Page 92 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
“I’m hitting the button, sir!”
“Hit it again.”
The tech hit it again. And again. And again. Nothing.
Vargas raised the glasses back to his eyes. He saw Olmedo hovering over the girl as doctors and nurses pushed their way toward them.
But what caught Vargas’s attention was the tall man in the red bandana who suddenly turned and scanned the tree line. Their eyes locked somehow. It was as if the man were staring right at him.
Vargas’s mil-spec binoculars saw the clear blue eyes as clearly as if the man were standing two feet in front of him.
“I know him—”
“Sir?”
“We need to leave.Now.”
?
Aboard theOregon
“We’ve got a squirter, Chairman,” Murphy said. “Heading southeast.”
He had a clear, drone’s-eye view of two men leaping into an SUV. The 4K image showed both had pistols on their hips. The one carrying some kind of controller yanked the driver’s door open and jumped in. The other hesitated at the passenger door and glanced up, giving Murphy a full-faced view of the man. He was already running video, but he snapped a screenshot anyway. Seconds later, the SUV’s engine roared to life and the vehicle launched down the rutted dirt path.
Murph’s drone stayed hot on his tail.
“Can you stop him?” Juan asked over the comms.
“I can try.”
Murph mashed the throttle and pushed the drone over a hundred miles an hour. It soared over the bucking SUV, slowed by the crappy road. Murph took up a position two hundred yards ahead at themouth of a mountain tunnel. He couldn’t follow the truck inside for fear of losing his signal. He only had five minutes of fuel left.
Murph’s quadcopter drone carried a mini Gatling gun slung beneath its fuselage. It hovered menacingly five feet above the road. Murph watched the SUV barrel toward him in his monitor, refusing to slow down.
“He’s not stopping,” Murph said. “And we’re going to lose him.”
“Then take him out.”
Murph hit the firing switch. A dozen rounds of 5.56 armor-piercing ammo burped from the mini gun, punching through the hood, spidering the glass, and shredding the roof as the SUV raced beneath the quadcopter’s skids and plunged into the tunnel.
Murph spun the bird on its axis and emptied the rest of the drone’s magazine. The rear window shattered and the tailgate puckered beneath the fury of lead, but the vehicle roared ahead and disappeared into the dark.
?
El Salvador
In the front seat, Vargas clutched at his chest wounds as blood spilled over his lower lip like an overtopping dam.
“Get me…to…a hospital,” Vargas said in a gargle of blood. His panicked eyes shut as he doubled over onto the floor.
“Jefe!” The tech shook him hard by the shoulder.
Too late.
The tech mashed the throttle to the floorboard and rocketed through the dark. He was fearful of his boss, whether he lived or died.
He would obey his last order no matter what.
