With a free hand, Chace popped open the armrest, pulling the GPS from where she’d stored it, handing it to Ruslan without looking at him. “Turn that on, take a reading.”
Ruslan fumbled with the device, then read out longitude and latitude, degrees, minutes, seconds. The information confirmed what she knew, and Chace barely nodded, her focus on keeping the Audi moving in the right direction. She appreciated the fact that he didn’t try to hand the GPS unit back to her.
From the backseat, Stepan said, “Ota?”
Ruslan turned, answering in Uzbek, and Chace saw the boy sitting up on the backseat, bleary and confused and looking more than a little frightened. He babbled something in response, and Ruslan spoke again, soothingly but it wasn’t enough, and in the reflected glow of the one working headlight, Chace saw the boy’s eyes growing wet as he started to sob.
“We’re close now,” she said. “We’re almost there.”
She saw Ruslan nod, speaking again to his son, and she assumed he was repeating her words, but she had no way of knowing. The headlights caught the water, reflected it, and she downshifted, urging the car forward, feeling the Audi beginning to lose itself in the softer earth fed by the river. Then she saw the bend, a dry wash of shore cut by the water sometime long ago, spreading out in a crescent of river sand. She downshifted a last time, turning the car slowly about in the wash until they faced the way they had come, killing the headlamp as the Audi came to a stop. She left the engine running, put the car into neutral, and hit the trunk release.
“Stay put,” Chace said.
She climbed out of the Audi, went around to the trunk. She’d switched from the hush puppy to the Sarsilmaz when they’d changed cars, keeping the pistol at her back, but now she moved it around so it rested at her waist in the front. The Kalashnikov, hush puppy, and grenades were all in the trunk, but she took only the automatic rifle, throwing the strap over her shoulder. She shut the trunk.
The river burbled past on her left, the water sixty feet away at its closest point. To her right, the ground rose sharply, turning into a low cliff, describing the outer edge of the crescent. Chace looked up, saw thin strips of cloud whipping past, obscuring the stars. The wind had risen, both in strength and in altitude.
From inside the car, she heard Stepan sobbing, watched through the rear window as Ruslan contorted himself in the front seat, lifting the boy onto his lap. The crying subsided.
Chace checked her watch and saw it was oh-five-hundred, exactly.
Almost immediately, she heard the first echo of the rotors, the helicopter’s rumble bouncing off the Syr Darya. She took the Kalashnikov off her shoulder, racked the bolt, holding the automatic rifle in both hands. The copter’s sound was growing louder, but that was all there was—no visual, no telltale lights. She wondered if Porter was flying with NVG, if that had been one of the incidentals her seventy thousand pounds had bought him.
Then she saw the bird, almost skimming the river as it came around the bend, spray flying from the wash of the rotor blades, a big, old, ugly Russian Mi-8 helicopter, and she knew it was Porter. He’d picked a workhorse, one common enough in this part of the world to be easily acquired and maintained, one that would raise no suspicion. She let her grip on the Kalashnikov go to one hand and stepped out from behind the car, to make certain he could see her.
The helicopter altered course, slowing and descending, and now the sand was flying, too, and Chace brought her forearm up to protect her vision, moving to the passenger’s side of the Audi. She opened Ruslan’s door, and he peered up at her, Stepan wrapped in his arms, the bloodstained flak jacket still around him.
“Our ride’s here,” Chace shouted. She adjusted the strap on the Kalashnikov, letting the weapon lie against her back, then held out her hands. “Here.”
Ruslan nodded, bent his mouth to Stepan’s ear, then lifted the little boy to her. Stepan turned his head to her, eyes wide with suspicion and fear, his mouth closed. Chace took him in her arms.
“It’s all right,” she told him in Russian, and stepped back to give Ruslan room to exit. The Mi-8 was louder than ever, the sand it was throwing up stinging her skin. She put a hand on Stepan’s head, pressing his cheek to her shoulder to shield him from the spray, adjusting the flak jacket around him more for protection from the cold and sand than anything else.
Then she heard an echo, what she thought was an echo, the sound of the bird reverberating off the cliff to her right, but the pitch was wrong, too high, and she knew it wasn’t an echo. She raised her head from Stepan to the Mi-8, seeing Ruslan emerging from the Audi in her peripheral vision at the same moment, and caught a glimpse of Porter behind the stick in the cockpit just before the helicopter exploded.
Fire and metal blew through the air, the remnants of the helicopter pitching nose forward, flipping into the earth, and the rotors snapped free, and Chace felt herself knocked off her feet. The world cracked, and she felt pain race along her spine, and she knew she’d landed on her back, on the Kalashnikov. She was dimly aware that she still had Stepan in her arms, and that amazed her.
She opened her eyes and couldn’t see anything but the after-image of the blast. The sound of the second helicopter cut through the ringing in her ears. She forced herself to roll, still gripping the boy, managed to get to her knees. Her vision cleared to pinpoints of dancing white, and she stumbled, turning, disoriented.
Light flared over the ground, blasting daylight into an oblong that skimmed the wreckage of the Mi-8, running over the sand toward her. Chace could barely see the helicopter beyond the flare of its searchlight, hovering twenty-five feet off the ground, and she thought it was a Sikorsky, a civilian model, and she knew that was where the missile had come from, the second Starstreak in the same night, this one used to kill not only Porter, but their chances of escape, too.
Starstreak, Chace thought. Another fucking Starstreak, and Jesus, but how many of them do these sons of bitches have?
She was already running for the Audi, clutching Stepan to her with her left hand, using her right to draw the Sarsilmaz from her waist.
“Ruslan!” she screamed. “In the car! In the fucking car!”
She fired as she ran, squeezing off rounds, trying to hit the light, or above the light, and not having any hope of success. The Sikorsky bobbled, turning, and Chace had reached the driver’s door, had shoved the boy back into the car, and was yanking the Kalashnikov’s strap from her shoulder, when she saw what the searchlight saw, and for a fraction, she froze.
Ruslan was sprawled in the dirt facedown, fifteen feet from the car, his arms splayed out in front of him, one of his legs bent back across the other. The searchlight struck him at an angle, pushing shadows off his motionless body. Chace thought she saw blood, but she couldn’t tell how much.
“Ruslan! Ruslan, get up!”
He didn’t move.
“Get up! Damn you, get up!”
The searchlight broke away from the body, the Sikorsky swiveling as it hovered, playing its ruthless light across the Audi’s hood. The beam struck Stepan inside, then Chace, and she saw the port-side door of the helicopter was open, and two men were crouched there, automatic rifles in their hands. She raised the Sarsilmaz in both hands and emptied the gun at them, flinging herself back into the car. One of the men pitched forward and fell.
Chace rammed the car into gear, then stomped on the gas, and the car lurched forward. She floored it, feeling the tires desperate for traction, and beside her, Stepan was screaming, pressing himself to the passenger window. Bullets punched holes along the edge of the hood, and then the wheels caught, the Audi shooting forward. Chace saw the man who had fallen trying to get to his feet and out of the way, and she ran him down before he had the chance, feeling the car jump slightly at the impact. More bullets struck, now hitting the roof, and between her hands on the wheel, Chace saw the dashboard shatter, and wondered fleetingly how the round had missed her.