The windscreen exploded, showering her with fragments of glass.
The jeep had no rear-view mirror. Bridge wiped sweat from her eyes with her sleeve, glanced over her shoulder, and saw another vehicle following her across the desert. One man driving, two shooting.
The jeep had been under a camouflaged gazebo, guarded by a single armed sentry. His companions were presumably away finding out what the hell was making the ground shake, but the sentry himself wasn’t on high alert. Bridge almost felt bad for shooting him in the back of the head while he blew smoke rings from an acrid Russian cigarette.
Almost.
It started first time and she stood on the accelerator, kicking up a dust cloud twice the vehicle’s size as it sped away. At the last minute, figuring it couldn’t make things any worse, she yanked the wheel hard right and smashed head first into the comsat dish — the site’s only uplink, according to the mission data. The mission plan said to leave it operational, to spread the infection if the server was ever put online, but with the server room now a pile of rubble it seemed almost churlish not to destroy it, too.
She tried not to think about Adrian, lying underneath all that rubble, and to focus instead on the route ahead of her. That was proving difficult. Sure, he’d screwed up, but so had Bridge. If she’d been more assertive, had been able to persuade him that she knew what she was doing…but then she didn’t, did she? Her first OIT, and when the bullets began to fly she’d frozen up. Now the Russians knew this location, a repurposed bolthole from the Iraq war, was compromised. Screw their legends, it didn’t matter now if Moscow thought she and Adrian were Serbian, British, or even Chinese. The whole op was a bust, and instead of infecting the target server, she’d had no choice but to blow it up.
She’d escaped, and driven like a madwoman through the desert night, because there was no sense in both operatives being killed. But the more she thought about the mission’s complete failure, the more she wondered if Giles would disagree with that assessment.
Out here in the silence of the desert, the jeep’s engine was a cacophony of white noise, drowning out all other sounds. But somewhere in the roar Bridge detected a high-pitched keening, something like…a siren? A motor, spinning up? The sound faltered, broke, and then she recognised her own voice, screaming into the wind. Tears filled her eyes. Whether they were born of the stinging sand grit blown into her face or genuine self-loathing, she neither knew nor cared.
Until the Russians shot out her windscreen from behind.
“Over there!” Adrian leaned across her, pointing to a collection of shanty houses and temporary structures up ahead, sheltered behind hills rising to the north.
Adrian?
Bridge stared at the empty seat, knew he couldn’t really have been there only a moment before. But she didn’t argue. She turned hard, wrestling with the jeep’s bad joke of a suspension as it threatened to tip over and roll the vehicle. More shots flew past, each with a tiny supersonic crack as it whistled close to her head, but none hit.
The settlement was abandoned, but now that she was among it, the structures didn’t seem so temporary. Some were made from breezeblock, and several had second floors held up by metal scaffold. Bridge wondered how big the area was, whether she could lose her pursuers in here somewhere. The jeep created an enormous dust cloud behind her as she turned through the settlement’s makeshift streets, and she hoped it would be enough to make the Russians take a wrong turn, or give up the chase.
As if in answer, bullets slammed into the jeep’s rear. She yanked hard on the wheel to avoid a stone wall rising out of the ground ahead, twin-paddling the brake and accelerator to drift through the corner. The vehicle’s back end clipped the wall, grinding the tailgate in a frenzy of sparks and groaning metal, but then she was out of it, speeding away. Behind her, the Russians took the corner more slowly, avoiding collision but losing ground.
Perfect.
“Grenade, now!” she shouted, holding out a hand.
Then remembered, again, that Adrian wasn’t there. Bridge fumbled in her jacket pocket, fingers closing around the last of his ICE grenades. She gripped it, pulled the pin with her teeth, and dropped the grenade out of the driver’s side. The Russians shot at her again, but she ducked down into her seat, counting off.
Three. Two. One.
The grenade exploded under the back half of the pursuing jeep, blowing out the rear tyres and killing one Russian soldier instantly. A second later the fuel tank caught and erupted, tossing the others like rag dolls into a breezeblock wall. The wall collapsed, burying the burning wreckage.
Bridge glanced over her shoulder. No survivors.
Then she hit a low hill, and the jeep sailed ten feet into the air before crashing down into the scrub outside the settlement.
“Watch out, BB! Bloody women drivers,” Adrian laughed from the passenger seat, wincing in pain as the jeep bounced and rattled through the scrub. He’d christened her ‘BB’ the moment he discovered she was a French woman named Brigitte. She’d asked him not to. He did it anyway.
“Don’t call me that,” she grunted, turning to face him. But he still wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. He never had been. Adrian was dead, lying in the server room rubble, lost forever.
Her eyes stung with tears. She cried out, unleashing pent-up adrenaline in a wordless scream that was lost to the empty landscape, drowned under the waves of wind and engine noise.
She wiped her eyes with a filthy sleeve and clung hard to the wheel.