Ethan switched on the engine and began turning the truck on the track.
‘Somewhere we don’t want to stay,’ he replied. ‘Are you okay?’
Lopez nodded slowly, staring ahead as Ethan turned toward the coast. ‘They hit me over the damned head. Where’s Abrahem?’
‘We lost him. We’ve got to get back to the coast or we’ll become permanent residents here.’
Lopez turned and looked through the shattered window of the truck.
‘Then get back to the coast faster,’ she said.
Ethan looked back and saw several vehicles hurtling toward them down the trail, clouds of dust billowing behind them. He cursed silently and slammed the accelerator down as far as it would go and squinted in the brilliant sunlight streaming across the horizon as the sun began to rise. The Somalians must have heard the Seahawk even from miles away, and headed east immediately.
A deafening crack split the air between them and the windscreen of the jeep blossomed with fractures and exploded inwards, showering them with sparkling shards of glass.
‘They’re good shots!’ Lopez shouted above the howling wind and she turned, pulled Ethan’s pistol from its holster and tried to take aim through the shattered rear window.
Ethan glanced in his side mirror at the nearest vehicle, a hundred yards behind them and closing fast. The second was right behind it and obscured in the dust trail of the first.
‘We’ve got about three miles to go!’ he shouted.
Lopez fired a shot and Ethan saw the first sickly flicker of panic in her expression. Somalia was a no — man’s — land of warlords, militants and deprived villages. If they were captured here they would vanish and never be seen again, the brutality of their captors well known.
The leading truck was within fifty yards now, two men in the front and several in the rear bearing rifles that were being fired at random, the puffs of smoke from their barrels visible in Ethan’s mirror. Ethan heard shots zip past a few feet from his window and he ducked reflexively.
‘Jesus!’
Ethan jerked the wheel from side to side and looked back to see thick dust clouds billowing outwards behind them, and almost immediately he lost sight of the leading vehicle some thirty yards behind as the dust concealed them from the gunfire. Another desperate shot rang out, rocketing by with a supersonic crack somewhere above their heads.
‘It’s not working!’ Lopez shouted. ‘We’re not going to make it!’
Ethan looked about the jeep desperately and then he saw the truck behind them loom forth from their dust trail, heard the sound of its engine above that of the truck he was driving, saw the faces of the militants crowding the rear, their eyes wide and shining with mindless hate, pink mouths agape, ugly rifles and machine guns pointing at them.
‘Hang on!’ he yelled.
Lopez rammed her boots up against the dashboard as Ethan slammed his foot down onto the brakes.
The truck’s wheels locked up on the dusty trail and it shuddered as it skipped and bounced across the rough ground. The truck behind it rushed up as Ethan dropped his head slightly and relaxed his grip on the wheel to prevent his arms from being broken as he took his foot off the brake pedal at the last instant.
The pursuing truck’s engine noise rose to a deafening crescendo and then it smashed into the back of their vehicle even as he heard the wheels lock up and screams of alarm compete with the roaring engine. Ethan was slammed backwards in his seat as the truck was catapulted forward, and he heard screams as three bodies were hurled over the cab of the pursuing vehicle and slammed into the rear of his own.
Ethan slammed the throttle back down and the truck accelerated away as he heard the second pursuing vehicle slam into the first behind them with a crash of rending metal and the screams of injured militants as they toppled from the back of Ethan’s truck. He turned and saw the first vehicle’s exhaust puff a thick cloud of black smoke as it pulled away from the wreckage, the driver screaming something unintelligible as he accelerated away again. Ethan saw the injured bodies of the militants hurled onto the track quiver as the truck’s tires crunched over them.
‘Balls.’
Ethan turned to concentrate on the view ahead as Lopez took aim and fired two shots, both of them impacting the truck behind but none of them injuring any of the militants still aboard.
Ethan pushed the accelerator to the floor, but the truck wallowed and creaked as it weaved lazily across the trail.
‘Go faster!’ Lopez yelled.
‘I can’t, the impact must have fractured the back end!’
Ethan looked in his mirror and saw the truck pursuing them once more, this time with suicidal rage as the militants chanted and jeered, the driver’s face smeared with blood from the recent impact.
Ethan saw the bluff ahead and the low buildings of El Hur and he realized instantly that the race was over: they’d run out of road. He was about to consider swerving off — road or even stopping and trying to shoot all of the militants behind them before they could be overpowered when a terrific crescendo of rotor blades hammered the air before him and vortexes of dense dust swirled in golden tornadoes into the blue sky.
From behind the bluff the SH–60 Seahawk rose up, its wicked looking side — mounted cannon pointed straight at Ethan.
‘Get down!’ Ethan shouted.
A crackling blast ripped the sky before them as the helicopter’s guns opened up, hails of tracer fire rocketing over the truck and slamming into the vehicle behind them. Ethan glimpsed in his rear view mirror the truck vanish in a shower of bright sparks and a cloud of black smoke as it veered sharply left, hit the bank alongside the trail and lifted off, rolling in mid — air to slam down into the desert as militants’ bodies flew from the wreckage, their bodies riddled with 20mm shells. Ethan saw the vehicle crash onto its back amid a cloud of twisted metal and spinning tyres.
Ethan’s truck slowed as it reached the bluff, blundered up through the thick sand and came to a halt. He clambered out, Lopez joining him as they dashed down toward the beach to where the Seahawk was landing. Its side door opened and the SEAL commander reached out with one gloved hand and helped them aboard.
‘Thought you weren’t coming back?’ Ethan challenged.
‘We weren’t!’ the commander yelled as the helicopter lifted off. ‘We spotted your vehicle fleeing the Somalians as we took off. Abrahem got away into the bush, probably on foot! He must’ve been among the villagers who attacked you.’
Ethan cursed as he strapped himself into his seat and shouted above the noise of the beating rotors.
‘Contact the fleet, tell them that he’s heading for America!’
‘We don’t know that for sure?!’
‘That a chance you want to take?’ Ethan challenged.
The commander gritted his teeth and relayed the command to the pilots.
XXIV
The SH–60 Seahawk touched down on the deck of the enormous aircraft carrier, and despite the ear protection he was wearing Ethan could hear the tremendous noise soaring across the decks as they climbed down from the helicopter’s interior. A buffeting gale whistled across the carrier’s flat deck as it sailed at twenty knots into the prevailing wind, the ocean churning by far below her massive hull.
Crewmen in colored shirts corralled them against the Seahawk, which had folded its tail back upon itself and turned its rotors into a single stack that lay back across the length of its fuselage to minimize the amount of space it required upon the ship. Steam from the launch catapults billowed across the deck from the bows as Ethan saw a Grumman EA–6B Prowler aircraft thunder down the catapults and roar off the deck into the turbulent dawn sky.