Текст книги "The Jungle"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Jack Du Brul
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Croissard had played him for a chump. Cabrillo looked at the suicide bombing at the hotel under a new light, but he couldn’t see an angle that benefited the Swiss financier’s master plan. That wasn’t staged. Those men were looking to kill as many people as they could. It was just luck that he and Max had survived. There was no way Croissard was behind it. Of that, he was certain.

He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been duped. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had even bluffed him at poker. He’d always prided himself on knowing all the angles, thinking three steps ahead, and having an edge over everyone he dealt with.

How could he not have seen it?

The question played though his mind on a never-ending loop. There was no answer. Mark and Eric had vetted Croissard. The guy was just a businessman. What the hell was he playing at? Why the subterfuge? And then came another question he couldn’t possibly answer: What had been in the bag that made it worth sending the first pair of explorers and then shelling out millions to the Corporation when they fell off the radar?

Cabrillo lay with his back propped up against the cement wall of his cell while a sea of unknowns filled his brain.

12

TO SMITH’S SURPRISE AND HER CREDIT, THE WOMAN DIDN’T argue when he said they should head into the jungle after the rope bridge parted. They stayed just long enough to see that the Burmese soldiers were hauling up their two new prisoners before they ran for cover in the forest. With the bridge out, the soldiers wouldn’t be able to follow until they could find a place to land their chopper. Smith and Linda would have more than enough of a head start to elude capture. But just in case the Burmese had a tracker as accomplished as Lawless, they made certain to sweep the trail behind them.

After an hour of hard going, covering ground they had just crossed that morning, Smith called for a five-minute break. His companion wasn’t even breathing hard. Smith plopped himself onto the ground, panting heavily. In the background was the omnipresent sound of birds and insects. Linda squatted next to Smith, her expression grim, her mind doubtlessly on the fate of her captured companions.

She wiped at her eyes and turned away from Smith. It was the opening he’d been waiting for. He silently drew his pistol and placed the barrel at the back of her head.

“Drop your rifle, carefully,” he ordered.

Linda had drawn air through her teeth and gone stiff. She had the REC7 across her knees. She slowly placed it on the ground in front of her. Smith kept up the pressure with his pistol as he reached out and dragged the rifle out of her range.

“Now pull out your pistol. Two fingers only.”

Like an automaton, Linda unsnapped her holster and, using just her thumb and index finger, drew the Glock 19 she favored. The instant her fingers opened, she ducked her head and spun, throwing up a blocking arm to push Smith’s pistol into the air. She’d known his attention would be on her weapon and used that as a distraction. She stabbed out with stiffened fingers and caught Smith in the throat just above where the collarbones met. Then she hit him in the side of the head with a left cross. The punch wasn’t her best because they were close together, but with his airways constricted from the jab it dazed the former Legionnaire.

Linda sprang to her feet and reared back to kick Smith in the head. Fast as an adder, he grabbed her foot out of the air and twisted it over so that Linda had no choice but to fall to the ground. He leapt onto her back with both knees, blowing the air from her lungs, and his weight made it difficult for her to refill them. He slammed the pistol into the nape of her neck.

“Try something like that again and you’re dead. Understand?” When Linda didn’t reply, he repeated the question and screwed the barrel deeper into her flesh.

“Yes,” she managed to croak.

Smith had a length of wire ready in his pocket. He grabbed Linda’s arms and placed them at the small of her back. One-handed, he looped the wire around her wrists and twisted the two ends closed. The wire was high enough up her forearms that she couldn’t reach it with her fingers. A second piece of wire bound her wrists to the reinforced belt loop of her camouflage fatigues. In just seconds Linda Ross was trussed up like a Christmas goose. Only then did he take his weight off of her. Linda coughed violently as her lungs began working again. Her face was bright red, and her eyes burned with rage.

“Why are you doing this?”

Smith ignored her. He retrieved his satellite phone from his pack and powered it up.

“Answer me, damnit!”

He stripped the baseball cap off her head and stuffed it into her mouth. With so much jungle overhead he couldn’t get a clear signal. He grabbed Linda and started walking toward a clearing about fifty yards away. He dumped her into the grass and sat opposite her. He noticed he had an e-mail that had come in first thing this morning:

Change of plans, my friend. As you know my intention all along was to use official channels for our search. Going with the Corporation was a risky choice. My negotiations have finally paid off. I have made expensive arrangements with a Myanmar official for a squad of soldiers to be sent out to the monastery. They know who you are. Together, you should be able to wipe out the Corporation team and complete the mission.

