China White

He got his answer as they closed in on Canal Street where it split, divided by Canal Park’s wedge of greenery between the west-and eastbound lanes. The Chevy made its move then, swinging out to pass Bolan’s Toyota, speeding up to overtake the Ford. Some kind of hit was going down in front of him, and Bolan had to make a split-second decision.

Should he intervene or wait to see how good the Wah Ching gunners were at self-defense? How many innocent civilians on their way home from a job or shopping errand would be placed in danger if he sat it out—or if he jumped into the middle of the game?

Scowling, he pulled his MP5K from its canvas tote and stepped on the Camry’s accelerator, playing catch-up on a one-way ride to Hell.

* * *

“YOU WANT TO take them here?” Babur Kazimi asked.

“Not yet,” Ahmad Taraki answered. “Wait until we’re past the park and all the little kiddies, eh?”

“Closer to Chinatown,” Kazimi told him in a cautionary tone.

“Not that far,” Taraki replied. “Just be ready when I tell you.”

Turning to Daoud Rashad in the backseat, he said, “And you, too.”

“I was ready when we started,” Rashad answered.

Taraki had taken some heat on the last hit about the civilians who’d been in his way when they’d taken down the target, but that was a risk of street fighting. The goal had been achieved regardless, and a message had been sent. The Wah Ching Triad was on notice that their days of peddling heroin outside Chinatown were coming to an end. There was a new force to be reckoned with, and the gang would have to step aside or face extinction.

Taking down this shipment from New Jersey, after it had traveled halfway around the world from somewhere in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, would drive home the lesson while putting a cool three million dollars, give or take, into the coffers of Taraki’s crime Family. If he went back without the drugs, there would be no forgiveness from Wasef Kamran. In fact, it would be better if he did not return at all.

Kazimi made the left-hand turn onto Canal Street, rolling past the park. Taraki saw the children playing there, some adults walking dogs, oblivious to what was happening around them. They existed in a world as different and distant from his own as life on Jupiter, believing that their trivial concerns were all that mattered. Braces on the kiddies’ teeth, a raise at work, a plastic bag for dog crap in a purse or pocket when they took a stroll. The daily grind for wage slaves in the city.

But somewhere within the next half dozen blocks, before the Wah Ching couriers had crossed the borderline of Chinatown, Taraki meant to give the drones around him a surprise. A little glimpse of life in his world, where the struggle for survival meant exactly that. If someone got between Taraki and his target...well, they’d simply have to die.

Stopping the Ford was no great problem. Shoot the driver, shoot the engine, shoot the tires. The operative word was shoot. But at the same time, even knowing that the Ford was bound to crash, its occupants riddled with bullets, getting to the heroin remained Taraki’s top priority. He couldn’t let it burn, and he would get no thanks if he returned the suitcase shot to hell, blood soaking through the plastic bags inside it. He’d been ordered to deliver, and the shipment had to be intact.

Case closed.

“Remember what I told you,” he advised Rashad, half turning in his seat.

“Head shots. No problem.”

Rashad could shoot, no problem there. Back home he’d been a member of the Afghan National Army Commando Brigade, created by the U.S. and its Coalition allies to hunt members of the Taliban. Taraki didn’t know how many men Rashad had killed before the brass cashiered him, citing his excessive zeal in clearing rural villages, but no one ever questioned his ability or willingness to pull a trigger. Stopping him once he got started was another matter, thus the warning in advance to keep it clean and not indulge in sloppy overkill.

“No damage to the suitcase,” Taraki said, driving home his point.

“I know the difference between a suitcase and a man,” Rashad gruffly replied.

Taraki let it go. Making his backseat shooter angry, seconds prior to firing on the enemy, would be a foolish move.

Instead he turned back to Kazimi. “No collision with their car, remember,” he commanded.

“Paint chips. FBI lab. Yodel-yodel.”

Meaning yada-yada, Taraki thought, but correcting the driver was a waste of time and energy. He’d never come to grips with English slang, habitually garbling what he learned from television.

They were approaching Hudson Street and its intersection with Canal. A block beyond it lay another park, this one located on Taraki’s right. The neighborhood was called Tribeca—meaning, as Taraki understood it, “Triangle Below Canal Street”—sprawling out immediately west of Chinatown.

This was their last chance for a hit outside Wah Ching Triad turf.

Taraki cocked his AKS-74U carbine, the shortest and lightest Kalashnikov made. It measured nineteen inches with its skeletal stock folded to the left side, and weighed six pounds without its magazine containing thirty 5.45 mm rounds. Its automatic rate of fire was 700 rounds per minute, but he’d set the fire selector switch for semiauto, playing safe. A clean shot through the head was better than a spray of fire to shred the driver’s body while the Ford went racing like a rocket sled across the park.

