Sam Fisher- Motorcycle Chase

  BOLIVIA’S North Yungas Road is known by the locals as El Camino de la Muerte, the Road of Death. It was constructed by Paraguayan prisoners of war back in the 1930s and is one of just a few routes through the mountainous rainforest that connects the country’s seat of government, La Paz, with the northern regions some sixty-nine kilometers away. The road is barely wide enough for two cars abreast, with dozens of sheer vertical drop-offs lacking any form of guardrails. There is no margin for error. When it rains, rocks and earth grow loose from the towering hillsides above and tumble down along the switchbacks. As drivers round a hairpin turn, they’re confronted by a mudslide or a wall of crumbling boulders that forces them off the ledge to plummet more than six hundred meters to the valley below, where the Coroico River rushes to join the Amazon. Even when nothing blocks the mostly unpaved path, dense fog often descends along the vine-covered cliffs, reducing visibility to zero. Numerous crosses and stone cairns mark the locations where, for two to three hundred loved ones each year, the journey ended and they became part of North Yungas’s dark legend. Though some say it’s cursed, clutched forever in the hands of the Devil, others have simply declared it the world’s most dangerous road.

  Sam Fisher knew all about North Yungas, and he knew the man he was chasing had deliberately led him up there to turn him into another statistic. The son of a bitch had no idea that he’d awakened America’s newest and most formidable beast, a blacker-than-black special ops and counterterrorism unit known as Fourth Echelon, commanded by Fisher and free to sink its sharpened talons into men like him. Free to do whatever it took with impunity.

  Fisher squeezed the stolen motorcycle’s clutch lever, geared up, and accelerated. He gritted his teeth and cut hard around the next bend, the old Yamaha fishtailing and sending a bolt of anxiety up his spine. As he came out of the turn, the bike’s rusting fenders rattled, and the faded sticker of Jesus affixed to the gas tank began peeling back. At once the headlight flickered through the gloom and heavy rain, and he found his prey just a few meters ahead, rooster tails of mud rising from the man’s own bike. Fisher was out of gears, wailing now at full throttle.

  The man known to intelligence sources as Hamed Rahmani, and with the known alias of Abu Jafar Harawi, saw something ahead and cut his wheel sharply, weaving around two pieces of rock appropriately shaped like coffins, one lying across the other. Fisher did likewise, his shoulder brushing along the wet stone. The bike’s engine began to cough and sputter as they climbed toward nearly five kilometers above sea level. They sped by a wider section used for passing, then crossed onto a single-lane stretch running along at least a kilometer of cliffs whose ledges sent streams of water into the darkness.

  Fisher’s arms tensed, his triceps already sore from keeping a white-knuckled grip on the handlebars. He shifted gears again as Rahmani whipped around the next bend and vanished momentarily, only to reappear—his headlight sweeping along the wall to his right.

  Seeing that Rahmani was widening the gap, Fisher leaned into the bike and accelerated, tucking in his elbows, trying to make himself a little more aerodynamic to bleed every bit of speed out of the machine.

  Suddenly, he was thrown to the right, the front wheel having connected with a piece of rock that served as a ramp, and as both wheels left the road, he thought the chase was over and that he should’ve stopped like most locals did to pour libations of beer into the earth and ask the goddess Pachamama for safe passage—because in three seconds it might all end here.

  As both tires slammed back onto the dirt, the impact reverberating up his spine, he gasped and recovered control, cutting the wheel to the left to avoid another section of larger gravel and by necessity taking the bike to within a tire’s width of the ledge. He groaned and leaned to his right, guiding the motorcycle past the gravel, then back, closer to the wall. Yes, he’d earned himself a breath now.
...

  Rahmani drew up fast on the taxi, and a second glance there showed he was trapped behind it. Fisher gritted his teeth and remained tight to the wall, his speed nearly twice that of Rahmani’s. The cabdriver had to be confronting his own mortality, and for a moment, Rahmani looked back, his face cast in the pallid glow of Fisher’s light. His eyes bugged out as he realized he’d failed to lose Fisher and was seconds away from being caught.

  A faint thrumming of rotors sent Fisher’s gaze skyward. Then another sound erupted, a large diesel engine, an engine much louder than the taxi’s.

  They were nearing another sharp turn to the right, and abruptly it was there: an old Volvo F6 delivery truck from the 1970s, its daredevil of a driver taking up the entire road and rumbling head-on toward the taxi.

  The truck driver locked up his brakes, as did the cabdriver, but their tires had little traction across the sheets of rain and mud.
...

  The truck and taxi collided in a thundering, screeching explosion of twisting metal and fiberglass and shattering glass that stole his breath and sent debris hurtling toward him.

  The taxi’s front end crushed as though it were made of papier-mâché, and the truck kept coming, plowing the taxi back with the front wheels rising off the dirt.

  Rahmani had no time to react. He screamed and struck the sedan’s rear bumper. His front wheel folded like a taco as the bike slid sideways, and in the next second he caromed off the rear window and vanished beneath the vehicle—

  Into the meat grinder.

  The squealing and gurgling and crunching of metal grew to a crescendo as Fisher cursed and steered for the barest of openings on the left side, trying to skirt around the bulldozing truck. He swore again because the taxicab with Rahmani beneath began sliding toward the ledge, cutting him off. He crashed into the taxi and flew headfirst over the handlebars, went tumbling across the cab’s trunk, and then the force of the Volvo’s momentum sent him rolling off the side of the sedan.

  A stretch of rocks and earth about eight inches wide saved Fisher’s life.

  He struck that patch shoulder-first, realized where he was—about to plunge over the ledge—and reflexively reached out with both hands, clutching some heavy weeds and grasses that sprouted along the cliffside.

  His legs came whipping around, the force driving the grass through his fingers, his grip now tentative at best. He dug the tips of his boots into the mountainside, but there was no good purchase on the wet rock and mud, and his legs dangled. He groaned with exertion, his arms literally trembling under the load. Something flashed to his left, and there it was, the sticker of Jesus that had been peeling off his motorcycle’s gas tank; it fluttered on a rock for a few seconds, then blew away.

- Blacklist Aftermath, Chapter 1