Iron to Iron (Wolf by Wolf) Read Online Free Page B

ears itch. His goggles acquired a fine film that made pothole spotting much more difficult than normal. There were plenty to spot. The road was a maze of them—so many that Luka wondered if the Axis Tour officials hadn’t just gone ahead of the racers with pickaxes and chopped up the roads to make things more interesting.
    Despite the constant swerving, Luka didn’t let Katsuo and Yokuto get more than a few seconds ahead. Adele kept the pace, her fist hungry on the throttle. A few times she swerved the opposite way around potholes, pulling ahead of Luka and teasing Yokuto’s flank. She had eyes for first: pushing, pushing into Katsuo’s piece of road, trying to get her bike in position to pass the Japanese victor. The attempt could have been successful, except for Yokuto’s sudden veer in her direction. Adele tapped her brakes, and Luka was forced to do likewise to keep them from becoming a tangle of metal and bloody limbs.
    “Don’t do that” were Luka’s first words to her when they stopped to set up camp on the night-smothered sands.
    Adele tugged down her mask. Dust marks slashed across her cheekbones. These plus the dark made her eyes ten times more cutting. “You wanted someone with ambition.”
    “Ambition!” Luka unstrapped his pup tent from the back of his bike, threw it into the sands. “Not stupidity.”
    “I saw an opening, and I went for it. How is that stupid?”
    Let me count the ways.
Luka fought the urge to roll his eyes, and did not win. “Never mind Katsuo’s pride. Trying to make passes in pothole central is
pleading
for a wreck. Yokuto almost turned you into road jam.”
    The fräulein wasn’t fazed. “But he didn’t.”
    “Because you slammed on your brakes, which almost turned
me
into road jam and yet didn’t because I slammed on
my
brakes, which took seconds off my time. I don’t like seconds being scraped off my time.” Luka tugged the tent parts from their bag and began assembling them. “This isn’t some asphalt track. You don’t just loop around a few times and win by muscling your way ahead. If you want to do well in the Axis Tour, you have to be in it for the long game.”
    “Fine, then. Let’s talk the long game. That’s why we’re here, right?”
    The tent came with instructions, but Luka tossed them aside. It was too dark to read anyway. “Our move, when we make it, will be after Hanoi.”
    “Hanoi!” Adele’s breath hissed in, cut off. “That’s thousands of kilometers away!”
    “The long game is long. Katsuo’s on his guard. If we make a move now, we’re going to fail. You have to let your competition think he’s winning. Let his pride put him at ease.”
    “So you just want to let him stay in first?”
    “Yep. Why are there so many
verdammt
pieces to this thing?” The poles and tarp were straightforward enough, but the stakes… there were supposed to be eight of them. Luka could only count seven. “Always something missing…”
    “Why Hanoi?”
    “The Li River,” he answered, patting the sand for the escapee stake. “It’s just a few hours outside of Hanoi. The bridge across it got blown to high heaven during the war, and the Japanese never replaced it. The ferry they use to cross it can only fit three riders at a time. If you’re not in the first batch, you automatically lose ten minutes. If you’re not in the second batch, you lose twenty. The area is a natural bottleneck.”
    Adele walked back to her bike. There was a rustling, and at first Luka figured she was getting out her own pup tent. She held up an electric lantern instead.
Let there be light!
It poured across her face and over the sands. Luka spotted the missing stake by his knee. If it were a scorpion, it would’ve stung him.
    “You want to use the river crossing to squeeze Katsuo out of the lead?” She was quick. No denying that.
    Luka snatched up a hammer and started driving the support poles into the ground. “Strategically it’s the best place. Ten minutes is