"He's definitely 90 mph," said Bronze, "and I can follow him a little distance and drive at his speed." The car was quiet again.

"So," Gong Yu finally spoke, "feelings make you uncomfortable?" You did fool me this summer. ”

"Because I'm consciously changing myself, opening my heart and making myself feel something. When you walked into my office on the first day, I was ready, for the first time in my life, ready to fall in love. ”

"And now you feel cheated because the woman you're in love with isn't who she claims to be."

Bronze did not answer.

Gong Yu continued, "You're thinking, maybe it's better for you to change back to your original one, you can distance yourself and not let yourself feel any feelings that might hurt you. ”

"I thought so."

"And then?"

"To hell with my self-esteem." Bronze squeezed her hand. "You asked me if I wanted to start over. I think it's because of that other option that scares me so much. I don't want to lose you. I'm going to go crazy if I can't spend the rest of my life with you...... I don't think I got back to where I was after all. ”

He said to himself, you better get back to where you are, you have to let the two of us survive tonight.

The tension had caused a familiar feeling in his stomach that he had suffered from while working in the Intelligence Bureau. The business he had eaten before was still undigested in his stomach, and in the afternoon he bought a few lamb roast buns and finger meat for each person after preparing his guns. Now, what he had eaten before was burning his stomach like acid. It's just like before, he thought.

He wondered how far away his pursuers were from him, and what they were deciding to do. Is there still their accomplices waiting in Santa Fe in front? Perhaps, it was just a few of Renata's friends waiting at the Dinghao Western Hotel, which was not enough to intercept him. Perhaps, they have already arranged reinforcements with the people in front of them. Or, maybe Bronze was mistaken, he didn't have a guide hidden in his car at all. Perhaps his plan was of no use at all. No, he stressed to himself, I've been doing this for so many years and I know what to do. In this case, I know what Renata will do.

Alas, he thought melancholy, wouldn't it be nice to be sure?

He crossed the three-way road to Santa Fe and continued along the road. The people chasing him, he thought, would be confused, and they would argue wildly, speculating about why he hadn't stopped, where he was going. It was interesting to him. However, they will all follow him now. Not only those who followed him from Xining, but also those from Santa Fe. He knew this, just as he knew that the greatest danger of the night was yet to come—for example, the uninhabited dirt road along the river.

The road was dirty, dark, narrow, and curved, with small settlements scattered along the roadside, but mostly shady groves. This stretch of road provides a perfect opportunity for his pursuers to knock him off the road without anyone seeing what is happening. He couldn't have been driving as fast as he was on the road. In that case, at the first sharp turn, he will overturn. In some places, even Highway 45 is already the limit. He hunched his upper body, staring into the darkness in front of him from the headlights, doing everything he could to win every second on the straights, then slowing down, slamming the steering wheel around the turn, and then accelerating again.

"I can't risk taking my eyes off the road ahead and looking in the rearview mirror." He told Gong Yu, "Look at the back, do you see the headlights?" ”

"Nope. Wait, now I see it. ”

"What?"

"I turned the corner. One – I read it wrong – looks like two cars. The second car had just turned the corner. ”

"Oh my God."

"They didn't seem to want to catch up with us. Why don't they catch up? Maybe that's not them. Gong Yu said.

Or maybe they want to know what they're up against before they do it. Look ahead. ”

"Lights."

"It's the town."

Bronze slowed down, but he didn't dare to slow down too much. He turned left and drove onto the silent dirt road toward the mountains to the north.

"I can't see the headlights," Mr. Gong said, "and those cars aren't following us." ”

"Maybe." No sooner had the lights of the sleeping town been thrown behind him than the bronze picked up speed again, and drove uphill along the dimly narrow road into the wilderness. "Or maybe the two cars were indeed Renata and her gang, and they distanced themselves and didn't want to make it easy to see that they were following us. They must be curious to know what we're doing here. ”

In the darkness, the dense pine trees seem to form an impregnable wall.

"This place doesn't look very hospitable." Gong Yu said.

