Clive Cussler: Mirage

“Come on,” Juan called over the sound of a dopplering siren. They ran away from the hole in the wall, as the blast had surely been seen by the guards in the towers. It was like running through a maze. They had to twist and contort their bodies around the countless struts that made up the scaffold. And yet only a contortionist could have moved quicker than these two. Once they rounded a corner, Cabrillo led them a few more feet and then began climbing upward. The metal was so cold, it felt like his hands were being scalded. The panels were secured from above with threaded bolts screwed into receptors on the steel framework. A final tube of concentrated acid formulated to dissolve steel ate through the rust-stuck nuts and even the bolts themselves.

Cabrillo’s six minutes were almost up. He levered himself into position so he could use his back and legs to shove the panel up and off the scaffold.

“Remember, stay with me, and we’ll be fine,” he warned again. “Half of what’s about to happen is for show.”

He pressed with his shoulders to test how hard the panel would resist after so many decades and, to his surprise, the section of perforated steel plate popped free almost before he was ready.

The prison alarm continued to keen, but over it came another sound, the unmistakable whop-whop-whop of a fast-approaching helicopter.

The timer in his head touched zero, and Cabrillo heaved the panel aside. He scrambled up and out of the earth, knowing that his blue prison uniform stood out starkly against the foot-deep snow that lay in drifts all around him. A dedicated guard could spot him in an instant, but he was banking on human instinct to keep from being spotted. The guards should be watching the approaching helicopter.

He could see the chopper out beyond the security fence, an olive drab insect that grew in size until he could recognize it as an ungainly Kamov Ka-26. With two main rotors set one above the other atop the hull and spinning in opposite directions, the craft had no need for a tail rotor on a long, tapering boom. This made the six-passenger helo resemble a flying moving van with two stumpy rudders bolted to its rear bumper.

In seconds, Yuri was at his side, and both men stood with their backs pressed against the prison’s featureless wall.

Now that it was closer, Juan saw the small wings that had been attached to the chopper’s hull just aft of the pilot’s door.

A jumpy guard let loose a long burst with his AK even though the chopper was well out of range. In response, a single rocket shot off one of the winglets and streaked toward the perimeter fence while a heavy machine gun on the opposite side roared to life, spitting a tongue of flame that shot out past the cockpit bubble. Shell casings the size of cigar tubes rained from the weapon as the newly fallen snow between the perimeter fence and the building came alive under the blistering assault of lead.

“Run!” Juan shouted over the hellish din.

To Yuri’s utter astonishment, Cabrillo charged into the maelstrom kicked up by the machine gun as though he were a member of the Light Brigade riding into the Russian guns at Balaclava.

“No matter what, follow me,” the man who called himself Chairman had said, and, to his greater amazement, Yuri let out a full-throated bellow that was unheard over the siren and chopper and still-pounding machine gun and took off after his friend.

The rocket detonated at the base of the fence, throwing up even more snow and clumps of frozen soil. Borodin expected to be cut down at any moment while geysers of snow erupted all around him, tossed high by bullets he had yet to hear cracking past.

Then he felt a small hit to the bottom of his left foot. It wasn’t enough to toss him to the ground, but it did make him stagger. It was the clue he needed to tell him he wasn’t immune to the massive amount of bullets pouring down from the chopper’s machine gun, for, in truth, there were no rounds. The Kamov was firing blanks, and the detonations of snow that created a ten-foot-high fog were small explosive charges that Cabrillo’s team had likely sown during the last snowstorm by simply tossing them over the fence.

But their luck couldn’t last forever. Bullets from autofire by the men in the guard towers began searching them out, the micro supersonic booms ripping the air near his head. Borodin wished Cabrillo wasn’t so soft. Had he planned this escape, the first missiles off the Kamov’s rails would have taken out the guards’ lofty perches. But Juan was different. Though a mercenary, as tough as any, he loathed killing when it wasn’t necessary, even if that put his own life at risk. Juan also didn’t know these men, didn’t know that they were Kenin’s private army, paid more for their loyalty to the admiral than to Mother Russia. They wore the uniforms of their country, but they were no less mercenary than Cabrillo himself.

With more and more real bullets stitching the ground, Cabrillo and Borodin made it across the open killing field with neither man being hit. The rocket had blown apart a section of the fence near one of its support stanchions, leaving a gap wide enough for them to run through but forcing them to angle to the left to avoid the mound of deadly razor wire lying on the ground.

Now clear of the shooting gallery and much closer to the chopper, they saw that ropes dangled from each side of the Kamov that were long enough to trail on the ground.

Juan led them to the ropes, and he quickly found the loop for his foot and another for a hand. “Hang on,” he shouted over the jarring rattle of rotor and gunfire.

The chopper’s downblast was a maelstrom of Category 5 proportions.

The pilot must have seen the two men take their places, for no sooner had Yuri slipped his shoe into one of the loops and his hand through another than it felt as though his stomach was trying to leave his body through the soles of his feet.

The Kamov lifted and whirled, swinging both men like pendulums and leaving the ground a good hundred feet below them. The wind, as the chopper gained speed, clawed at their exposed bodies like stinging needles that numbed skin and turned eyes into streaming torrents.

Borodin fought to cling to the twisting, sinuous rope and prayed that Cabrillo’s plan called for them to land soon and crawl into the nice warm cabin — and knowing Juan’s style — where a good bottle of brandy awaited. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold on, but looking down at the snow and stone racing by below, he knew he could last for the rest of his life because a fall would certainly kill him.

The chopper thundered due east and deeper into the mountains, the pilot flying as close to the earth as he dared with his two passengers dangling below the helo’s tricycle landing wheels. Each dip and rise and swooping turn sent shocks through both men’s bodies. Dusk was beginning to settle over the landscape, but the pilot didn’t turn on any landing lights. Borodin suspected he had some night vision capabilities to be flying so recklessly through these uncharted canyons.

After an eternity of ten freezing minutes, the beat of the rotors changed when they neared a copse of pines sheltered under yet another granite cliff. They were finally landing. Borodin would curse the Chairman for such a torturous flight, but only after he stopped shivering.

The chopper dropped lower and lower until both men could simply step out of the loops and duck under the wind screaming at them from the whirling blades. Borodin expected the Kamov would continue to the ground, but instead the engine’s whine increased, and once again the ungainly aircraft was shooting eastward, leaving the two men alone in a frozen wasteland. He knew that they’d both be dead of hypothermia within the next hour, if not sooner. He also knew that Juan Cabrillo hadn’t yet finished dipping into his bag of tricks.