Smith scratched at the stubble on his jaw. This changed everything, and explained how the chopper happened to show up at the exact right time. This meant the first team sent into the jungle was probably attacked by smugglers rather than the army. Just bad luck on their part.

Smith wrote out his text:

Wish I’d read your e-mail sooner. I’ve spent the last hour running from the patrol. No harm done. BTW I have them. Cabrillo and another taken prisoner. I have their woman with me. Bound and gagged. Instructions?

A minute passed before the reply lit up the screen:

I knew you could do it! And three Corporation members grabbed in the process. Interesting. It seems the Oracle gave them far more credit than they deserve. It appears they are no longer a threat. What of the other team I sent? Any ideas?

Smith replied:

Basil was shot, most likely by drug runners. Munire drowned. He had them in a bag. They had been under the dais, just like it said in the Rustichello Folio I stole in England. I am about an hour away from the army unit. How do I make contact?

The response came a moment later:

I will get word to them that you are coming back to their location. They will stand down. You can fly with them back to Yangon. A jet is waiting.

That beat having to hike out. In the cosmic scheme, it made up for being in a firefight where he was never a target. He thumbed in another message and hit SEND:

What do I do with the woman?

Is she attractive?

Smith looked over at Linda and assessed her the way a butcher looks at a cut of meat.

Yes.

Bring her along. In case the Oracle didn’t misjudge as badly as we think, she makes a good bargaining chip. If we don’t need her, we can sell her. See you soon, and well done, my friend.

Smith shut off the satellite phone and put it back in his pack. He again looked over at Linda. She glared at him with laser intensity. He smirked. Her anger had absolutely no effect on him.

“On your feet.”

Linda continued to stare defiantly.

“I was just told to keep you alive,” he said, “but that is an order I needn’t worry about obeying. Either get on your feet or I shoot you now and leave your corpse to the vultures.”

Her defiance lasted another heartbeat or two. He could tell when she finally accepted that she no longer had choices. The fire remained behind those eyes, but her shoulders sagged just a little as tension ran out of her body. Linda rose. With her in the lead, and Smith just behind her enough so that she couldn’t try anything, they retraced their path and headed back to the monastery.

* * *

JUAN MARKED TIME by the twin ravages of hunger and thirst. The hunger was a dull ache that he could handle. It was the thirst that was driving him mad. He had tried pounding on the door to get someone’s attention, but he knew that they hadn’t forgotten him. They were breaking him down bit by bit through deliberate deprivation.

His tongue felt like a seared piece of meat that had been rammed into his mouth, and his skin had stopped sweating so that it felt papery and brittle. No matter how he tried not to think about it, images of water flooded his mind—glasses of it, lakes of it, whole oceans of it. It was the worst form of torture. They were letting his mind betray him the way Croissard and Smith had. He realized that the waterboard treatment had only been a lark, a way for them to amuse themselves. If it had worked, fine. If not, they already had the second phase of his interrogation mapped out.

This was their tried-and-true method of breaking prisoners, and he was quite sure it had never failed.

Suddenly the bolt securing his door snapped back with a metallic echo, and the hinges squealed like nails on a chalkboard. Two guards were there. Neither had weapons other than the rubber truncheons slipped under their belts. They stomped into the room and lifted Cabrillo from the floor. The Burmese are not usually big people, and these two were no exception. In his exhausted state, and with only one leg, Cabrillo was deadweight, and the soldiers staggered under him.

Cabrillo was dragged down the corridor toward where he had been waterboarded. The dread he felt was like a load of stones had been packed around his heart.

But they continued past the door and went farther down the hallway to another interrogation room. This one was square, cement, and had a table and two chairs. One was bolted to the floor, the other was occupied by the interrogator with the cultured voice. On the table was a carafe of water, its sides dewy from the humidity, and an empty glass.

“Ah,” the interrogator greeted him with a smile that was part bonhomie, part reptilian. “Good of you to join me, Mr. Smith.”

They were still using that name, Juan thought. They either hadn’t tortured MacD or he hadn’t broken. Or this guy was smart enough not to reveal what he’d learned from their other prisoner.

