Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Deadly Beautiful ❯ From Kushrenada with Love ( Chapter 44 )

**I was going to set a firm release date for this chapter of the coming Saturday, to increase sales. But then I decided I love you more than that, so you get it early. :D

 

A/N: As for this chapter, I said to myself, “Self, this story needs a car chase.” And I always try to heed good advice.

 

Disclaimer: My papers declaring my legal ownership of Gundam Wing were in my pants pocket and got washed with the laundry. I was looking like mad for them so I wouldn't have to write a disclaimer. The moral of the story: check your pockets when you do laundry. Because I lost some gum, too. I really miss that gum. Barring that, laminate all your ownership papers before laundering them.

 

 

Deadly Beautiful - Chapter 44

 

by danse

 

~*~

 

Duo and Hilde left the Maganac base early the next morning, both strangely silent. Duo hadn't seemed himself since he and Heero had come back from their mission the other night, Wufei had noticed.

 

Trowa had slipped out with them, the trio sharing a Jeep for the trip to the airport before going their separate ways: Duo and Hilde back to New York, and Trowa to wherever his sister was hiding as she waited for him. Wufei had also noticed that Quatre seemed out-of-sorts after their departure, but unlike Duo's mood swing, he could take a very good guess at why Quatre was acting strangely.

 

That left him and Heero as the only outsiders left among the Maganac forces. The two of them and Quatre were lingering over a late breakfast, having skipped the meal earlier to go say goodbye to their comrades.

 

It was Heero who brought up the issue of leaving first. “Well,” he said, “I'm all packed. I assume you are, too.” He looked at Wufei, who was finishing off his orange juice.

 

Wufei put down his glass and nodded. “I'm ready to go.”

 

“Where to?” Heero asked.

 

“France,” Wufei answered without hesitation.

 

Quatre raised his eyebrows. “What's in France?”

 

Heero smirked, locking eyes with Wufei as he answered the question. “Treize Kushrenada is in France,” he said.

 

Wufei gave Heero a very brief, scathing look, but said nothing.

 

“What's your hang-up with this Kushrenada?” Quatre asked. “I mean, I know he's a bad guy, but I think you've got way too much of a personal stake in this.” He gave Wufei a concerned look.

 

The Chinese boy avoided his two companions' gazes as he got up from the table. “It's none of your business,” he muttered as he walked away with his dishes.

 

Heero called after him. “We'll travel together till we hit Greece, okay? We're going the same way.”

 

Wufei just nodded without turning around. Quatre and Heero gave each other an exasperated look, and Quatre twirled a finger around next to his ear as he took another bite of his toast.

 

***

 

Heero and Wufei said their goodbyes to Quatre a couple of hours later and caught a ride with a Maganac woman who was taking a helicopter to Turkey to look after some pressing issues. Once they were in Istanbul, Heero led the way to a car rental company where, with a fake international driver's licence that said he was twenty-five and a questionably valid credit card, he set about renting a car to take them the rest of the way. Unfortunately, the inevitable stack of paperwork, haggling, and contracts to sign kept them at the rental company for a little over an hour.

 

Just as Wufei finished flipping through his third Turkish sports magazine and was considering just ditching Heero and finding his own way to France and possibly also lunch, his erstwhile travelling companion emerged from the office he'd been stuck in for the past hour, holding up car keys and looking as tired as if he'd just finished an endurance marathon.

 

Wufei stood up, stretching out his legs and arms as Heero approached him. “What kind of car did you get?” he asked.

 

Heero twirled the keys around his finger. “Mazda RX-7,” he responded absently.

 

Wufei froze with his arms stretched over his head, staring in surprise. He didn't know what he'd been expecting Heero to say, but it wasn't that. To his credit, he recovered quickly, lowering his arms back to his sides as he smirked at Heero. “You could have done better than that,” he pointed out, raising an eyebrow.

 

Heero shoved his hands in his pockets and made his way toward the door. “They don't have an RX-8,” he admitted.

 

“The truth comes out. You know,” Wufei said suddenly, smirking again, “if Duo was here, he'd probably be bouncing around, yelling 'road trip', and trying to steal the keys.”

