Out of Range: A Novel (17 page)

Chapter Thirty

T
here was no sound but the ticking of the radiator and something like static. The car was lying on its side, water visible halfway up the windshield, and Charlie realized they had catapulted over the side of the road and into the river. Through the side window—which was now directly above him—he could see they had fallen down a very steep and rocky ravine. And that staticky sound was actually the rush of the rapids.

But Charlie felt curiously stupefied, as if he’d had his bell rung. From his vantage point, he could see the driver lying sideways in an unmoving heap in the front seat, the air bag deflating in front of him. He seemed to be unconscious, though there was no blood or any indication that he’d been seriously wounded.

The mercenary, on the other hand, was done for. He lay on his side next to Charlie. His face was now strangely flattened, its features wiped away, like an orange that had been hit with a hammer. Blood was pouring out of the single gaping hole that had once been his nose and mouth, leaking onto the slick surface of the window in enormous quantities.

And then water began flowing into the vehicle. The SUV was wallowing deeper in the river, showing signs that it might be swept away at any moment. If Charlie didn’t get out soon, he would drown in here. But he was pinned to his seat by a heavy canvas bag that had bounced out of the rear of the vehicle, and with his hands behind him, he had a very hard time maneuvering.

From the front of the car, the driver grunted softly—an Uzbek curse—and shifted around in his seat, sloshing water around the cabin. As he began to make sense of what was happening around him, his eyes widened. “You!” he yelled. “What are you doing?”

Charlie pushed himself to his knees and clawed at the door handle, struggling to find the latch. He yanked but it felt limp and dead in his hand. The lock switch must have shorted out.

The driver pulled out his gun. He’d have a hard time turning around to get a good look at his prey, but that gave Charlie only a few seconds.

In desperation, Charlie slid around and inverted himself, his entire torso underwater, and kicked the window.

Nothing happened.

The frigid water was up to his shoulders now and he could feel it robbing his body of oxygen. He kicked again. Once, twice, three times. The water was at his chin. In moments, it would cover his face. He kicked again with all the force he could muster and finally the window gave way.

Before he could even register that he’d penetrated the window, a cascade of water twisted and flipped him inside the car. Gasping and spluttering, he sucked hungrily for air, struggling against the current, trying to find an exit through the broken window. But it was no use. He held his breath and stayed as still as possible, trying to conserve his energy until the rush died down.

When the water finally reached equilibrium, he found a small pocket of air. Pressing his head against the roof, he contorted his neck and managed to suck in a few gasps of oxygen, then pushed himself upward through the window.

As he did, Charlie heard the sound of two gunshots. The driver firing at him somewhat haphazardly. And too late.

Charlie foisted himself on top of the wrecked SUV and stood on the battered door, gazing at the roaring rapids beneath him. It would certainly be no picnic diving into that with his hands cuffed behind his back.

As he hesitated, he heard the driver bellowing inside the car, then saw the front door open. Charlie stomped on it and heard a rewarding yelp of pain. But he knew he couldn’t hold him off like this for very long. And as hairy as those rapids looked, if the big man got out while Charlie was still standing on the vehicle, it would be no contest.

The moment Charlie hit the water, he lost all control, all sense of up and down, all sense of direction, the current grabbing him and sucking him beneath the surface of the river. As he spun helplessly, he saw light above him, appearing and disappearing with each rotation of his body.

He kicked and thrashed wildly, trying to get his legs in front of him. Light, dark, light, dark. But none of his feverish activity seemed to have any effect on his relationship to the river. And then suddenly his head broke the surface and air surged into his burning lungs.

That brief glimmer of hope was quickly shattered as he was sucked in again. Propelled by the furious current, his entire body battered and scraped by the jutting rocks, he struggled desperately for another surge of air, only to find himself slammed into something hard. The current flipped him up and he found himself lying atop a smooth black boulder, his lungs screaming. He sucked in another desperate breath, then was swept away again.

All of the muscles in his abdomen, his shoulders, his neck burned as he fought to hold his head above the surface. He didn’t know how long he could keep this up, but right now anything was better than being underwater in those rapids.

