Andy McDermott - The Midas Legacy

The soldier advancing from the front froze in horror at the carnage. Nina looked back, her concern changing to unexpected hope and delight as she saw her husband waving from inside the cab.

The missile had now risen high enough for a person to fit underneath it. ‘Get over!’ he shouted, gesturing. She rolled into the curving cradle beneath the huge cylinder.

Eddie accelerated at the second man, who snapped out of his fearful trance and darted on to the back of the truck. He was about to raise his gun when the driver of his own vehicle swerved sharply, trying to ram the chasing TEL off the road. The impact threw the soldier flat.

A second collision jolted both transporters. Eddie was about to shift his foot to the brake, then changed his mind and kept the accelerator down, making a turn of his own to sideswipe the other truck. His cab was just short of halfway along his target, knocking its rear end towards the embankment. The increasingly unsteady TEL lurched. The Korean driver hastily straightened out, deterred from any more attempts at vehicular combat.

Eddie kept up his speed, the two vehicles now side by side with the other ahead by a nose. He glanced back, seeing Nina beneath the missile — and the soldier recovering, snatching his pistol from its holster.

The Englishman ducked and groped for one of the dead men’s rifles, but before he could reach it, the side window cracked under bullet impacts. The glass was toughened to withstand a rocket launch — but wasn’t bulletproof, he discovered as more rounds shattered the pane beside him—

The gunfire stopped. Like most of the soldiers at the base, the Korean only had one magazine of ammunition. But it was not his only weapon. He scurried forward, shouting to his comrades in the cab, then snatched a hand grenade from his belt. Another man leaned out of the window in alarm, yelling for him to stop, but he had already pulled the pin.

He drew back his arm to lob the grenade through the broken window—

Eddie swung his transporter at its neighbour. The crash knocked the soldier on to his back, but he kept his grip on the explosive, the fuse not yet triggered. The other driver slowed, the Yorkshireman grinding past and slicing off both vehicles’ wing mirrors as he drew ahead.

The man in the cab raised his rifle and fired. Eddie dropped lower as bullets lanced over him. His windscreen burst apart.

Wind rushed in through the gaping hole. He squinted and saw the road curving away to the left, rounding a large bowl in the hillside. The lights of Kang’s SUV were visible in the distance on its far side, with nothing between them and Eddie’s transporter except empty space over the dark forests below.

The Korean driver made another aggressive move, pushing his vehicle against the side of the hijacked TEL and forcing it relentlessly towards the road’s edge. If Eddie didn’t brake, he would be forced into oblivion over the approaching curve — but slowing would bring him back into the soldier’s firing line—

A clunk of metal against metal behind him added a third, equally fatal outcome. The soldier had just thrown his grenade.

Nowhere to go — except out .

He flung open the driver’s door — and leapt on to the other transporter, catching the bull bars running across its flat front. The unstable TEL rolled like a ship on heavy seas as it entered the turn, the missile straining against its support arms.

The Englishman’s former ride continued onwards…

Over the edge of the road.

Engine roaring, the massive vehicle hurtled into the void. The grenade exploded, tearing off half the cab’s roof — then the missile was thrown free as the truck hit the steep slope, smashing into the trees.

It was indeed fully fuelled.

A monstrous explosion ripped through the woods, engulfing the hillside in flames. A blazing mushroom cloud rolled into the dark sky.

Eddie clung to the transporter’s nose, heart racing at his narrow escape — only to see astonished, then angry faces looking back at him through the windscreen.

Hunched in the cradle beneath the rising missile, Nina hadn’t seen the other transporter go over the cliff — but she certainly heard, and felt, its destruction. She raised her head as the deafening roar faded behind her.

The soldier had dropped flat to shield himself from his grenade detonation. Now he lifted his head and saw her. His gun was empty, but he still had a knife, which he drew as he rose and advanced.

The missile was now almost forty-five degrees from the horizontal. The microlight’s wing rattled and flapped, still caught on the clamp holding the rocket. No hiding places; Nina’s only escape route was to climb around the weapon itself. She ducked under the hydraulic arm and sidestepped back along the transporter’s flank.

The soldier followed, wielding the knife.

The driver shouted commands to the other man in the cab, who grabbed his rifle and leaned out of the window, trying to curl his gun arm around the transporter’s front.

Eddie flattened himself against the bull bars as a bullet cracked past him. The soldier stretched further out. The Yorkshireman hurriedly climbed sideways. There was a gap in the middle of the hefty metal bumper to accommodate a winch. He dropped into the space as another round whipped by. A third shot clanged against the bumper just above him. He tried to squeeze deeper into the recess, a protruding lever jabbing painfully against his chest—

It moved — and the winch whirred, a hefty hook lowering on a heavy-duty steel cable. It hit the road and was immediately snatched backwards to bang noisily against the cab’s underside. Eddie considered replicating a famous stunt from Raiders of the Lost Ark by grabbing the cable and letting himself be dragged along beneath the transporter, but instantly dismissed the idea as suicide; on the curving road, he would be crushed by the massive wheels.

Instead he shoved the lever back to the stop position before taking hold of the winch assembly itself and dangling from it. His position was precarious in the extreme, but he was as shielded as he could possibly be from the soldier’s bullets.

As if to make the point, another round ricocheted off the bumper above him. The North Korean shouted angrily, then withdrew.

Eddie was about to pull himself back up when he heard a bang. The soldier had climbed out on to the cab’s ladder-like steps, slamming the door behind him so he could reach the truck’s front… for a clear shot.

A long dangling line from the microlight’s wrecked wing flicked at Nina’s face. She ducked away from it, continuing towards the transporter’s rear. The rocket rattled and squealed against its restraints above her.

Her wounded arm was slowing her. The Korean soldier closed in, thrusting the knife. She tried to dodge — but the blade slashed the back of her shoulder.

She screamed, almost losing her grip. The soldier smiled, the headlights of the jeep approaching from behind revealing dirty, crooked teeth. He waved the knife at her, taunting, enjoying the moment before he got the rare privilege of killing a foreign spy…

The hanging line slapped against the back of his head. Startled by the unexpected touch, he jerked around to see if someone was behind him. Nobody there. He looked back—

Nina seized the line and snapped it like a lasso to loop it around his throat.

The man let out a choked yelp as she pulled it as hard as she could, swinging the wing outwards from the clamp above. It caught the slipstream — and broke free.

The wing acted like a braking parachute. The soldier was about to hack the line with his knife when he was abruptly yanked from the transporter by his neck. He landed in front of the jeep, taking the 4x4’s solid metal bumper to his face with a gruesome smack.