Ripple Effect

Bolan preferred to work alone, whenever possible, but there were times—like now—when he required assistance from a local or an agent with specific background, skills, intelligence. Tom Dixon was supposed to fit that bill. And if he didn’t?

Once again, Bolan would have to wait and see.

TOM DIXON DAWDLED at a newsstand, checking out the tabloids while he tried to spot a tail. The hairy monster known to locals as orang dalam had paid another visit to Johor, one paper told him, leaving twenty-inch footprints and scaring hell out of coffee plantation workers in the process. Other headlines clamored about rebels in the countryside and government attempts to crush them, while the price of oil was going up again, no end in sight.

Dixon had drawn the Indonesian posting mainly because his language skills included fluency in French, Bahasa Indonesia and Cantonese. It helped to speak the native tongue, of course, but as a white man in an Asian world, there still were times when he felt totally alone.

Like now.

He’d thought the job sounded exciting when he started. Cloak-and-dagger stuff in an exotic setting, very double-0 and all that rot. He even had a pistol, which he’d qualified to use under instruction from a grizzled combat veteran who looked as if he’d been used for target practice by the Red Chinese back in the day.

He’d rolled into Jakarta thinking it would be a piece of cake—or, at the very least, something to tell the kids about, assuming that he ever married, settled down and got around to siring children. Then the truth had slapped him like a wet towel in the face, and Dixon realized that he might never see the U.S.A. again. Might never make it to his thirtieth birthday.

That understanding hadn’t come upon him all at once, of course. First, Dixon had begun to recognize that learning different languages didn’t make him a native of the world at large. No matter how he honed his accent, he was still a white-bread boy from Mason City, Iowa, at heart. And he had much to learn about survival in a society where life was cheap and might made right.

He’d managed well enough at first, in terms of following instructions and collecting certain information his superiors required, but then he started feeling as if everyone was watching him. At first, Dixon had chalked it up to a first-timer’s paranoia, but he soon discovered that he was, in fact, under surveillance.

Fine.

It could’ve been the government, although Indonesia was a theoretical ally in Washington’s attempt to save the world from all free radicals. Or maybe it was someone else. In which case, Dixon thought, he might be well and truly screwed.

There’d been no move against him yet, but maybe they were waiting for a certain time and place in which to strike. Now, with another agent coming from the States to help him out—or do the dirty work, why kid himself?—he wondered if the other side had finally decided to eliminate him.

All his contacts with Homeland Security so far had been securely routed through the U.S. Embassy, and while he didn’t think there was a leak inside, Dixon was wise enough to know he could’ve tipped his hand a hundred different ways while chasing leads on foreign soil. He spoke the language, but he didn’t know the people well enough to tell if they were working both sides of the fence, scheming to bait a trap that would destroy him and his faceless, nameless ally from America.

How’s that for trust? he asked himself, leaving the newsstand with a last glance back along the street he’d traveled moments earlier. No one immediately hid his face or ducked into a doorway, nothing to betray a clumsy tail.

And that was the point, Dixon thought. No one said the enemy was clumsy, stupid or inept.

It was a part of the established Western mind-set, he supposed, but it was clearly wrong. In Vietnam, peasants in black pajamas, armed with weapons left behind from World War II, had fought the mighty U.S. Army to a standstill after eight long years of war with no holds barred. On 9/11, zealots armed with supermarket boxcutters had seized four high-tech airliners and scored the single most destructive hostile raid on U.S. soil in all of history.

Long story short, it didn’t pay to underestimate the enemy, especially when operating on their enemy’s native soil. Dixon had spent the past two nights without much sleep, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong, and he still had nothing to show for it.

Maybe the new guy from the States, this Mr. X, could put things right. If not, then, what?

James Bond would never take this lying down, Dixon thought.

