Chapter Seventeen #2
Court considered his options for a moment.
He looked around at his predicament and immediately pronounced himself trapped.
He could fight a few of them, maybe, but the wide expanse in front of him over which they would surely come was a disadvantage.
If they spread across the frozen meadow and approached simultaneously in a wide line, he would not be able to engage targets at his left, right, and center before they could gun him down.
The high ground was supposed to be a tactical advantage but, Gentry saw, this high ground sucked.
Off to his right there was another way down the hillside. A sheep trail, not more than four feet wide and incredibly steep, dropped more or less in a straight line through the forest towards the meadow on the other side. But the grade was far too sheer for the snowmobile to negotiate.
Even trying it would be suicide.
Now Court heard voices below him. Shouts of men, wild in the frenzy of the hunt.
They were moving up the road to him, closing on his cornered position.
—
“He’s got nowhere to run!” shouted number One.
He didn’t bother with his radio. The noise from the explosion and the gunfire had withered his and his men’s hearing for the rest of the night.
He just shouted out to the three men around him jogging up the slippery road.
Number Three had been left behind at the cabin.
He’d wrapped bandages over his injury, and he was lucid and ambulatory, even if out of the fight.
The four Libyans nearing the crest of the rise above them quickly dropped their magazines from their Skorpions and checked them for sufficient ammo.
Professionally they reseated the clips and clicked them back into place.
Their night vision goggles covered their eyes.
The steady snowfall gave movement to the green view ahead.
They slowed as they neared the top, spread quietly across the road without waiting for instructions to do so.
Suddenly the engine noise of the snowmobile screamed again. It revved higher and grew louder and then in front and above the four Libyans a single headlight appeared, glowed like a green specter in their night vision optics as it barreled down towards them.
“Open fire!” screamed number One with a shriek.
The four assassins knelt into crouches and poured rounds at the oncoming vehicle.
Twenty rounds a second of hollow-point ammunition sprayed from each of the four braying guns.
Tracer rounds arced and struck and bounced into the sky like rocket-powered fireflies.
At thirty meters distance the vehicle left the ground. It floated to twenty-five meters and then came down hard, bounced again into the air, and then landed on its side. The light stayed on as the machine slid down the hill past the four Libyans and came to a stop twenty meters behind them.
The engine idled.
Hot gases poured from the motor and hazed the men’s optics.
Number One ran to the snowmobile after reloading his weapon. He slipped on ice and fell to his knees. Number Two passed him as he got back up. A quick scan around the road by all four men confirmed their suspicions.
“He’s not here!”
—
There was a moment when Court thought he might have been sliding at fifty miles an hour. Everything seemed faster at ground level, of course, and the snow and ice and crunchy bits of stick and grass that flew into his face no doubt added to the perception of speed.
But whatever the actual velocity, Gentry knew he was descending the sheep trail way too fast.
It was hard to part with the second duffel worth of gear, but he’d seen no alternative.
He’d dumped the weapons and the grenades and the binoculars up there on the ice.
He lashed the sawed-off shotgun to the handlebars to keep them straight and then used a length of cord to tie the throttle open.
He watched the machine leap over the ledge and down the road, then he ran as fast as possible across the snow along the shelf, along the granite wall, to where the sheep trail began and led down at nearly twenty degrees through the forest, through the lower meadow, and then to the little village, still dark, still an hour from the first hues of dawn over the mountains to the east.
At a full sprint, Gentry leapt through the air, his injured feet first, holding the big canvas duffel bag behind his backside, and landed on the snow.
The grade was especially sheer at the beginning.
He’d lost control almost immediately but found his position again at a slightly less severe stretch of trail that proved to be all too short.
On the hillside to his left he could hear the gunfire and sense the flashes of light, but he did not turn his head away from his feet and what was in front of him.
For nearly a hundred yards he’d been happy with his plan.
He sledded quickly out of the kill zone.
And in truth, it wasn’t a bad plan really, but, as it turned out, its execution was wanting.
When he skidded into the woods, the pine roots crossed the sheep trail, and he was sliding too fast to stop.