"Ground Force Two, this is Black Dragon. Capture instructions are as follows: priority one is the Firestone priority two, the girl and West, both are to be captured alive, if possible. Any other captives are to be executed. There can be no witnesses to our doings here."

Hearing this, West snapped to look over at Alby. Then he looked forward at Zoe, driving the lead car.

It was one thing to know that if everything ended badly, you were safe, but it was another thing entirely to know that those dear to you were not.

"You hear that?"Zoe said over the radio.

"Yep," West said, his jaw tightening.

"Please get us out of here, Jack."

AS JACK'S AND ZOE'S cars sped away to the east, a Chinese command APC was arriving at Jack's farmhouse, flanked by several escort jeeps.

As it skidded to a halt, two men stepped out of it, one Chinese, the other American. While the Chinese man was clearly older, both bore the rank of major on their collars.

The Chinese major wasBlack Dragon, the owner of the voice on the airwaves. Officious and intense, Black Dragon was known for his cold methodical efficiency he was a man who got the job done.

The younger American with him was tall and broad, powerful, and he wore the customized uniform of a US Army Special Forces operator. He had a sharpedged crew cut and the unblinking eyes of a psychopath. His call sign:Rapier.

"Secure the farmhouse," Black Dragon ordered the nearest unit of paratroopers. "But be wary of any improvised devices. Captain West is clearly a man who prepares for eventualities such as this."

Rapier said nothing. He just stared intently at the abandoned farmhouse, as if absorbing every feature of it.

THE RIVER CROSSING.

The bridge was up ahead now, maybe a mile away-an old wooden singlelane bridge.

West saw it come into view, just as three APCs and five Chinese jeeps skidded to a halt in front of it, blocking the way. A roadblock.

They'd got there first.

d.a.m.n.

The lead APC lowered its turretmounted cannon ominously.

At that exact same moment, four Chinese jeeps caught up with West's cars from behind, two to each side.

The soldiers on the jeeps looked angry as all h.e.l.l and, buffeted and jostled by the uneven terrain, they tried to aim their rifles at West's tires.

"Jack!"Zoe called over the radio."Jack...!"

"Stay on the road! Whatever you do, stay on the road till you reach the windmills!"

Two skinny windmills flanked the road up ahead, halfway between them and the bridge.

An explosion boomed out behind Jack's LSV-barely three feet behind it-tearing a crater from the road. A shot from the APC's cannon.

"Sheesh." Jack turned to Alby. "Do me a favor, kid. Try not to tell your mother about this part of your stay."

Zoe's car came to the windmills flanking the roadway, shoomed between them, closely followed by Jack and Alby's LSV-still harried by the four Chinese jeeps.

Jack cut through the windmills, while the jeeps took them differently: one jeep swung onto the road proper and sped between the windmills, while the three others went wider, whipping around theoutside of the windmills and- Suddenly the first such jeep dropped from view. As did the jeep traveling immediately behind itand the one that had sped around the windmill on the other side of the road.

The three jeeps just fell out of sight, as if they had been swallowed by the Earth.

In fact, that was exactly what had happened. They had fallen into Indian tiger traps-large concealed holes in the ground next to the windmills, designed by Jack for an escape just like this one.

"Zoe! Quickly! Let me pa.s.s, then drive exactly where I do!"

Jack zoomed past Zoe's car and then abruptly shot left, off the road and out onto rough scrubland. Zoe followed him, swinging her LSV left, chased now by the sole surviving Chinese jeep.

Bouncing over the scrub, the river up ahead, the roadblock off to their right.

"Exactly where I drive!" West repeated into his mike.

He swept down an embankment toward the Fitzroy River-a suicidal course. There was no way he could possibly cross the fastflowing waters of the river in his lowslung LSV.

But into the river he went. At full speed.

The LSV plunged into the Fitzroy, kicking up spectacular fans of spray on either side as it sheared right through the water, unusually shallow water, across an uncommonly smooth section of riverbed: a concealed concrete ford.

