in the left hip before he got there, spinning him to the ground and wounding him fatally.
Travers changed magazines in a flash, then rose and began running over to the woman, his weapon now pointing back at the church, because gunfire continued booming from inside.
Travers raced up to the woman, shouting over the raging gun battle. “Ma’am, come with me. I’m taking you to cover.”
“Cut my arms free,” she shouted back.
“I’ll do it when we get somewhere safe.”
“I can’t run like this. Just cut the rope.”
Travers realized the folly of standing here in the open arguing, so he pulled his knife off his chest rig and moved behind the attractive woman he’d last seen months earlier near Phuket, Thailand. He cut her free, resheathed his knife, then said, “I want you tight on my back. We’re running to the wall of the church. Got it?”
“Got it!” she replied.
Travers began running for the church, twenty yards away. He’d expected to feel the presence of the female CIA asset right on his heels as he ran, but he did not. He slowed a little, concerned he’d gotten ahead of her, and then, when he made it to the stone wall, he spun around and looked back.
The brunette was not behind him at all. Instead she had climbed behind the wheel of the remaining white van. Before his eyes the vehicle lurched forward and took off down the hill, following the tracks of the two before it.
* * *
• • •
Zoya Zakharova raced down the hill, trying to catch up with the closest van, now three hundred meters away or so and barely visible in the mist. As she buckled herself in to reduce the thrashing she was taking from the rough terrain, she looked to her left. There, next to her, was a wounded man in the front passenger seat. He was a Bratva soldier, not one of the elite mercenaries who’d shown up, and as she drove on she rifled through his body with her left hand and pulled out a CZ 75 pistol, which she placed on her lap, and a mobile phone, which she examined. When she saw the phone was locked, she used it to smack the wounded man across the face. In Russian she said, “Hey! Unlock this.”
The man had been shot through the left arm, and from the blood on his mouth she realized at least one of his lungs had been perforated by bullet fragments.
He turned his head to her slowly but said nothing.
Zoya now snatched up the CZ 75 and thumbed off the safety. Pointing it at him with her left hand she said, “Unlock it!”
Reluctantly, the man did so. Zoya kept one eye out the front windshield and the other on the wounded mafia goon, and when he tapped in his code he handed it back to her.
She reached for it, turned the wheel to avoid a rainwater-filled pothole in the gravel road, then looked over to the man.
He reached out and lunged at the pistol.
Zoya fired three times across her body, knocking the Russian dead into the passenger-side door.
She scrolled through the man’s apps. Once she found the navigation app, she checked it to see where she was in relation to Castle Enrick.
She knew she had to hang back so as not to be detected but stay close enough to not lose the entourage racing away from the church. She knew her father. He wouldn’t drive these obvious vehicles up to the castle. No, he would switch vehicles, do something to obscure his plan and his approach to his target obliquely.
As she was thinking over her desperate predicament, the yellow Air Tractor flew through the air above her on her right. She looked at it in surprise, then saw that it was trailing both smoke and fire.
As it plunged back to Earth, Zoya was relieved that the plague weapon had been destroyed, but she was still worried. She worried the Americans behind her would think their battle was won, when in truth her father had hinted he had a different type of attack up his sleeve.
She pushed down harder on the gas, increasing her speed, and the dead body slumped over into her lap.
* * *
• • •
Court watched as the yellow airplane sputtered and died in the air, then began its death spiral at only four hundred feet.
It hit a field of heather nose down, then exploded in a ball of fire.
Court pumped his fist in the air. To Zack he