The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,207

sadism nor sorrow.

A scrim of red momentarily suffused Janson's vision: which was the greater insult, he wondered - being executed as a traitor, or being sacrificed as a pawn? Once more the fishing vessel caught his attention, but this time the sight was accompanied by a wrenching sense of danger. It was too small to be a crabber, and too near the shore to be after rockfish or perch.

And the thick staff that extended from the flapping tarpaulin on the deck was not a fishing pole.

Janson saw the bureaucrat's mouth moving, but he could no longer hear him, for his attention was wholly devoted to an immediate and deadly threat. Yes, Collins's bungalow was on a narrow, two-mile-long spit of land, yet the sense of security conveyed by the isolation, Janson realized now, was an illusion.

An illusion that was shattered by the first artillery round that exploded in Collins's living room.

A torrent of adrenaline constricted Janson's consciousness to a laserlike focus. The shell smashed through the window and hurled into the opposite wall, spraying the room with splinters of wood and chunks of plaster and fragments of glass; the blast was so intense that it registered on the ears less as sound than as pain. Black smoke began to billow and Janson understood the fluke that had saved them. A howitzer shell, he knew, spun more than three hundred times a second, and the result of its force and spin was that the shell had burrowed far into the cottage's soft-pine and plaster construction before it exploded. Only this had spared them a deadly blast of jagged shrapnel. Seemingly conscious of every millisecond, Janson realized, too, that an artillery gunner's first few shells were fired in order to zero in on the mark. The second shell would not arrive ten feet above their heads. The second shell, if they stayed where they were, would not leave them to ponder shell rotation speeds and detonation times.

The old wood-frame house would offer them no protection at all.

Janson leaped from the couch and raced to the attached garage. It was his only hope. The door was open and Janson took a few steps down to the concrete floor, where a small convertible stood. A yellow late-model Corvette.

"Wait a minute!" Collins called out breathlessly. His face was smudged with soot from the explosion and he was obviously winded from having followed Janson's sprint. "It's my Z-six. I've got the keys right here." He held them out meaningfully, asserting the primacy of property rights.

Janson grabbed them from his hand and jumped into the driver's seat. "Friends don't let friends drive drunk," he replied, shoving the startled undersecretary of state out of the way. "You can come or not."

Collins hastened over to the side, pressed the garage-door opener, and rode shotgun with Janson, who revved the motor in reverse and shot out of the garage with just a millimeter of clearance between it and the lumbering roll-up door.

"Cutting it a little close, are we?" Collins asked. His face was now drenched in perspiration.

Janson said nothing.

Using, in rapid succession, the emergency brake, the steering wheel, and the accelerator with an organist's fluidity, Janson executed a reverse bootleg turn - a J turn - and gunned the car down the narrow macadamized roadway.

"I'm thinking this wasn't such a smart move," said Collins. "We're now totally exposed."

"The flat nets - they extend out all the way around the tip of the island, right?"

"About a half mile out, yes."

"Then use your head. Those nets would entangle any sloop that tried to cut across them. So if the gunboat wants to gain a new line of fire on us, it's got a very wide apex to sail around. It's a slow-moving vessel - it just isn't going to have enough time. Meanwhile, we keep the house itself between us and it: that's concealment and protection."

"Point taken," Collins said. "But now I want you to turn onto the pocket marina we've got a little farther on the right. We get there, we're out of sight. Plus we can take a motorboat to the mainland if we need to." His voice was composed, masterful. "See that little path to the right? Turn on it - now."

Janson drove past it.

"Goddammit, Janson!" Collins bellowed. "That marina was our best chance."

"Best chance to get blown to bits. You imagine they won't have thought of it? They'll already have lobbed a time-delayed explosive device there. Think like they do!"

"Turn around!" Collins yelled. "Goddammit, Paul, I know this