They stepped into the daylight. The sun had reached the tops of the Brandenburg woods and the dark would be settling within the hour.
Jon picked up the padlock from the cement ramp where Kyra had laid it and turned his back to the base. He hooked the shackle over the entry doorway latch—
“Jon!” Kyra yelled.
Jon looked up.
Five men were talking toward them. They were dressed in plainclothes, short haircuts, with pistols drawn. They saw the Americans and shifted from a slow walk to a dead run, guns raised. The man on the far left fired and Jon heard the round strike concrete.
Jon dropped the lock, and the analysts ran for the woods, just to the south. More rounds hit the bunker, closer than the first. The men behind them yelled. Russian, he realized. He couldn’t understand their commands, but the cadence and guttural sounds of the language were unmistakable.
He heard their pistols fire over the sounds of his own boots tearing through the grass and leaves. The rounds cracked the air open as they passed by the running analysts faster than sound. Kyra sprinted ahead of him, her breath already getting heavy. She looked back, saw she was outpacing her lumbering partner, and slowed up to let him close the distance.
They reached the woods and crashed into the undergrowth at full speed. The brush and weeds slowed them, and the trees forced them to run in anything but a straight line. Three hundred feet into the forest, Kyra ran up to one of the larger trees and stopped for a second, looking back. Jon caught up with her and looked back. He couldn’t see their pursuers, but their voices carried well enough as they cursed and yelled at the scrub pines and low bushes tearing at their legs and arms.
“Still coming,” Kyra said, her breathing rapid. She pulled her backpack off and tore open a Velcro pocket on the outside. “Which way?”
Jon looked up, and picked out the sun’s direction through the green canopy. “We’re running south. That means the road is that way.” He pointed left. “The truck is a mile down, there.” It would be at least a fifteen-minute run through these woods.
“A mile,” Kyra muttered. She pulled out a Glock 21, the clip already locked in. She racked the slide to chamber the first round. “Maybe we can slow them down.”
A Russian shouted in the distance, not quite so far away now, and the analysts started to run again. “We’re on friendly soil,” Jon yelled. “You’re not supposed to be carrying!”
Kyra leaned around the oak and sent three rounds back at the men behind. “Are you complaining?”
“Nope,” Jon told her. “Just don’t tell the Germans.”
“You keep telling me that.”
The woods were pulling on them, trying to slow them down. Surely it was doing the same for the men behind, but every shout seemed closer than the one before. Bullets whined through the trees around them. He could hear them tearing into the trees, dull thuds and hard cracks, but he could not see where they were hitting. Kyra broke stride, turning and firing as often as she dared, but there were far more rounds coming in their direction than she was sending back.
Jon looked left and saw the concrete wall that bordered the open road. They could jump it, get into the open, and put some distance between them and the Russian hunters before the men realized they had left the woods—
He saw movement beyond the wall. The Russians had seen the road and come to Jon’s own conclusion. Two of their pursuers had moved out to the road on the other side of the wall, flanking them. If they were Lavrov’s men, then they were Spetsnaz, he thought, and they had a clear path to run all the way to the truck. They would certainly reach it before he or Kyra would.
Five soldiers and five guns at least… two analysts and one gun, Jon thought. The odds weren’t hard to calculate. Even if he and Kyra turned west and moved deeper into the woods, the men would almost certainly run them to ground. There wasn’t enough distance between them and their pursuers, and the men behind were in better shape than he was. Kyra was young and fast, but Jon was past his prime.
He saw Kyra go down hard in the dirt ahead of him, stumbling over some growth in the brush. Jon thought for a moment that one of the Russians had finally drawn close enough to be accurate with his sidearm, but the girl scrambled to her feet and pushed off, trying to recover the speed she had lost. He was hardly fast enough to catch up before she was back at her full speed—
— no, not her full speed, he realized. Kyra was running slow so she wouldn’t lose him.
Run faster, old man, he told himself. His body refused to obey. He didn’t have more speed in him to give.
He looked at the young woman, the world moving in slow motion around him.
The enemy was too close, there were too many obstacles between them and the truck. Even without him plodding behind, every tree, every root, every dip in the ground would slow Kyra down. She couldn’t run at full speed over this damp ground. At every step, the earth was pulling at her feet, forcing her to use her strength to pull her feet back up. The road was in better shape, but it was no escape route. If she jumped the wall, the men on the open road would be in her path and they would have a clear field of fire. If she stayed in the trees, the enemy behind her would get into pistol range long before she reached the truck. She would be forced to stop running and find cover, and then the men on the other side of the wall would climb back over into the woods, get in behind her, and that would be that.
For three years, he’d tried to give her, this broken girl, what little he had to offer. He’d been the best friend he knew how to be, which wasn’t much, but she’d taken it and returned more than he’d ever given her.
Kyra needed more time, more space, and she didn’t have it. Maybe he could give her that.
He dug deep and decided he might have enough energy for one more sprint.
Kyra turned and fired again. Jon ran up to her and put his hand on the Glock. “Give me the gun,” he ordered. His words were labored, his lungs wheezing hard.
“What?”
Jon didn’t ask twice. He reached out and put his hand on the weapon. Kyra, confused, released it to him. “Keep running!” Jon yelled. Then he pulled away, running left for the concrete wall.
The Spetsnaz soldiers on the road were twenty yards ahead of them when Jon reached the concrete wall. He ran at the barrier at full speed, sprinted up, and pulled himself over. He hit the dirt on his feet, the mud absorbing some of the impact and the sound. He pushed off and ran after the Russians. The soldiers ahead hadn’t heard the sound of his boots in the wet dirt, their ears filled with the sound of their own gasping breath.
Jon raised the Glock, lined up the sights as best he could with one hand on a dead run.
He’d shot men before, once in Iraq. The dreams had haunted him for years, driven him into depression, and left him unsure whether he could ever kill another person again, even in his own defense. He knew the answer to that question now and he was at peace with the answer. The Russians would probably kill him and the act wouldn’t have a chance to torture him after.
Jon pulled the trigger.
The pistol kicked hard in his hand, the barrel jerking up. The shot was high, his aim thrown off by his own motion. He’d never shot anyone moving on the run before, but he was close enough. One of the soldiers went down as the .45 round punched into his shoulder, his body twisting and his legs collapsing under him.
The sound of the shot reached his companion’s ears just as the man started to tumble to the ground. The second Russian spun around, trying to line up his weapon, but the advantage of surprise had allowed Jon to pull the Glock back down and line up his own. His second shot fired a fraction of a second sooner than his target’s and the round struck the Russian’s chest on the right side, knocking off the soldier’s aim and spinning him as his Makarov pistol fired.