Point Blank

board onto its edge, making a turn. He had seen a gap in the trees and he made for it. Now he was racing through the forest, with branches and trunks whipping past like crazy animations in a computer game. Could the snowmobiles follow him through here? The question was answered by another burst from the machine gun, ripping through the leaves and branches. Alex searched for a narrower path. The board shuddered, and he was almost thrown headfirst. The snow was getting thinner! He edged and turned, heading for two of the thickest trees. He passed between them with inches to spare.
    The Yamaha snowmobile had no choice. The rider had run out of paths, and was traveling too fast to stop. He tried to follow Alex between the trees, but the snowmobile was too wide.
    Alex heard the collision. There was a terrible crunch, then a scream, then an explosion. A ball of orange flame leapt over the trees, sending the black shadows in a crazy dance. Ahead of him, Alex saw another hillock and beyond it, a gap in the trees. It was time to leave the forest.
    He swooped up the hillock and out, once again catching air. As he left the trees behind him, six feet in the air, he saw the second snowmobile. It had caught up with him. For a moment, the two of them were side by side. Alex doubled forward and grabbed the nose of his board. Still in midair, he twisted the tip of the board, bringing the tail swinging around. He had timed it perfectly. The tail slammed into the second rider’s head, almost throwing him out of his seat.
    Alex fought for balance. The rider yelled and lost control. His snowmobile jerked sideways as if trying to make an impossibly tight turn. Then it left the ground, cartwheeling over and over.
    The rider was thrown off, then screamed as the snowmobile completed its final turn and landed on top of him. Man and machine bounced across the surface of the snow and lay still.
    Meanwhile, Alex had slammed into the snow and skidded to a halt, his breath clouding, green, in front of his eyes.
    A minute later, he pushed off again. Ahead of him, he could see that all the trails were leading into a single valley. This must be the bottleneck called La Vallee de Fer. He’d actually done it! He’d reached the bottom of the mountain. But now he was trapped. There was no other way around. He could see lights in the distance. A city. Safety. But he could also see the railway line stretching right across the valley, from the left to the right, protected on both sides by an embankment and a barbed-wire fence. The glow from the city illuminated everything. On one side the track came out of the mouth of a tunnel. It ran for about a hundred yards in a straight line before a sharp bend carried it around the other side of the valley and it disappeared from sight.
    The two men in the gray van saw Alex snowboarding toward them. They were parked on a road on the other side of the railway line and had been waiting only a few minutes. They hadn’t seen the explosion and wondered what had happened to the two men on their snowmobiles.
    But that wasn’t their concern. Their orders were to kill the boy. And there he was, right out in the open, expertly managing the last slope down through the valley. Every second brought him closer to them. There was nowhere for him to hide.
    The machine gun was a Belgian FN MAG and would cut him in half.
    Alex saw the van. He saw the machine gun aimed at him. He couldn’t stop. It was too late to change direction. He had come this far, but now he was finished. He felt the strength draining out of him. Where was MI6? Why did he have to die, out here, on his own?
    And then there was a sudden blast as a train exploded out of the tunnel. It was a freight train, traveling about twenty miles an hour. It had at least thirty train cars being pulled by a diesel engine, and it formed a moving wall between Alex and the gun, protecting him. But it would be there only a few seconds. He had to move fast.
    Barely knowing what he was doing, Alex found a last mound of snow and, using it as a launch pad, swept up into the air. Now he was level with the train … now above it. He shifted his weight and came down onto the roof of one of the cars. The surface was covered in ice, and for a moment he thought he would fall off the other side, but he managed to swing around so that he was snowboarding along the roofs of the cars, jumping from one to another while being swept along the track—away from the gun—in a blast of freezing