"Good. Renata would think that whoever came here was only to hide. We're almost there, and we'll be there soon. A few more—"

He almost rushed past the sign. He slowed down so he could drive through the barely visible gap in the middle of the fir tree. He realized in horror that he might be luring himself and Gong Yu into a trap, just as he tried to trap Renata. He drove over the wooden bridge, and the narrow Yongding River below the bridge was fast-flowing. The car drove into a dark clearing and stopped in front of the steps leading to the house. He turned off the engine, and only then did he twist the knob that turned off the headlights – which kept his lights on for two more minutes.

With this light, he took out Gong Yu's crutches and the carrying bag from the back seat. He felt an irresistible urge to act as quickly as possible, but he didn't dare let himself do it. If Renata and her accomplices had driven by and saw him hurrying into the cabin, they would immediately suspect that he knew they were being followed, that he was waiting for them, that they had been deceived. He nervously restrained his impatience and allowed himself to appear exhausted, just as he had felt.

He followed Gong Yu up the log steps and reached into a metal box attached to the doorknob of the cabin. The car's lights provided just enough light for him to use his own key to unlock the box. He lifted the lid of the box, took out the key to the cabin, opened the door, and helped Gong Yu into the house.

As soon as the door was closed, locked, and the light turned on, Bronze reacted to the urgency of swelling to the limit in his body. The curtains of the cabin had long been drawn, and no one outside could see him helping Beth to let her down her crutches. Before leaving the cabin to go to the station, they had already put on the thick underwear he had bought. At this time, Bronze applied the black soot from the stove to Gong Yu's face, and then to his own face. When they rehearsed the moves earlier that night, it took less than two minutes to get everything in place, but now Bronze felt that they were taking much longer, which made him nervous. Hurry up, he thought. To avoid leaving fingerprints, they wore dark cotton gloves. The gloves are thin enough to shoot a gun and thick enough to keep them warm. Bronze turned on the radio, and a modern female singer from Shanghai began to sing mournfully about "life, love, separation...... and bronze, leaving the lights on. He helped Gong Yu out the back door, closed the door behind him, and ventured to a halt in the cold night, lovingly stroking her arm to encourage her.

She trembled, but did what she had to do, as they had rehearsed. She disappeared to the left of the cabin.

Bronze secretly admired her courage. He went to the right. In front of the cabin, his headlights had been turned off. In places where the light from the cabin window does not shine, the night is thicker. Gradually, the bronze eyes adapted to the darkness, and the bright moon and countless stars characteristic of the plateau region gave a wonderful and soft glow in the night.

Earlier, Bronze and Blue officers walked around the area, surveying the terrain from a tactical point of view. They decided to take advantage of the hunter's trail behind the cabin, which was covered in thick bushes. Gong Yu is now moving along this path, and the people on the main road can't see her. Soon she would come to a large tree with dense foliage, and the path would go around the tree. There, Gong Yu would lie down on the ground in the woods, crawling down the bush-covered slope and into a shallow pit dug by Officer Lan. There were two double-barreled shotguns on a log, ready for her.

At the same time, Bronze crawled in the dark into an identical shallow pit, which he had dug himself with a camping shovel. Despite wearing three layers of clothing, he felt the moisture on the ground. He lay behind a log, hidden in the bushes. He looked around, but couldn't find what he was looking for. His pulse pounded with anxiety, and finally he finally touched the Type 30 lever rifle. This lethal weapon is designed for medium-range firing in such bushy terrain. It has 6 rounds in the magazine and one more in the chamber, and with the lubricated lever behind the trigger operating up and down, the bullets can be fired very quickly.

Next to the rifle was a car battery, which he had also brought before leaving Santa Fe. Next to the battery are 12 pairs of wires, all with exposed ends. The wires were connected to kettles filled with fuel oil and a plant fertilizer whose main ingredient is ammonium nitrate. These things are mixed in a certain proportion of ingredients and become a kind of explosive. In order to increase the lethality, the bronze dissected several shotgun bullets and poured the gunpowder and large lead bullets inside.