As Jack's LSV skipped out the other side of the river, roaring up the far bank with a three foothigh jump, Zoe's car hit the near edge of the stream, at the same time as the last Chinese jeep came alongside it.

Zoe hit the ford, following Jack's path exactly. But the pursuing jeep didn't, and the ford was deliberately narrow, a submerged concrete bridge only one car width wide, and thus the Chinese jeep nosedived into the water and came to a jarring, splashing halt, while Zoe's LSV just continued on, bouncing safely up the far side.

Seeing the two LSVs successfully cross the river to the north, the Chinese troops blocking the bridge leaped into their jeeps and APCs, and started across the bridge in pursuit.

Only to have the bridge collapse completely beneath the first jeep.

Amid a tangled mess of-precracked-wooden beams and struts, the jeep tumbled down into the river, leaving the remaining vehicles bunched up behind the void, now with no bridge to cross.

They hurried for the ford, but by the time they found it and negotiated its narrow span, Jack's two escape cars were already speeding onto the highway.

THE ESCAPE PLANE.

WHILE JACK and Zoe had been fleeing east, tripping nail traps and racing over concealed river crossings, Sky Monster had been busy, too.

He'd arrived in his pickup at the very south of the farm, where he disappeared inside a cabin set into the hillside, a hillside that-when seen from up close-was actually a giant camouflagenetted structure.

A hangar.

And in it was a giant black 747.

If one looked closely at the plane's underbelly, one could still make out an inscription in Arabic:PRESIDENT ONE-AIR FORCE OF IRAQ: HALICARNa.s.sUS.

It was a plane that had once lived in a secret hangar outside Basra, one of several such 747s that had lain in secret locations around Iraq, ready to whisk Saddam Hussein to safe havens in East Africa in the event of an invasion. Saddam, it turned out, had never been able to use this particular plane. But in 1991, cornered by enemy forces and abandoned by his own men, Jack West Jr. had.

It was now his plane, the Halicarna.s.sus.

The Halicarna.s.sus rumbled out of its hangar and down a wide dirt taxiway, which itself crossed the flowing Fitzroy River via a second submerged concrete ford a few miles south of the rigged bridge.

Once over its ford, Sky Monster brought the big 747 left onto the highway, pointing north.

The giant plane thundered up the desert highway, a great black behemoth speeding along the shimmering blacktop, until Sky Monster saw the two LSVs of Jack and Zoe swing out onto the bitumen a few hundred yards in front of him.

A ramp at the rear of theHalicarna.s.sus lowered to the roadway, kicking up sparks as it did so, and-with the great plane still moving at considerable speed-the two LSVs swung in behind it and zoomed up the ramp into its belly, closely followed by the tiny shape of Horus.

Once the second car was inside and firmly tied down with a crankharness, the ramp was raised and the plane sped up and hit takeoff speed and slowly, gracefully, lifted off the empty desert highway, leaving the farm-now crawling with Chinese cars and troops-in its wake.

West strode into the c.o.c.kpit of theHalicarna.s.sus.

"We're not outta this yet, Boss," Sky Monster said. "I got incoming bogeys. Four of them.

Look like J9 Interceptors. Chinese MiG variants."

West charged back into the main cabin, where Zoe was buckling in the kids.

"Zoe," he said. "To the guns."

Moments later, he and Zoe were harnessed into theHalicarna.s.sus 's wingmounted gun turrets. The plane also had revolving guns on its roof and underbelly that Sky Monster could control from the c.o.c.kpit.

"They can't blow us out of the sky, can they?"Sky Monster asked over the intercom."They'd destroy the Firestone."

"It's made of almost solid gold," West replied. "It'd survive just about anything except a total fuel fire. If I were them, I'd shoot us down and expect to find it in the wreckage."

"Great. Here they come..."

Four Chinese J9 Interceptors blasted across the sky in pursuit of the Halicarna.s.sus, screaming low over the desert, unleashing their missiles.

