Noordhof ran unsteadily towards the gunship, like a drunk man. He was holding the side of his head. The pilot leaned over and opened the side door. The Colonel buckled himself in; blood was oozing out of a three-inch gash in front of his ear.
“You should get that seen to, sir.”
“The road to Mexico City. They’ve got a jeep.”
The gunship soared rapidly into the air.
“How much of a start, sir?”
“Christ knows.” Noordhof’s words were coming out strained; maybe concussion, the pilot thought, or maybe pain, or maybe the giant bruise at the side of the soldier’s jaw made speech difficult. “I was out maybe ten minutes. It took you ten to get here. I guess they have a twenty-minute start.”
“No problem, sir. All we have to do is follow the road. We’ll have them in five.”
“We have to get off the road!” Webb yelled above the screaming engine. Judy, hunched forward like a shortsighted old woman, ignored him. Swathes of rain streamed across the cone of the headlights. The jeep’s speedometer was hovering at around eighty miles an hour independently of the curves in the stormswept road. He tried again, putting his wet face close to hers and holding grimly on to the dashboard. “The helicopter at Oaxtepec — it has thermal imaging. All he has to do is follow the road. Can you hear me, you crazy witch? Even if you switch off your lights the heat from your exhaust will show up like a whore in church.”
“You have a map, stupid? Where do we leave the road?”
“Another ten minutes on it and we’re dead. Watch that corner. Oh my God. Why did you wait until the last second to move on Noordhof? You had me worried.”
“A New Mexico scorpion, am I? Anyway, how did you know I wasn’t on Noordhof’s side?”
Another glistening corner rushed up and Webb grabbed her arm to stay on. Arcs of mud and water shot past his head. The jeep hammered into a deep pothole and he was momentarily in free-fall. “That slide into the gorge. If you were in with them you wouldn’t have told me it was a murder attempt. Anyway, if God had meant you to fool me he’d have given you brains.”
“And the pigs thought I was expendable,” she shouted furiously.
“They recruited you and…”
“… and I went along with them to see how deep it went. Like you, Oliver, I didn’t know who I could trust.”
“Get off the road in five minutes or we’re dead…”
“The pigs, the lying, treacherous pigs!”
“… and half the planet with us!”
Mexico, the Last Hour
They flew six hundred feet high in pitch black, the machine bucketing in the wind, but in the infrared the road below was easily traced even through the torrential rain.
A brilliant green spot appeared at the top of the HUD and drifted slowly down. The pilot grunted in satisfaction. “Contact. Two miles ahead.”
Noordhof peered through the driving rain into the blackness ahead. He thought he saw a hazy light but it disappeared. In a second it reappeared, more strongly now, at first seeming to move unphysically fast over the ground before it resolved itself into the reflection of headlights sweeping from side to side as the driver manoeuvred round corners.
“I see them,” said Noordhof. Then: “Take them out.”
“Sir?”
“You having problems with your hearing, Mister?”
“Sir, is that an authorized order? This is Mexican territory. We’re not at war with Mexico, sir.”
“Ay-ffirmative it’s legal,” Noordhof lied. “Ay-ffirmative you’re in Mexico. And if you question my orders again ayffirmative I’ll stick your head up your ass.”
The pilot pulled the collective up and the gunship soared into the clouds, stabilizing at two thousand feet. The storm played with the machine like a child with a rattle. They flew blind, the infrared increasingly useless against the water and the pilot increasingly nervous about mountains. Finally he lost his nerve and dropped the machine below the cloud base. Noordhof looked behind; they were well past the headlights.
The pilot took the machine on for a minute and then turned it round, pushing the stick forward to decrease the lift, and settled gently down to the road, facing back towards a corner. He loaded a single rocket, pressed a key to arm it, and put his thumb over the fire button, with his free hand ready to switch on the searchlight when the jeep appeared. At this range there would be no need for a guidance mode: it was just switch on, take a second to line up and then, fried gringo.
Light scattered off a stony field. The pilot tensed. The headlights came into view about three hundred yards away. He began to press his thumb against the firing button, switched on the searchlight, and the wet bodywork of a melon truck glistened brilliantly in the beam. With a single curse the pilot switched off the light and soared away, leaving the driver standing on the brakes and frantically crossing himself.
They flew on for another five minutes, following the curving road.
“Okay,” Noordhof finally said. “So they’re cute. They’ve left the road.”
“Where, sir? It’s all mountains.”
“They ain’t on the road. So they must be off it.”
“I’ll go back and do a to-and-fro sweep, sir.”
“Just don’t hit any mountains.”
It seemed incredible, but the weather was getting worse, the sheer mass of water cutting down transmission through the normally optically thin infrared window and degrading the imager’s range. The radar was a mass of snow. He pulled the stick to the left, veering off the road, and began to fly low, in narrowly spaced sweeps about five miles wide. He began to wonder if maybe they weren’t so crazy after all.
Webb sat awkwardly on a melon and put his back up against a thin metal girder entwined with ropes, spreading his legs wide to maximize lateral stability. He could see Judy in silhouette, jammed in a corner, knees almost round her ears.
He looked at his watch, and could just make out 4:59 a.m. on the luminous dial. It might take the pilot half an hour to find the empty jeep and check out the surrounding countryside before he cottoned on. It might be more, and it might be less.
Judy and the driver had talked in Spanish and Webb understood there was a village with a telephone which they said worked quite often. If Julio’s lazy son had done a proper job on the carburettor they would be there in maybe half an hour, otherwise who could say? From there we could phone a garage for a repair. He could recommend his cousin Miguel, who would not object to being wakened for gringo business.
But if the rain stops, Webb thought, the pilot’s IR range will expand and he’ll find the jeep in minutes. The hammering of the rain on the tarpaulin was deafening and brought joy to Webb’s heart; the occasional faltering of the engine, however, was having the opposite effect.
He hadn’t expected it would be at the bottom of a gorge and he almost missed the faint, fuzzy blob on the imager. He dropped to a hundred metres above the ground, hovering over the spot. He switched on the Night Sun and a cone of driving rain swept through the brilliant beam.
The jeep was lying on its side, three quarters immersed in black surging water. The gorge was about thirty feet deep and the ground on either side sloped steeply upwards. He lowered the gunship as far as he dared, the blades whipping the water below into a spray.
“No sir!” he shouted but it was too late, Noordhof had opened a door and leapt into space. The Colonel disappeared under the water with a splash and immediately reappeared, drifting rapidly towards the jeep. He grabbed at it in passing and held on firmly with both hands, his face more under the water than above it. Then he vanished. The pilot, alarmed, took the gunship down until the runners were almost touching the water. The blades were hardly a foot from either side of the gorge. In the confined space, the roar from the quiet gunship was painful.