Juan was dumped into the chair, and it took everything in him to remain erect and keep his eyes on the interrogator and not ogle the pitcher. His mouth was too dry to speak.

“Allow me to introduce myself,” the interrogator said, pouring water into the glass so that the ice cubes clicked musically. “I am Colonel Soe Than. In case you were wondering, you have been our guest here at Insein for two and a half days.”

He set the glass in front of Cabrillo. Juan sat as still as a statue.

“Go ahead,” Than encouraged. “I will not think any less of you.”

With a studied deliberation, Juan reached for the water and took a measured sip.

Then he set the glass back onto the table, less than a quarter of it gone.

“I do admire your strength, Mr. Smith. You are one of the most disciplined men I’ve ever come across. By now, most people would have upended the carafe and sucked it all down. Of course, the abdominal cramps that accompany such a foolish mistake are as brutal as the original thirst.”

Juan said nothing.

“Before our time together comes to an end”—he glanced at his watch; it was the black military-style chronograph that Cabrillo had brought on the mission—“which should be in a half hour or so, I wonder if you would at least tell me your real name.”

Cabrillo took another slow sip of water. His body craved it, but he forced himself to put the glass back on the table. He cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was a hoarse croak. “No joke. It really is John Smith.”

Than’s forced civility vanished in an instant, and he swung a fist into Juan’s hand, which was lying palm down on the table. The blow wasn’t enough to break bone. He could see a smug look cross Than’s otherwise bland face. By reacting like he had, he was telling Juan that he knew the truth. MacD had broken.

“Chairman Juan Cabrillo,” Tran said, civility back in place, “of the Corporation. Preposterous name, by the way. You’re based out of an old freighter called the Oregon. Which, as of first light this morning, our navy and air force are searching for. They have orders to sink it on sight. That was what I got out of a bargain that’s been made: the satisfaction of punishing your people for transgressing on our soil.”

“Bargain?” Juan asked.

“Oh, I should tell you that when we told our friends to the north your identity—you see, we share everything with them since they are so supportive of our government—they were very interested to hear of your capture.” Cabrillo knew Than was talking about China, Myanmar’s largest trade partner and only real ally in the region. “They very much want to speak with you. Your compatriot, young Mr. Lawless, as well, but I get the impression that General Jiang is most anxious to speak with you. It seems you were once in the employ of the CIA and that you might have insight into certain espionage events that have taken place over the years.”

Juan had never worked in China during his time with the Agency and couldn’t fathom why a Chinese general would think he would know anything. He couldn’t even guess why his name would pique their interest. He’d been out of the game for years.

Than went on. “Though I’ve never worked directly with the general, I must tell you his reputation precedes him. You will look back at our time together with fondness in the coming months and wish that you had remained in my gentle and loving care.”

Another thought struck Juan just then. He still had his tracker chip, so the crew would know where he was, but getting him and MacD out of China was going to be damned close to impossible. His hand was a little unsteady when he drank more water. Than refilled his glass.

“Not so glib now, eh, Chairman?” Than taunted. “Still want to remain defiant?”

There came a knock on the door. Than nodded to the guard stationed next to it to open it. In strode a middle-aged Chinese man in a beribboned uniform with a peaked cap placed firmly on his salt-and-pepper head. His face was deeply wrinkled, the skin of a man who spent a great deal of time out in the field rather than in an office, pushing papers. Behind him was a tall woman, also in uniform. She was about thirty, with long, straight black hair and horn-rimmed glasses, with her bangs obscuring parts of her face.

Than stood quickly and extended a hand. He and the general conversed in Chinese. Jiang didn’t introduce his aide, nor did the general even glance in Cabrillo’s direction. Juan took the opportunity to keep sipping at the water, hoping that the fluid would give him strength for whatever hell Jiang had planned for him. Cabrillo studied the general a little closer. There was something familiar about him, but he was certain he’d never met the man before. Maybe he’d seen a photograph in a briefing. He wasn’t sure.

“On your feet,” Than said in English.

Cabrillo stopped wracking his brain and did as he was ordered, balancing as best he could on his only foot. One of the guards grabbed his arms and pinned them behind his back so he could whip on a pair of Flex-Cuffs. The plastic bit deep, but Juan had kept his wrists slightly apart so when the guard stepped away the binding wasn’t so tight. It was an old trick that on rare occasions had allowed him to get out of bindings or, at a minimum, make them a heck of a lot more comfortable. Well, less uncomfortable.