In order to make a detonator for each bomb, he carefully broke the outer glass of 12 100-watt bulbs, not daring to use too much force so as not to destroy the filament inside. Then, he grabbed the metal base of the bulb, inserted the filament into each kettle one by one, and glued two wires to the base of each bulb. He buried the kettles in key locations and covered them with leaves. The pair of wires were pulled all the way to the car battery next to Decker and covered in the same way. The wires are lined up from left to right, in line with the direction in which the kettle is buried. Bronze can pick out any pair of wires, press the end of one wire to the positive pole of the battery, and the other to the negative pole, so that after forming a circuit, the filament of the bulb will burn up, thus detonating the bomb.

He was ready. Along the trail, across the narrow Yongding River, on the other side of the road, Officer Lan was hiding in the woods. He must have seen himself driving to the front of the house, and must have been waiting for Renata and his accomplices to arrive.

According to common sense, when their introducer receiver told them that the bronze had made a turn and opened the road, they would not follow him down the trail without first paying attention to see what trouble might be encountered. More likely, they'll drive past the entrance to the trail, continue on the main road for a considerable distance, stop the car, and cautiously return to the trail. They certainly didn't want to cross the bottlenecked entrance to the trail, but they couldn't, because there was only one way to get close to the cabin, and that was to swim through the rushing river. In the dark, this approach is too risky.

Renata and her men left the main road and walked onto the trail. Officer Blue would get out of his hiding place and wreck their car. If they have a bad premonition and want to escape, they won't be able to do it. There will probably be two cars - one from the station surveillance team and the other from Santa Fe's gang. Officer Blue would stick a thin twig into the axle valve of a few tires to prevent the car from running, and the light sizzling sound of the gas leaking out would be drowned out by the rattling of the river.

Officer Blue would then tiptoe close to the gang and attack them from behind with a Type 22 semi-automatic rifle with a 30-round magazine and two other magazines on his belt as soon as the shootout began. Although it is a light weapon, this rifle has several advantages - it has a low firing sound, can hold a lot of bullets, and can fire bullets extremely quickly.

These features are useful in short-range, hit-and-run operations. One by one, those kettles would blow up; Gong Yu would shoot with that shotgun; Bronze would fire with that rifle, and that Remington rifle as a backup. If everything went as they planned, Renata and her gang would be killed in 30 seconds.

The problem, Bronze thought, is that Murphy's Law is always going to disrupt the plan in some way. As long as there is a chance that something will go wrong, something will go wrong. And there are a lot of question marks in the middle of this plan. Will Renata and all her gang come down the trail at the same time? Will they sniff out the trap, will they look back to see if anyone has snuck up from behind them? Will Gong Yu be able to control his reaction and shoot at the right moment as they rehearsed? In this regard, will she be stunned and unable to shoot at all? Or will it ......

Bronze heard a sound like a tree branch breaking. He nervously held his breath so that the slightest sound of breathing would disturb his hearing. He listened to the damp ground, trying to distract from the faint music coming from the cabin, and not paying attention to the vague murmur of the river, but intently waiting for the sound to come again. The sound seemed to have come from near the path, and he couldn't be sure if someone had made it. It's so close to the wilderness and there are a lot of nocturnal animals. That sound may not mean danger.

He really wanted to know how Gong Yu reacted to this voice. She can control herself

Fear? He had been trying his best to convince himself that Gong Yu's presence was necessary. If she hadn't come along, Renata might have suspected that he had set a trap, but she didn't want Gong Yu to be in danger. At the same time, Bronze kept retorting to himself, maybe Gong Yu's presence was not very necessary. Maybe he shouldn't have let her get involved, maybe he's asking too much of her.

She didn't have to prove anything to me.

You're the one who makes things this way.

Stop, he said to himself, there is only one thing you should concentrate on, and that is to survive tonight alive and let Gong Yu survive tonight.

He didn't hear it anymore and exhaled slowly. The cabin was to his right, and the light was shining through the window. But he deliberately did not look in that direction, so as not to interfere with his night vision. He stared straight ahead at the road, at the wooden bridges, the paths, and the clearings. The lights in the cabin will provide light for those who sneak in, and it will also make it difficult for people tiptoeing close to adjust their night vision and see the darkness around the cabin.

