A pair of gunshots zinged close to Chavez and his prisoner. A third slammed into the left calf of the man in the black raincoat, and he tumbled into the grass.
Chavez spun around, dropped to his knees, and raised his weapon. While doing this he said, “Dom! Suppress that fire!”
Dom Caruso was running along the sidewalk fifty yards southeast of the minivan, and he could see Chavez raising his gun back in the direction of the trees and the wounded prisoner rolling in the grass.
He dropped to his knees himself, raised his Smith & Wesson, and took aim at the edge of the tree line. It would be a long shot to hit someone with his compact pistol, especially considering he had been at a full sprint for over a minute and his heart was racing, causing his front sight to bob and weave with his heartbeat. But his job was to suppress the enemy, to give them something else to worry about.
He wasn’t here to win a sniper competition.
As soon as he saw movement — a man in a T-shirt and shorts with a gun in his hand — he fired. Off to his left Ding Chavez did the same.
Jack scooped up the wounded prisoner in a fireman’s carry, while Chavez fired at the men in the trees. Jack lumbered with the traitor back to the minivan as fast as he could, trying his best to ignore the gunfire going on behind him. He literally threw the man off his shoulders and through the open rear door of the vehicle, then he drew his own pistol and aimed at the trees.
“Ding, I’m covering! Move!”
Jack fired three rounds at a flash of gunfire deep in the trees. As he did this he realized the man he’d scooped up didn’t have his backpack on him any longer. “Ding, the pack!”
In front of him on his right Ding raced toward the minivan, not even slowing down while he swept his arm down and scooped up the backpack lying on the grass. He leapt in the back with the wounded man, and Jack emptied his magazine at dark targets in the trees. He wasn’t sure if he’d hit anyone, but now it was his job to drive.
As he got behind the wheel he could see Dom Caruso on the sidewalk, fifty yards straight in front of him, changing out his magazine and firing again on the North Koreans. Jack said, “I’m on you in ten seconds!” And then he floored the Mitsubishi.
He heard bullets tear through the metal of the vehicle as he raced on, and the shattering of glass in the back.
“You okay back there?” he asked, careful not to use any names this close to their prisoner.
Chavez replied, “You just get us out of this and we’re fine. He’s got a GSW to his leg, but he’ll make it.”
Jack saw Dom Caruso stand from his crouch and begin running toward the minivan that was quickly approaching him. But Jack saw something Caruso did not. Behind him on his left, the POLISI car was racing across the street, directly toward Caruso from his left side. They were going to try to get in front of this shooter and cut him off.
Jack shouted, “Hang on back there!” He turned his wheel to the right, raced past a confused Caruso, and slammed the front of his Mitsubishi into the front-left quarter-panel of the police car, spinning it forty-five degrees and smashing the front left tire.
Jack’s airbag deployed, smacking him in the face. Cops inside the vehicle would probably be dazed from the impact, and they’d certainly be pissed, but this was a hell of a lot better than the Campus team getting arrested and held in Indonesia on weapons and kidnapping charges.
Dom turned around and ran back to the Mitsubishi and dove into the open back door, on top of Ding and the prisoner, who by now was crushed facedown on the floorboard. Dom closed the door behind him, Jack waved away the chalky dust from the deployment of his airbag, and he pushed his minivan forward through the damaged police car, while the snaps of handgun rounds continued striking the vehicle.
“Heads down!” Jack yelled.
As he drove past the cop car he looked down at the stunned and dazed police, through their cracked windshield.
“Sorry, guys,” he said, but they couldn’t hear him.
He floored it now, charging east, and then he made a hard left and raced northeast to the exit of the square.
In the backseat the prisoner was pulled into a sitting position. He moaned in pain for a moment, then he shouted, “Listen to me! You have to—”
Chavez put the barrel of his pistol in the man’s open mouth. “Trust me, you’ll have plenty of people who want to hear you talk. I’m just not one of them.” Chavez now turned to Dom. “This guy is a screamer. He tried to lead the DPRK goons to us in the trees.”
Dom Caruso said, “I’m gettin’ the tape!”
“Good deal,” replied Chavez.
Seconds later Dom used electrical tape from his personal medical kit to tape the man’s mouth shut. Ding then rolled the man on his stomach and looked over his calf wound more closely, used gauze and tape from his own kit to stop the bleeding. It wasn’t bad at all, but it would be messy if he didn’t stanch the flow.
From the front Jack said, “Something just occurred to me. Either I’m the luckiest dude in the world for finding this van at the particular corner of the park I exited, or they have other vehicles around the square. That means they have other guys mobile who can chase us.”
Chavez said, “And they know what kind of vehicle we’re in, seeing how it’s theirs and all.”
“Yeah,” Jack conceded. “Good point. I’m going to go back to the parking lot to the west. We’ll transfer into our rental to take back to the airport.”
“Do it, but watch out for trouble.”
“Sure,” Jack quipped. “We sure wouldn’t want anything bad to happen.”
19
The Hendley Associates Gulfstream G550 took off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport just fifty-one minutes after Jack Ryan crashed into the Jakarta police department patrol car.
Helen and Country were still in the process of climbing out to the northeast, barely a thousand feet off the ground, when Chavez, Ryan, and Caruso moved close around the zip-tied American prisoner. He was bandaged and stable, but his gag remained in place.
They’d searched him on the way to the airport, and he had no identification with him whatsoever. Certainly he’d left his wallet at the embassy or his home to make the pass with the North Koreans in case something went wrong.
In his backpack they had found three binders full of papers, all of which were clearly marked classified, although the ones Jack had thumbed through briefly were all under the classification Confidential, the lowest level.
Jack and the other Campus men were surprised to find that all this was over documents that were less than Top Secret.
The three men took a few minutes to go through the papers, then Chavez ripped the electrical tape off the man’s mouth. Before the prisoner could even speak, Chavez asked, “What’s your name?”
The man looked confused. He said, “Ben. Ben Kincaid. Benjamin Terrance Kincaid. Did you—”
Chavez started to tape the man’s mouth back up. “All I need to know. It’s going to be a long flight, so take a nap,” he said, but before he could push the tape tight, Kincaid managed to push it away with his tongue, long enough to say one thing.
“Jennifer! Let me talk to—”
Chavez stopped. More curious than anything else, he lowered the tape.
“Jennifer?”
Kincaid said, “Please, sir. I just need to know she’s safe.”
Chavez looked at Jack and Dom, then back to Kincaid. “Who the hell is Jennifer?”
Kincaid stared wide-eyed at the three men. “Who is Jennifer? Who? She’s my wife!”