But could he pull it off?

Taraki hit the button for his window, instantly rewarded with a rush of warm air in his face, and twisted in his seat, tracking the driver with the V-notch of his weapon’s open sights.

* * *

AS SOON AS Bolan saw the rifles jutting from the Chevy’s windows, he immediately had a choice to make. He could hang back and let it happen, let the trackers and his targets fight it out, then maybe waste the winners, or he could attempt to intervene.

For what?

No matter how it played, once shooting started, the Wah Ching gunners would not be leading him to their HQ in Chinatown. That move was foiled the second that the third car joined their little caravan and made its move to strike. Beyond that plan, he didn’t care if the young gangsters lived or died—would probably have wound up killing them himself, in time—but he did care about the innocents going about their business, motoring along Canal Street as it turned into a battle zone.

He let the Camry drift, came up behind the Trailblazer and gave its right rear bumper just the slightest nudge, then backed away. It was enough to spoil the shooters’ aims, their first rounds jarred off-target, gouging shiny divots in the black Ford’s roof.

The Wah Ching driver gunned it, rapidly accelerating, while his backseat passenger—the one they’d picked up at the ferry terminal—rolled down his window, ready to return fire.

Bolan rolled down his window and reached across with his left hand to lift his submachine gun, even as he checked his rearview for patrol cars. They were clear so far, but every driver and pedestrian along Canal Street likely had a cell phone and was fumbling for it now, to punch up 9-1-1 and shout some garbled message about gunfire on the road.

No time to waste, then.

Bolan swung his MP5K out the window, bracing it against his wing mirror, and fired a 3-round burst into the SUV’s lift gate. The 9 mm Parabellum rounds shattered the tinted glass, one of them flying on to crack the windshield while another ripped the backseat dome light from its socket. Bolan knew the hunters had to be going crazy in there, wondering who had brought them under fire, just as the Wah Ching gunner who had brought the heroin from Jersey started popping at them with a semiauto pistol.

Bolan swung his stuttergun around to fire a burst across the Camry’s hood, stitching three holes across the Ford’s C-pillar inches from the triad gunner’s face and shooting arm. The young man lurched backward, out of sight, just as his wheelman tried to milk more speed out of the Ford’s 2.0-liter Duratec engine. A short burst from the Chevy’s shotgun rider ripped across the Ford’s trunk as it fled, while Bolan saw the backseat shooter leaning well out of the SUV to bring his Camry under fire.

He swerved back to the left-hand lane, putting himself behind the Trailblazer just as his adversary loosed a burst, his bullets wasted on thin air. Bolan responded with another three rounds through the lift gate’s yawning maw, putting them roughly where the SUV’s tail gunner ought to be. This time the Chevy veered off to starboard, running up behind the Focus in Canal Street’s right-hand lane, its left rear window gliding down to give the soldier in the rear another angle on his mark.

Bolan was faster, falling into line behind the Chevrolet and pumping three more rounds into it. When the SUV began to swerve, he guessed he might have winged the driver, but it straightened out again in seconds flat and Bolan had to duck a short burst rattling through the blank space where the lift gate used to be. Most of the bullets missed, but one punched through his windshield near the upper frame and sent his rearview mirror flying somewhere toward the seat behind him.

It became a duel then, Bolan swerving back and forth to keep the Chevy shooter guessing, ruining his aim, and all the while returning 3-round bursts that scarred the SUV’s tailgate, rattling around inside the passenger compartment. In the driver’s seat, wounded or not, the Chevy’s driver did whatever he could think of to evade incoming rounds, while still pursuing his intended targets in the Ford.

They’d nearly cleared the park when the Trailblazer swung around as if to pass the Wah Ching vehicle, then swerved hard right to slam the Ford along its driver’s side and force it off the pavement onto sloping grass. Tires churned brown tracks across the turf, lost traction, turned them into long sidewinding loops, the Chevy following the Ford and both cars spitting gunfire. Civilians scattered, ran for cover where some scattered trees provided it, or simply hit the ground and prayed.

It was not what he’d hoped for, but the Executioner had long since mastered adaptation in adversity. Without a second thought he braced himself and swung off-road, trailing the two combatant vehicles into the wedge-shaped park between Canal Street and Sixth Avenue.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_020364c1-3cdb-577d-9648-80318aac0192)

Two Days Earlier

Winchester Regional Airport

Frederick County, Virginia

“I could have driven down,” Bolan said to Jack Grimaldi after their handshake on the tarmac.