AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Court raced up the stairs. “No! You’ve got to—”
“Gotta go.” Pace ended the call.
Court’s leg muscles burned as he ascended as fast as he could, at any moment expecting to hear the gunshot above that killed the CIA officer.
•••
Chris Travers and his five men raced between the stacks of forty-foot containers, then pulled to a stop at the end. They looked left and right, then ran across a pathway between the stacks. A voice shouted out somewhere behind them, but no one looked back.
At the next intersection between the towers of containers they encountered a man driving a reach stacker with a twenty-foot container high above him. He stopped rolling forward and stared at them through his windshield, and they all stared back at him, but after a moment’s hesitation Travers waved his men on and they began running again.
The sirens closed on them from behind, and he imagined that every single one of the Cuban soldiers had piled into terminal vehicles and were racing to his position.
The fence line was still two hundred yards distant, and Chris didn’t even know what he’d find when he got there.
Through labored breath he said, “Overwatch, are we going to be able to get over that fence?”
“Wait one,” came the reply. The men kept running, now sprinting past more terminal workers inspecting a ground-level container.
Soon Pace came back over the air. “Doubt it. Razor wire looks legit. Suggest you grab yourselves something that can punch through.”
“Solid idea,” Travers said, and then he halted his men at the end of another row of containers. Exhausted from the run, he put his hands on his knees, then looked up and down the two-lane road separating his position from the next cluster of huge steel shipping containers.
A tractor-trailer loaded with a forty-foot-high cube box, taller than the standard models, approached from the north.
Travers said, “That’s our truck, boys. Time to go grand theft.”
Just as he was about to race out into the road and stick a gun into the driver’s-side window, a gunshot rang out from behind him. Travers heard the snap of the round as it streaked by overhead, but he knew that with a hundred Cuban soldiers here in the terminal, that one gunshot would invite hundreds more in a matter of moments.
“Go!” he shouted, as another round clanged off a steel container to his right.
All six men ran out into the road; three of the Victors held their guns up to the right, stopping the advance of a forklift and several helmeted workers on foot, while Travers, Takahashi, and Victor Four raced up to the truck.
The man behind the wheel ground his gears to a halt and skidded to a stop.
Chris Travers himself opened the driver’s-side door of the cab. “Afuera!” he shouted, and the middle-aged Black man climbed out, his hands in the air and his eyes wide as saucers.
Terminal tractors like this weren’t built like normal road trucks. Yard trucks, as they were often called, typically had only a single-seat cab, with the area that would normally be for a passenger seat missing, giving the tractor an off-kilter appearance.
Once the driver was out, Travers heaved himself up and behind the wheel, and then in his headset he ordered all the other men to grab on to the outside. Victors Two and Four climbed behind the cab just in front of the container, and the other three men hefted their exhausted bodies onto the rear of the container, using narrow ledges for footholds.
Travers had learned how to drive big rigs from his uncle back in Oklahoma, but it had been twenty-five years, so he ground gears for several seconds as he tried to refamiliarize himself with all this.
Whoever had been shooting at them apparently lost line of sight for a moment, but suddenly they, or someone else in the terminal, found the right angle, because more gunfire erupted from the direction of the terminal operation’s building and the front gate. The truck Travers sat in was struck multiple times, angry metallic pops just behind his cab, and then snapping rounds from multiple soldiers’ AKs raked the street around them.
Victor Five, hanging on to the back, shouted into his mic. “We good to put their heads down?”
“Make noise, motherfuckers!” Travers shouted as he finally got the truck in gear.
Instantly all three men hanging on to the rear of the container towed by the truck opened fire, each holding their weapon with one hand while they clasped locking rods, latches, anything to keep from falling off. Their small but still-potent weapons blasted the pavement between a row of containers a hundred yards back, just in front of a trio of terminal work trucks loaded with armed Cuban Revolutionary Army forces.
All three pickup trucks swerved out of sight behind container stacks, but a new vehicle took up the chase behind him.
Jim Pace came over Travers’s headset. “Victor, you’re going to have to ram that fence at top speed, you understand?”
“Yep.” The metal fence with huge coils of razor wire on top looked especially formidable as it loomed larger in Chris’s windshield.
To his team he said, “Everybody tighten up back there, we’re gonna have to make our own exit!”
