Clive Cussler - Dragon

“Another helicopter,” Pitt acknowledged. “Can you see markings?”

The speeding cars raced out of the trees and into open farmland. The approaching helicopter banked to one side, and Mancuso could read the wording on the cowling under the engine and rotor blades.

“Henrico County Sheriff’s Department!” he yelled above the heavy thump of the rotor blades. Then he recognized Giordino waving from an open doorway. The little Italian had arrived, and not a minute too soon. The Stutz was on its last breath.

The pilot in the strange copter flying above the limousine saw the new arrival too. He suddenly veered off, dropped low, and headed northeast at full throttle, quickly disappearing behind a row of trees bordering a cornfield.

The Lincoln appeared to slowly drift to one side of the road. Pitt and Mancuso watched in helpless horror as the long white limo angled onto the shoulder, soared over a small ditch, and surged into the cornfield as if chasing the fleeing helicopter.

Pitt took in the rapid change of scene in one swift, sweeping glance. Reacting instantly, he twisted the wheel, sending the Stutz after the Lincoln. Mancuso’s mouth hung in shock as the dry and brittle cornstalks, left standing after husking, whipped the windshield. Instinctively he ducked down in the seat with his arms over his head.

The Stutz plunged after the limousine, bouncing wildly on its ancient springs and shock absorbers. The dust clouds flew so thick Pitt could hardly see past the sun goddess, yet his foot remained jammed flat on the accelerator.

They burst through a wire fence. A piece of it clipped Mancuso on the side of the head, and then they were out of the cornfield almost on top of the limousine. It had shot into the open at an incredible rate of speed in a direct line toward a concrete silo with the Stutz right behind.

“Oh, God,” Mancuso murmured, seeing disaster.

Despite the shock of witnessing an approaching crash that he was helpless to prevent, Pitt jerked the steering wheel violently to his right, throwing the Stutz in a spin around the other side of the silo, and missed piling into the Lincoln by an arm’s length.

He heard rather than saw the convulsive crush of metal tearing apart followed by the crackled splash of shattered glass against concrete. A great cloud of dust burst from the base of the silo and shrouded the devastated limousine.

Pitt was out of the Stutz before it stopped and running toward the crash site. Fear and dread spread through his body as he came around the silo and viewed the shattered, twisted car. No one could have lived after such a terrible impact. The engine had pushed through the firewall and was shoved against the front seat. The steering wheel was thrust up against the roof. Pitt could not see any sign of the chauffeur and assumed his body must have been thrown to the other side of the car.

The passenger compartment had accordioned, raising the roof in a strange peak and bending the doors inward, jamming them shut so tightly nothing less than an industrial metal saw could cut them away. Pitt desperately kicked out the few glass shards remaining in a broken door window and thrust his head inside.

The crumpled interior was empty.

In numbed slow motion Pitt walked around the car, searching under it for signs of bodies. He found nothing, not even a trace of blood or torn clothing. Then he looked at the caved-in dashboard and found the reason for the vacant ghost car. He tore a small instrument from its electrical connectors and studied it, his face reddening in anger.

He was still standing by the wreckage as the chopper landed and Giordino ran up, trailed by Mancuso, who was holding a bloodied handkerchief to one ear.

“Loren?” Giordino asked with grim concern.

Pitt shook his head and tossed the strange instrument to Giordino. “We were hoodwinked. This car was a decoy, operated by an electronic robot unit and driven by someone in the helicopter.”

Mancuso stared wildly about the limo. “I saw her get in,” he said dazedly.

“So did I,” Giordino backed him up.

“Not this car.” Pitt spoke quietly.

“But it was never out of your sight.”

“But it was. Think about it. The twenty-second head start when it left the track and drove under the stands to the parking lot. The switch must have been made then.”

Mancuso removed the handkerchief, revealing a neat slice just above his ear lobe. “It fits. This one was never out of our sight once we hit the highway.”

Mancuso broke off suddenly and looked miserably at the demolished limo. No one moved or said anything for several moments.

“We lost her,” Giordino said as if in pain, his face pale. “God help us, we lost her.”

Pitt stared at the car unseeing, his big hands clenched in anger and despair. “We’ll find Loren,” he said, his voice empty and cold as Arctic stone. “And make those pay who took her.”

Part 3

Ajima Island

31

October 12, 1993

Bielefeld, West Germany

THE FALL MORNING was crisp with a biting wind from the north when August Clausen stepped out of his half-timbered house and gazed across his fields toward the slopes of the Teutoburg Forest near Bielefeld in North Rhine-Westphalia. His farm lay in the valley, bordered by a winding stream that he had recently dammed up. He buttoned up his heavy wool coat, took a few deep breaths, and then walked the path to his barn.

A big hardy man just past seventy-four, Clausen still put in a full day’s work from sunup to sundown. The farm had been in his family for five generations. He and his wife raised two daughters, who married and left home, preferring city living in Bielefeld to farming. Except for hired hands during harvesting, Clausen and his wife ran the farm alone.

Clausen pushed open the barn doors and mounted a large tractor. The tough old gas engine turned over and fired on the first revolution. He slipped the transmission into top gear and moved into the yard, turning on a dirt road and heading toward the fields that had been harvested and cultivated for the next spring planting.

Today he planned to fill in a small depression that appeared in the southwest corner of a lettuce field. It was one of the few outdoor chores he wanted to get out of the way before the winter months set in. The evening before, he had set the tractor up with a front-end scoop to move dirt from a mound near an old concrete bunker left from the war.

One section of Clausen’s land was once an airfield for a Luftwaffe fighter squadron. When he returned home after serving in a Panzer brigade that fought Patton’s Third Army through France and half of Germany, he found a junkyard of burned and destroyed aircraft and motor vehicles piled and scattered over most of his fallow fields. He kept what little was salvageable and sold the rest to scrap dealers.

The tractor moved at a good speed over the road. There had been little rain the past two weeks and the tracks were dry. The poplar and birch trees wore bright dabs of yellow against the fading green. Clausen swung through an opening in the fence and stopped beside the depression. He climbed down and studied the sinking ground close-up. Curiously, it seemed wider and deeper than the day before. He wondered at first if it might be caused by underground seepage from the stream he had dammed. And yet the earth in the depression’s center looked quite dry.

He remounted the tractor, drove to the dirt pile beside the old bunker that was now half hidden by bushes and vines, and lowered the scoop. When he’d scraped up a full load, he backed off and approached the depression until his front wheels were on the edge. He raised the scoop slightly with the intention of tilting it to drop the dirt load, but the front of the tractor began to tip. The front wheels were sinking into the ground.