The second Suburban was gaining on them, now just fifty yards back. "Get him off of us," Scott said.
Benny smashed out the back window with the butt of an M-4 carbine and cut loose with a long burst of automatic fire. The explosion of shots inside the closed confines of the SUV's cabin was deafening and left a high-pitched whine in Scott's ears.
At the next intersection, Scott ripped a hard left onto a four-lane divided highway named Calzada Revolucion that ran south towards downtown.
Benny fired off the rest of the thirty-round magazine and jammed in a fresh one. Scott checked the rearview mirror. The SUV had dropped back, its windshield shattered, but it was still coming after them. "Aim for the engine block," he shouted.
Ahead of them cars were careening off the road to es-cape the carnage, while overhead Scott heard the whop, whop, whop of the Black Hawk's big rotor beating the air. Gunfire erupted behind them and a bullet dinged off the doorpost beside Scott's head and punched a hole in the windshield. Benny opened fire with the new magazine.
Scott blasted the stolen Suburban across Calle Jesus Molina with the speedometer pegged at ninety-five. Some-how they didn't get broadsided. On the other side of the in-tersection, two cars were side by side in front of him doing fifty at the most. He passed them on the right shoulder at nearly twice their speed. Then as he edged back into the out-side lane, the side window directly behind him exploded and showered him with glass. The shock made him swerve left. He fought it by torqueing the wheel to the right, but he went too far with it. He corrected left but went too far again. Then the Suburban was lurching back and forth at nearly a hundred miles an hour, each time on the very edge of a high-speed rollover, which Scott knew neither of them would survive. In the cargo compartment, the heavy gyrational forces slammed Benny from one side to the other.
In desperation, Scott quit fighting the physics and held the wheel centered. The lurching slowed, then stopped as the big SUV righted itself. He checked his mirror. The second Suburban was still behind them.
They passed the turnoff for Avenida Aeropuerto on the right, then seconds later Calle Tecolotes on the left. Scott drove another mile on Calzada Revolucion, zigzagging through traffic and passing on the shoulder when he couldn't find an opening. The pursuing Suburban clung to them but because of all the wild maneuvering, Benny couldn't get a clean shot at it. The good news was that the men in the other SUV couldn't get a clean shot at them either.
Across Avenida Eva Samano, the highway curved east toward the river and downtown. The other Suburban was still on them and somewhere overhead, even through the ringing in his ears, Scott heard the Black Hawk.
"Hang on," he shouted. Then, keeping the accelerator almost to the floor, he stomped his left foot on the brake pe-dal and spun the steering wheel to the right, powering the Suburban through a sliding, tire-smoking ninety-degree turn at maximum speed, a technique called drifting that left a thick cloud of burned rubber behind them. When Scott re-leased the brake and pulled out of the turn, they were racing down a two-lane street headed south.
A quick check in the rearview mirror revealed that the other Suburban was still behind them but had lost a lot of ground during the turn, although now that they were both out of traffic, the sight lines and the firing lines were clear.
Scott backed off the accelerator and tracked the other Suburban in the mirror. "Brace yourself," he said to Benny, loud enough to hear himself over the ringing. "And be ready to open fire when I hit the brakes. Put a whole mag into the engine." He saw her nod and switch to a full magazine. Then she pushed her back against the rear seat and spread her feet to lock herself into a solid shooting position.
The other Suburban was gaining on them, and Scott knew he was taking a huge gamble. The timing was critical. If he got it right, he would give Benny a huge no-miss tar-get. If he got it wrong, he would give the bad guys the same thing. Everything depended on who got off the first shots.
The other Suburban was fifty yards back and closing. The front-seat passenger kicked out part of the shattered windshield and sent the fractured sheet of glass sliding off the hood onto the pavement.
"Now!" Scott shouted and stomped the brake pedal. The Suburban pitched forward and slid, all four of its tires clawing the road and screaming in protest. His eyes shifted up to the rearview mirror again just in time to see the pursuing SUV dip nose-down, its driver jumping on his own brake pedal. Then Benny yanked the trigger of the M-4 and sent a steam of .223-caliber full-metal jacketed bullets into the front end of the Suburban, blowing off chunks of steel and glass as the bullets raked the grill, the hood, and the remnants of the windshield.
Blood exploded inside the pursuing Suburban.
Scott kept his foot jammed down on the brake pedal un-til they screeched to a stop in the middle of the street. Be-hind them, the other Suburban came out of its nosedive at about twenty miles an hour, veering to the right and parad-ing past in a slow-motion pantomime until it crashed into a utility pole, shaking loose a barrel-shaped transformer and sending a shower of sparks cascading down onto the crumpled hood. A second later there was a dull whumpf and the SUV burst into flames.
No one got out.
Scott punched the accelerator to the floor.
* * * *
Standing in the open door of the Black Hawk, Marcus saw Ground Two's SUV smashed against a utility pole and burning. "Son of a bitch," he said without keying his mic.
The other Suburban was pulling away.
"What do you want me to do?" the pilot said.
"Put me on top of them," Marcus shouted into his head-set as he strode across the troop compartment to a weapons rack mounted on the rear bulkhead. He pulled down an M-249, a .223-caliber light machine gun that held 200 rounds of linked ammunition in a box magazine and had a firing rate of 800 rounds per minute.
As the pilot swung the helicopter around to line up the angle of fire on the fleeing SUV, Marcus sat down on the steel deck, wedging himself in the open doorway and cra-dling the chainsaw-like M-249 in his arms.