Dual Action. Don Pendleton

Chapter 22

       Chapter 23

       Epilogue

      Prologue

      “Jeez, you get a load of that one?” Eddie Sawyer asked.

      “There’s nothin’ wrong with my eyes,” Joe DeLuca answered from the shotgun seat beside him. “Twenty-ten, last time I read the chart.”

      “So, what’s the score, Hawk-eye?”

      “I’d give her six.”

      “I bet you would,” Sawyer quipped, “if you had the six to spare.”

      He tried to get another quick glimpse of the blond hitchhiker in his right-hand mirror, but the armored truck was rolling at a steady 60 mph, and her form had dwindled to the size of a toy soldier in the glass.

      “I’m sayin’ I’ve seen better,” DeLuca said.

      “Not today, you haven’t.”

      “Well—”

      “Let’s ask the mole.” Sawyer reached back and keyed the intercom that linked the driver’s section of the truck with the cargo vault behind. “Hey, Tommy boy!” he called. “You see that sweet young thing?”

      Tom Nelson’s scratchy voice came back at Sawyer through the speaker. “Screw the botha youse.”

      It was a running joke among the men of Truck 13, Ohio Armored Transport. Nelson’s line of vision from the vault was strictly limited, and it was well-known that he spent his travel time immersed in Popular Mechanics, trying to “improve” himself. He never saw the sweet young things at roadside, standing with their thumbs out, and a good deal more besides. They always asked him, though, and his reply was perfectly predictable within a narrow range.

      Screw you.

      Piss off.

      Blow me.

      The Nelson repertoire.

      It never failed—and always got a laugh out of DeLuca.

      “Never mind there, Tommy. Sorry I disturbed you,” Sawyer offered in meek apology before switching off the intercom.

      During the spring and summer months, girl watching was a principal diversion for the men of Truck 13. Of course, they lost the female scenery in autumn, and they saw no one at all on foot during their long runs in the winter. It got boring in a hurry, then, with nothing to watch out for but the black ice on the highway, waiting for a chance to put them in a ditch.

      Their long run, once a week, was back and forth from Dayton to Columbus, with a stop in Springfield on the eastbound leg. It wasn’t all that far, really—no more than fifty miles—but it seemed longer with the load they had to escort over open country.

      Wednesday mornings, as regular as clockwork, they were out on Highway 70 with ten to fifteen million dollars riding in the back.

      On Wednesdays, Sawyer had an extra cup of coffee in the barn before they hit the road. It kept him sharp, ready for anything—although, in truth, nothing had ever happened on a Wednesday run, or any other time.

      He had been lucky driving Truck 13. DeLuca was a decent partner, if somewhat opinionated. Sawyer had seniority with four years longer on the job, and both of them had Nelson ranked. He was the baby of the family, all six feet seven inches of him, with a pair of hands that made the M-16 they kept in back look like a toy.

      Not that they’d ever had to use the rifle, or the shotgun mounted on the dashboard, or the pistols on their hips. Sawyer had never fired a shot himself, except in practice, and he hoped he never would.

      Still, you could never tell.

      “You hear about that orange alert on the news this morning?” he asked DeLuca.

      “Sports arenas, what they said on Channel 7. Maybe sports arenas, maybe on the coast. Of course, they couldn’t say which coast. ‘No further details. Sorry. As you were.’”

      “I hear you.”

      Ever since the 9/11 attacks, Ohio Armored’s management had tried to keep up with the terrorist alerts from Washington, but who could follow all of that? It had been years of running through the color code with “credible” alerts from “trusted” sources, and they never came to anything. Lately, Sawyer suspected the alarms were issued automatically, either to justify the Homeland Security payroll or to make the Feds seem like they were achieving something with their sound and fury.

      Mostly, Sawyer thought it was a waste of time and energy, but if he dropped his guard and something happened for a change, it would be his ass in a sling. He was the senior man on Truck 13, and thus responsible for anything that went awry.

      He glanced at the odometer and told DeLuca, “We just hit the point of no return.”

      It was another ritual. DeLuca grunted, as he always did, acknowledging that they would have to top off the gas tank before they started back to Dayton from the capital. The armored truck burned fuel like there was no tomorrow, no price gouging at the pumps, no crisis in the Middle East. Come rain or shine, Truck 13 guzzled gas, and Sawyer didn’t want to be caught short when they were on the open road.

      Not that a chase was anything to fret about. If anything went down, they had a cell phone and a two-way radio with which to summon reinforcements. State police could reach them anywhere along the route within ten minutes, give or take.

      Ten minutes wasn’t bad.

      “We got some company,” DeLuca said.

      The road ahead was empty, but a square gray van was gaining on them from behind, growing in Sawyer’s left-hand mirror. “Let ’em pass, if they’re in such a—What the hell? You see that, Joe?”

      “See what?” DeLuca asked.

      The mirror needed cleaning, which prevented him from seeing details, but it seemed to Sawyer that a portion of the van’s windshield had opened. Was that even possible with modern vehicles? Some of the old jeeps used to have windshields that—

      “Jesus!”

      A jet of flame shot from the dark hole in the van’s windshield, and Sawyer heard the ringing impact as a high-powered projectile slammed into the rear of his truck. Before his tongue could wrap around the first of the emergency commands they had rehearsed a hundred times, Tom Nelson started screaming in the cargo vault.

      DeLuca swiveled in his seat, shouting, “Tommy! What’s going on, man?” When the only answer was another high-pitched scream, DeLuca slammed his palm against the speaker. “Listen, dammit! Will you—”

      “Joe!” Sawyer shouted. “Wait! He isn’t on the intercom.”

      DeLuca blinked at that, then opened the sliding hatch that screened their only interior view of the vault. He stared at the square of inch-thick glass and then recoiled, gagging.

      Sawyer was losing it. So many years of training, practice runs, and still the real thing took him by surprise. His eyes were torn between the road ahead, the gray van in the mirror, and his partner’s stricken face. He clutched the steering wheel in hands that ached, their knuckles blanched bone-white.

      “What is it, Joe?”

      “He’s burning,” DeLuca moaned. “God Almighty, Tommy’s burning up!”

      Sawyer could smell it, the scorched-flesh smell he’d never quite forgotten from the summer twelve years earlier, when he had driven past a five-car pileup on the interstate, southeast of Cleveland. Bodies cooking, doused in gasoline.

      This smell was different, though.

      No gasoline, for one thing—and those