Tibor and János stood, leaning forward on the cab, replaced the magazines on their rifles, and looked ahead. Remi held her pistol in both hands, also watching ahead.

Sam lifted his pistol from his belt with his left hand. “I’m going to go through as fast as I can. It would be best if we could make the guards keep their heads down until we’re out of their effective range.”

“Good plan . . . as plans go,” she said.

“I know you’re the only pistol champion we have, but I’d rather they not see enough of you to hit. You’re also the only wife I have . . .”

“You’re so sweet.”

“. . . at the moment.”

Zoltán looked at each of them in turn, not sure what to think.

Sam reached the last corner, slowed to make the turn, and drove past the van they had brought there. As they passed, two men hiding in the back of the van flung the rear door open. Sam, Remi, and the others were too far away to hit before the men jumped to the ground, pulled out pistols, and fired wildly in their direction.

“If one of us had opened that door, we’d be dead,” said Remi.

Sam shifted from third to fourth as he drove for the gate. The two men on duty had closed the chain-link barrier, and now there were five or six others standing in front to guard the exit. To Sam it looked as though they were overconfident, assuming that nobody would actually try to crash the gate, so they were not really ready. Their rifles were slung across their backs, and they had done nothing to reinforce the barrier, even though they had another stake truck parked beside the gate.

“Slight change of plan,” said Sam. He switched on the high-beam headlights. “Tell the guys to get down.”

“Get down!” she shouted.

The three men lay flat on the truck bed, the brothers facing the sides with their rifles ready, Albrecht, in the middle, facing backward.

Sam kept adding speed as he approached. When he and Remi were twenty-five yards out, Remi held her right elbow with her left hand and fired, dropping the man in the guard kiosk, then fired several rounds at the riflemen, who were unslinging their firearms. Sam fired eight shots into their midst, but he was not the shot with a pistol that Remi was and all he was sure he accomplished was to increase the men’s impulse to dive for cover.

Sam adjusted his course slightly, held the steering wheel steady, and passed just three feet to the right of the parked truck, missed the gate, and plowed into the chain-link fence. The fence was so high that as the cab ran straight into the mesh, it passed under the crossbar where the razor wire was coiled. The truck pushed a forty-foot section of the mesh ahead of it until the bottom links caught on the ground, the mesh was pulled flat, and the truck drove over it.