A minute later, MacD appeared with two more guards. They had to prop him on his feet. His uniform was hanging off him in rags, and fresh bruises covered his face, masking the old ones inflicted by the Taliban. His head lolled drunkenly, and if not for the guards, he would have collapsed. Spittle oozed from his lips. Jiang hardly gave Lawless a look, but his aide gasped when she saw him and had to stop herself from reaching out to him in a gesture of compassion.

They made a sad little procession. MacD was barely conscious, and Juan had to be dragged because he didn’t have the strength to hop. His guards sort of carried him under the shoulders and let his good leg take long steps.

They were taken into a large loading dock/motor pool. Sunlight blasted through the big overhead doors, forcing Juan to squint. The air reeked of diesel and spoiling food. Prisoners under the watchful eyes of more guards were unloading sacks of rice from the back of a Chinese-made stake truck with the baldest tires Cabrillo had ever seen. Its driver sat in the cab and smoked. Another truck was being loaded with produce grown on the prison grounds.

Parked just outside the big room was a white van without rear windows. The back doors were opened to reveal a cargo bed separated from the cab by a metal grille. The two prisoners were tossed into the back. MacD’s head hit with a thump and he lay still. There was nothing Cabrillo could do.

More Flex-Cuffs were used to secure the two men to hooks built into the floor. This wasn’t a regular prison vehicle, just a commercial van, but without internal door handles it was just as effective as an armored car. The doors slammed shut with a finality Juan felt in his bones. This was not going to end well.

A few more minutes went by. He could imagine Than and the general comparing torture techniques the way housewives swap recipes. Even with the front windows open the rear of the van grew as hot as a Dutch oven.

Jiang finally broke free from Than and got behind the wheel himself, his demure aide at his side in the passenger seat. They didn’t speak to each other as the engine was fired and the vehicle put into gear. A little wind puffed into the cargo area as they threaded through the prison grounds and headed toward the main gate. Juan couldn’t see anything but sky from his position on the floor, but he recalled that Insein Prison was a massive complex in northern Yangon built around a central hub like the spokes of a wheel. He also remembered that families were allowed to bring nonpolitical prisoners food at the perimeter wire and that, without it, many would simply starve to death.

Society is said to be measured by the condition of its prisons. Myanmar had to be at the bottom of the barrel.

The van slowed to a stop at the main gate. Guards checked the underside and opened the back doors. One pointed first at Juan, then at MacD, checked a clipboard, counted them a second time, and nodded. The doors were slammed closed.

They were a block from the prison, and Juan was about to try talking to the general when his aide opened the steel grille confining them in the back. She’d removed her glasses.

Juan gaped at her, unable to believe what he was seeing. She started crawling back into the cargo bed, carrying a small black case.

“How?” he rasped.

Her eyes’ shape changed with latex appliances and her hair dyed and lengthened with extensions, the Oregon’s chief medical officer, Dr. Julia Huxley, threw him the warmest smile he’d ever seen.

Then it dawned on him why he recognized the general. It was Eddie Seng, also heavily made up to appear older.

“Eddie and I were in the neighborhood.” She quickly cut Cabrillo’s Flex-Cuffs with a scalpel from her medical bag and started examining MacD Lawless.

“Don’t get cocky,” Seng warned from the driver’s seat. “We just passed a motorcade heading toward the prison and, if I don’t miss my guess, in the backseat of the second car was the real General Jiang. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

“What?” Cabrillo cried. “The Chinese really want me? What the hell for?”

Seng glanced over his shoulder. “It was before I joined the Corporation, but didn’t you sink one of their navy’s Luhu-class destroyers?”

“The Chengo,” Juan recalled. “It was the first time we ever worked with NUMA’s current director, Dirk Pitt.”