On the contrary, the light pouring out of the house, combined with the bright moonlight and starlight, was good for bronze. These lights were at the outer edge of his field of vision, making his eyes feel comfortable. He felt like he was looking at things with a pair of giant brightening glasses.

The crickets chirped. Another sad ballad sounded faintly on the radio in the cabin, full of grievances, which should have been sung by Li Xianglan.

Bronze heard the sound of branches breaking again, and immediately became nervous. This time he knew with no doubt that the sound was coming from near the trail, among the bushes and bushes on the right side of the trail. Hasn't he seen Renata and her group yet, and they've crossed the bridge?

It seemed impossible—unless they crossed the bridge before he reached the shallow pit. But his gaze was only a few minutes away from the wooden bridge. Before he came out of the cabin, Renata would have had time to drive past (he didn't see any passing lights), make sure he had driven up the trail, parked, surveyed the area, and crossed the bridge? Is this possible? Then Renata and her people would be acting almost recklessly. That's not Renata's style.

But when Bronze heard that sound for the third time, he grabbed his rifle. He suddenly remembered that Gong Yu would do the same, she would grab a shotgun, but could she restrain herself and wait until it was absolutely necessary to pull the trigger? If she panicked and fired prematurely before her target came into range, she would have ruined the plan and would most likely have cost her her own life for it.

As they drove from Xining, Bronze stressed the danger to her, repeatedly telling her to remember that the shotgun was a short-range weapon and that she could not shoot until she had fired her own shot and that there was a clear target in the clearing. Her injured shoulder may have made her less accurate, but the lethal scatter of lead bullets would make up for it, especially when she fired all four bullets in a row in a short period of time.

Remember what I said to you, Gong Yu, don't rush to shoot.

Bronze awaits. Nothing happened. There was no more sound of branches breaking. As far as he could tell, five minutes had passed, and the sound had not been heard again. He couldn't look at his watch. The watch is in his pocket. Before arriving at the cabin, he had already double-checked to make sure that both he and Gong Yu had taken off the watch and put it away, so that the dial would not reveal their position in the dark.

According to his judgment, 10 minutes passed. He told Gong Yu that he lay motionless for several hours, restraining his impatience. Tell yourself that you are playing and that the other person will act before you act. At Xining Station, although neither of them felt like they needed to go to the bathroom, Bronze insisted that they both had to go once. He pointed out that when they lie in the woods at night, a full bladder can make them feel very uncomfortable and may make them unable to concentrate. Squatting up to urinate will attract attention. The only option is to untie it in your clothes, but that will definitely be distracting.

15 minutes. 20 minutes. No more suspicious sounds. There was no movement on the moonlit path or in the thick bushes beside it. Bronze said to himself to be patient, but a part of his mind began to doubt whether his reasoning was valid. Maybe Renata didn't have a guide in his car. Maybe Renata wasn't in the area at all.

The coolness of the night enveloped Gong Yu, but when the trees in the forest moved, he felt a more bone-chilling coolness. In one part of the woods, there was something low, probably a crouching man, carefully moving behind the clumps of bushes. But the movement was not near the trail, not in the place where the bronze expected to move. In fact, to his alarm, the figure was already about to skirt the tree-lined clearing and was tiptoeing towards the cabin. Bronze thought in horror, I didn't see him, why was he so close?

Where are the others?

Near the first person, he saw another figure, and the chill on his body was even worse. This man did not seem to have come around the edge of the clearing, but had come out of the depths of the woods, and he did not seem to have come from the bridge to the west, but from the north. The only explanation is that they found another way to cross the river.

But how? I checked the river 100 meters north along the side of the road, and they wouldn't have driven any further to stop. There are no logs, no small bridges, and no big rocks to cross the river.

Bronze struggled to suppress a wave of nausea as a third figure emerged from the woods on the edge of the clearing, and he understood what had happened. After the gang stopped, they split into two groups. One group followed the main road to the south, holding the exit of the trail and cutting off their escape route, while the others walked north on foot.

Bronze didn't expect them to run in this direction. They walked along the main road to another house, where they crossed the river over the bridge. Bronze never imagined that in the dark, in such an urgent moment, Renata and her men would walk so far.

。