Floating on his back, his feet downriver ahead of his body, Charlie could see the ravine and the jagged rock walls rising steeply around him. As he passed under the bridge, he saw sunlight piercing through its joints and seams and thought he felt the current letting up.

As he emerged on the other side, he knew it for sure. The water was slowing.

The ravine was widening. And the ominous jagged boulders were replaced by a fringe of benign reeds.

Charlie managed to flip over and look back. The Cadillac was surprisingly far away. But where was the driver? Had he drowned?

Suddenly, Charlie noticed a sound like thunder.

He turned to see what it was. Not fifty yards in front of him, the placid surface of the water seemed to disappear, as though the river had been sawed in half. His brain couldn’t make sense of it at first. And then it hit him. That sound.

It was a waterfall.

Charlie kicked as hard as he could. The reeds grew closer and closer. But so did the roar. He sneaked a glance and saw clouds of mist spraying up from the falls. The speed of the current was picking up again as he got closer to the edge. And the rocks themselves seemed to be transmitting the shock of the falls into the water.

Faster, faster. Propelling himself forward with his legs, his arms nothing but dead weight, the water pulling at him, clinging to his limbs.

And then he felt his toes graze the bottom.

Salvation.

Plunging his feet deep into the water, he groped for the earth. But just as quickly it was gone. And the effort to reach it lost him a critical two or three yards. The thrumming deepened, the sound of the falls grew louder, a wave of fine mist began to roll over the top of the falls onto his face.

He panted, trying somehow to kick harder. But the sheared-off wall of water was growing closer. He wasn’t going to make it.

Then there it was again.

The bottom.

He planted his right foot in it. And this time, it held. Fighting the inexorable tug of water, his left foot found it, too. And now he was walking. One foot. Then another, then another, gasping and spluttering. Slipping in the silt, regaining, holding again.

With only a dozen feet to spare, he reached the reeds.

Flipping over in the muck, he pulled himself up onto the bank, lying on his back, greedily sucking in air, staring upward. Above him was a steep, rocky bank that rose a good two hundred feet to the top of the small mountain. And higher still, a cloudless blue sky.

Revived, he turned and surveyed upriver.

The driver was alive. Spluttering and coughing, pawing awkwardly at the water, but very much alive. And coming for him.

Charlie staggered to his feet and began trudging through the mud and reeds. The bank soon turned steep, its surface cluttered with rubble and boulders. Not only was the ground uneven and slippery, but the rocks felt unstable, as though every pebble was ready to plunge down the hillside. And without the use of his hands to balance himself, every footstep felt uncertain.

“You’re a dead man!”

Charlie turned and looked back. The driver was splashing wildly toward the shore, eyes blazing. Despite his adversary’s pathetic swimming skills, Charlie could see that with the use of his hands he would easily make it to the reeds well before the waterfall.

This would be a chase. And Charlie barely had a head start.

Charlie tried running up the steep hill, but in his haste, he slipped and fell, slamming his face against a rock. He scrambled gracelessly to his feet and began forging upward again, working more methodically this time.

Behind him, the driver hit the shore and began plowing through the reeds toward him. Charlie was only halfway up the hill, a hundred feet ahead of his stalker. Looking down, he saw the man pull out his pistol.

Two rounds snapped and clattered off the rocks at Charlie’s feet.

“You’re wasting your time, dead man!”

Another shot rang out, this one passing close to Charlie’s head.

Above him, Charlie spotted a boulder—big enough to offer him some cover—and he hurtled toward it as another near miss slapped into the rocks in front of him. Reaching the huge rock, he paused, bracing himself against it and staring over his shoulder. He was still at least a hundred feet from the crest of the hill.

But even if he made it to the ridgeline—what then? It wasn’t like he was going to be able to outrun this guy. Charlie eased his head around the side of the big rock. The bodyguard had stripped off both his coat and his shirt. Grunting and heaving with each footstep, the man’s muscles rippled beneath his pale skin as he pushed relentlessly upward.

How the hell am I going to fight this guy?
Charlie thought.
With my hands behind my back?

