Ripple Effect

“They found us!” Dixon told him as the gray Toyota leaped out of its parking space.

“Hang on!” Bolan said to his passenger. “It’s all downhill from here.”

CHAPTER THREE

Three shooters formed a fragile skirmish line across the exit ramp as Bolan’s hired car hurtled toward them, gaining speed with an assist from gravity. The middle man carried some kind of Uzi submachine gun knockoff, while his flankers brandished shiny semiautomatic pistols. When they saw that Bolan wasn’t slowing, the bookends dived for cover, while their seeming leader opened fire.

Too late.

His first round cracked the gray Toyota’s windshield, two or three more struck the window frame and roof with glancing blows and all the rest were wasted as the bumper clipped his knees and rolled him up across the hood, then tossed him high and wide over the speeding car.

Wild pistol shots rang out behind them, none finding their mark, and Bolan’s vacant rearview mirror told him that the bookends had decided not to mount a hot pursuit.

He slowed when they were out of range, hoping to pass the exit booth without another incident, but then he saw the cashier craning a look from his window, obviously trying to pinpoint the source of gunfire. Bolan floored the gas then, surging forward as the clerk ducked backward, out of sight. They hit the flimsy wooden barricade at fifty, smashed on through it and were gone.

More damage to the rental, there, and Bolan knew he’d have to ditch it soon, or else risk drawing more attention from police. Before he thought about new wheels, however, there was still the matter of escaping from their present trap.

They weren’t clear yet. He was prepared to bet his life on that.

To prove his point, a navy-blue sedan bearing two or three men raced head-on toward Bolan’s vehicle, when he had barely cleared the gate of the municipal garage. The grim-faced driver seemed intent on ramming him, but Bolan called his bluff.

Another terse “Hang on!” to Dixon, and he held down the accelerator, holding steady on the steering wheel. Most hit men, in his experience, lacked the fanatic’s common urge toward martyrdom. In short, they shied away from suicide whenever possible—but there were always rare exceptions to the rule.

With thirty yards between them, Bolan wondered if the other driver had the grim resolve to take him out at any cost. A head-on collision at their current rate of speed meant almost certain death, regardless of the built-in air bags or the safety harness that he hadn’t taken time to buckle as they fled. No vehicle created for the world’s civilian markets could save its occupants if they were doing sixty miles per hour and they hit another car doing the same. That made the terminal velocity 120 miles per hour.

And the operative word was terminal.

“Jesus!” Dixon blurted out. “What are you—?”

“Doing,” or whatever else he meant to say, was swallowed by an incoherent squeal of panic, just before the chase car’s driver swerved to save himself, jumping the curb and scattering pedestrians as it decelerated brutally, tires smoking on the pavement.

Bolan took advantage of the lag, however brief, before his enemy could turn and follow him. Accelerating toward the nearest busy cross street, he decided slowing for the turn would be a costly waste of time, more likely to produce an accident than to avert one. It was all-or-nothing time, and Bolan’s life was riding on the line.

“Hang—”

“On, I know,” Dixon finished for him, clutching at the plastic handgrip mounted just above his door. “Just do it.”

Bolan did it, swerving into northbound traffic with a chorus of protesting horns and overheated brakes behind him. He was looking for police cars now, as much as shooters, hoping that it wouldn’t turn into a three-way race.

The press of traffic slowed him, but he still made fairly decent speed. Jakarta’s drivers didn’t dawdle unless they were stuck in traffic jams, and some of them were dare-devils in their own right. He watched for hunters, heading either way, and warned Dixon to do the same.

“I’m on it,” the agent replied, his voice sounding more normal than it had a moment earlier. “Sorry about all that back there.”

“It may not be your fault,” Bolan said, knowing even as he spoke that Dixon probably had missed some sign that he was being followed to the meet, and likely well before.

But, then again, it could’ve been his fault. They’d likely never know unless the trackers overtook and captured them.

How many in the hunting party? Bolan couldn’t say. He’d dealt with three men on the run, a fourth in the garage, with two more seen on foot and two or three in the chase car. Beyond that, he’d be guessing, which was usually a waste of time and energy.

If Bolan couldn’t count his enemies, he would assume they had him covered, both outnumbered and outgunned. He’d act accordingly, and put a damper on whatever latent cockiness he might’ve felt after a hell-for-leather getaway that left him and his contact more or less unscathed.

They weren’t clear yet.

And if he needed any proof of that, his rearview mirror gave it to him, framing a blurred image of the navy-blue chase car.

“Incoming,” Bolan told his passenger. “Get buckled up.”

Bolan followed his own advice, knowing the safety harness wouldn’t save him from a bullet, any more than it would help him walk away from sixty-mile-per-hour crashes into other speeding vehicles. Still, it was something, and he needed any small edge he could get right now.

To stay alive and find out what the hell was going on.

KERSEN WULANDARI CLUTCHED his Skorpion machine pistol so tightly that his fingernails and knuckles blanched, the weapon’s wooden grip printing its checkered pattern on his palm. He didn’t feel it, kept his index finger off the trigger only with an effort, craning forward in his seat and staring at the target up ahead.

“Get after them!” he snarled. “Don’t let them get away this time!”

His driver didn’t answer, fully focused on the street and the traffic that surrounded them. They were already well above the posted speed limit and still accelerating, but the other cars around them made a straight run at their prey impossible.

Wulandari couldn’t fault his driver for not crashing into their opponents’ vehicle outside of the garage. He had no wish to die for what he had been paid to do, the present job, although that risk was always present in Wulandari’s line of work. The trick, he knew, was making sure that other people died, while he survived to joke about their final, agonizing moments with his friends over a round of drinks.

Unfortunately, these damned Westerners weren’t the kind of targets he was used to. They were quick, courageous, deadly. He’d already lost at least three men pursuing them, and now Wulandari didn’t know what had become of those who’d chased the targets into the garage. The building’s steel-and-concrete structure interfered with messages after they ran inside, and there’d been nothing more since the Americans escaped.

All dead?

Wulandari didn’t know, nor, at that moment, did he care.

The men he’d chosen for this day’s assignment had proved adequate on other jobs. All ten were killers, tested under fire in gang wars with the triads and the Yakuza. They hadn’t failed him yet, but once was all it took to make a corpse out of a street soldier.

Three corpses. Maybe six, for all Wulandari knew.

And three more shooters still at large, somewhere, presumably attempting to make contact with the targets.

Scooping up a walkie-talkie in his free hand, Wulandari keyed the button for transmission, snapping at the air, “Car Two! Where are you? Answer!”

Agonizing second later, came the answer. “Passing the art gallery, westbound. Over.”

That had to mean Jakarta’s Fine Art Gallery, below Merak Expressway. They were headed in the right direction, anyway.

“We’re near the Puppet Theater,” Wulandari told his second chase car. “Target fifty meters up ahead. Hurry, before you lose us!”

“Coming!” the tinny voice said before the radio went dead.

Wulandari should’ve felt relieved, with help rushing along behind to join him, but his anger and frustration banished any positive emotion. Even as the fury raged inside him, he was fully conscious of his cardinal mistake.

Don’t get involved.

Killing and kidnapping for money was a business, he understood, and businessmen who let personal feelings cloud their judgment soon went out of business, losing everything they had.

In this case, that could mean Wulandari’s life.