 

He couldn't see Heero's face from where he was. “Don't get any ideas,” Heero said, nodding at the man who presented them with their overindulgent ride to France. It was candy-apple red, of course. Wufei was realizing more and more that Heero was quite a piece of work.

 

It was clear by the time they got out of the rental company's parking lot and onto one of Istanbul's main drags why Heero liked performance cars. He settled back into the driver's seat so that Wufei started to wonder how well he could see over the dash as he deftly maneuvered the vehicle through the narrow, crowded streets.

 

“You hungry?” Heero asked, but didn't actually wait for an answer as he suddenly turned a corner into the parking lot of a falafel house. Wufei thought the black car behind them was going to smash right into them for a second. Heero drifted the car into a spot in the mostly-empty lot, his face expressionless except for the faintest glimmer of amusement in his eyes. “Hope you like falafel,” he said as he opened his door, glancing at Wufei before getting out.

 

It took a second for Wufei's legs to start working properly again. He'd had to restrain himself from digging his fingers into the dashboard during that drift. It would have been a sign of weakness, and one could not afford to look weak around Heero. He's fucking nuts, Wufei sighed to himself, following Heero into the restaurant.

 

***

 

Armand had been watching the Maganac's helicopter pad when the male half of their two targets suddenly strolled out onto the pad with two other people. While one of them was a woman, she was clearly the wrong one, as she was Arabic. He beckoned to Philippe, who came over and stole Armand's binoculars to peer at the pad himself. Meanwhile, Armand hauled out their laptop and tracking equipment. He picked up what looked like a high-powered rifle and put the helicopter carefully in his sights before squeezing the trigger. It wasn't a bullet that embedded itself in the tail of the chopper, though; it was a tracking device developed by OZ that was the size of his thumb, with a range of approximately 1000 kilometres. After activating it with his laptop, which he was already in the process of doing as the rotors on the top of the chopper started to turn lazily, it would transmit a wireless signal to the computer which would allow them to follow at a safe distance without fear of losing their targets in the air. They'd used a similar device already to track the targets to Saudi Arabia from Paris.

 

Armand tapped Philippe's shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up when the other man turned around to face him. The roar of the churning helicopter blades was too loud to talk over without shouting. Philippe nodded back and the two men packed up their equipment as quickly as possible to dash to their Jeep, Armand balancing the open laptop as he went. Philippe took the wheel and they peeled off through the sand to the closest Romefeller-owned oilfield, where they'd landed their own helicopter the day before. It was refueled and ready to go by now, or people were going to die until it was. Treize's orders.

 

***

 

When the two French OZ agents arrived in Istanbul on the heels of their prey, Armand spotted the Chinese boy who accompanied the one they were after, just as he disappeared around a corner on the edge of town. The two men readily abandoned all of their things, except for a loaded sidearm apiece, in the helicopter; Philippe had just called someone stationed in town to come and do something about the vehicle and its contents for them. They took off after the two boys and caught up within two blocks, trailing at a distance.

 

While they'd been warned that their target was most likely quite dangerous, they were both good at following people quietly and it would never have occurred to them that if Heero was on his guard, he could have noticed their presence even while they were over half a block behind. Luckily for them, Heero wasn't on his guard, and it never occurred to him that someone could possibly be stalking him from one of the most secure terrorist encampments in existence, when he himself hadn't been sure of his destination until about five minutes before getting in the helicopter.

 

Thus the two men went completely unnoticed as the two boys entered a car rental company close to the airport. They went into a café across the street and loitered at the window with thick coffee and baklava, watching the Chinese boy sitting behind the window of the rental place for an hour until he was finally rejoined by his friend and the two walked out the door. As soon as they disappeared around the back of the building, Armand and Philippe sprang from their seats, dropped several bills on the table, and left the café, jaywalking across the street to the other building.

 

As Philippe marched up to the counter and flashed a fake CIA badge and his gun holster, growling at the secretary in a flawless American accent to give him a damn car right now, Armand peeked out the window and saw a red Mazda peel around the corner. He caught sight of the first four digits of the license plate and muttered them over and over to himself as Philippe came out the door, brandishing keys and grabbing him by the arm to drag him over to a black Fiat at the front of the lot. Philippe lost no time in screeching out onto the street after the Mazda, and all told, it was hardly two minutes after the import's departure that they started pursuing it.

