Nuclear Reaction

“Look out!” he barked at Lahti. “Stop!”

Lahti slammed on the brakes, heedless of the vehicles behind him, and Chandaka fancied he could hear a short cry of alarm from Corporal Dekhar in the second jeep before it struck the rear of his vehicle with impressive force. A lance of pain tore through Chandaka’s neck and shoulder blades, but he had no time to consider it, as gunfire crackled from the tree line.

“Ambush!” he called out to no one in particular. A glance at Lahti told him that the sergeant couldn’t hear him. He slumped sideways against his shoulder harness, dark blood spilling from a bullet hole above one eye.

Cursing his pain, Chandaka threw himself out of the jeep, clutching the CETME rifle to his chest. He hit the ground running, gunfire ringing in his ears, as bullets filled the air around him.

He had no idea how many bandits were unloading at him from the forest, but his own men were returning fire in awkward fashion, spraying bullets here and there in lieu of finding clear-cut targets. It was a wasted effort, but Chandaka couldn’t blame them. They were panicking, taken completely by surprise.

And it was all his fault.

Chandaka stopped, crouching, and sought a target of his own. Where were the bastards? Had they cut him off? Was it too late to slip away?

The thought shamed him. Chandaka held his weapon in a tight, white-knuckled grip and started edging back in the direction of the jeeps and truck. They were his only cover, short of plunging right into the trees, and that was clearly hostile territory.

He would rally his command, devise a strategy, and make the bandits sorry they had ever crossed his path, or he would die in the attempt.

And at the moment, Chandaka knew it could still go either way.

BOLAN SQUEEZED OFF a burst from his AKMS and watched one of the soldiers topple screaming from the open truck. He hadn’t planned on waging war against the native military quite this soon, but he was in it now, and there was nothing left to do except his best, fighting to stay alive.

He’d lost track of Pahlavi when they separated, no time to coordinate their action, but he hoped the young man would be circumspect, fire only when he had a target, and conserve his ammunition for the shots that he could make. Perhaps he could retrieve another weapon from the field, if he ran out of ammunition for his pistol, but whatever happened, he was on his own.

Bolan kept moving, stopping long enough to fire a short burst from the shadows, constantly in motion when he wasn’t lining up a shot. The duffel bag was slung across his shoulder, riding heavily against his left hip as he moved, but short of pocketing its contents Bolan couldn’t let it go. He needed the spare magazines, the frag grenades, to help him shave the odds against these unexpected adversaries.

He was halfway through a 30-round box magazine and had reduced his distance from the truck by forty feet or so, when he decided it was time to give his enemies another shock. Palming one of the RGD-5s, he pulled the pin, mentally counted down from six seconds to four, then lobbed the green egg toward the jeeps where they sat nose-to-tail, with gunners crouched behind them.

No one saw the grenade coming, not until it landed on the broad hood of the second jeep with a resounding clang and wobbled for a heartbeat, as if making up its mind which way to go. The RGD-5 wasn’t round, and so its path was unpredictable. It bounced, then slipped into the small space left between the two jeeps, where the second one had rammed into the first.

Bolan hunched down and waited for the blast. Before it came, one of the soldiers recognized the danger. Calling out to his companions, he rose and turned to run. He wasn’t fast enough. The blast rocked both vehicles, its shrapnel taking down the would-be runner like a point-blank shotgun blast. It also burst the lead jeep’s fuel tank and ignited a spare can of gasoline on the rear deck of the passenger compartment, instantly enveloping both vehicles in flames.

Watching from cover, Bolan saw a handful of soldiers burst from cover, all of them on fire and beating at the flames with blistered hands. They ran instead of dropping to the ground and rolling, partly out of panic, and because the turf around them was on fire, as well. A lake of burning fuel surrounded them, allowing nowhere to go except a mad rush for the tree line that would offer no help, no shelter.

Bolan left them to it, ready with his automatic rifle as the other troops began to reassess their situation. Knowing they were all at risk, the soldiers redoubled the outpouring of their aimless fire into the forest, bullets flaying bark from tree trunks, clipping branches, ventilating leaves.

Bolan was relatively safe from being spotted, in those circumstances, but a stray round through the head or chest was just as deadly as a sniper’s well-aimed killing shot. He stayed low, took advantage of the cover, firing only when he had a target dead to rights and in the clear.

Where was Pahlavi? he wondered.

Never mind.

Survival was the first priority. If he could deal with the remaining soldiers and emerge alive, there would be time enough to look for his elusive contact. In the meantime, it was strictly do-or-die.

The jeeps were destroyed, but the Executioner heard the truck’s big engine cranking, as someone tried to get it started after stalling it.

Bolan rose and sighted on the cab. The soldiers surrounding it were firing wildly. His angle wasn’t optimal, he had no real view of the man in the driver’s seat, but he was lined up on the left-hand door. Taking a chance, he held the autorifle’s trigger down and used the last rounds in his magazine to ventilate that door, spraying the inside of the cab with sudden death.

