The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (beach read .TXT) 📕

On the way in from Belgium earlier in the day, he’d driven the full length of the Haringvliet—a lake two kilometers wide and nearly thirty kilometers long. The brackish water of Rotterdam’s port remained clear, but the freshwater lake had frozen over. The dams at either end were the only routes across, separated by thirty kilometers of winding shore roads. No cops were foolhardy enough to follow him onto the ice. If Ben could cut across the middle, he’d lose them for sure. A big if. He had to wonder, how thick was the ice?

The Peugeot crested a low hill, and the lake came into view. White. Pure. Dusted with snow. Ben drifted onto the shore road and accelerated southeast, steeling himself for the upcoming stunt.

Well ahead, skiffs lay overturned on the shore, covered with tarps for the winter. A boat ramp. Ben planned to slow fifty meters out and turn to hit it at the correct angle. With too much energy and not enough angle, he’d miss the ramp, jump the bank, and spin helplessly across the ice—assuming he didn’t crash right through.

More lights.

Ben’s heart sank. Two new cruisers came at him from the opposite direction. They’d boxed him in.

He shoved the pedal to the floor. The tachometer redlined. The engine screamed. He had to reach the ramp before the newcomers cut him off.

The Peugeot won the race, but not with enough margin to slow and change Ben’s angle to the boat ramp. At the last second, he shifted into neutral and cranked the wheel hard over.

The tires failed to catch. Ben slid off the ramp and jumped the bank sideways. The rear tires hit the ice first. The Peugeot whirled into a sickening spin.

The car traveled a good distance from the shore before the spinning stopped, far enough for the cold air of the oncoming dusk to quiet the policemen’s shouts. Not one risked stepping out onto the ice. Ben found that more worrisome than comforting.

The cops crouched behind their doors, guns pointed through rolled-down windows.

Ben ignored them. The engine had quit. After a few coughs, it started again. He put it into first and tried the gas. The tires whined and kicked up snow, but nothing else. After a few breaths, he tried again, and this time the whine of the tires ended with an ugly crack. Ben stopped and killed the engine, as if that made any difference. The ice squeaked.

The vehicular ballet had put him on the Peugeot’s lee side, shielded from his law enforcement fans. Small favors. Ben shoved an arm through his backpack strap and opened the door. He slowly shifted his weight onto his leg and climbed out, raising his left hand high. The ice answered his first step with an awful creak. “Nicht schießen!” Don’t shoot! He chose German to keep them guessing. No reason to make identifying him later any easier.

One Dutch cop answered in the same language. “Hände hoch!”

“Ja, ja.” Ben gave him a tired wave. Placing his second foot on the ice sent stark white cracks out in all directions. He resigned his mind and body to a single, terrible fate.

“Hände hoch!”

“Ja, ich habe Sie gehört. Aber schießen mich nicht, schon gut?” He meant that one. Yeah, I heard you. Just don’t shoot me, okay? As he answered, Ben let the SIG he’d taken from the watch officer hang low, out of sight. He sucked in a deep breath and fired straight down into the lake.

32

The cold threatened to crush Ben.

When the ice gave way, his ankle had been caught in the car’s door. He let Giselle’s beloved Peugeot drag him down, eyes closed. He saw her. Smiling. A little mischievous. Beautiful. But as his skin lost all feeling, he lost his grip on the vision. Her features faded, replaced by Clara’s.

Four or five meters below the ice, the car hit bottom and the door swung out. His eyes popped open. Frigid lake water seared his pupils, without the rapid relief of numbness afforded to his skin. For his eyes, the burning never ceased. Ben had experienced that pain before. Of the varied specialized survival courses in Hale’s schoolhouse program, he’d hated Arctic week the most. But he’d gutted it out and learned.

Every frozen lake has a thermocline, with the bottom up to eight critical degrees warmer than the top. Blindly beating at the surface ice is a death sentence. Stay low, where the view is broader and the water warmer. Assess the surface above to find holes or weak points in the ice. If you can overcome the pain of opening your eyes, you might survive.

Ben stayed low and assessed the light and shadow above. Before going down, he’d noticed an island more than halfway across the lake, some hundred fifty meters southeast of his position. He did his best to pick a bearing off the car, prayed he’d chosen the right shadow, and launched himself off the hood.

Was he kicking? He struggled to tell, unable to feel his legs—unable to feel anything but the cold threatening to slice through his eyes and into his brain. Oh, how he wanted to close them. He fought off the temptation. The slightest deviation from his course could mean the difference between life and death.

His target, a border between shadow and light, grew close, taking on detail. He saw river grass, brown and dead. He saw the cracks in the ice, spidering out from the rocks of a shoreline. Some passed over his head, but he didn’t fall for their trap. He didn’t slow. They were mere changes in the structure of a solid mass, like veins of quartz in granite.

Lungs ready to burst, mind drifting on quartz and marble slabs, Ben dragged himself along the subsurface shoreline, clawing at rocks and grass to reach the other side. He wanted to put plenty of cover between himself and the cops to block both sight and sound. Only when he felt reality slipping from his grasp did