The Saboteurs by Clive Cussler (top 10 best books of all time .TXT) 📗

lost a minute backtracking through the intersection and taking up the chase once again. It took several minutes and many blind turns for Bell to begin to recognize where he was. The overloaded Ford was barely keeping pace with his nimble little car.

But then Bell came to a near-complete stop. A wagoner was trying to maneuver a two-horse team on a street that was far too narrow. The wagon held barrels, most likely Caribbean rum, as there seemed to be nothing but bars and cantinas lining this particular road. The Ford came roaring up behind him. Bell didn’t bother with the horn. It was useless with city horses. In his haste to jump free, Jorge had left his knobby cane in the car. Bell took it and rose slightly in his seat to deliver a backhander to the one horse’s rump as sweetly as an eight goal handicap polo player.

The horse reared up, causing its yoke mate to do likewise, their front hooves pawing the air, and giving Bell the room he needed to sneak past the traffic snarl. Barrels fell from the wagon as the horses’ initial panic became self-sustaining terror. The driver hauled at the reins while crowds of men who’d been paying for drinks in the bars and cantinas suddenly had a lake of free booze glugging merrily from broken casks.

The Ford was stuck while Bell pulled away, but his pursuers maintained the line of sight and saw him take a sweeping turn that led to the coast road where he’d earlier taken Marion. He knew they would be after him quickly, so he poured on the speed. He had to reach a specific spot on the road with at least a minute ahead of the Viboras.

The Renault gave him everything it had, the little engine puttering away as smoothly as an electric sewing machine. The city quickly gave way to suburbs, and then civilization fell away so just a few huts clung to the shoulders of the road. Minutes later, he was barreling close enough to the beach to hear the surf crashing onto the sand, while the western sky was darkening with fresh storm clouds. To his left were a few driveways where wealthy Panamanians enjoyed ocean views. Backing the homes were some low hills covered with more of the country’s impenetrable jungle.

Bell found the cove where he and Marion had enjoyed their picnic. He couldn’t see the Ford but had to trust it was still behind him. There was no real turnoff, just a slight widening of the dirt track. Bell wrestled the car through a three-point turn and had it racing back the way he’d just come.

In less than a minute, a speck appeared on the road ahead of Bell, and it quickly resolved itself into the boxy shape of the Ford Model T. The gunmen never suspected a thing until the last moment, when the sharp-eyed driver recognized the green Renault.

Bell saw his eyes go wide, and just before they raced past each other at a closing speed of eighty miles per hour, Bell gave his wheel the tiniest tug, twitching the roadster just enough for the approaching driver to react and then overreact.

The Ford slid, its back end whipping around so quickly that it almost flipped onto its side. The outside rear wheel collapsed in a shower of wooden shards and rubber chunks, and the car dropped heavily onto its suspension, the de-wheeled axle gouging a furrow in the road.

Bell watched the accident unfold over his shoulder and slowed his car to a safer speed, a satisfied expression on his face. He hadn’t expected the wheel to come apart like that and he wasn’t displeased. He had more time to get into position and camouflage the Renault.

Two miles closer to town, Bell came to a stop and carefully backed his car off the coast road onto an overgrown track that gave access to the beach fifty feet behind him. Opposite was a driveway with a gate drawn across it to prevent anyone accessing the property. The track was little more than a footpath for the homeowners to make their way to the water’s edge. This was another feature Bell had seen on his earlier visit and it had given him the idea of how to turn the tables on whoever the Viboras had sent to attack him.

He’d originally planned to simply back the Renault into this nook and wait for the hunters to pass. He would then begin to tail them, but with the gunmen stuck, changing out their ruined wheel, he had time to rake the side road clean of his tire tracks and drape some fronds over the windshield and hood.

It took them a solid thirty minutes to replace the tire. Had the car not suffered a breakdown, the Model T would have raced back toward the city still in hot pursuit of Bell’s Renault. But the Viboras’s return was one of ignoble defeat. They knew their quarry was long gone. Bell watched them approach from behind some dense bushes.

A light rain began to patter the leaves and impact the dusty road with micro-sized explosions.

The Ford was doing less than thirty miles per hour, maybe not even twenty-five. Bell noted that the spare wheel wasn’t in great shape. He recognized the driver and his accomplice in the front seat. They were natives, with dark skin and hair. The shooter in the back, the man whose features remained hidden behind a red bandanna, looked tense, like a man who dreaded having to deliver bad news to his boss. Bell had a fleeting familiarity with the man, the way he held his head, perhaps. More likely, it was Isaac’s mind hoping this would be the spark to trigger a flood of memories that didn’t come.

Bell began to uncover the car. In a jarring flash, the vague feeling he’d had earlier of some boat vanishing into the mist solidified into the solid image of a poorly maintained cargo vessel from which Talbot