Chase laid the Browning on the seat between his legs, revved the engine, and pulled sharply away, the man grabbing hold of the metal frame of the windshield for support. The end of the rifle made an indentation in his dungarees, right between the slanting doublestitched pockets.
Any second now, Chase thought. If a shot was going to come, it was going to come now. He steered for the gap and had a blurred impression of a round fat shiny face in the cab of the truck, fleshy lips puckered up beneath a flattened nose in an expression of pure venomous hate. No shot came. In the rearview mirror he glimpsed the fat man climbing down from the cab and the others running forward to cluster around him. Chase kept his eye on this receding image, distorted by the shimmering waves of heat rising from the blacktop, which soon vanished as a bend cut it off from view.
Chase drove steadily and carefully so that Ruth could keep the rifle pressed home. What next? While they held the man hostage they were safe, but they couldn't hold him forever. In their favor was the fact that his friends wouldn't know when he'd been released. What they'd probably do would be to follow at a safe distance, ready to pick him up, and then come after the jeep with the killer instinct fanned to white heat.
They could kill the man and dump his body off the road. Could they? No, he couldn't commit such an act in cold blood and he doubted whether Ruth, for all her pent-up fury, was capable of it. There was also a strictly practical reason why not: The others would hear the shot and know at once what it signified. Then there'd be no stopping them.
"What are we going to do with him?" Ruth said, preoccupied with the same problem. "The minute we get rid of him--"
"1 know," Chase snapped, "I know," irked by the knowledge that they had escaped and yet were still trapped.
The man knew they wouldn't kill him. Despite the rifle barrel in his belly he seemed unconcerned. His lips spread in a grin across his gums. "I guess you're 'tween the devil and the deep blue sea--you got me but they've got you. How d'ya like that?"
The grin thinned only slightly when Ruth rammed the barrel deeper. "Don't tempt me," she said acidly. "I've seen decent people die, so it wouldn't bother me one bit to get rid of scum like you."
"Maybe so, lady doctor. But if I go your lives sure as damnation ain't worth bird spit, and you both know it."
They were now winding upward toward Hickison Summit. On their left the rock face rose vertically, sheared away in broad swathes like orange-yellow cheese sliced by an uneven hand. On their right, beyond a narrow fringe of grass, the valley dropped steeply away, strewn with large fractured boulders and fragments of rock, remnants of the road's construction. Chase looked to the left and then to the right. He stopped the jeep, applied the hand brake but left the engine running, tucked the gun in his pocket, and swung himself out.
"If he so much as moves an eyelid, shoot him."
"1 might do it anyway," Ruth said.
The road, being impassable on either side, had given Chase the idea. He hoisted one of the jerry cans from its rack on the back of the jeep and sloshed a pale amber stream across the road, right to the edges, shaking out every drop, then dropped the empty can into its cradle. Gasoline fumes drifted in a throat-catching mist off the hot blacktop. Pray to God it wouldn't all evaporate before it had a chance to ignite.
Crouching down, he tossed a lighted match and there was a gentle boom as a wall of flames sprang up. He retreated a few paces, watching anxiously in case the fire should burn itself out too quickly. He smiled, catching a whiff of a gorgeous rich aroma: the tar itself was alight, bubbling and frothing and giving off a blanket of dense black smoke that rose sluggishly to form an impenetrable smoke screen.
"That should hold them long enough," Chase said, climbing in. He put the jeep into gear and looked at the man. "Here's where we part company."
The man opened his mouth to say something but never got the chance. Even Chase was taken aback at the savagery with which Ruth thrust the barrel hard into the man's groin. He shrieked and clutched himself, falling doubled-up onto the road and moaning.
They didn't speak for a long time, eyes fixed on the road ahead, as if words might break the spell of flight. When at last Chase looked at her, Ruth was slumped in her seat, ashen-faced, her lower lip visibly trembling, still clutching the rifle with hands that might have been locked in rigor mortis.
"It's all right, we're safe," he reassured her. "They won't get past that for at least an hour. We're safe." When she didn't respond, he said with genuine admiration, "You were fantastic. You really had me believing that you'd have killed him."
Ruth cleared her throat as if she'd swallowed a ton of sawdust. "I would have, I mean I really would have," she said in a hoarse fluttery voice. "Except I forgot to put any bullets in."
"You mean," Chase said staring through the windshield, "it wasn't loaded?"
He gripped the wheel and his shoulders began to shake. He could hardly see where he was going because of the tears filling his eyes. They rolled down his cheeks.
Ruth gazed at him dumbly, and her stomach started to tremble, and then she too was afflicted by helpless hysterical laughter. For the next ten miles they were like two giddy kids.
24
General Madden listened to the slurping sounds of lovemaking. When the man began to speak in a low, barely audible voice the rage boiled up inside him. His jaws ached from the pressure of his clamped teeth.
Col. Travis Murch, senior security officer, pressed the tab, stilling the taped voice. "1 have a transcript you can look at. They met on a number of occasions"--Murch glanced down at the open file--"eleven that we know of for certain. But I'd say this was the first time he'd passed sensitive information, in my opinion."
"You didn't tape all the meetings. How can you be sure?" Madden asked stolidly.
"I'm not," Murch admitted. "But how does it sound to you? He was briefing her from zero. Then when she says, '1 can't believe this is happening, not here, not on the island,' doesn't that suggest she was hearing it for the first time? I'd say so."
"She could have been faking."
"Possibly," Murch nodded, thumbing tobacco into his ceramic pipe. "The important thing, however, is that we know for a fact that Skrote has divulged classified material to an agent of a foreign power." He struck a match and spoke around the stem of his pipe. "How do you want us to proceed?"
"What's the woman's name?"
"Natassya Pavlovitch. Biochemist according to her accreditation. We've had her under surveillance since the day she arrived. The Soviets are so simpleminded it's unbelievable. They send this knockout dame to penetrate our security--and she is built--and expect us not to smell a rat." He blew smoke toward the ceiling. "Pathetic amateurs."
"Amateurs or not, they succeeded," Madden said coldly. He was infuriated and yet strangely aroused. He would deal with this personally; there were several intriguing possibilities. "You haven't broken this to Skrote, of course."
Murch shook his head. "I embargoed further action till you arrived."
"Can we be sure she hasn't already passed on what she knows?"
"All channels are intercepted at source. There's been nothing."
"Code?"
Murch shook his head again, this time with a faint smile.
"We could infect Skrote or the woman with the virus," Madden said suddenly. "It would be transferred during their sexual activity and they could watch each other decay." He'd like to witness that himself. The woman's breasts turning into bloated pus-filled sacs, the ugly slit of her sex distended until it resembled a porpoise's mouth. And Skrote. His scrotum shriveling to the size of a wrinkled black pea and dropping off. Skote's diseased scrotum. That was funny. He laughed, the noise unnaturally shrill, like a screech.