The engine fell silent, and the troops around the truck’s cab scattered, seeking better shelter from the storm that had enveloped them. Reloading in a rush, Bolan moved on.

4

Darius Pahlavi was no longer terrified. Somehow, somewhere between the death of his two friends and his arrival in the forest clearing with Matt Cooper, he had passed from numbing fear to a sensation that he barely recognized.

Rage was a part of it, for all he’d lost and all his people had endured—the nightmare that they would endure, if he failed to complete his mission. There was guilt, as well, for leading Adi and Sanjiv into the trap that claimed their lives. He vowed to make amends with Adi’s wife and Sanjiv’s parents somehow, someday.

If he lived that long.

Right now, he had to focus on surviving for the next few minutes, which meant ducking bullets in the woods and doing everything he could to stop his enemies.

Kill them, Pahlavi silently corrected himself. It all came down to that. Kill or be killed.

He’d never shot a man before that afternoon—never shot at a man, in fact—and when it happened, the sheer deceptive ease of it surprised Pahlavi. He had practiced with the pistol earlier, knew how to aim and squeeze the trigger slowly, without jerking it, but mortal combat put a different slant on things.

His first shots, on the highway, had been wasted but for one that cracked the windshield of the jeep behind them. Too late, even then, to save his friends, but he’d felt a rush of satisfaction from the simple act of striking back.

It was a different thing, of course, to fire at living men on foot, instead of faceless autos on the highway, but it helped that these men were intent on killing him, had killed his friends already.

Cooper had taken down a number of the enemy already, firing with an automatic rifle, then contriving somehow to destroy their jeeps. Pahlavi found it horrible and fascinating, all at once, as if he had been dropped into the middle of some action film from Hollywood.

Except that there were real bullets whining around him, thunking into trees raising spouts of sod on impact with the ground. Real bullets, too, inside his pistol, waiting to be used against his foes.

Pahlavi found a vantage point where he could watch the soldiers. Several of them were hunkered down behind their truck, waiting for orders or an opportunity to move. Cooper had pinned them down, but he was somewhere on the other side. These troops apparently had no idea there was another enemy watching, on their side of the truck.

Pahlavi took his time, aiming, worried a bit that he was letting Cooper down by not advancing more aggressively. But he knew he would do the tall American no good at all if he was dead. Aiming, he framed a target in his sights as he’d been taught—but then the soldier moved, shifting away, duckwalking toward the rear of the truck. Cursing, Pahlavi tracked him, had him lined up when the soldier rose and stepped around the tailgate, rifle at his shoulder, squeezing off a burst toward the far side of the clearing.

Pahlavi squeezed the trigger, rode the sleek Beretta’s recoil, hopeful but still surprised to see his target crumple, back arched, slumping to the earth. The soldier writhed, convulsing, kicking at the sod, then shivered out and moved no more.

Pahlavi had expected nausea, a rush of guilt, something besides the mere sense of a job well done, but nothing came to him. Perhaps it was the moment, he decided, too much going on around him to permit normal emotions coming to the fore.

Or else, perhaps he liked it.

No. Pahlavi wouldn’t, couldn’t think about that now. There would be ample time to psychoanalyze himself if he survived this battle and the mission still to come.

And if he died, what difference would it make?

Soldiers were grouped around the man he’d shot, checking for vital signs. Some of them were firing aimlessly into the woods. They clearly had no sense of where the fatal shot had come from, meaning he could fire again, at least once more, with relative impunity.

Pahlavi chose another target, lined his sights up on the soldier’s chest, and let the hammer drop.

SACHI CHANDAKA HUDDLED underneath the truck and tried to understand exactly what was happening. He’d been pursuing four men, with a force of thirty-one behind him, and he’d seen two of them die. The others should be dead by now, as well, but instead his men were dying all around him, while he cowered in the shadows, trembling and in pain.

He had been splashed with burning fuel, along one sleeve and shoulder of his jacket, when the jeeps exploded moments earlier. Ducking and running to escape the shrapnel and clear the spreading lake of fire behind him, the lieutenant had been pulled down by two privates who smothered the flames and doubtless saved his life. Chandaka reckoned they should both receive citations for their courage and quick thinking, but from where he lay beneath the truck, he saw one of them stretched out dead, almost within arm’s reach.

His pain and fear immobilized Chandaka, shamed him. He knew he should find the strength to rally his remaining troops, lead them to victory, and thus salvage some shred of honor from this day—but how?

At present, he had no idea how many enemies were firing at his soldiers from the forest, whether they were bandits or guerrillas, why they’d sought this confrontation. It was preposterous to think that he had simply stumbled onto them, and any hint that he was only dealing with the two men they had chased into the woods seemed like insanity.

Two men alone could never do all this.