The intruders apparently had the same thought, and it took them only a couple of minutes to decide to take their new acquisition and run. But even as one of them twisted pretzel-fashion under the control panel and began the task of bypassing the starter lock, Caine's men reached position, and with only a few seconds' worth of rustling brush to warn them, the strangers were suddenly faced with a backpack-laden hiker strolling into sight.
"Hold it!" the man with the machine pistol snapped, swinging the weapon around to cover the newcomer. "What do you want?"
Caine froze, letting his mouth fall open with apparent shock. "Hey—take it easy, huh?"
One of the others stepped forward. "This your car?" he asked, gesturing toward it.
"No, hell no." Caine shook his head vigorously. "No, I'm just out for a hike. Uh—meeting someone upstream a ways in half an hour.
"Sure you are." The second man glanced back at the two by the car, who'd halted their own activities at Caine's approach. "Move our stuff to his car—it'll be better for the drop. Let's have the keys," he added, turning back to Caine.
"The keys? But I told you, it's not mine."
The other snorted with disgust and strode forward. Stepping behind Caine, he pulled off the backpack—
And with a crack like a stick on a ripe melon, the man with the machine pistol toppled backward, his weapon flying into the grass behind him.
The two at the car gaped... and Caine took a half-step backward to drive his elbow into his frisker's stomach. Two more punches and a kick and the other fell and curled around himself to the ground.
"Don't try it," Caine advised the others, turning back to them. One did anyway; he collapsed from a second slingshot bull's-eye halfway to the machine pistol. "I warned you," Caine said, retrieving the weapon himself and waving it toward the last man. "Now, suppose you tell me just who the hell you are and what you wanted with—"
He broke off as his tingler abruptly signaled: Car approaching from west. He took a step to the side to get a better look—just in time to see the car skid onto the stones beside the road and discharge a half-dozen uniformed Security men. It was so unexpected that Caine was caught completely flatfooted. But his opponent wasn't. "He tried to steal my car!" he shouted to them, jabbing a finger at Caine... and the laser rifles swung up in response.
There was only one thing Caine could do, and he did it without hesitation. The gun in his hands was surprisingly noisy as it drained its clip in the Security men's general direction, scattering them as they dove for the ground. Laser bursts filled the air; dropping the gun, Caine sprinted back toward the mountains and the limited cover of the bushes on the lower slopes. There was a shout from behind him, and a new series of shots scorched at his shirt as he hit the ground and turned around.
The Security men were on their feet again. Or rather, four of the six were, and as Caine watched, two of the four flipped over backward as the snipers on the hillside found them.
Abruptly, the landscape in front of Caine's eyes exploded with light. Twisting around, Caine tucked his head to his chest, letting his back take the brunt of the attack. A shot found him, painfully hot even through the flexarmor—a second brushed his leg—and abruptly, the attack ceased.
Cautiously, he raised his head again. The Security men had joined their companions on the ground—alive or dead, he couldn't tell. Behind him, he could hear the crashing of bushes and tree branches as the rest of his team abandoned stealth for speed. And at their car—
Caine ducked involuntarily as, with a sleet of thrown gravel, their car spun around and raced for the road. "Damn!" he spat, jumping to his feet and hurling a shuriken toward the nearest tire with all the power he could muster. But the clouds of dust and wild fishtailing worked against him, and over the noise he heard a thunk as the star hit somewhere in the car's bodywork.
"What the hell?" Pittman panted from behind him.
"I guess he was farther along at getting it started than I thought," Caine said grimly. All their supplies, everything but the emergency packs they had with them—all of it gone. Damn! "Come on," he said as the others came up, "let's get moving. If Security doesn't have reinforcements already on the way, they will soon."
"Which car do we take?" Braune asked, already moving to obey.
"Both," Caine told him. "You and me in the Security car, everyone else in the other. Pittman, you drive. And you go first—we may need to pretend that we're chasing you."
Both sets of keys were in the appropriate starter locks, and half a minute later they were roaring down the road back toward Denver. "What do we do if Security sends more cars or aircraft against us?" Braune asked, his voice studiously casual. "It's a fair distance back to Denver."
"True." Caine's lips felt dry. "But remember that they've presumably got some distance to come, too.
The guys in this car were probably just patrolling and happened upon a suspicious group near—"
A blare from the car's radio interrupted them. "Car Em-Jay Forty-six, what is your mark-fourteen?
Repeat, your mark-fourteen?"
"What the hell is a mark-fourteen?" Braune muttered.
"I don't know," Caine shot back. "Situation code, probably." Gritting his teeth, he pulled the slender microphone from its clip. "Car Em-Jay Forty-six," he said, hoping the noise of tires on pavement would disguise his voice enough to get by. "Tailing possible smuggling suspects east on one-onenine.
Request all units stay clear of area to avoid spooking them."
A new voice came on the line. "Do you require air backup, Em-Jay Forty-six?"
"Negative," Caine said.
"What happened with the mark-twenty-one?"
The confrontation by the road? "No problems," Caine said, feeling sweat gathering on his forehead.
The longer this conversation went on, the better the chance he'd say something so far out of normal parlance that they'd tumble to the charade.
"Okay. Mark-four, Em-Jay Forty-six. Stay on it."
"Smugglers?" Braune asked as Caine replaced the mike.
"Best I could come up with on the spur of the moment," Caine told him. "I'm not at all sure he bought it, though. Better signal the others to watch for company."
Braune nodded and reached for his tingler.
—
They'd covered perhaps half of the thirty kilometers back when the reaction finally came.
It came from both air and ground, and was clearly more than simply a routine check. Rounding a gentle curve, Caine caught a glimpse of a Security car parked sideways three hundred meters ahead, directly in front of one of the short tunnels straddling this part of the road. Simultaneously, an armed spotter swooped down to pace them a few meters up.
"Have Pittman drop back; I'm passing," Caine snapped to Braune, swinging into the other lane and leaning hard on the accelerator. Once, Lathe had demonstrated that Security cars on the planet Argent were routinely built tough; Caine hoped to hell that pattern held here, too.
Ahead, the Security men grouped behind their car suddenly realized what he was intending, and laser flashes lanced ineffectively out as they tried to fire while dashing madly for cover. Caine aimed toward the rear of the blocking car and braced himself... and with a horrendous crash they were past and into the relative safety of the tunnel.
"Signal the others to pull over," he told Braune, confirming via mirror that the second car had successfully followed them through the ruined roadblock. "When we get out, check the trunk and see if we've got anything heavy enough to take out that spotter."
A moment later the cars were side by side in the darkness. "We've got to lose that air cover," he told the others through their side window as Braune rummaged in the Security car's trunk. "If I remember the road properly, there's another tunnel coming up maybe four hundred meters past this one.