Chapter 17 - The Fire on the Highway
"Scatter!" Arthur roared, throwing himself out of the truck bed and tackling me into the ditch on the northern side of the road.
A second later, a shoulder-fired Kornet missile slammed into the center transport with a deafening, concussive roar.
The blast wave lifted us off the frozen ground, slamming us against the concrete retaining wall. Shrapnel tore through the air, shearing tree limbs and turning the truck's fuel tanks into a roaring vortex of fire and black smoke.
My ears rang with a high, piercing squeal. Through the orange glare of the burning wreckage, I saw Nathan rolling behind the smoking chassis of the G-Wagon, returning fire with his sidearm.
"Claire!" Arthur shouted, his face covered in soot and blood dripping from a gash on his cheek. "Can you stand?"
"I'm up!" I gasped, shaking the dizziness from my skull and pulling my rifle into my shoulder. "Who are they?"
"Sterling's cleanup crew," Arthur said, his eyes narrowed with lethal fury. "They were tracking the convoy by independent satellite. They aren't here to recover the cargo—they're here to sanitize the site and leave no witnesses."
From the ridge above, automatic fire raked the asphalt, chewing through the burning metal of the transport. The shooters were advancing down the slope in a disciplined wedge formation, bounding between the pine trunks with professional precision.
"Nathan, suppress the left flank!" I yelled, leaning around the edge of the retaining wall and firing three deliberate rounds at the lead shooter. The contractor stumbled, his rifle dropping into the snow as my rounds caught him in the upper chest.
Arthur didn't fire. Instead, he unclipped two white-phosphorus grenades from his tactical harness. "Cover your eyes!"
He hurled both canisters high into the trees above the advancing squad.
The night sky turned into a blinding, midday glare of chemical fire. White sparks showered down through the pines, igniting the snow-covered branches and creating an impassable wall of smoke and blinding light between us and the remaining shooters.
Screams echoed from the hillside as the contractors' night-vision optics were instantly overwhelmed by the sudden thermal flare.
"Move to the Suburban!" Nathan shouted, sprinting across the burning road and laying down a continuous wall of suppressive fire into the blinding smoke.
Arthur grabbed the aluminum briefcase containing the client registry with one hand and hauled me to my feet with the other. Together, we scrambled across the burning highway toward our idling vehicle three hundred yards down the shoulder.
We tumbled into the Suburban, Nathan slamming his boot against the gas pedal. The four-wheel drive caught the frozen asphalt, tires spinning before biting hard, propelling us forward through the blinding Bavarian night.
In the rearview mirror, the burning wreckage of Route B85 receded into a distant orange smear against the black pines.
Arthur slumped back into the leather seat, clutching his left side. When he pulled his hand away, his fingers were slick with dark red blood.
"Dad!" I screamed, lunging across the console.
"I'm fine, Little Bird," he grunted, grimacing as he pressed a field dressing against his ribs. "Just a piece of the bumper. Been shot worse in Grenada."
"You're not fine," Nathan snapped, glancing in the mirror while keeping the vehicle at eighty miles per hour. "We have twenty miles to the Austrian border. If Sterling's team has air assets, they'll paint our transponder within ten minutes."
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"They won't," Arthur wheezed, tapping the aluminum briefcase resting on his knees. "Because Sterling thinks we burned in that truck with the core. The registry inside this case doesn't just name him, Nathan. It names the exact bank accounts used to fund the coup in Panama."
He looked at me, his breathing shallow but his eyes fiercely lucid. "There's one more name on this list, Claire. A name nobody in Washington ever suspected. The man who orchestrated Richard Bradley's entire career."