He took Hux’s seat in the van’s cab. On the center console was a liter bottle of water. He drank a third before rescrewing the cap. He wanted more, but cramping was a real concern. Outside, Yangon was like any other modern megalopolis. The air was thick with smog and the stench of leaded gasoline being burned in untuned engines. This part of town was poorer than most. The road was a strip of crumbling asphalt. The curbs were open sewers. The single-story houses all seemed to lean on one another for support while half-naked children watched traffic with vacant eyes. Mangy dogs lurked in alleyways, looking for whatever scraps the kids hadn’t gotten to. Car horns blared at every intersection and usually for no apparent reason. In the far distance, Cabrillo could see some high-rises, but they had the institutional blandness of 1970s Soviet architecture. Occasionally there were signs of the city’s Oriental nature, a pagoda or Buddhist shrine, but other than that Yangon was indistinguishable from every other Third World city on the planet.

“Where’s the Oregon?” Of the dozens of questions swirling through Cabrillo’s mind, that was the most pressing.

“She’s about twenty miles southeast of us,” Eddie replied.

“Do you have a phone or a radio? I need to tell Max that the air force and navy are hunting for her.” Seng fished a two-way radio from his uniform pocket. Juan called the ship and told the duty officer—Hali Kasim, as it turned out—about the search under way and to place the Oregonon battle stations. The ship’s klaxon was wailing by the time the last words were out of the Chairman’s mouth.

Next, Cabrillo spun in his seat so he could look into the rear. “How is he, Hux?”

“Head injury for sure,” she replied in her clinical voice. “Can’t tell how severe until we get him back to the medical bay and I run an MRI.” Like everything else on the Oregon, her infirmary was state of the art, and would qualify as a Level One Trauma Center. “How about you? Any injuries?”

“Dehydration and a broken collarbone. I had a concussion, but it’s cleared up.”

“I’ll examine you in a little while.”

“Concentrate on MacD. I’m fine.” Cabrillo turned back around. “Okay, what’s been happening? Oh, first, Roland Croissard double-crossed us. I don’t know what he’s playing at, but his man Smith is why MacD and I were captured.”

“We figured something was up when yours and Linda’s tracking chips showed you both heading out of the jungle at over a hundred miles per hour. Figured it was a chopper.”

“An old Mi-8. Wait, Linda came with us? Where is she now?”

“A few hours after you landed in Yangon, she went to the airport and flew out to Brunei. The signal went dark when she was moved to a location just off the coast. I assume she was heloed out to a ship.”

“Brunei?” It made no sense. Unless Croissard had business dealings there, which was entirely possible.

“Murph and Stony are looking into it and digging deeper into Croissard’s background.”

Cabrillo asked, “How’d you set up the rescue from Insein?”

“We took the Oregonsouth as soon as your signals started to move and we couldn’t raise you on your phone, and when we were within range we started monitoring all military communications, especially stuff coming out of the prison. When Soe Than—he’s the warden, by the way—made his deal with General Jiang, we saw our opening. The trick was to time it so we arrived earlier than him, but not so early that we roused suspicion.”

“I have to congratulate Kevin and his magicians. The makeup is amazing.”

“Remember, he once barely missed out on an Academy Award. This was a piece of cake to him. He said a real challenge would have been to make Linc into Jiang.”

“How’d you two come to shore?”

“On the Liberty.” That was one of the Oregon’s two lifeboats. Like her mothership and her twin, the Or Death, the Libertywas a lot more than she seemed. “We came in during the night and docked her at an old boarded-up fish-packing plant across the river.”

Traffic was growing thicker and the sound of car horns louder. Big city buses and little three-wheeled tuk-tuks overloaded with passengers and their possessions vied for the same real estate with equal disdain for the other’s presence. It was bedlam. They saw no traffic cops, but plenty of soldiers patrolled the sidewalk, all armed with AK-47s and aviator shades. Pedestrians went around them like water around a boulder, parting and merging again, and making sure to never jostle them.

To Cabrillo, they didn’t look particularly alert. They were menacing, but they didn’t have the look of soldiers on the hunt for something in particular. That meant Than hadn’t sent out an alert. Yet.

“Where’d you get the van?” Juan asked as they sat behind an old truck carrying lengths of teak logs.

“Rented it from a delivery company first thing this morning.”

“No problems?”

“For the thousand euros cash I paid him, the clerk would have offered to kill his own mother,” Eddie replied. Like Juan, Seng had been a deep-cover operative for the CIA, so he had a way about him that made strangers trust him and had an ease in foreign countries as though he’d lived there his entire life.

