He took off after her, feeling the jagged edges of the stone dig into his hands and knees. The air was full of shrapnel and cloying dust. The deafening fusillade suddenly ended. Lauren stopped moving and Mercer was about to prompt her on when a figure loomed to their right, a guard who’d climbed the sloping bank of gravel. Her silenced Beretta spat once and the man tumbled into the trough, prompting a fresh barrage. It sounded like a hundred guns were screaming to get at their rocky defile.
“There’ll be more,” she warned savagely.
Each foot they wriggled forward brought them no reprieve from the scathing attack. The Chinese raked the entire pile, holding their aim only where several of their comrades assaulted the hill to fire down the channel along the wall. Trusting Lauren to keep their front clear, Mercer concentrated on their flanks and rear.
A head appeared over the crest twenty yards behind him. He took a snap shot that plowed into the crest of the mountain and prepared for counterfire. Instead of a burst from his type 87, the Chinese soldier heaved a grenade in a long parabola. The bomb smacked the top of the hill and bounced back down its long face. It landed near the armored car. There was a scream followed by a sharp explosion that rocked the building to its foundation.
Without the need for stealth, Mercer and Lauren jumped to their feet, running hard for the exit. Another grenade sailed into view, a perfect toss that placed it only ten feet in front of them. Mercer rushed forward to grab Lauren around the waist and threw them both out of the ravine. He landed on his back with her clutched to his chest. As they slid down the pile, Lauren cycled through the remains of her magazine to provide cover fire. The second grenade detonated in a gush of gravel that blew across the warehouse like grapeshot from a cannon.
They hit the floor side by side and raced behind the Caterpillar bucket loader. The warehouse’s open doors were clear and they took off, Lauren changing out her magazine without losing stride. The twin grenade blasts were bound to bring reinforcements and they were still trapped inside two different perimeter fences.
“Now what?” she panted.
“This way!” Mercer said as soon as they were outside. Armed men stationed at the gate were just now coming to investigate. He threw himself under one of the idling dump trucks parked near the warehouse and sprang to his feet on the far side. Keeping low in case there was a driver in the cab, he crept forward until he could see the operator’s seat in the wing mirror. Empty. He opened the door and launched Lauren into the tall truck with a shove to the seat of her pants.
“Stay down,” he said and jammed the transmission into gear.
The dump truck snarled when he pressed the accelerator. The cab shuddered. Pulling out of line, the front fender clipped the dump body of the truck in front of them, the sheet metal tearing as easily as paper.
“You do know what you’re doing, right?” Lauren taunted, much more calm than Mercer.
“Hush.” He ground up through another two gears and raced the truck toward the gate.
By the time the soldiers in the warehouse realized their quarry was escaping, Mercer was almost abreast the break in the fence. The troops caught the fleeing dump truck in crossfire, but the vehicle’s thick hide turned away their bullets like the armor on a tank. In the wing mirror, Mercer glimpsed weapons spitting tongues of fire before a bullet disintegrated the glass. And then they were past the gate, careening across the main part of the Hatcherly terminal.
“We have to get to the fence that rings the entire port.” Lauren used the tail of her shirt to wipe camo paint and sweat from her face.
“Which way?” Mercer swerved around a row of containers, scattering the workmen who’d been helping a forklift driver. As yet, he didn’t think the regular workers knew there was a pair of fugitives running around the facility.
“Back through where Victor first let us out. It seemed more deserted than around here.”
Mercer cranked the wheel over. The tires barked in protest and for an instant the truck seemed light on one side before it settled back on its suspension. All around them, startled workers and guards gawked at his driving. One of the guards must have gotten a call over his walkie-talkie because rounds suddenly sprayed the side of the truck. “They’re on to us.”
They were going too fast for Lauren to accurately return fire, which left evasion as their only course. Mercer weaved the truck as best he could. Even empty the rig was top-heavy and tippy. More guards were alerted and it seemed that no matter where he steered, soldiers were waiting in ambush. The windshield had taken a dozen hits or more. He could feel that several tires had been shredded. He found cover by steering toward a parking area littered with ranks of shipping containers.
It was like running a maze, he thought. The containers had been stacked in rows that intersected at right angles, creating canyonlike lanes that seemed to lead nowhere. He couldn’t see far enough to know if he was heading in the right direction. The track was too narrow to turn the vehicle, so he pressed deeper into the labyrinth of containers, hoping to spot an outlet down any one of the numerous side branches.
“Oh, my God!” Lauren pointed ahead with a trembling hand.
Slicing through the air as if by magic, a bright green container swooped down the chasm directly at the dump truck. Above it Mercer could barely see the grapple carriage of the cable crane. The container had been lowered to just a few feet from the ground on stiff hawsers. There was no way he could avoid the head-on collision. Although their arrival from an unexpected corner of the facility had escaped notice, Mercer realized bitterly that surveillance cameras had tracked their escape in the ten-wheeled truck.
Standing on the brakes so the smell of burned rubber became overpowering, Mercer intentionally crashed the truck into one wall of containers, making sure the rear end broke loose and completely blocked the road. The flying container was fifty feet away, silently speeding toward them.
“Out your door and run toward it.”
“Are you nuts?” she shrieked.
“Do it.” Mercer reached across her lap and threw open the passenger door. As roughly as he’d pushed her into the cab, he tossed her back out, jumping to the ground on her heels.
He took her hand and ran at the cargo box, now just ten feet from them. The gap between the container and the pavement was only a couple of feet, and if the unseen technician remotely operating the cable crane realized what they were doing he could drop the box on them with the force of a hydraulic car crusher. Mercer held his breath and dove for the ground, pulling Lauren after him.
The bottom of the box hurtled an inch over his face, its passage stirring dirt from the asphalt. The air became fouled with the smell of stale rust. And then it moved beyond them. Mercer jumped to his feet and didn’t look back at the collision about to take place.
The container was traveling at thirteen miles an hour when it hit the truck, but it was its forty tons of mass that did the damage. The box barely swayed at the first impact. It crushed through the corner of the big rig, tore the front wheel off its suspension and then ripped the sixteen-cylinder engine off its mounts. Fountains of diesel from severed fuel lines ignited like oil-well blazes. Inertia tossed the motor through the cab an instant before the huge crate sliced it from the chassis like an enormous blade. Only when the container struck the dump body did it begin to push the twenty-ton truck across the pavement, rolling it over and over once the back axle had snapped. A lake of burning fuel spread like a flickering veneer. Gravel drizzled from where the container’s skin had split.