His pursuer paused, rested one hand on the mountainside to support himself and, raising his gun, took a slow, careful bead on Charlie’s face.

Charlie ducked behind the boulder just in time to avoid the shot. The bullet hit a rock. As the shards of shrapnel flew sideways and began bouncing slowly down the hill, something came to Charlie. A play that might work. He braced his back against the mountainside and shoved the massive rock with his feet.

It didn’t budge.

The Uzbek below him began laughing. “You gonna hide behind that rock all day, little boy?”

Charlie pushed again. He thought maybe he felt something this time, a miniscule shifting of weight beneath his feet. But still the rock was there. Charlie took two deep breaths, closed his eyes and summoned images of Ollie and Meagan. Anger filled him like a furious red fire. He took one more deep breath, then screamed, pushing with all his might.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, it began to move—at first propelled only by the strength of his muscles—then, suddenly, the boulder lightened as its own momentum took over.

And it began to fall.

It seemed to go in slow motion at first. But then it hit another rock, bounced a little, and began to accelerate, sweeping dozens of smaller rocks in front of it. Those rocks drove another hundred into motion and soon the entire hillside was moving.

The landslide made a curious, horrifying noise, like some mythic giant grinding its teeth, and suddenly the bodyguard, who had looked so intimidating and huge, appeared as insignificant as a gnat before the vast carpet of earth and stone.

For a few terrifying seconds, Charlie was sure the entire hillside would collapse, sucking him down with it. But then the terrible noise of the landslide subsided, replaced once more by the rush of the waterfall. As the dust began to settle, Charlie walked over to the edge of the hill and looked down at where the big man had been. He was barely recognizable now, just a heap of twisted limbs, one arm trailing in the river.

For a moment it seemed unthinkable. Unreal.

Charlie had been in many situations over the course of his career where he thought he might have to defend himself, or someone he cared about. And he had always assumed that if the time came, he would do what needed to be done.

But as he peered down the hill at his adversary’s corpse, he was shocked by his own reaction. There was no revulsion at the act, or even fear of the line he’d just crossed. Instead, he was filled with a wheeling sense of triumph. A desire to stick out his chest, point at the dead man and laugh.

And then, as quickly as that feeling came, it was replaced by a wave of nausea. That nausea was a reaction not to what he’d done, but to the primal relish which had just overtaken him.

Charlie shook his head, pushing away the self-analysis. He had no time for introspection or guilt now.

It wouldn’t take long for Quinn and his men to figure out that he’d escaped. And he had to get through to MI6 before they did.

Chapter Thirty-one

C
harlie ran in an awkward trot, his hands still cuffed behind him. He knew the moment Byko learned of his escape, he’d be on the move and Charlie would lose any chance of finding Julie.

From the ridge running along the small river, Charlie could see the ribbon of concrete in the distance, the A217 highway running back to Tashkent. It was probably about two or three miles away if he went cross-country, but the problem was that once he got down off the ridge, he was liable to lose his way.

As he jogged unsteadily past a bend, he spotted a small track diverging from the little road. It was barely more than a cow path, unpaved and weedy, with two deep ruts that probably had been made by tractor wheels, but it seemed to lead off in the direction of the main highway.

He headed down the path, which led up and down a series of small hills and then out into the valley below. Still shivering from the cold water, he crested the final hill and looked down into the valley, spotting a small farmhouse flanked by a ramshackle barn and a livestock pen. The track on which he was running headed straight across the cotton fields toward it.

He had been planning to flag down a ride on the A217 and convince someone to lend him a phone, but this was a much better option.

When he grew closer, he saw two cars parked in front of the farmhouse. He moved faster at first, anxious to see what was going on here, then slowed as he discovered what those cars were.

A blue Toyota van and a sleek red Mercedes SEL. Outside a farmhouse?

Had he stumbled upon one of Byko’s outposts?

He scanned the surrounding fields and realized where he was. The characteristic maroon flowers in the fields had faded, but each waist-high plant was still topped with the bulbous capsule that remained after the flower disappeared—a feature that gave the crop a comical air, as though it might have been invented by Dr. Seuss. This was opium.