As they drove and the neighborhoods improved, they saw stores selling just about everything under the sun and street vendors who sold anything else. There was a more commercial vibe, and a vibrancy, though nowhere near that of other Asian cities. It was the pall of the military dictatorship that sapped people of energy. Traffic was snarled not because there was so much of it but rather because the drivers were in no hurry to get to their destinations.

“On the left?” Eddie said.

Juan knew immediately who he was referring to. Midway down the block of stores selling knockoff clothing and bootleg CDs and DVDs was a soldier holding a walkie-talkie to his ear. He nodded, spoke a few words, and clipped it onto his belt. He had a partner who’d been standing at his side. The first one relayed information to the second, and the two started paying the traffic a lot more attention.

“What do you think?”

“I think,” Cabrillo replied, “that the jig is up. Do you have a weapon?”

“Glove box.”

Juan opened it and retrieved a Glock 21 chambered for .45 caliber. The big slugs would put down just about anything short of a charging elephant.

The two soldiers saw the big white van amid the sedans, taxis, and bicycles, and their carriage changed in an instant. Hands tightened on weapons, and their posture stiffened. They started walking with purpose.

“I don’t want to have to kill these guys,” Juan said.

“Hold on.”

Eddie crushed the gas pedal and turned the wheel so that the front of the van clipped the back of some Chinese-made subcompact neither had ever heard of. Its wheels burned off rubber as the van pushed the tiny little car out of the way.

The soldiers started running. Juan stood with his head out the window and fired across the sloping hood. He aimed for the smoking brazier of a street vendor selling some sort of meat skewers. The metal drum toppled off its stand and crashed to the ground at the same time the two soldiers dove flat for cover. Glowing embers peppered the sidewalk in smoking heaps, and enough landed on the soldiers that their immediate concern was immolation and not the van.

Seng finally bulldozed the car out of the way, which allowed him to steer the van onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street from the soldiers. He laid on the horn and kept going. People leapt aside, and wares displayed outside shops were blown through. He spun the wheel at the next cross street, which thankfully was clear, and got back onto the tarmac.

“We’ve bought seconds at most,” he said, checking his wing mirrors. “Any ideas?”

“Ditch the van.”

Hux must have heard him because she said, “I want to move MacD as little as possible.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have much of a choice. This city’s crawling with soldiers on the lookout for us. We need another vehicle.”

Eddie pulled off the road into the parking lot of a gilt-topped shrine. The building towered more than seventy feet and managed to shine despite the smog. Several monks in saffron robes were sweeping the entrance steps. Off to the side were a string of tuk-tuks for hire. He stopped the van next to them and jumped out. The motorized tricycles, powered by 50cc engines, could seat three, and were as anonymous as yellow cabs in Manhattan.

Seng pulled the keys from the ignition and approached the nearest driver. His negotiation consisted of dangling the keys, pointing to the van and then to the man’s three-wheeled scooter. This must have been the best day of his life because the driver couldn’t nod fast enough.

While this was going on, Juan tucked the pistol into his waistband and made sure his T-shirt covered the butt before stepping out of the truck. He could hear police sirens. He jumped to the back doors and opened them. With Hux’s help they got MacD out and over Cabrillo’s good shoulder. The broken one shot out spears of agony with every move. He walked on his knees, and placed MacD as gently as he could in the tuk-tuk’s rear bench seat, Julia cradling his head the whole time.

She got in on one side of Lawless, Juan on the other, and Eddie placed himself behind the handlebars. The engine belched a cloud of noxious blue smoke with the first kick of the starter and fired on the second.

A whistle shrilled behind them. A policeman was rushing up the road on a bicycle, waving a hand and blasting away with his whistle.

Eddie popped the clutch as the cop fumbled for his sidearm. The tuk-tuk had the acceleration of a boulder rolling uphill. Its woefully underpowered engine strained to get them moving. The cop was thirty yards away when the little jitney started going and was coming at a breakneck pace.

The other tuk-tuk drivers sensed trouble and vanished behind a hedge of blooming shrubs while the man who’d made the Faustian bargain yelled at Eddie to get off the bike. He ran alongside and pulled at the handlebars.

Seng reached over, grabbed the guy’s face, and shoved. He tumbled to the ground in a heap of flying arms and legs. The cop was still gaining but was having a hard time pulling out his weapon. His whistle blasts were becoming shriller as his breathing became more ragged.