Close, now. They can’t get to the door, since there’s barely six inches between the door and the walls on either side.
I look at Rin, and she meets my gaze. Using the hand gripping the stock, she holds up three fingers.
I nod.
Two fingers.
I suck in a breath.
She bobs her head, curls the last finger around the stock grip, and lifts up and out the window, knee going up and under herself on the seat, butt tucked against her shoulder. I mirror her movements, leaning halfway out the window, finger on the trigger.
It’s a fraught moment—what if they’re just police officers, doing their job? Or local citizens, curious?
The slide racking, the tiptoeing…
We each have a split second to make the decision.
Rin’s an eye-blink ahead of me—her rifle cracks, once. My pistol is just behind, bucking in my hand. I’m not sure exactly what tipped the decision in my mind—I fired before I even really processed what I was seeing: two shapes, dim, shadowed, backlit only by the glow of their headlights a dozen feet away. Weapons drawn—assault rifles, not service pistols. Something about the crouching shuffle—ex-military, not police.
It’s all in a blink, taking it in.
CRACK!—BLAM!
Our shots come almost in unison.
We look at each other for a moment.
“Now what?” Rin asks. “Drive over them?”
I frown. Look around, search for a solution. I’m not certain we have enough ground clearance to simply run over them, not how they’re arranged, at least; an idea hits.
“Take my place.” I scramble over into the back and out the rear, and then climb up onto the roof, slide down the windshield, off the roof, and to the ground.
The men are both dead with almost identical round, red-weeping holes to the forehead. They’re armed with suppressed HK MP-7s, small submachine guns, or machine pistols. Not policemen, then, nor even local military. Their garb gives it away, too—dark clothing in shades of gray and black, but private clothing rather than official issue. It’s dark and they’re wearing black gaiter masks over their mouths and noses, so I can’t tell too much about them.
I’m about to rearrange them so we can get the Toyota over them without making an unduly godawful mess, when I realize I’m being an idiot. I strip them of their weapons, and then rifle through their pockets.
I find, between the two of them, a shit ton of cash in a variety of currencies, local Tunisian Dinars, Euros, US dollars, and British pounds; I also come away with spare magazines for the HKs, a sidearm each with spare magazines, and two cell phones, both cheap, throwaway burners. No ID, no passports.
A decent haul that will set us up well.
I rotate the bodies side by side and perpendicular to the vehicle, heads and feet at either side of the alley walls, so we can just roll over them like squishy speed bumps—moving them is a lot of hard, awkward work with only one useable arm.
Ugh, gross mental image.
I back up and gesture for Rin to pull forward. The motor coughs to life, and the revs as Rin accelerates gently. The sound of the tires rolling over the bodies is sickening.
Once over them, I gesture for Rin to exit the alley, and then I hop into the dead men’s vehicle—it’s an ancient Lada 1300, falling apart, held together with rust and wire. The engine, still running all this time, rattles and squeaks as if it might die at any moment. So, we won’t be switching. The transmission requires a bit of brute force to get into gear, and then I pull the old Lada into the alley, the right-hand side scraping the wall—this gives me just enough to squeeze out. Wincing and gagging, I drag the bodies all the way to the back of the alley and cover them with the old pallets and then pull the Lada the rest of the way forward, so the nose is pinning the pallets into place. The next step requires some contortion—I pop the hood and rip the spark plugs out, bringing the keys with me. Making it nearly impossible to move the car without towing will make it take that much longer until the bodies are found.
I join Rin in the Toyota, and we trundle away from the alley, slowly, unhurriedly. A half mile from the alley, I toss the keys out the window. Another mile so and a few turns later, the spark plugs join them.
Rin drives at random for a while, sticking to the outskirts. We find an old parking lot littered with broken-down junkers and stripped and salvaged derelicts, and park in among them. At a glance, the old Toyota won’t stand out.
“Apollo?” Rin looks at me, after the motor is off. “How did they find us?”
“I have been trying to figure that out myself. I think they must have done some deduction. They knew we were in the deuce-and-a-half, and there will not be many of them around. They also knew we had to be within a certain radius, and the most likely place for us to be would be here in Tunis—there aren’t many other major cities within a day’s drive of the old fort. So from there, it’s a simple matter of looking for the deuce-and-a-half. We couldn’t have gotten far on foot—it’s too hot, and we stand out. There’s no other way for us to have gotten anywhere other than in a vehicle, so we had to have traded. Which means they had to merely find every possible location within a half-day’s drive where we could have traded in the truck. Once they found the shop, they bribe or torture or otherwise convince the shop owner to tell them what he gave us. I don’t think he would have taken much convincing—he owed us no loyalty, and his life wouldn’t be worth ours.”
Corinna sighs, nodding. “And from there, it’s a matter of scouring Tunis, and they got lucky.”