And even if this property didn’t belong to Byko, even if Charlie had just stumbled upon the property of a local drug dealer, getting any help here was a dubious proposition. In fact, merely cutting through the property to get down to the highway was a perilous idea.

The problem was that the fields were very large. If he went all the way around them, he would double the distance to the highway and waste precious time. But if he kept the barn between himself and the main house, he might just be able to scoot through the area unseen. A quick dash past the farmhouse and he’d be no more than a couple of hundred yards from the tree line on the other side of the fields. And then he’d be home free.

When he got within earshot of the house, he slowed. He could hear a steady thump from the building and crept toward the barn, easing his way around the corner. He peered through the open back door and saw two men, wearing identical Adidas hoodies, bright colored warm-up pants and a great deal of gold.

They were dancing. Gyrating to the noise of the horrible electronic music coming from a primitive boom box. Clearly they were partaking of the bounty in the field. How else to explain the sight of this?

Suddenly, a buxom young woman with dyed blond hair and thick black eyebrows moved out the door, wearing nothing but a half-buttoned man’s shirt and a pair of thigh-high leather boots. Mumbling and cursing as she moved drunkenly toward the cars, she fumbled with a set of keys and managed to unlock the trunk of the red Mercedes. It was a case of vodka she was looking for.

But as she pulled it out of the trunk, it slipped from her hand and fell on the dirt with a clatter of glass.

She swore in Russian, though somehow the bottles managed not to shatter.

Charlie tried to back quietly away, but it was no use. She saw him.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded.

“I got picked up by the Internal Security Police,” Charlie improvised, swiveling to show her his cuffs. “Have you got a knife or something?”

She stared at him as if he’d dropped in from outer space. “Where did you come from?”

“I don’t know exactly. Somewhere in the hills.” He gestured in the direction opposite Byko’s compound. “They had me for a couple of days, but I managed to escape. If they find me here with you guys, it’s not gonna be good for you. For your own sake, the best thing you can do is cut these cuffs off and let me get the hell out of here.”

“I don’t know.” The woman winced nervously, looking back at the house. “Maybe one of the guys has a knife.”

“No,” Charlie said. “I’m sure we don’t want to bother them.” He glanced inside again. “They seem pretty busy with what they’re doing in there. Maybe we can find something out here to do the trick.”

Charlie quickly scanned the car for something she could use. There was nothing inside the cabin of the Mercedes, so he moved back toward the rear of the car. Lying inside the trunk, next to a loose jack, was a small pallet knife. “See that?” he said. “You can just cut them off yourself.”

The drunk girl rubbed her face, smearing her heavy eyeliner. This was too much thinking for her. “I don’t know,” she said. “I better go grab—”

“Wait!” Charlie barked, immediately regretting how much he’d raised his voice. He peeked inside the house again but the blinged-out dealers were still rapping away. “Wait,” Charlie said again, voice softer now. “Five hundred dollars, cash American, if you help me.”

“Five hundred?” She appraised him skeptically. “You got it on you?”

“Uncuff me first.”

She sneaked a glance at the house, then grabbed the knife and came toward him.

Charlie turned around to expose his cuffed hands. But freeing him turned out not to be the first thing on her mind. Instead, she lifted the back of his shirt and touched the blade to his skin.

“Don’t move,” she said.

“What are you doing?” Charlie asked, though he already had a pretty good idea.

She ripped off his money belt, unzipped the flap and pulled out the cash.

Charlie wheeled around to face her. “You don’t want to do that,” he warned, combing his mind for something that might coerce or scare her. And then it came to him. “I work for Slavik Omarich. You screw with me, you’re screwing with him.”

Six years earlier Slavik Omarich had been one of the biggest drug smugglers in Uzbekistan, a man unparalleled in reputation for violence and ruthlessness.

The woman stopped, eyes widening, mouth opening slightly. Apparently Slavik was still alive. Good for him and good for Charlie.

“Now get the cuffs off me or your head’s gonna end up on a pole.”

With trembling fingers, she took the pallet knife out of the trunk and cut off the plastic flex cuffs.

