veered right. The Cushman’s front quarter panel scraped the tunnel wall, sending up a shower of sparks. They slowed slightly. He eased away from the wall, then back again.
A hundred yards down the ramp, the cylinders caught up with the Emir’s Cushman. One cylinder took a bad bounce and tumbled past, but the second one crashed into the rear bumper. The Cushman skidded, turning broadside, then tipped onto its side and skidded onto the landing.
“Get us stopped,” Clark ordered.
Dominic spun the wheel hard over, putting the whole left side into the wall. The Cushman slowly ground to a stop. They got out and started down the ramp. On the landing, the Emir’s Cushman lay upside down. A few feet away, a body lay sprawled on the concrete. They paused at the entrance to the landing. To their left, the tunnel continued on another fifty feet before turning sharply left. There was no one in the tunnel. Chavez walked over to the body and knelt down. “Not him,” he said.
They jogged down the tunnel. Around the corner, they found themselves in a thirty-foot-wide alley. Overhead, vaulted girders spanned the ceiling. They could see the circular entrances to the storage drifts, spaced at twenty-foot intervals along each side of the alley.
“I count twelve per side,” Dominic said.
“Split up,” Clark ordered. “Me and Jack will take the right, you two the left.”
Clark and Jack sprinted across the alley to the opposite wall. Jack mouthed, I’ll take the last six. Clark nodded. Jack took off in a sprint, glancing into each drift as he went. On the other side of the alley, Dominic was doing the same.
Jack dashed past the fifth drift, saw nothing, then continued past the seventh and eighth. He skidded to a stop, backed up, and looked again. He saw a flicker of light two hundred yards down the drift. He could just make out two figures crouched beside what looked like an industrial bait box. Jack looked around. Clark was working his way forward but too far away. Same with Dominic and Chavez.
“Hell with it.”
He sprinted into the drift.
He’d covered half the distance to the figures when one of their heads snapped up. A muzzle flashed orange. Jack kept running. Raised his gun, snapped off two shots. From the alley, Clark yelled, “Over here!”
The man stepped forward, firing from the hip. Jack hunched over and pressed against the wall, trying to make himself small. He adjusted his aim, laid the sites on the man’s center mass, squeezed off two rounds. The man spun and went down. The other figure ignored his fallen comrade and kept working, his hands moving in the box. He looked up, saw Jack, kept working. Thirty feet away. Jack raised his gun and kept firing until the slide locked open, the magazine now empty. Twenty feet. A head peeked around the box, disappeared again. Jack covered the last ten feet in two strides, then dropped his shoulder and slammed into the box. He heard something pop in his shoulder, felt the pain rush up his neck. The box skidded backward. Jack’s feet went out from under him, and he slammed face-first into the concrete. Blood gushing from his shattered nose, he pushed himself to his knees. His eyesight sparkled. He looked around. The first man’s body lay sprawled against the curved wall, his AK a few feet away. Jack crawled over to it, snagged the sling with his right hand, and dragged it toward him. He got to his feet and stumbled around the box.
Already on his feet, the Emir was stepping toward the box. He saw Jack and stopped. His eyes flicked to the box, then back to Jack’s face.
“Don’t!” Jack barked. “You’re done. It’s over.”
Down the tunnel behind Jack came the pounding of footsteps.
“No, it’s not,” the Emir said, and knelt down before the box.
Jack fired.
89
LATER, when asked BY Hendley and Granger, Jack Ryan Jr. would remain cagey about whether he’d intended to simply wound the Emir or, in the heat of battle, he’d missed his center-mass target. The truth was, Jack wasn’t sure himself. At the critical moment, the flood of adrenaline in his veins and the pounding of his heart had combined to seemingly both stretch and compress time in his brain. Contradictory thoughts fought for control of his fine motor skills: shoot to kill, stop the Emir; shoot to wound, gain an intel gold mine but risk the man getting a chance to push the button.