With four flats the Crown Vic sat low enough that she could lie prone and get a view without having to gopher up and make herself a target. Heat drew her Sig Sauer and pressed her cheek down against the slush. Behind her in the underpass an SUV idled. Not the graphite gray, this one was navy blue. In the dimness of the tunnel, it was impossible to see how many there were. The driver’s door stood open with the window down, so her guess was that the driver was also the shooter, using the window frame as a brace. She made a quick clock of the street behind her and got a bad feeling. There was no oncoming traffic. The Transverse cut across Central Park, connecting two busy avenues. The only way there could be no cars was if somehow both ends of the road had been blocked.
There was movement at the SUV when she looked back. A glint—probably reflection off a scope—shimmered briefly in the open window of the driver’s door. Heat made an isosceles brace, pressed the butt of her gun on the ground, and squeezed. The sound was deafening as her shot reverberated under the chassis. Nikki didn’t wait to see if she hit him. She was still smelling cordite as she duckwalked away, keeping the Crown Vic between herself and the SUV.
After twenty yards, the road curved and she was able to jog upright. The same high wall that trapped her down in canyon of the Transverse was serving as cover. Behind her she could hear the growl of the SUV engine and then a brief squeak of brakes. Her abandoned car was diagonally across the lane and would have to be moved unless the shooter wanted to chance coming on foot.
Nikki stepped up her pace, wishing to hell she had located her cell phone. She arrived at a point where the curve that had concealed her began to straighten out. She slowed to a walk and then stopped before rounding the bend and risking exposure. Lying down in the slush and pressing herself against the icy rocks of the wall, she crawled forward until she had a view of the straightaway.
What Heat saw chilled her more than the ice she was lying in. A hundred yards out, three men in ski masks and hooded rain gear were slowly walking a line across the road toward her. They all held rifles.
SEVEN
For Nikki Heat everything became about calculations. Panic had no place except to get her killed. As odds go, they sucked, but keeping her head would make the most of them. The TOs at every combat survival course she had ever taken had all drilled the same message. Put fear in your back pocket and train yourself to rely on your training. Assess, calculate, seek opportunity, act.
Her rapid assessment was simple: She was in the worst possible tactical position, trapped on a walled subterranean road midpoint between one shooter in a vehicle coming up behind her and three riflemen advancing on foot ahead of her. Heat’s next appraisal was bleaker. There was an experienced air about the three men she was watching come toward her. They walked at an unhurried pace, with a military demeanor, weapons at the ready—alert but not tense. These were professionals who would not be fooled or spooked.
As they advanced three abreast, spanning the width of the road, she calculated her chances of putting a shot in each, left to right, from a distance of a hundred yards. Pop, pop, and pop. But while Heat weighed the riskiness of pulling off three successive kill shots with a handgun, they adjusted, as if reading her mind, to form a single file close to the wall and that opportunity evaporated. Nikki crawled backward before they could see her.
Around the curve behind her, she heard a revving engine and metal on metal as the SUV pushed her abandoned car out of the way. The sound was terrorizing in its implications. So she fought her fear and assessed. It meant that the shooter would come in the SUV, not on foot. What else? That he was probably alone. If he wasn’t, his partner would have just driven her car out of the way for him.
Calculations: At pace, the three on foot would be there in twenty seconds. Sooner for the SUV.
Nikki looked upward, her eyes stinging from the sleet fall. The wall was about ten feet high, about the same as an average home ceiling. Leafless branches from park shrubs drooped down about two feet. She holstered her Sig, pulled her gloves out of her coat pockets, and started to climb.
The spaces between the rocks were barely wide enough for her to get a toehold, but she managed to find enough bite to boost herself up on her right foot and finger claw the rock above her head with her left hand. She reached up with her right for a jutting edge above, and in the transfer of weight, her shoe lost its grip on the icy rock and she landed on all fours on the frozen, soupy roadway.