felt the rope beginning to fray.
He continued rubbing against the knifelike metal until the rope abruptly split apart. He could feel blood on his hands where he had nicked himself. He unwound the rope from his wrists and lay quietly, his ears aching with the strain of listening. How many terrorists were left? They had been so eager to rush out that it seemed most had gone before the chopper actually landed.
Outside, there were more violent bellows and curses. Abu Auda shouted, “Spread out. Look for them. Search everywhere!”
“Here’s a map of France!” someone yelled. “I found it in the chalet!”
More bellowed reports, more loud swearing. The hubbub outside moved away.
Jon tried to hear breathing inside the chopper, the smallest movement. Nothing. He inhaled deeply to calm his nerves, stripped off his blindfold, and dropped to the floor among the seats. He peered around. There was no one at the front. Twisting, he glanced behind and around. Again, no one. Still lying on the floor, he ripped off his gag and scanned the chopper for an extra assault rifle. A pistol. A knife someone had dropped. Anything. The stiletto he had Velcroed to his ankle had been taken when he was captured.
But again, there was nothing. He crawled to the pilot’s and copilot’s seats at the front. That was where he spotted an ungainly-looking pistol in a rack next to the copilot’s seat. A flare gun.
Cautiously he raised up and peered out the windows. They had landed on a sloping field at the edge of a thick pine forest, near a half-timbered chalet with a high-peaked roof. The chalet was tall and narrow, which made it less visible from the air and two sides. Pine trees crowded close to the house and stretched away back up the slope toward a low mountain behind. Farther behind were snow-mantled peaks. Someone had said France. The Alps?
Two of the terrorist soldiers, their weapons slung, were picking up the body of Mauritania’s dead pilot. Two more were searching out into the sloping meadow, while high above on a second-story deck stood Abu Auda with two older Saudis. They were scanning the distance.
But it was the endless forest that attracted Jon’s attention. If he could slip out of the chopper and in among the pines, he would triple his odds of escaping. He needed to make his move now, while the terrorists were distracted. Every second increased the danger that Abu Auda and the others would give up their search, regroup, and remember him.
Low to the floor, he scuttled to the door on the copilot’s side, which faced away from the chalet. His wounds forgotten, he slid over the edge and, holding on to a landing strut, he coiled toward the ground like a snake. Lying on his belly, he gazed under the chopper at the terrorists, who remained angrily busy. Satisfied, flare gun in hand, he crawled on his forearms toward the brown grass that edged the pine forest. Spring flowers were beginning to show among the grasses. The fresh scent of the moist mountain soil rose around his head. For a moment he felt dizzy, heady with freedom. But he dared not stop.
Crawling swiftly on, he reached the perimeter of the trees and slithered gratefully into the twilight forest, thick and hushed with fir trees. lie was breathing hard. Beads of sweat had collected on his face. But he had seldom felt better. He crouched behind a tree trunk and studied the terrorists in the clearing and around the chalet. They still had not discovered he was missing. With a cold smile, he jumped up and loped off.
The first time he heard the sound ahead, he dodged behind a tree and dropped flat. His heart pounded as he stared through the lacy forest shadows. When he saw a head emerge from behind a pine tree, his heart pounded faster. The head wore an Afghan puggaree, long cloth tail and all. He had nearly blundered into an armed Afghan, who was still searching through the woods for any sign of Chambord, Mauritania, and the others.
The man turned slowly, his dark gaze examining the shadows. Had he heard Jon? It seemed so, since he lifted an old American M16A1 and aimed it in Jon’s general direction. Jon held his breath, the flare pistol gripped in his hand. The last thing he wanted was to fire the thing. If the flare hit the Afghan, he would scream like a banshee. If it missed, the flare would ignite brighter than a Roman candle.
He watched the Afghan step carefully toward where he lay silent. The terrorist should have called for backup, but he had not. Perhaps he was unsure of what he had heard or whether he had heard anything at all. By the expressions playing across the man’s face, it seemed as if he were talking himself out of his alarm. He had heard nothing. A rabbit. The wind. His countenance cleared, and his guard lowered. Now that his suspicions were eased, he approached faster. By the time he reached where Jon hid, he was moving at a fast clip.
Jon raised up and was on him before the fellow could react. Instantly, Jon swung the heavy flare pistol, knocking him to his knees. He clamped his hand over the man’s mouth and crashed the weapon down onto his head. Blood spurted. The man struggled but was obviously stunned and confused by the initial blow, Jon hit him again, and the extremist collapsed limp into the forest duff. Breathing heavily, Jon stared down. His lungs ached, and his rib cage was tight. He ripped the M16 away and found the man’s curved dagger.
He reached down to check the terrorist’s pulse. He was dead. Jon stripped the extra M16 clips from the body, turned on his heel, and melted up through the forest again. As he settled into a distance-eating trot, thoughts flooded his mind. He tried to understand what had happened here before the helicopter had arrived. Why was the Saudi pilot murdered? From what Abu Auda had said, Chambord, Theacute;regrave;se, Bonnard, and Mauritania had been at the chalet. Where had they gone now?
What came echoing back were Chambord’s words: I’m not with them, Colonel Smith, they’re with me. It stayed in his mind, teasing him with possibilities. The mosaic of odd pieces of what he had learned since Monday began to reassemble in his thoughts until they finally added to a question: Why would Chambord and Bonnard not be waiting? After all, the Crescent Shield was supposedly working for him.
Chambord was not part of the Crescent Shield. He had made a point of it, that they were with him.
As he ran on, Jon continued to puzzle over it all, trying to stretch the ideas out. And then, as if a mist had cleared, it began to make a crazy kind of sense: Just as the Black Flame had been a front for the Crescent Shield, the Crescent Shield could be a front for Chambord and the French captain Bonnard.
He could be wrong, but he did not think so. The longer he considered it, the more sense it made. He must get to Fred Klein and warn him as soon as possible. Klein and half the world’s intelligence services were looking for criminals, but the wrong ones. Klein had to know, and Jon had to uncover where Chambord and Bonnard had gone and what devastation they were planning.
The first sign that Jon was in trouble again was explosive gunfire from the S-70A helicopter. It slashed over the treetops as Jon crossed a small clearing. Pine needles rained down, and the chopper banked steeply and climbed, turned, and came back for a second pass. By then, Jon was no longer in the open, and the chopper roared past overhead and down the slope. It was a ruse, Jon figured. They had seen him the first time and would land in another clearing lower on the slope. After that, the terrorists would spread up and out on foot and wait. If there were enough of them to cover a lot of territory, they could hope that he would come to them.