I didn't lunge for Garrett. He was armed, braced, and three feet from a running patrol car.
Instead, I stayed low in the ditch, my boots silent in the wet leaves, moving directly toward the open rear window of his cruiser. The key to stopping the convoy wasn't my sidearm or Garrett's badge.
It was the unencrypted relay box still humming on his console, and the microphone hanging from the plastic clip on the dashboard.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
I kept my head below the door sill. The rear window was cracked three inches to vent the interior heat. I reached through the gap, my fingertips grazing the rubberized cable of the passenger-side cage divider. Inside, the interior speaker buzzed with low-frequency squelch.
Across the road, the man in the work bibs finished cranking the landing gear of the second hauler down into the aggregate. The iron pad ground against the asphalt with a dull shudder. He stood up, wiping grease across his canvas thigh, and turned toward the front of the bridge.
"Both sets down, Garrett," he shouted over the wind. "Tires are off the deck. The center arch is plugged solid. Even if the escort slams their crash bumpers into the rear axles, they'll just buckle their own radiators."
Garrett didn't move from his position by the cruiser's right front fender. His attention remained fixed on the lower switchbacks below the gorge, where the pulsing flashes of blue light were growing brighter through the bare maple branches.
"Get your truck off the apron," Garrett commanded, not looking back. "Take the maintenance trail behind the aggregate silos. If the trailing gun truck tries to back out, drop the timber gate at the lower cattle guard. Vance wants the limousines penned inside the cut before the state post realizes the transponder feed is dead."
The man in bibs turned and broke into a heavy jog toward the western tree line, disappearing into the black shadows of the quarry access road.
I waited until the sound of his boots faded behind the rush of the river. Then I slid my left arm fully through the window gap, reaching down behind the heavy mesh screen.
My service weapon was in the locking console box, but the glove compartment door was hanging open two inches, held only by an unlatched catch. Inside lay the black leather folder Garrett had tossed aside. My badge was pinned to the front, but what mattered was the clip-bound dispatch ledger tucked behind the identification card.
My hand stretched across the vinyl seat back, my ribs pressing painfully against the lower window frame. My fingernails caught the corner of the leather folder. I dragged it back toward the divider mesh, centimeter by centimeter, until the stiff cover cleared the metal upright.
I pulled it through the window into the freezing rain.
Kneeling in the muck beside the rear wheel, I flipped the folder open. Tucked behind my credentials was the carbon sheet Vance had countersigned at three o'clock that afternoon at the regional staging depot in North Creek. It was the official escort itinerary, listing the precise axle weights of the motorcade's lead armored Suburbans, the presidential limousine, and the follow-up tactical carrier.
Right beneath Vance’s signature was the state engineer’s weight-restriction endorsement for the Blackwood Gorge span.
The ink was clear under the dull ambient light of the road flares: MAXIMUM DECK LOAD: FORTY-TWO TONS. SINGLE-AXLE COMPLIANCE REQUIRED FOR ALL CLASS-E MILITARY-GRADE VEHICLES.
The two abandoned haulers resting across the center span were loaded with solid steel ballast plates, their tandem axles compressed flat against the leaf springs. Together with the two armored presidential limousines—each weighing over twenty thousand pounds—the total weight entering the sixty-foot concrete arch would exceed seventy tons in a single concentrated impact.
This wasn't just an ambush to halt the convoy. The bridge itself was an engineered failure point.
If the lead tactical vehicle hit those stationary trailers at forty miles an hour, the structural shear pins in the abutment would give way under the combined mass, dropping the entire center span into the gorge before the trailing vehicles could reverse.
I shoved the ledger into my interior jacket pocket and stood upright behind the cruiser's rear pillar.
Garrett was reaching for the driver's door handle, preparing to get inside. His back was turned to me, his focus entirely on the bend in the road three hundred yards south, where the first siren wail suddenly tore through the rain.
I didn't reach for his holster. I didn't lunge for the door.