6. Chapter 6
Crowe
I take the truck up the fire road faster than the map says anyone should.
Their road is the highway. Wide, easy, the kind a convoy picks when it doesn’t want questions at a fuel stop.
Mine is a logging track that climbs straight up through the forest, and no vehicle their size would risk it.
Rougher ground, fewer miles. I drive every one of them too fast to be sensible.
Two roads, and one place they meet. A pass with a single road through it and one turn tight enough to drop any vehicle to walking pace.
I know roughly when they’ll reach it. I know exactly when the sun comes up. Everything I’m going to do has to fit between those two.
Not long.
The truck drops through a washout hard enough to bounce the gear in the back, and I hear Kent catch his rifle before it slides off the seat. In the mirror, he’s got it across his knees, checking it a second time.
Meyer sits with one boot braced against the seat frame and watches the road climb past the window.
“How many are we dealing with?” the kid asks.
“The order lists two riding in the back with her. That’s all it lists.”
“And the ones it doesn’t list?”
“There’ll be a driver. There’ll be a man beside him. After that I’m guessing, and I don’t like guessing.”
“Right.” He turns the rifle over. “Because there’s three of us.”
“There’s three of us.”
“Almost too easy.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, kid,” Meyer tells him.
We climb for a while. The trees close over the track. Past the headlights there’s nothing at all.
“When did you last feed?” I ask Kent.
“Before we left the site.”
“Meyer?”
“Same.”
“Good. Nobody starts anything hungry.” I take the next bend without slowing. “And nobody feeds on that mountain. Not off the crew, not off anyone in that vehicle, not for any reason you think is a good one at the time.”
“Understood,” Meyer says.
“Kent.”
“I heard you.” He shifts. “How long have I been doing this, do you think?”
“Long enough to have been told. Not long enough for me to trust you remember.”
“Fair.”
“And if this runs past first light, all three of us are in the same trouble,” I say. “There’s no shelter on that road. So it doesn’t run past first light.”
He’s quiet for about a mile.
“So,” he finally says. “Since we’ve come this far… What’s in the back of that thing worth all this effort?”
“This the first time you thought to ask?” says Meyer.
“I figured I’d be told if I needed to know. Now, I’m asking.”
“A woman,” I say.
“Any particular woman?” He leans forward again.
I take the next bend and don’t answer him because I don’t have an answer.
“A friend of Lord Val-Serein’s new consort,” says Meyer, who apparently knows more than he’s let on so far. “They were confined together. Formed a friendship.”
“Right.” Kent sits back. “Should’ve known it would be one of the higher-ups. Nobody gets this much attention from Faine without some clout behind it.”
We leave the truck at the tree line and go the rest on foot, in the dark, without a lamp between the three of us. None of us needs one.
The rock underfoot is loose scree. It’s loud if you don’t know how to put your weight down and silent if you do, and all three of us know how.
The cold does nothing to any of us, and we cover ground a living man couldn’t.
Kent still complains about the gradient the whole way up.
I figure it’s out of habit. He can’t have been turned more than a decade ago.
The pass is what I need it to be. Rock walls on both sides.
The road narrows to one lane at the tightest part, and there’s a turn in the middle of that narrow stretch with rock standing across the far side of it, so a driver can’t see what’s around it until he’s already in it.
Nothing on wheels takes that turn at speed.
Everything slows to a crawl to get through.
I walk the whole length of it once, slowly. Kent walks half a step off my shoulder, and where I stop, he stops.
“Here’s how this goes,” I say. “If any part of it doesn’t make sense to either of you, say so now.”
“Go on,” Meyer says.
I put my boot down on the road.
“They come up the grade from below us, in low gear. The transport is a box on wheels with a driver’s cab at the front and a locked compartment at the back. She’s chained inside that back compartment. Two men are riding in there with her.”
“And two more in the cab?”
“Yes, most likely. Nobody drives a load like this alone.”
“So four, like we said before,” Kent says.
“Four that I can account for. Anything past that is a surprise.” I glance from one to the next. “Expect surprises.”
“I love surprises,” says Kent.
“Hate ‘em,” mutters Meyer.
“They can’t see this turn until they’re in it, and by then they’re going at walking pace. That’s where I step into the road. They stop, because there’s nowhere left to go. I take the men in the cab. You two come down off the rock and help me put the rest of them on the ground.”
“Alive?” Kent asks.
“Alive if that’s quicker. Dead if it isn’t. I’m not spending time on it either way.”
“Understood.”
I point up at the shelf of rock on the left side of the road, twenty feet above where I’m standing.
“You’re up there. You can see the road coming up the grade, and you can see the turn.”
Then I point across.
“Meyer, the other side. That ledge where the wall steps out. Same view, other angle.”
Meyer looks at it and nods once.
“Neither of you makes a move until that vehicle stops rolling. Avoid gunfire, if you can. And nobody shoots at the vehicle at all. Not the box, not the tires, not the cab. There’s a woman chained inside, and a round through that wall goes somewhere I can’t control.”
“And if there’s a second vehicle?” Meyer says.
“Then it’s yours. Both of you. Anything that comes around that turn behind the transport is your problem, and you keep it behind the transport. You pull it back down the road, away from the box. You don’t let it come up level with the box, and you don’t fight it standing next to the box.”
“Why not level with it?” Kent asks.
“Because if they open fire, they’ll be endangering the van. Draw their fire away.”
“Away from her,” Kent says. “Whatever happens. Got it.”
“That’s the one rule underneath the whole thing. Whatever happens, she’s not to be harmed.”
“What if you’re the one in the way?” Meyer asks.
“Then I’m in the way.”
He accepts that faster than I should be comfortable with.