Four small aerial darts zoomed out from their wings, spiraling smoke trails extending out behind them.

"Launch countermeasures!" West called.

"Launching countermeasures!"Sky Monster reported back.

He punched some b.u.t.tons and immediately, several chaff bombs sprang out from the underbelly of theHali.

Three of the missiles took the bait, and detonated harmlessly against the fake targets.

West himself nailed the fourth and last one, blowing it to pieces with his cannon.

"Sky Monster! Hit the deck! Rawson's Canyon! Let's throw the line and hope Super Betty still works! Go! Go! Go!"

The Halicarna.s.sus banked and dived, swooping for the flat desert floor. Two of the Interceptors took off in pursuit, the other two staying high.

The Halicarna.s.sus came to a rocky canyonland, a wide dry plain flanked by low mesas and hills. It shot into Rawson's Canyon, a long thin chutelike canyon that ended at a narrow aperture between two mesas. Technically this was all Army land, but no one except Jack West Jr. had set foot out here in years.

The Halicarna.s.sus zoomed low through the canyon, barely a hundred feet off the ground, chased by the two Chinese Interceptors.

The fighters fired their guns.

Jack and Zoe blazed back from their revolving turrets.

Tracers sizzled through the air between the chased and the chasers, the landscape whizzing by in a blur of speed.

Then Zoe got a bead and hammered the lefthand Interceptor with a wave of tracers that entered it square in its intakes. The J9 shuddered instantly, belching black smoke, before it wobbled in the air and lurched dangerously to the left, popped its ejection seat, and smashed at 500 mph into the canyon wall.

The remaining fighter kept firing, but Sky Monster kept banking within the confines of the narrow canyon and the bullets sizzled past the speeding black plane, nicking its wingtips but hitting nothing of value.

Then theHalicarna.s.sus. .h.i.t the end of the canyonway and blasted through the narrow exit, just as Jack called: "Sky Monster! Call in Super Betty! Now!"

And-bam!-Sky Monster punched a switch on his console marked: LAUNCH SUP BET.

A hundred feet below and behind him, the solenoid on a large explosive that had sat undisturbed on the desert floor for many months tripped.

The explosive was a large RDX one, based on the principle of the Bouncing Betty land mine. Once triggered, it set off a preliminary blast that launched the main bomb a hundred feet into the air.

Three seconds later, the main charge went off, just like a Bouncing Betty, only much bigger. Planesized. And filled with shrapnel.

The Super Betty.

A giant starshaped blast exploded in the air behind the fleeingHalicarna.s.sus, right in the path of the second speeding Interceptor.

Shards of shrapnel a.s.saulted the fighter jet headon, smacking against its c.o.c.kpit canopy, lodging in its reinforced gla.s.s, creating a hundred spiderwebs. More shards slammed into the J9's air intakes, ripping apart the innards of the plane.

The pilot's ejection was followed by the fighter's fullscale explosion. Dead Interceptor.

"I hadn't checked on Betty for months," West said. "Glad she still worked."

The Hali soared up into the sky.

Where the last two Interceptors were waiting.

By now, Sky Monster had taken them northwest, toward the coast, and as theHalicarna.s.sus left the mainland of Australia and shot out over the Indian Ocean, the two Interceptors engaged it.

Missiles, guns: they gave it everything they had.

West and Zoe returned fire with equal violence until finally West nailed one Interceptor with his cannon and...went dry.

"Rightside gun is out!" he called into the intercom. "How're you traveling, Zoe?"

"Still got a few rounds left,"she said as she fired at the last J9."But not many-s.h.i.t! I'm out, too!"

They were out of ammo and there was still one bad guy left.

"Uh, Huntsman...!" Sky Monster called expectantly. "What are we gonna do now, throw rocks?"

Jack stared at their remaining pursuer-the Interceptor hovered in the sky behind them, waiting, watching, holding back a little, as if it sensed something was wrong.