 

Armand scanned the road ahead, leaning forward and squinting through the windshield as if it would help. His eyes widened. “F-54H! There they are! There they are! À la gauche!” he yelled, pointing wildly at the car that was a block away (it had been held up by a red light). Their good luck was almost ridiculous today.

 

Philippe gunned the Fiat's engine and cut off someone in the left lane, working the wheel like his life depended on it as they slalomed through the afternoon traffic to catch up to their quarry. When they were two cars behind, he slowed down to follow casually.

 

The sporty, red four-door snaked through the busy avenues of Istanbul like it owned the place, eventually (and abruptly) turning to enter the parking lot of a falafel house. Armand watched with wide eyes as the Mazda drifted gracefully into an empty spot, leaving short tire marks on the pavement. Philippe kept driving as Armand watched the car doors open. “We'll park just up the street,” he explained to his partner. “When they leave, we'll put the press on them, as it were.”

 

Armand nodded his agreement.

 

***

 

After a filling first encounter with falafel, Wufei was in good spirits as he and Heero left the restaurant. They'd whiled away the time between mouthfuls of food by discussing the merits of hand-to-hand combat over weapons. While Heero had declared that nothing really beat the sensations of going to town on someone with a length of lead pipe (God only knew when he'd experienced that), Wufei was quite proud of an argument he'd presented about the twin merits of kung fu, in that not only was it more honourable for one to fight an unarmed enemy on equal terms—or better yet, defeat an armed one bare-handed—but also because it felt so good to be able to paralyse someone twice your size with only your thumb and forefinger. Heero seemed to agree with him there.

 

They got into the car and Wufei gritted his teeth as Heero reversed and swung the front of the car around nearly 180 degrees to exit the parking lot. Once they were back on the road, it was smooth sailing. Heero seemed to know where he was going, which was more than Wufei could say for himself, so he relaxed back into the plush seat and tried to enjoy the ride. He even shut his eyes to try and catch a nap, but he opened them a few minutes later when it seemed like Heero was taking a lot of right turns. “What are you doing?” Wufei asked.

 

Heero was tense, his right hand gripping the gear shift until his knuckles turned white as he kept glaring at the rear-view mirror. “I think we're being followed,” he said tersely.

 

Wufei stuttered out some syllables of disbelief as he sat up and glanced in the mirror on his door, and then turned to peek around his seat. “That black car?” he asked. He remembered it from in front of the restaurant.

 

“Yeah, that one,” Heero growled, down shifting and turning left into an alley as the Fiat stuck to their tail.

 

Wufei faced forward again, his mind racing as he stared at his feet. “Get out of town,” he said. “Get on the highway or something. We can outpace them.”

 

Heero was stony-faced. “I can handle it,” he said staunchly. Wufei glared at him but could do nothing as Heero skidded out of the alley and drove for half a block in the wrong direction on a (thankfully empty) one-way street, sailing around the corner onto a two-way road again. The Fiat pursued.

 

Admiring the guts that this guy obviously had, Heero stepped it up a notch, shifting up and completely ignoring the posted speed limit as he cruised through the mid-afternoon grind of Istanbul. Half a block ahead, he saw an intersection where the light was changing to yellow. He saw a large van sitting at the red, waiting to go. Smiling for the first time, he floored the accelerator and shot through the intersection just as the light changed, watching in his mirror as the Fiat followed and expecting the van to pull out and either block the black car or collide with it. His face fell when he saw he'd timed the risk wrong; the other car had to swerve a little but it missed the van and kept coming.

 

Heero decided it was time to start driving with both hands on the wheel.

 

He wasn't sure where he was after that one-way street stunt, but a couple of blocks later on the same straightaway, running two red lights with milliseconds of safety to spare, he figured out his location and formed a plan from there. He took his next left nearly on two wheels and felt the engine respond beautifully as he roared down a major thoroughfare for two kilometres. The Fiat was still riding his ass as he took an exit with no warning at all, and he grinned as the other car looked like it was going to overshoot the exit. Unfortunately it slowed down in time and rode across the grass to hit the pavement again, nearly sideswiping him on the driver's side in the process.