“Once they’re out of the way, I go to the back of the box and get the door open,” I say. “You two are still working while I do it. Nobody comes up that road behind me.”
“How long do you need at the door?”
“I won’t know until I’ve got my hand on it.”
Kent looks up at the rock shelf, then back down the road, then at me. “And what if we miss them? Do we get another go further on?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because when they’re out of this pass, the road opens up and their destination is a clear drive from there. Once they arrive, I’m betting things will be a lot tighter.”
“So this is it,” Meyer says.
“This is it.”
“And once you’ve got her?” Kent says.
“Then we’re carrying her off a mountain in the dark.”
He laughs, once, and it’s mostly nerves, and that’s fine. Nerves before is better than nerves during.
They go up. Kent takes the shelf. Meyer is on the ledge on the far side before I see him move.
I take my place at the narrow part. There’s nothing left to do but wait for engines.
Waiting is the one part of this work that sixty years hasn’t made easier.
“How long have we got?” Kent asks from the shelf. Quiet. It carries anyway up here.
“Before they arrive, or before the sun does?”
“Either.”
“They’re an hour out at the pace that road allows. The sun’s about one hour behind them.”
“So we’ve got an hour after they get here.”
“You’ve got less than that. You want to be off this rock and under something before the sky changes, and so do I.”
“Everything takes an hour,” Meyer says from the far side.
“Not tonight.”
Nobody says anything after that.
Then it comes.
Her mouth at my throat. Heat. Teeth. The weight of her against me—
My hand is flat on the rock wall.
I don’t remember putting it there. I’m braced against cold granite in the dark, and there’s an ache in my throat with nothing to cause it.
Half a second. Less.
“What the fuck?” I barely realize I’ve said it out loud.
Odile’s voice echoes in my head: ‘Keep an open mind, Crowe. Do you believe in Fate?’
No. I don’t, and I’m not going to start on a mountain an hour before a fight.
I can’t shake it. My throat aches where nothing touched it.
“You say something?” Kent asks, quiet, from the shelf.
“No. All good.” I take my hand off the rock, and put my eyes back on the road.
Then engines, and there are two of them.
Two sets of gears, both working the grade below us, one behind the other.
“That’s two vehicles,” Meyer says.
“I hear it.”
“You planned for one.”
“Warned about two,” Kent reminds him.
“Nothing changes. The transport is still the transport. Wait for it to stop.”
The first vehicle comes up into the narrow stretch and slows into the turn, just as we expected. I step out into the road, and it comes to a halt. The headlights are blinding.
The driver’s door opens because the driver wants to see what’s in front of him. That’s a mistake. I take him out of the seat before his boot touches the gravel.
The man beside him gets a hand on his weapon. Kent comes off that shelf and crosses twenty feet of open road in the time it takes the man to lift it. Then the man is face-down on the gravel with Kent’s knee between his shoulders.
“Don’t,” Kent tells him, and the man stops reaching for his radio.
More doors open. Four more men come out of the first vehicle. I’d expected four in total.
Goddammit!
Then the second one comes around the turn behind us, and it isn’t slowing to stop. It’s slowing to let men out.
“Behind us,” Meyer calls. “Doors both sides. Six of them. Maybe more.”
Six back there. Six on the first one, counting the two we’ve just put down.
Twelve men on this road, and I planned for four.
Amateur hour, Crowe. Idiot.
I can’t remember the last time I got it so wrong.
Boots hit the gravel in a rhythm too even for men in a hurry. These have done this before. Heavier gear than anything I see in the first truck. Rifles, plates, the lot.
“The box is mine,” I call, already moving. “Everything else is yours. Keep them off it.”
“Go!” It’s Meyer to Kent, who clocks the guard on the ground with the butt of his rifle, then takes off at a run, ducking low.
Gravel, then rock, then gravel again. Muzzle flash reaches me before the sound does. Nobody out here is wasting rounds on anything they can’t see.
I put myself where they’ll shoot at me. That’s the job now. Every step I take, I take away from that box, and they come with me, because I’m the biggest thing moving. I go left, into the rock, off the road, and two of them follow me and put rounds where I was, which is what I wanted.
Meyer pushes three more backward down the road, a few feet at a time, and keeps them there.
Then he goes down. I hear it over everything. It’s the sound a man makes when he lands on rock without choosing to.
“Report,” Kent shouts.
“Up,” Meyer says.
He is, and he’s already moving again. Whatever hit him is already healing while he works.
The sky over the ridge hasn’t started going gray. Not yet.
I come back through the middle of it. A man steps out from the front of the transport with his rifle already up, and I take the rifle first and him second with enough force that when he hits the truck, he crumples and stays down.
Another comes off the second vehicle’s tailgate.
He gets one round away before I reach him, and it goes high, over the road, over the rock.
The two who followed me into the rock have come back out, and they’re moving up the road. I go at them straight down the middle where there’s no cover, because straight is faster, and I can take being shot if it means ending this.
Something goes through my side. I keep going. The first one I put into the rock wall. The second one gets his barrel around toward the transport, and I knock it off line with my forearm and put him down under it. Kent is at the back corner of the box.
He’s put himself between two of the guards and the door, and he doesn’t move off that spot. He takes a hit that was coming for my back, and then a second one, and the second one breaks his arm. The bone won’t close as fast as the rest of it. He’s still there.
When I reach him, he’s reloading one-handed, braced against the bumper.
“Door’s yours,” he says through his teeth. “Make it count.”
The handle is cold under my hand. Colder than the air, warded like everything else on this convoy. I take hold of it and ignore the sizzle in my palm.
It holds against the first pull.
Not the second.
The door flies open.
Eyes like fire stare back at me.