Shadow War. Don Pendleton

was thrown backward, bouncing off the granite mass of Manning and landing on top of Encizo. The men scrambled to fit themselves into seat belts as McCarter slalomed the gigantic stretch Hummer in and out of traffic.

      “This is bollocksed!” McCarter snarled to no one in particular.

      “Let’s just get to the jetty!” James called back. “It’ll take them a while to shift the pursuit to the water. By that time we’ll have scuttled the boat and be gone.”

      “That’s what I’m doing, mate,” McCarter agreed.

      He tapped his brakes, snapped the steering wheel to the left, gunned the gas and zoomed past a black four-door sedan, then he cut the wheel back to the right. Behind him a single siren and flashing light bar became three.

      Hawkins crawled over the barrier between the backseat and the driver compartment through the open glass divider. He swung down, twisted and slid into the shotgun seat. McCarter darted around a heavy diesel truck stacked with crates and the motion threw the former U.S. army commando up against the passenger door. Hawkins snatched hold of the handle above the window to steady himself.

      “Let’s use the improved clearance on this thing,” Hawkins said. “Cut through something, drive over something. Those patrol cars are low-slung.”

      “I’ll see what I can do.”

      Hawkins looked at the NSA field version of the vehicle’s navigation device and watched their GPS coordinates speeding through the map display of the French city. He saw a series of switchback turns coming up on the road ahead toward the team’s exfiltration point.

      McCarter burned through an intersection against the light. Horns blared in sudden panic, and the Hummer rocked on its suspension like a boxer avoiding jabs. They crested a rise and through a break in the buildings, and the Briton could see empty black under a dark sky. Behind them a police cruiser gunned forward and tried to pull parallel. McCarter swerved to cut him off and bullied the cop back with the superior weight of the stretch Hummer.

      “Up ahead. Take that alley,” Hawkins barked, “drive across the parking lot and down the hill. There’s no way the cops’ll follow us in their cars. It’ll buy us minutes as they try to navigate the switchbacks down to the shore.”

      “That’s crazy!” McCarter shouted. “We’ll flip for sure.” He jerked the wheel in a tight, 180-degree spin then let it flip back around. “Hold on!”

      The Briton reached down and flipped off the all-wheel drive, switching the custom setting to front-wheel control. He tapped the brakes and the rear wheels of the Hummer locked up, screaming in protest as McCarter just managed to slide the rear end around.

      The knobby front tires of the sliding vehicle clawed at the asphalt. They met the curb of the sidewalk and bucked up into the air. The rear wheels caught hold and as the front of the Hummer bounced back down McCarter snapped the vehicle back into all-wheel drive.

      “Who dares wins,” McCarter gritted.

      T HEY SPED INTO THE NARROW alley Hawkins had indicated. The former SAS commando struck a pair of garbage cans with the stretch Hummer’s heavy bumper. They bounced up into the air, spilling trash across the windshield, then bounced off the hood and flipped up over the vehicle’s roof. McCarter snapped the wheel to avoid a larger, industrial-size green garbage bin and scraped the wall of the alley. There was a shower of sparks, then the screaming of metal peeling away from metal as his sideview mirror was snapped off.

      “Oh, we’re having fun now,” Hawkins said.

      The stretch Hummer rocketed out of the narrow alley and shot across the street. McCarter lay on the horn as he cut across two lanes of traffic. A forest-green Audi locked its brakes as the Hummer suddenly loomed in front of it. The little coupe turned sideways, its rear end fishtailing.

      The Hummer’s front wheels struck the edge of the sidewalk and bounced up again. McCarter wrestled the massive vehicle over a parking divider, uprooting a sapling as he did so. He weaved in and out of sitting vehicles as he crossed the parking lot. A middle-aged couple in evening dress appeared at the edge of his headlights.

      The woman screamed and the man had the presence of mind to jerk back. McCarter turned his wheel, kissed the side of a parked Fiat and shot past the terrified couple.

      “Sorry!” he yelled, knowing they couldn’t hear him. He glanced at his sideview mirror to see how close the pursuing patrol cars were, and then remembered he’d ripped the driver-side mirror clean off the body frame. His eyes darted to the passenger-side mirror. He saw spinning lights emerging from the alley across the street.

      He turned his gaze forward again. A thick hedge of arborvitaes formed a wall at the rear of the parking lot. He cut his eyes toward Hawkins, then back toward the wall of foliage. He never slowed.

      The bucking of the vehicle as it hit the curb rattled their teeth hard. Then the heavy bumper struck the arborvitaes like a battering ram and the Hummer slammed through and out the other side.

      For a second McCarter couldn’t see anything but the rubbery, fanlike needled leaves. The Hummer hurtled through a shoulder-high fence of 4x4 planks and turned them into splintered kindling.

      Then there was nothing.

      The Hummer hovered for a moment out into open space and Hawkins had an absurd, momentary flashback to his childhood and the television show The Dukes of Hazard. The Hummer tilted as they hovered and they could see the lights of the city plunging down the steep hill below them.