There was a wide plaza in front of the science building. Some students were still running out the main doors, while others stood and stared after where the little Honda had vanished. They all reacted when Mercer ground his fist into the SUV’s horn and steered the truck up the four steps onto the plaza. He now saw marks in the snow where the Honda had sped up a handicapped access ramp that was too narrow for the big GMC. Students scattered and Jordan was beginning to scream. Mercer ignored it all and guided the truck toward the entrance doors, slowing enough to give stragglers time to get clear before he rammed the truck into the opening. Though there were double doors, the entry was too narrow for the SUV. Aluminum jambs buckled and glass shattered when Mercer rammed the vehicle through.
More people reacted to the pandemonium. One hysterical woman stood with her hands clutched to her mouth and shrieked maniacally. Others ran for a set of internal stairs. The last of the students who’d been in the ramp made it to the atrium and scattered.
“What are you doing?” Jordan yelled.
“Not sure,” Mercer told her.
The ramp was too narrow for the SUV, but following the Honda wasn’t Mercer’s intention. The sides of the truck were scraped down to raw paint, and both mirrors had been torn off by the entry doors. There was little additional damage Mercer could do to the SUV by slamming its nose into the tunnel entrance. The four-by-four actually made it deep enough that the front fender wedged against where the ramp began to curve out and up. There was no way the Honda could make it past them. Nor could he open either his or Jordan’s door. He fumbled for a button to hydraulically open the rear gate.
“Go,” he told Jordan. “I’m right behind you.”
She needed no further prompting and quickly wriggled between the two front seats and legged over the back bench seat. In the rearview mirror Mercer saw her jeans stretched tight across her backside before his attention was grabbed by a new rush of frightened students running down the ramp, casting panicked glances behind them.
They reached the stuck SUV but paused at the obstruction for only a moment. Like lemmings, the students climbed over the hood and on top of the roof, forcing down the rear tailgate before Jordon could escape the trapped vehicle.
“Mercer,” she cried from the cargo area.
The last student leapt onto the truck’s hood, looking goggle-eyed at Mercer before scrambling up the windshield and onto the roof. Seconds later he slid down the back of the SUV and vanished across the science building’s atrium.
Mercer was just reaching for the tailgate button again when the Honda came roaring down the ramp. There was a passenger sitting next to the driver this time. It was the team leader. He was in his forties with weathered lines around his eyes and a strong jaw. Any woman would have considered him handsome. His hair was just a little longer than a military buzz cut, and under a dark coat and thick sweater his chest and shoulders appeared broad.
That was all he saw of the gunman. Mercer might have thought he had trapped the killers in the building by blocking their escape, but the Honda’s young driver was nothing if not adaptable. He cranked the wheel to the left, and the nimble car smashed through a laminated wood handrail and then the ramp’s curved glass wall. The panes exploded in an eruption of shards that dusted the ground below. The car chased after the glittering avalanche. It had been doing less than twenty miles per hour and yet flew a remarkable distance before crashing to the ground in a dustup of white powder that cushioned the eight-foot drop. The driver kept the momentum going, the front wheels spinning wildly as the vehicle grabbed and fought to find traction.
Mercer swore. He hadn’t anticipated that. While the Honda reached a shoveled pathway and its tires found purchase, he dropped the GMC into reverse and pulled the SUV free of the ramp with the piercing whine of nails on a chalkboard.
He threw the Yukon into a tight K-turn, knocking over an abandoned reception desk and a bunch of ferns in a concrete planter.
“Hold on!” His warning came too late to prevent Jordan Weismann from being tossed around like the marble in a can of spray paint.
He jammed the gas pedal again and laid on the horn. By now all the students had wisely sought cover away from the chaos, and he had a straight shot for the main doors. Mercer misjudged slightly, and the big truck pinballed through the tight opening, breaking more glass and leaving behind curls of chrome trim on the floor.
The shooters were pulling away, but not too quickly. Their crazy stunt of launching the car off the ramp must have damaged the Honda somehow. It was going nowhere near its top speed. Mercer and Jordan had a chance. He took off after the gunmen, his eyes slitted against the glare of a newly shining sun. The Honda was headed for a back gate out of the fenced campus, and Mercer calculated angles and speeds and felt he had a good shot at catching them before they reached it. Jordan wedged herself back into her seat next to him, her expression as determined as his. It took just a few moments for the rampaging V8 to close the gap. Mercer felt the comforting weight of the P-38 still nestled in his jacket.
He hadn’t taken any professional driving courses, but he’d talked to enough law enforcement to know how to spin out a car while in pursuit. The maneuver had more to do with momentum than the relative weights of the cars, but here, with a GMC SUV versus the little Japanese import, the advantage was all Mercer’s.
Until the Fit’s sunroof slid open and the team leader emerged, cradling a wicked-looking black machine pistol with a thick silencer. Just the day before Mercer had faced a full-on assault of four such weapons while driving a massive bucket loader. The shooters couldn’t miss, then. Here, the ground was even rougher, there was only one gun, and despite its size, the Yukon was tiny compared to the Caterpillar 990 loader.
Mercer was confident that in the most vulnerable seconds before they rammed the car, the gunman’s aim would be thwarted by his weapon’s inherent inaccuracy, his bouncing gun platform, and the fact his target was hopping and jouncing as well. Mercer was just about to commit to his attack when he studied the small weapon’s barrel and not the hurtling car and realized the 9mm aperture was rock steady. The shooter was so well trained and so proficient in this, the most difficult of shooting situations, that he had a dead bead on his pursuers.
“Down!” Mercer shouted, reaching across the center console to haul Jordon below the dash while he cranked the wheel sharply left, hurling the Yukon through a split-rail fence.
Half of a thirty-round magazine emptied into the SUV in as much time as it took Mercer to yell his warning, but his driving reflexes had been quicker than both his mouth and the gunman’s finger, because the bullets stitched a trail across the top of the SUV’s windshield and peppered a line down its flank. None of them hit where the shooter had been aiming — a tight slashing burst across the windscreen that would have decapitated driver and passenger alike.
While the Honda wove through a small forest of pines, its taillights growing more distant, Mercer fought to regain control as the Yukon fishtailed wildly in the middle of what appeared to be an open meadow. Having never been to the school before, he didn’t understand the significance of the split-rail fence they had blasted through and didn’t know something was seriously wrong until he heard the first moaning cracks of ice giving way under the truck’s nearly three tons of steel. The open field was a pond surrounded by a fence so students didn’t wander too close. Mercer chanced a look into the rearview mirror and saw that the ice in their wake was bobbing in great broken slabs that had dark water lapping at the back wheels.