Adrenaline by Jeff Abbott Page A

containers, keeping up its flying speed, but just barely. It wasn’t in a hurry. It was searching.
    My heart sank. Infrared scanners tied to thermal imagers. My body temperature would stick out like a flame against the coolness of shipped goods like my Vermont soap and New Jersey hand wipes.
    I had to find somewhere else on the ship to hide. Now.
    I couldn’t go down. My body heat would stick out like a blister. I had to go up and then find rapid entry into the ship. I’d be spotted, but they were going to find me within minutes anyway. I ducked back down to my container, grabbed my gun and the ammo, and the cash. I put the cash and the ammo in a belt bag and tucked the gun in the back of my pants, then went back out the door. The containers’ surfaces were damp from the ocean breeze, andI tested my grip carefully; a slip would be fatal. I hoisted myself up high. The helicopter was about a hundred meters away. The ship had stopped and dropped anchor; the white noise of the engines had faded.
    The helicopter was turned away from me, its nose pointing back to where the suit from the helicopter and the captain (I presumed) stood. I crawled out onto the top of the containers. I was five stories in the air, laying flat on the cool steel of a blue container. I could see that the container stack here stair-stepped down, then rose again. The loader had not done a neat job and it gave me ledges and walls, just like back in Vauxhall.
    The helicopter began its turn. I hunkered low and ran. I eased myself over the lip of the first stack and dropped down to the next.
    I made a
clang
when I hit. The helicopter couldn’t have heard it. But a crewman, standing near the railing toward the bow, turned, either at the sound or at the flash of color I made as I ran.
    I saw him turn and point. Right at me.
    I rolled and ran toward the edge again, and I heard the increasing whine of the helicopter. I slammed off the edge of one container, slowed my descent, hit the top of another and rolled to my feet. I glanced back as I ran the twenty feet to the edge and saw the helicopter bearing down on me. One of the men jumped from the copter onto the container stack, gun in hand.
    I ran. Metal hit metal—a bullet pinging against the container. I had to get off the stack—the helicopter roared above me, circling, keeping me in sight as the gunman narrowed the gap between us.
    I was caught between man and machine, boxed, nowthree stories above the deck, and I could see another thin crevasse between shoved-together stacks of multicolored containers.
    I wriggled inside the gap. I had maybe thirty seconds to navigate down thirty feet to the deck before the gunman caught up to the canyon. I’d be a dead target if I wasn’t out and clear by the time he reached it. He could simply fire a bullet into the top of my head.
    I bounced down, my feet catching the edges of the containers, just enough to break the descent, then dropping again. Find the line, I told myself. It was like a parkour run inside a pipeline; my shoulders bounced hard against the steel.
    Twenty feet. I hit a skid, lost my balance. I slammed into the metal side, caught the edge of a container with my hands. I could hear the helicopter drumming above me like a hammer.
    I focused and let go and managed to drop to the deck in a controlled roll. I spilled free from the container stack, out of the shadows, into the weak, ocean-guttered sunlight. Fifty feet ahead of me was a railing—and beyond that the uncaring gray of the sea.
    I ran, staying close to the edge of the containers. I needed to get belowdecks. On a ship full of warm bodies and heating pumps and heavy engines, they’d have to do their thermal scans by hand. And hundreds more containers should be below. I could become the needle in the haystack for a while. I was going to make them work to find me, because I was sick of being stymied, of being pushed away from finding Lucy and my son.
    I crashed into a crewman, a young Filipino who