Tom Clancy - Locked On

The building was four stories tall, and it was connected to other buildings on either side. Clark thought about going all the way to the roof and trying to put space between himself and those chasing him by moving along the tops of the other buildings, just like he and his mates had done in Paris. But when he got to the third floor, he heard noise above, a large group in the stairwell on the fourth floor, heading his way. They sounded like they may have been just a group of young people on their way to a night on the town or a party; by their high voices and laughter they did not sound like a snatch team from the FBI. But Clark was alone now, and he did not want to rush into a group of people who could ID him or tell the men on his tail which way he was heading.

Clark left the stairwell, ran up a hallway, and saw a window at the far end. Outside, under dim electric lights, he could see a fire escape. He charged to the window, half exhausted and nearly out of breath, and pulled it open.

In seconds he was back out in the rain. The fire escape rattled and creaked with his movements, but it seemed like it would hold for his descent of the flights to the alleyway. He had just turned away from the window, grabbed the railing to head to the first set of rickety stairs down, when a man appeared coming up. Clark hadn’t heard him climbing with all the noise Clark himself had made coming out of the window onto the fire escape.

“No!” John exclaimed as the man, the same man he had seen watching him in the train station at the ticket kiosk, drew a silver automatic pistol and tried to level it at his prey. But the men were too close to each other on the steep and wet iron steps, and Clark kicked the gun out of the lower man’s hand. The weapon flew over the side of the fire escape and the man slipped back, down two steps to the landing just a few feet below Clark.

The two men stared at each other silently for a second. John had his gun on his hip, but he did not go for it. He was not going to shoot an FBI agent or a French detective or a CIA officer or a German cop. Whoever this man was, Clark had no plans to kill him.

But when the man reached inside his raincoat, Clark launched down toward him. He had to close the distance before another weapon came out.

Luc Patin spooked when Clark knocked his weapon away. He reached for a knife he kept in a scabbard on a neck chain under his shirt. He tore the blade free and slashed through the air at the American.

John saw the motion, brought his arm up and knocked away the blow, but took a slashing cut to the back of his hand. He cried out in pain, then he fired out his right hand, palm up and out, and he connected under the chin of the French private detective.

Luc Patin’s head snapped back with the punch to the jaw, and he reelee cd backward and then slipped, his hips hitting the low railing behind him hard, and he tumbled backward off the fire escape. His feet flew into the air as he fell. Clark leapt forward to catch his attacker by his coat, but the rain shower and the slick blood on his left hand caused him to lose hold as soon as he grabbed it, and the Frenchman fell three stories down to the cobblestones.

His head hit with a sound like a baseball bat striking a melon.

Fuck, thought Clark, he had not meant to kill him, but he would have to worry about that later. Now he stumbled off the fire escape at the second floor by forcing open a thick wooden door to a kitchen apartment. He found a roll of paper towels, wrapped his hand in them as he stepped back into the hallway, and then raced downstairs and back out onto the street.

Three minutes later, he walked past the entrance to a subway, and then he hurried back to it. As he headed down the stairs he chanced a glance behind. He saw two pursuers, men in raincoats running together through the rain across an intersection twenty-five meters behind. A Peugeot swerved and honked in their wake. It did not appear to Clark that the men had spotted him, but it did appear that they’d gotten word that their colleague was dead.

John bought a ticket and rushed to the platform of the next train. He held his breath to keep from hyperventilating. Play cool, stay calm. He stood near the edge by the track, waiting with a dozen others for the next train.

John could not believe his luck. Somehow he had managed to make it down the steps without being seen by his pursuers, and as he struggled to fill his aching lungs with oxygen, he checked again to make sure he had not been followed. No. He could get on a train to anywhere and then make his way to safety.

Well, relative safety.

He felt the cool breeze from the tunnel on his left indicating the impending arrival of the train. He stepped to the edge of the platform so he could be the first one through the doors. A final check to the stairs on his left. Clear. He absentmindedly looked over his right shoulder as the train came out of the tunnel on his left.

They were there. Two men. New guys, but definitely from the same crew. They approached him with hard faces.

He knew he had made it easy for them. On the edge of the track, they needed only a little shove and he would be gone. If they weren’t planning on killing him before, he had little doubt that the death of their colleague would change their mission, no matter their original orders.

He turned away from them and faced the tracks. The train was fifty feet away and closing fast, from his left to his right. John leapt off the edge of the platform, down the four feet to the tracks.

The others on the platform screamed in shock.

John crossed the rails right in front of the speeding U-Bahn. A black chain-link fence separated the eastbound line from the westbound, and he had to get over this before the train passed. He leapt onto the fence, pulled himself up with a bloody hand and an arm still aching from a month-old gunshot wound, then he kicked his legs over the fence as the train behind him screeched and wailed. The first car struck his right foot and his heel felt like it had been smacked with a ball bat, and Clark spun off the top of the fence, falling to his hands and knees next to the other track. Like a deer in the headlights, he lookfelt liked up to face another train, farther away but barreling down on him from the west. He could hear screams from the platform next to him. He rose and leapt forward, posting on his injured ankle to do so, and made it to the edge of the platform without touching any of the track’s rails. He tried to heave himself up on the concrete before the train came, but the muscles in his arms faltered. He dropped back down, his body spent.

Clark turned and looked at the train that would kill him.

Achtung!”

Two young men in soccer jerseys came to his rescue. They knelt at the edge of the platform and scrambled to grab his collar and yank him up and over the edge. They were big and young and a hell of a lot stronger than Clark; his worn-out arms tried to help, but they just hung by his sides.

Three seconds later, the train filled the space his body had just vacated.

John lay on his back on the cold concrete, both hands holding his aching ankle.

The men shouted and slapped him roughly on his shoulder. John picked up the word for “old man.” One of them laughed, and he helped Clark up, patted him again on the shoulder.

An old woman pointed her umbrella angrily at his face as she chastised him.

Someone else called him an Arschloch. Asshole.

John struggled to put weight on his injured foot, then nodded with a smile at the men who had saved him, and he tottered into the train that had almost crushed him. Inside, he collapsed on a bench. No one else on the platform followed. The train moved, and he looked through the window toward the eastbound platform. His two pursuers were still there.