Games of State - Tom Clancy [30]
She stepped over the upended table, ran to the door, and opened it.
"You didn't get me!" she said again, her jaw outthrust and her fists raised. She turned and looked at the trailer.
A shock sizzled down her back.
What if they're expecting to hear the explosion? she asked herself. And when they don't, will they come back?
Exhausted, Jody ran to the other side of the trailer. She used a twig to pull the smoldering cloth from the gas tank, then climbed back into the cab. She pushed in the cigarette lighter. While she waited for it to heat up, she tore strips of cloth from the inside lid of one of the trunks in the trailer itself. When the lighter was ready, she lit one of the pieces and walked toward the gas tank.
Jody used one strip to dry off the area; then laid another strip half in and half out of the tank. She used the burning strip to ignite the one in the tank, dropped it, and ran into the woods, away from the trailer. In all her years of movie watching, she'd seen a lot of cars and trucks blow up. But those were rigged to blow with carefully placed explosives, not a full tank of gasoline. She had no idea how big, how loud, or how destructive the blast would be.
It occurred to her to put her hands over her ears as she ran.
Only a minute or so passed when she heard the muffled timpani boom of the blast, followed by the louder rending of metal and the deafening explosion of the tires. A heartbeat later she was hit by the concussive heat wave which rolled from the blast. Jody felt the intense heat through her wet blouse and against her scalp. But she forgot about the heat as hot shards of metal rained down, along with particles of glass. She thought of the burning hail from The Ten Commandments, how when she saw the movie she remembered thinking there was no way to protect yourself from that. She dropped to the ground and covered her head with her arms, bent her chest to her knees. A large piece of fender tore through the canopy of trees and slammed to the earth just inches from her foot and she jumped.
She swung toward a tree and hugged it, kneeling, thinking that the branches might offer some protection against the larger chunks of the trailer. She held the tree tightly, sobbing again, as though all the courage had been drained out of her. She remained there even after the downpour had stopped. Her thighs were shaking wildly and she couldn't stand. After a moment, she couldn't even hold the tree anymore.
Letting go, Jody walked for a while. She was exhausted and lost and decided to rest. Though the soft, green grass looked inviting, she pulled herself up into a tree. Cradling herself in two closely spaced branches, she put her head on one of the branches and shut her eyes.
They left me to die, she thought. They killed others. What gives them the right?
The sobs came less frequently. The fear didn't go away. But along with a realization of how vulnerable she'd been was a sense of the strength she'd managed to find as well.
I didn't let them kill me, she told herself.
She saw Karin's face in her memory, vivid and cold. She hated it, hated how smug and confident the woman had been. Half of Jody wanted to let the monster know that they had nearly taken her life but not her spirit.
The other half of Jody wanted to sleep. Within a few minutes the sleep-half had won, though not without a struggle.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Thursday, 6:40 A.M.,
Quantico, Virginia
Mike Rodgers hadn't intended to visit Billy Squires until seven o'clock. But when he received a call from Melissa just after six, he pulled on his uniform, grabbed the comic books-- he wanted to have something, and wouldn't have time to pick up anything else-- and rushed over.
"It's nothing life-threatening," Melissa had said over the phone, "but could you come a little early? I want you to see something." Melissa had told him she couldn't elaborate since Billy was in the room. But when Rodgers got