Steve Martini - Trader of secrets

The next ones I hit are standing up. The first two go airborne up over the roof. The third one hits the windshield and shatters the safety glass on the passenger side of the car. I roll over a few more and we start to lose speed.

“Pick it up,” says Harry.

I can feel the tires getting tangled in body parts. I pull to the right to clear the underside of the car and let the next few go.

Our reward is to be shot at from behind as I hear the flat thud of bullets pierce the trunk of the rental car.

“Everybody OK?”

“Good!” says Joselyn.

I look over.

Harry nods.

The strange thing is that none of the men I hit see us coming until the bumper is into their legs and they are bent sideways over the hood-deer in the headlights.

If it was a game for points, I’d have to take a handicap. They have no chance to get the muzzle of their rifles around. Most of them can’t even see us bearing down because the man standing next to them is in their way.

I pick up speed and plow back into the line. The first three I hit, the impact sends them flying over the sandbags. I floor the accelerator and take out some more. Two bullets pierce the back window from behind, shattering the glass. One of them takes a piece off the rearview mirror. The other goes through the windshield.

Harry smashes out the glass in front of him with the butt of the speargun so he can see. The whole time he’s doing this he has the spear aimed at the side of my head.

“Watch the point!” I tell him.

“Watch where you’re going,” he says. “You hit those sandbags we’re all dead.”

While we’re arguing, something whizzes between our heads leaving a vapor trail, a taste of aluminum in my mouth, and the smell of burnt rubber. I look at Harry and suddenly there’s an explosion somewhere behind us.

The next guy I hit lands up on the hood of the car. Rifle in hand he reaches inside the broken windshield. Harry shows him the business end of the speargun. The guy smiles at him and rolls off the right side of the hood. He bounces on the road away from the car and strangely enough lands on his feet as if nothing has happened.

Ben Rabin watched as the first body flew up into the air. It spun like a rag doll and fell to the ground. Three more suddenly followed. Then an entire line of bodies, like grass being clipped in a mower, flew over the roof of the moving vehicle, flailing arms and legs.

The car seemed to pull away from the line and gain speed, then plow back into the assembled riflemen behind the sandbags.

Ben Rabin wondered if the driver was drunk. If so, and if Uncle Ben survived the rest of the day, he was prepared to spring for another drink or an entire bottle if the driver wanted it. He shouted for his men to hold their fire. He didn’t want them killing whoever was at the wheel. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

He picked up the wireless headset. “Rebel Two, this is Rebel One. Come in. Rebel Two, this is Rebel One. Come in, where are you?”

When the crackling headset in the Jeep sounded, Adin, Herman, and the wounded SAW man were sitting at the end of the runway making final preparations for a run at the building.

Adin grabbed the headset. “This is Rebel Two.”

“Where are you?”

“Far end of the runway,” said Adin.

“We need to move now,” said Ben Rabin. “Can you see what’s happening?”

“No.”

All of a sudden an explosion erupted behind the sandbags.

Adin looked up. “Is that you?”

“No,” said Ben Rabin. “They’re doing it to themselves. There’s a driver, ran a vehicle through them. Bodies flying everywhere. But we have to move now before they regroup.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Catch them in a pincer from their right flank,” said Ben Rabin. “We’ll squeeze from this direction.”

Adin grabbed a pair of field glasses from the glove box in the front of the Jeep and checked to see what was at the near end of the sandbags and the chain-link fence. What he saw was a small blockhouse with a slit in it, what looked like a light-machine-gun installation, protecting this end of the roadway leading to the front of the buildings.

“You got it. Give me thirty seconds to get in position.”

“Roger. Out,” said Ben Rabin.

By now the incoming volley of fire into the trailer and the area around the plane had died down. Ben Rabin looked up and winced at the smoldering tail section over his head. A few more minutes and the steel supports holding it to the fuselage would start to give. Half a ton of hot metal would fall on the overturned trailer.

“Take all the ammunition and grenades you can carry,” he told his men. “Get ready to move.”

They started stripping the trailer of anything they could reach, bandoliers of bullets, bags of grenades.

Ben Rabin grabbed two satchel bags filled with C-4, along with a roll of det-cord and two electronic and six pencil fuse detonators. He handed one of the satchels to his sergeant and draped the other over his shoulder. He looked at his watch. “Grab your weapons and follow me.”

Ben Rabin broke cover and ran toward the gate in the chain-link fence. Eleven other soldiers followed him. He watched in amazement as the red sedan continued in the distance driving down the line, rolling up the enemy’s left flank. The driver had a perfect angle. No more than a single soldier, maybe two, could turn and draw a bead on him at a given moment. The car was moving so fast that by the time they turned, the vehicle was on them.

The driver missed a few of them. The survivors lined up and fired toward the back of the vehicle as it sped past.

Ben Rabin and two of his commandos aimed their assault rifles from the shoulder and fired. They dropped the guards who had escaped becoming hood ornaments before they could pull off any more rounds.

Liquida, looking for a vehicle, had worked his way to the end of the complex of small buildings. He found nothing and began to suspect that he was going the wrong direction.

Hauling the heavy money bags was wearing him out. He was breathless and sweating and beginning to wish he had used the cart into which he had piled Leffort’s body.

Occasionally he got a glimpse of the mayhem outside through the various doors in the complex. With the electronic key card from the man in the pay room, Liquida seemed to have access to everything he needed except a car.

He picked up an assault rifle from one of the dead guards who had stumbled back into one of the buildings and died near the front door. The clip was mostly empty, but it still had three rounds. Liquida didn’t plan to use it unless he had to.

He sat for a moment and rested; he felt the weight of the bags and wondered how the hell he was going to get away. Suddenly there was an explosion outside. It shook the building.

Liquida dragged himself to his feet and went to the door. He looked through the blown-out plate glass opening. One of the double doors was missing, reduced to a pile of glass pebbles under Liquida’s feet.

He glanced down the street. A small concrete pillbox at the end of the road was belching black smoke. Chunks of fractured concrete littered the pavement around it. Liquida watched as a low-slung Jeep drove slowly past the smoldering wreckage and turned toward him, heading down the street in front of the building.

He stepped back into the shadows inside the door and watched as if in a daze as the Jeep cruised by. The breeze from the slow-moving vehicle blew curling white tendrils of smoke from the barrel of the recoilless rifle. As he looked on, Liquida was in no doubt as to the existence of the afterlife. Otherwise how was it possible that the man he had killed in a parking garage in Washington three months ago could today be driving a car in the jungles of Mexico?