He eyeballed her with menace. “Okay, you stupid cow, my money.”

“What about my five hundred?”

He grabbed the girl by the shirt, pulled her toward him and snatched the cash. “You already blew your shot at that. Now your cell phone.”

When she hesitated, Charlie got in her face, playing the part. “Your phone, wench! I know you got one on you.”

She reached into her boot and handed him a pink, diamond-studded Nokia. Charlie looked at it—no signal. Not up here.

He grabbed the keys from the trunk of the red Mercedes, hopped in the driver’s seat and cranked on the engine. Before he pulled away, he leaned out the window.

“You tell those assholes in the house about me, I’ll come back here and kill you myself.”

But as he floored it and tore out of there, he heard the girl shouting. By the time he made it to the trees, he could see the men boiling out of the house, shooting wildly toward him, then piling into the blue van.

Charlie thought there were only a few hundred yards of trees separating the fields from the highway beyond, and that escape would merely be a matter of zipping down the dirt track and up onto the A217.

But the reality was not so simple.

The track was rutted and full of potholes deep enough to swallow an axle—if he just floored it and flew down the road, he was likely to bottom out and rip a wheel off the Mercedes.

So he slowed as much as he dared. The little road meandered through the woods, looping around gnarled trees and boulders, then suddenly took a hard left into a small dry creek bed. Charlie poured on the gas and the powerful Mercedes quickly gained speed, but suddenly the dry wash divided in half, creating a fork. Which way?

He knew that left was east. And east was where the highway was.

He went left.

Thirty seconds later, the path narrowed and the drab brown walls closed in on the Mercedes until he was unable to squeeze through any farther.

He’d chosen wrong.

Charlie turned off the engine, put his head out the window, and listened for the sound of the van.

Nothing.

Were they lying in wait, ready for an ambush as soon as Charlie backed up? Or were they going to wait for him by the highway, expecting Charlie to jump out of the Mercedes and try to make his way on foot?

It was a fifty-fifty proposition and either way there wasn’t much time for deliberation.

Charlie threw the car in reverse and backed slowly up the dry wash. As soon as he saw the fork again, he stopped and listened for the van. But he couldn’t hear anything over the sound of his own engine. He eased his foot off the brake and continued creeping backward, hoping the drug dealers couldn’t hear him.

And then he saw them in his rearview. Backing up from the other fork, no more than fifty feet behind him. Point-blank range.

Charlie floored it.

The big Mercedes flung itself backward so hard that he nearly banged his face into the steering wheel. Within seconds, he was doing almost forty miles per hour.

One of the dealers was hanging out the window looking for Charlie, nothing but his legs inside the van. His eyes widened as he saw the Mercedes hurtling toward him and he swiveled around, trying desperately to bring his AK-47 to bear before impact.

But he was too late.

With a metallic thud and a ripping of metal, the Mercedes smashed into the van. Charlie heard a skittering thud, saw the would-be shooter pinwheel over the top of the Mercedes and disappear below the line of the hood, arms flailing wildly at the air.

Pulse racing, Charlie dropped the Mercedes into drive and stomped on the gas again. The big German V8 responded with a throaty roar and the car jumped forward as he shot down the other fork.

He glanced one more time in his rearview. There was no sign of the driver trying to get out of the car. He must have been crushed by the impact.

As for the Mercedes, its legendary engineering had proved its mettle here. The trunk lid was completely buckled and the cover on the rear bumper fell off after dragging behind the vehicle for a few hundred yards—but there was no sign that the car had sustained any mission-critical damage.

Charlie gripped the wheel tightly and poured on the gas.

He soon crested the incline and found himself on the edge of the highway. Bumping and slaloming onto the A217, Charlie picked up speed then checked his watch—it had been just thirty-six minutes since he’d left Byko’s compound in that Escalade.

He pulled out the girl’s diamond-studded phone. The moment he got into range, he dialed the British Embassy.

After three rings, he was greeted by a pleasant female voice.

“My name is Charlie Davis,” he said. “I need to talk to somebody at MI6. Tell them it’s about my wife. Julie Davis.”