 

Just as Wufei said, this car would be able to outmatch a Fiat on a straightaway. He knew that after a tunnel with some gentle curves, the road he was on flattened out for six kilometres before curving around a cliff side for a while. He would be able to lose his tail on the straight section and then take the first available exit, dirt road or otherwise, and loop back into town before they had a hope of catching up. Maybe he'd even luck out sooner and the cliff curves would do them in. Mentally crossing his fingers, he flew down the road and into the broad mouth of the tunnel.

 

Once the two cars had entered the two-lane tunnel, the Fiat picked up speed and rode alongside, the drivers coming up parallel to each other. Heero allowed this until Wufei declared that their pursuers were armed and that the passenger had his gun out. “Oh my god, is that a Desert Eagle?” Wufei gaped.

 

Heero floored it again and they took off ahead.

 

As the Fiat nosed its way up to them again, it slipped back into a position right behind them. Wufei was watching in his mirror as the passenger did something he couldn't see properly, and then suddenly the man was hanging half out of the window, his head terribly close to the concrete wall of the tunnel.

 

Wufei's eyes went very wide. “He's going to shoot!” he said, hunkering down in his seat instinctively.

 

“Well, shoot back!” Heero said distractedly, glancing quickly behind him as he nosed the car over 110 in fourth gear.

 

“I'm not armed!” he said.

 

“Where's your precious unarmed kung fu getting you now?” Heero muttered, taking one hand off the wheel for a second to reach behind his back. He tossed a handgun at Wufei, who caught it deftly. “It's loaded; eight shots. No extra ammo.”

 

Deciding not to wonder why Heero kept a gun down the back of his pants, Wufei carefully rolled down his window and took off the safety on the gun, taking a deep breath and waiting for the first shot.

 

It came through the back window on the passenger side, and although they were somewhat prepared for it, Heero still had to work not to let the car swerve. They went around a right curve shortly after, and Wufei took advantage of the angle to lean out of his window and fire a return shot at the Fiat. It hit the windshield around the middle and spiderwebbed it.

 

The Fiat caught up again, but by this time they'd emerged from the tunnel onto the straightaway. Heero relaxed and kicked the RX-7 into fifth gear, letting it accelerate evenly until he was doing close to 170 kilometres per hour. The Fiat all but vanished. He didn't figure it would be able to go faster than 150 without pushing it. He knew he could break 200 without much problem. Just to be safe, he pushed the needle up to 180 for the last two kilometres of the straight road and then prepared himself for some work as the first, somewhat gentle curve approached, the road disappearing around the side of the cliff.

 

Wufei looked at Heero, at the determined expression on his face as he sat low in his seat and stared fixedly ahead, and double-checked his seatbelt. This guy drove like Mario Andretti. He silently crossed his fingers that no one would suddenly appear going the other way, because Heero was taking corners in the middle of the road, using the whole thing at his disposal. It was like watching someone play a road racing simulator.

 

They were two and a half kilometres into the cliff road with no sign of their pursuers when something suddenly started beeping. Wufei shot Heero a wary glance as Heero looked down at the dashboard. He suddenly started swearing in what sounded like Japanese and then Wufei noticed the car slowing down noticeably from its breakneck pace. “What the hell is wrong?” he demanded. “Why are we slowing down?”

 

Heero glared darkly at everything. “The oil light came on. The engine badly needs some,” he snipped.

 

Wufei goggled at him. “So-so what are we going to do?” he snapped back, gesticulating wildly. “Pull over and fill it?! Oh hey, we can wave at those idiots in the Fiat when they go by. You know, the ones with the big guns.”

 

“Shut the fuck up, Wufei,” Heero said concisely. “I think we can ride it out long enough to get away, but we can't go quite as fast as we were or we won't have a car at all in another ten clicks.” He tapped his nail on the steering wheel irritably. “Those idiots at the rental place clearly haven't kept the oil topped up properly. Rotary engines like this one need a lot of it.”

