The small amber light on the console didn't flash; it lit up solid, blindingly bright in the dark cab. Through the roof speaker mounted behind the cruiser's lightbar, a high-frequency emergency burst tore through the rain—a rhythmic, piercing warble that broadcast twenty thousand watts of unencrypted transponder signal across every low-band receiver within twelve nautical miles.
Outside in the rain, Vance spun around as if he had been shot through the shoulder.
His face was completely white in the glare of the strobes. The iron pry bar slipped from his leather glove, striking the gravel with a heavy, hollow ring.
"Donald!" he screamed, his voice instantly swallowed by the roar of the coming engines.
He lunged back toward the cruiser's open driver's door, reaching for the console to tear the wiring harness out of the dash.
He was four feet away when the high timberline above the gorge exploded into pure white light.
The lead vehicle of the convoy didn't round the rock face at sixty miles an hour. It rounded the turn at seventy-five, its three-ton armored chassis completely flat against the asphalt, its twin high-beam clusters throwing two thousand yards of daylight across the rain-slicked trees.
The driver of that lead Suburban had already heard the emergency burst. He wasn't looking for a broken-down commuter car on an empty rural road. He had his front thermal imaging sensors locked on the broadside silhouette of Vance’s Charger blocking the lane.
The heavy air brakes on the lead transport didn't lock into an uncontrolled skid. The big truck dropped its front nose three inches, its high-pressure anti-lock calipers firing in rapid, rhythmic thuds that shook the wet limestone ledge. The vehicle didn't veer into the gorge, and it didn't smash into the solid rock face on the right.
It held the center crown of the road with terrifying, hydraulic precision, sliding sideways into an engineered tactical deceleration that brought its front steel push-plate to a dead stop exactly fourteen inches from the driver's side door of Vance’s cruiser.
The air died completely. The only sound left was the steady, massive hiss of four heavy turbo-diesels idling in tight formation across the wet blacktop, their exhaust plumes rising thick and gray into the headlights.
Vance froze on the gravel, his right hand still reaching toward the open door of his car, his knees trembling violently under his wet duty trousers.
The heavy driver's door of the lead Suburban swung open on reinforced hinges.
A man stepped out into the rain. He wasn't wearing a small-town polyester blouse or a brass name tag. He wore an unadorned black tactical windbreaker over a Kevlar carrier, a low-profile communications harness hooked over his left ear, and the flat, unblinking eyes of an agent who had spent twenty years running motorcade security through hostile airspace.
He didn't look at Vance. He looked straight through the open driver's door of the cruiser, his flashlight beam instantly finding my face behind the dropped partition mesh.
He saw the open cuff dangling from my bleeding left wrist. He saw the steel pick gripped in my right hand. And then his beam dropped lower, picking out the solid amber light glowing on the secondary console.
"Who initiated the transponder trip?" the agent asked, his voice cutting through the diesel idle without rising.