Altered State

He wasn’t squeamish, but every extra body added heat. Or would, if those he killed were men with influential friends.

“So, what’s the plan?” Falk asked him when they’d cleared another block.

“You drive,” Bolan replied. “I’ll shoot.”

And as he spoke he squeezed the AKSU’s trigger, shattering the Ford’s rear window into flying beads of safety glass.

“G ET AFTER THEM , goddamn it!”

“I am trying,” Farid Humerya stated.

“Then try harder! Christ! We’re losing them!”

Red Scanlon might have said that he’d seen everything during his years of soldiering, but he’d been startled—make that shocked—when the tall stranger shot his four men just like that.

Bam-bam-bam-bam.

Four up, four down.

Scanlon knew two of them were dead, for sure. He’d seen the head shots strike, and there was no mistaking how their bodies dropped like puppets with their strings cut. That was brain death, even if their hearts and lungs kept pumping for a few more minutes. On the other two, he wasn’t positive, but they were down and showed no signs of rising as the Prius passed them, following the Camry that was closer to the shooting scene.

The bastard was quick and cool, Scanlon would give him that. Most shooters hesitated for at least a fraction of a heartbeat in a face-to-face encounter, and some of them—especially Americans—were still hung up on John Wayne etiquette, giving the other guy a chance before they drew and fired.

Fuck that.

Scanlon had stayed alive this long by shooting first and generally not bothering with any questions afterward. Somebody threatened him, or seemed about to, and he hit them with a terminal preemptive strike.

When in doubt, take ’em out.

The men he’d handpicked for this job all had the same philosophy, all had sufficient notches on their guns to qualify as shooters and survivors, but the stranger had dropped four of them like it was nothing, cutting Scanlon’s force by thirty-three percent in something like two seconds flat.

That was embarrassing.

It simply couldn’t be allowed to go unpunished.

“There!” he snapped. “They’ve got a car now!”

“Yes, I see it,” Humerya said.

“Shit! What’s Eddie doing?”

Eddie Franks being his second in command for what had been envisioned as a relatively simple job. Follow the bitch from DEA, using a GPS tracking device that one of Scanlon’s men had planted in or on her car, find out who she was meeting and take care of them.

Easy.

With twelve men on the job, it should’ve been like swatting gnats with a sledgehammer.

Now the whole damned thing had blown up in his face, and Scanlon had begun to worry that he couldn’t make it right.

Scanlon was leaning forward in his seat, willing Humerya and their car to greater speed along the narrow crowded street, when someone in Deirdre Falk’s car opened fire on Eddie Franks’s Camry with an automatic weapon. Scanlon couldn’t actually see it, but the rattling sound of a Kalashnikov was unmistakable.

Humerya seemed to flinch at the first sound of gunfire, then stomped on the Toyota’s accelerator to compensate for his flicker of weakness. The Prius surged forward, sideswiping an aged pedestrian and leaving him sprawled in their wake, his packages scattered from curb to curb.

“Closer!” Scanlon barked at his driver. “Get me a shot!”

But that meant two lanes, at the very least, and Humerya couldn’t widen Kabul’s streets, regardless of his skill behind the wheel.

Humerya didn’t answer Scanlon, but he kept his foot down, speeding on in hot pursuit of the Camry and Deirdre Falk’s Ford. Whether he’d ever catch them was a question Humerya couldn’t answer at the moment.

But he knew one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt.

He couldn’t go back and report that he had failed, until he had exhausted every trick at his command.

T HE FIRST BLAST from Matt Cooper’s automatic rifle sounded like one of those 20 mm Gatling guns, inside the narrow confines of the vehicle. Deirdre Falk wished for earplugs but had none at hand, so she focused on driving the Ford like a bat out of hell.

She checked the rearview, trying to see if Cooper had scored any hits, but the chase cars were weaving as much as they could between vehicles parked on each side of the street, while the point car’s shotgun rider tried to aim a weapon through his open window.

Cooper fired again, but Falk had to focus her gaze on the roadway ahead. She felt more than saw Barialy crouch in his seat to her right, his hideout revolver now clutched in his lap.

“Don’t shoot yourself with that,” she chided. “And for God’s sake, don’t shoot me .”

“I won’t,” he promised, and forced a nervous laugh that could have been incipient hysteria.

Another burst from Cooper, as she made a sharp right turn and watched startled pedestrians scramble for safety. They would soon be leaving the Old City, roaring into the Chindawol district one of Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods, where overcrowding and horrendous sanitation made cholera outbreaks a daily fact of life.

“Where are we going?” she asked Cooper, speaking to the rearview between bursts of autofire from the back window.

“You tell me,” he countered.

“Not the office,” she replied, thinking aloud. “And sure as hell not to the Ministry of Justice.”

“No,” he granted, and unleashed another short burst from his stolen SMG.

“We need to lose these guys and ditch this car, then find another one,” she said.

“And pick up mine,” he added. “All my gear is in the trunk.”

“We’re rolling into Chindawol,” she told him. “That’s a big-time slum, and Rika Khana is another one, just over Jadayi Maiwand. We won’t find any decent rides there, but if we can dump these turkeys without winding up on foot, I know where we can make the switch.”

“I’ll do my best,” Cooper replied, and fired another 4- or 5-round burst at their pursuers.

“Listen, Edris,” Falk said to the man huddled beside her. “If we have to leave the car and separate, don’t go back to your flat. Hear me? Somebody may be watching it.”

“I hear you,” Barialy said.

“And don’t go wandering around the streets with that thing in your hand,” she added.

“I am not a fool,” he answered.