 

Wufei quite frankly didn't give a shit. They were going at the comparative snail's pace of 120 around the corners and, he suspected, slower every minute. He thought he could hear the slight beginnings of a knock in the engine. He slunk down in his seat and held the gun tightly for self-security. Seven shots left.

 

It didn't take long for the Fiat to appear behind them suddenly on a curve. The passenger leaned out of his window again and the driver moved to the middle of the road to keep him from braining himself on the rock wall at 130 kilometres per hour. Angrily, Heero sped up again, pushing the car's endurance as Wufei played his waiting game once more, planning to hit a tire this time if at all possible. Hopefully that wouldn't flip the other car over on top of them before Heero could get away.

 

They hit a straighter stretch of road without a guardrail on the steep side for the next few kilometres. Heero came out of the corner on the outside and was riding close to the shoulder as a shot missed their car. Wufei leaned out of the window and fired twice at the partially visible tire on the front driver's side, but only managed to put holes in the fender and front bumper. He climbed back inside the car and strapped himself in again as Heero negotiated another turn with no guardrail. They were in a frequent avalanche zone now, apparently; there were signs in Turkish with pictures of falling rocks, and a lot of little gravel piles on either side of the road.

 

The shot that took out their right rear tire surprised them both; Wufei could do nothing but hold on for dear life as the Mazda swung back and forth. Heero's hands were grafted to the wheel as he fought with the car to keep it on the road. It was hopeless. Like watching a train wreck, Wufei saw each event individually and in extreme slow motion: the car swinging right, left, right, and finally spinning around to face the Fiat; the passenger of the Fiat aiming at them but then lowering his gun as he watched them fishtail; the patch of loose gravel on the road that the still-spinning left rear wheel hit at at least 70 kilometres per hour; the lurch to the side as the car swung around again and crashed through the first five feet of where the guardrail started again; the screech of tearing metal and the smell of burning rubber and oil; the weightless sensation as thousands of pounds of metal careened through open space for a second; the sick, brain-mushing crash as it smashed into the hillside and started to roll.

 

The next few minutes after that were lost to Wufei forever. The first thing he remembered after the rolling was suddenly realizing that he was slouched forward. His seatbelt was keeping him attached to his seat. He looked over to his left for Heero and saw a tree trunk about three inches from his face. The car had slid down the last part of its descent nose-forward, and plowed directly into a tree hard enough to cleave the front in two. He tried to speak, but started coughing from the dust and smoke. “H-Heero?” he croaked finally, afraid to be too loud. He got no response and tried again. Nothing.

 

Seeing that his door opened if he kicked it hard enough, and that there was solid ground shortly underneath, Wufei carefully unbuckled himself and slid out of the totalled Mazda. He still had the gun, with five shots left in it if he wasn't mistaken, and there was his cellphone and pager in the rear pocket of his jeans. He also had a splitting headache but he didn't think that counted.

 

He sat there in a daze for a moment, trying to get his thoughts to stop scattering, but the sudden sound of male voices and the skittering of a stone down the cliff did more to rouse him. He stood up shakily, the gun in his right hand as he splayed his limbs out for balance, and walked around the back of the car to the driver's side as quickly as he could. There was still a lot of smoke around, and he was surprised nothing had exploded yet. He peeked into the smashed window on the driver's door. Nothing there. He checked under the car and scanned the bushes all around. Nothing there, either. The voices were getting louder, and if he looked up the hill he saw—holy cow, was that a steep drop—two men at the top with rope, tying it to what was left of the guardrail and apparently intending to come down and see what was left of the car. He didn't think they could see him through the foliage. Not finding any trace of Heero, not even blood, and feeling rather helpless and vulnerable and more than a little nauseous, Wufei stumbled off through the bushes, heading more or less back the way they'd come.

 

He was half hoping that he'd stumble upon the other teenager while trekking through the trees, but no such luck. Finally, he stopped to rest, unable to stand the way his head was spinning. He sat down on a rock and felt his cellphone in his back pocket again. Putting down the gun, Wufei dug the phone out, opened it, and stared at the glowing screen. Finally, he dialled Quatre's number and put it to his ear.

 

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A/N: :O