Sam Fisher- Escaping Zone 526

  Crouching behind cover, Fisher glanced up at the fractured window as smoke clogged the air. Without a clear path to escape, he would be forced to create one.

  He threw himself at a cabinet filled with gaudy trophies and patriotic memorabilia, hitting it like a linebacker bulldozing the defensive pack. Fisher’s blow knocked the cabinet over and sent it careening into the window. The heavy impact deformed the glass and blew it out into the drizzling night. Rain, wind and the strident rattle of an alarm bell wafted in through the broken frame.

  Four floors up. Fisher hadn’t forgotten that he was far enough off the ground that the fall might kill him – but staying in this room for one second more absolutely would. Fisher dove toward the shattered window, rifle rounds humming through the air around him as he launched himself at the gap.

  He felt impacts across his shoulder and lower back, the force of them knocking him off his stride. Fisher lost his momentum and fell badly over the edge of the lintel, and out into nothing.

  He tumbled head-over-heels through the wet air, spinning as he went through a cluster of telephone lines strung from side of the building. Fisher grabbed at the greasy black cables as they whip-sawed around him and they snapped free of the wall. He clung to the snarled lines as they arrested his fall and swung him out on a pendulum, down toward the muddy ground.

  Too late, he realized that the arc of his path ended in the wide flank of a grimy tipper truck parked near an outbuilding. Fisher collided with the vehicle, the brutal contact blasting the air from his lungs, and he was thrown to his haunches in the mud.

  Bullet impacts cratered the wet ground around him as men up above fired down from Seok’s office, trying to tag Fisher before he could move. He scrambled for the revolver, grabbing it from where it had been knocked out of his waistband, blindly returning fire.

  The cab door at the front of the truck swung open and a panicked worker leapt out, sprinting away without looking back. Fisher saw an opportunity and took it, hauling himself up and into the driver’s seat, dragging the drawstring sack across his back with him.

- Dragonfire, Chapter 20