up another foot into the air, and suddenly it was rearing and bucking like a horse. As the antiplow skirts struck the car's rear fender, Janson had a horrible realization: It was trying to climb over them.
He glanced over to his right and saw Collins doubled forward in his seat, his hands over his ears, trying to protect them from the immense din.
The hovercraft bounced and tipped again as the churning blades whipped air into a punishing substance, like water from a water cannon. In the rearview mirror, through the eddying sand, Janson caught a glimpse of the spinning auxiliary propulsion blades mounted on the craft's underside. If the side-strafing from the M60 was not sufficient, the assassins wanted them to know that they could easily lower the powerful blades of the undermounted propeller over them, like a gigantic lawn mower, destroying the car and decapitating its inhabitants.
As the large hovercraft bucked against the rear of the Corvette, Janson swung the steering wheel abruptly to the left, and now the car veered off the paved surface, its wheels spinning into the sand and scrub as it rapidly lost traction and speed.
The hovercraft zoomed past, its motion as effortless as an air-hockey puck, then came to a halt and reversed course without turning around.
It was a brilliant maneuver: for the first time, the man with the M60 had a direct line of fire at the driver and passenger alike. Even as he watched the machine gunner seat a fresh link-belt of ammunition into the M60's drive mechanism, he heard the sound of yet another craft - a speedboat, crazily veering toward the shore.
Oh Christ no!
And in the speedboat, a figure, arranged in prone firing position, with a rifle. Aimed at them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The speedboat was equipped with an aircraft turbine engine, for it had to have been traveling at upward of 150 miles per hour. It skimmed along the water, leaving behind a slashing contrail of spume. The small boat became rapidly larger, a mesmeric spectacle of death. Two miles from the cottage, the flat netting was no longer in place; nothing protected them from the rushing gunman. Nothing.
Where could he go? Where was safety?
Janson turned the wheels of the Corvette back onto the road, heard the chassis scrape as it lurched from the sodden earth to the hard pavement. What if he tried to ram the hovercraft, jamming his foot on the accelerator and testing its lightweight fiberglass construction against the steel cage of the Corvette? Yet the odds were slim that he could even reach the craft before the M60 had perforated the engine - and him.
Crouching below the fan, the machine gunner grinned evilly. The linkbelt was seated; full-fire mode was activated. Seconds remained before he served them with a lethal fire hose of lead. Suddenly the man pitched forward, slack, his forehead dropping like a deadweight against the bipod-propped gun.
Dead.
There was an echoing sound - on the waters of Chesapeake Bay, it sounded oddly like a cork popping - and then another, and the hovercraft came to a rest just a few feet from the car, half on the road, half on the shoulder. It was not how anyone deliberately parked such a craft.
Like those of many military vehicles and devices, the controls must have been designed to require continual nonpassive pressure - simply put, the grip of a human hand on the tiller. Otherwise, in combat situations, a soldier in command could be killed, and a driverless vehicle - like an unmanned automatic weapon - might inadvertently cause harm to the wrong side. Now the craft depowered, the engines shutting off, the churning blades growing slower and slower, the craft's skids setting firmly on the ground. And as the craft fell to earth, Janson saw that the pilot, too, was sprawled, limp, on the windshield.
Two shots, two kills.
A voice called across the waters of Chesapeake Bay, as the engine of the speedboat sputtered to a halt. "Paul! Are you all right?"
A voice from the speedboat.
The voice of a woman who had saved them both.
Jessica Kincaid.
Janson got out of the car and raced to the shore; he saw Jessie in the boat only ten yards away. It was the closest she could bring the speedboat without grounding it.
"Jessie!" he shouted.
"Tell me I did great!" Jessie said, triumphant.
"Two head shots - and from a speeding boat? That's one for the goddamn record books!" Paul said. He felt suddenly, absurdly lighter. "Of course, I had everything under control."
"Yeah, I could