Chopper—sniper—tunnel, he thought.
All he needed was an escape vehicle.
Knight glanced at his rear-view mirror: it was filled by the grille of the first rig—it was a Mack rig, with a distinctive long-nosed bonnet—rumbling down the road behind him.
Thank you very much.
'Hang on, Schofield. I've got this sucker.'
He powered forward, bringing the Lamborghini under the Mi-34 chopper, out of its sight. Then with a rather morbid bang, he charged his car right into the dangling sniper's corpse, so that the body bounced up onto his bonnet and then dropped in through the Diablo's open targa roof.
Knight whipped out a pair of handcuffs—the bounty hunter's most valuable tool—and cuffed the dead sniper's safety harness to the steering wheel of his Lamborghini.
He then hit the cruise control and jumped out of his seat, climbing up and out through the targa roof.
At that moment, the big Mack rig caught up with him and rammed into the back of the Lamborghini.
But Knight was ready for the impact, and as the two vehicles touched, he made his move—dashing across the flat rear section of the Lamborghini, firing his pistol into the windshield of the Mack
as he did so, killing its driver, and then leaping from the rear of the Lamborghini onto the long nose of the Mack!
Within seconds, he was through the rig's shattered windscreen and in its driver's seat, in control of the big rig—and with a front row seat for what was about to happen.
Schofield's WRX shot into the tunnel at the base of the hill.
The Skorpion chopper—knowing it had to go over the tunnel and recapture Schofield on the other side—lifted, or rather, tried to lift.
But the lightweight Mi-34 chopper couldn't rise, owing to the weight of the Lamborghini now anchored to it.
The Skorpion pilot realised the implications of this a second too late.
The driverless Lamborghini rushed into the tunnel's arched entrance, while the chopper rushed over it, and to the pilot's horror, the vertical rope connecting the two vehicles went taut and . . . folded ... as it hit the archway.
The Skorpion chopper and the Lamborghini came together like a pair of scissor blades.
The Diablo was lifted completely off the ground, flying upwards, crunching into the ceiling of the tunnel, crumpling in an instant, bringing down a rain of tiles as it did so.
For its part, the Mi-34 was yanked downward by the rope, and it slammed down into the rocks above the tunnel and exploded in a shower of fire and rubble.
Knight shot under it all—at the wheel of the Mack rig—roaring into the tunnel, shooting past the fiery remains of his discarded Lamborghini.
Up ahead, Schofield blasted out the other end of the same tunnel, started zooming up the hill.
He rounded a corner, saw the upwardly-sloping road ahead— lots of sweeping bends and blind corners, and at the top of the road, the two other yellow Peugeots that had taken the high road.
They'd gone ahead, taking the shorter route, and doubled back, so that now they were shooting down this road, on a collision course with him and Gant.
Schofield's WRX powered up the hill, now trailed by only two vehicles, the two rigs: Knight's long-nosed Mack and the second rig, a snub-nosed Kenworth.
But then the WRX swept around a blind corner and was abruptly confronted by another unexpected sight:
A fighter jet had swung into a hover just out from the bend, its nose pointed menacingly downward, an arsenal of missiles hanging from its-wings.
Schofield recognised it instantly as a Dassault Mirage 2000NTI, the French equivalent of the Harrier jump-jet. Converted from the regular Mirage 2000N, the 'II' was a hover-capable fighter stationed only on France's newest and biggest aircraft carriers. It looked a lot like a Harrier, stocky and hunchbacked, with semi-circular air intakes on either side of a two-man cockpit.
The Mirage's guns erupted and a swarm of laser-like tracer bullets tore into the rock walls above Schofield's car.
Schofield floored it, whipping past the hovering plane as it
wheeled around heavily in the air, its bullet-storm chasing him, but he shot around another bend just as some of its tracers sheared off his rear bumper.
'Here, quickly, take the wheel,' Schofield said to Gant.
She slipped over into the driver's seat while he dipped into a pocket on his combat webbing and removed some bullets— Knight's orange-banded rounds. Bull-stoppers.
'People, no. Fighter planes, yes,' he said as he loaded the orange bullets into his Desert Eagle's magazine, finishing at the same time as a second Mirage swooped down over the road right in front of the WRX, its guns blazing.
But now, Schofield was ready to respond.
He lifted himself out the passenger window, sat on its sill, and pointed his Desert Eagle dead ahead.
The Mirage's bullets tore up the road in front of the WRX just as Schofield started firing repeatedly at the hovering plane— blam!-blam!-blam!-blam'.-blam!-blam!-blam'.-blant!-blam!—hitting it in both of its air intakes at the same time as some of the fighter's tracers sizzled in through the windscreen of his WRX.
Schofield's gas-expanding bullets did their job.
As the first bullets hit the Mirage's intake fans, their internal gases blasted outward, tearing the fans' blades to pieces, warping them, causing them to jam and the plane to stall and also to allow the following bullets to race fully into the jet engines themselves and detonate within the plane's highly volatile fuel injection chambers.
Two small bullets was all it took to destroy a $600 million warplane.
Its engines failing, the Mirage wheeled wildly around in the sky, spraying tracer bullets everywhere, before—boom!—the French fighter blasted out into a thousand pieces, showering liquid fire, before it just dropped out of the sky, landing in a crumpled smoking heap on the road 50 yards in front of the speeding WRX.
Schofield dropped back inside the passenger window . . .
... to see Gant slumped against her door, blood gushing from a giant wound to her left shoulder. A two-inch-wide hole could be
seen in the driver's seat behind her, matching the location of her wound.
She'd been hit by one of the Mirage's tracer bullets.
'Oh, no . . .' Schofield breathed. He dived across the seat, hit the brakes.
The WRX squealed to a halt, just short of the wreckage of the Mirage.
'Fox!' Schofield yelled. 'Libby!'
Her eyes opened, heavy-lidded. 'Ow, that hurts . . .' she groaned.
'Come on,' Schofield kicked open the door and lifted her out, carrying her in his arms. Then, into his radio: 'Knight! Where are you!'
'I'm in the first rig. With another one close behind me. Where are—hang on, I see you.''
'Fox has been hit. We need a ride.'
' When I pull up, get in fast, 'cause that other rig is going to be right on my ass.''
And then Schofield saw Knight: saw the long-nosed Mack rig rumbling up the slope, moving quickly.
With a loud shriek of its brakes, the Mack shuddered to a stop beside the WRX.
Knight threw open the door, and Schofield lifted Gant and himself in. Knight jammed the truck back into gear and hit the gas a bare moment before the snub-nosed Kenworth rig appeared around the bend behind them, coming at full speed, its engine roaring.
- The Mack jounced and bounced over the wreckage of the Mirage fighter strewn across the road, picking up speed. The second rig just barged right through the Mirage's remains before ramming hard into the back of Knight's still-accelerating rig.