He was smiling when he hit the fish market, then caught a whiff of what was waiting for him, and his face went blank. Dixon had walked the same ground yesterday, getting familiar with the turf, and knew exactly where to go for his anticipated rendezvous. Along the way, he stopped at different stalls, chosen at random, checking out the fish and casting sidelong glances at his backtrack.

Nothing. Zip. Nada.

Which reassured him not at all.

The pistol underneath his baggy shirt, a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson, felt heavier than usual this morning. He supposed that it was nerves, and hoped he wouldn’t freeze if he was forced to use the gun for once, instead of simply hauling it around with him.

He saw the stall with squids and octopuses heaped in baskets, countless arms entangled as if someone had prepared a latex sculpture of Medusa, daubed with slime. Dixon was almost there when strong hands gripped his biceps from behind and someone aimed a solid kick behind his right knee, dropping him into a crouch.

He felt rather than saw the keen blade drawn across his throat.

BOLAN WAS THIRTY FEET from Dixon when it started going down. He’d made a positive ID on Dixon, had the password turning over in his mind, when suddenly two wiry Asians came at Dixon from behind, out of the crowd.

Each man clutched one of Dixon’s arms, one kicked his right leg from behind, to put him on his knees and, as he dropped, the man on Dixon’s right had drawn a long knife from its hidden sheath, whipping the blade across his target’s throat.

Instinct let Bolan draw the Glock 19 as Dixon’s legs were buckling. By the time that his attacker had the knife in hand, Bolan was leaning into target acquisition, with his lightweight autoloader braced in a two-handed combat grip.

He didn’t fire a doubletap, for fear of sending one round wild into the crowd. Instead, he stroked the trigger once and slammed a Parabellum hollowpoint round into the knife man’s chest. Before it had a chance to flatten, chewing through a mangled lung, he was already tracking toward his second target, hands rock steady on the Glock.

Without a sound suppressor, the shot was loud. A wailing cry went up from somewhere close at hand, joined instantly by others, but the racket didn’t mess with Bolan’s aim. He had his target zeroed, even as the second would-be killer raised his eyes from Tom Dixon to glimpse the face of death.

The second round drilled through a startled eye, scrambled the dead man’s brain and flattened up against the inside of his skull. Bolan was moving as his gunfire echoed through the fish market, stooping to clutch at Dixon with his free hand, meanwhile checking out the crowd for any further enemies.

He spotted three within two seconds, give or take, identifiable by their reaction to the shots. While normal vendors and their customers recoiled from the explosive sounds, ducking for cover where they couldn’t flee, these others jostled toward the sound, fighting their way upstream against the human tide. One of them had a pistol in his hand, and Bolan didn’t think the other two would be unarmed.

“Come on!” he snapped at Dixon, giving him a yank to put him on his feet and moving in the right direction, which was anywhere away from there. A solid shove for emphasis got Dixon jogging, ramping up into a sprint after the first few yards.

Bolan was close behind him, following and guiding all at once. They had to reach his car somehow, and hopefully without the bloodbath that would follow naturally from a full-scale shootout in the crowded market.

Dixon, running, called across his shoulder, “Christ, I hope you’re who I think you are.”

“I don’t care much for octopus,” Bolan said, giving him the first half of the pass code.

“On the other hand,” Dixon replied as he should have, “I’m fond of squid. Thank God!”

“Pray later,” Bolan said. “Run now. That way!”

They ran, and someone in the crush behind them risked a shot. It missed both fleeing targets, struck a woman off to Bolan’s left and dropped her with a spout of crimson from her neck.

Bolan ducked lower as he ran, his shoulders hunched, braced for the impact of a bullet at any second. Somewhere behind him, whistles started to blow, indicating that police had joined the chase. That meant, in turn, that he and Dixon now had twice as many enemies. If they were honest cops, they’d go for everyone with guns, likely shoot first and ask their questions later.

Bolan and his sidekick neared the eastern exit from the fish market. This time, a burst of automatic fire tore through the crowd, leaving at least four persons wounded, but again the shooter missed his primary targets.

A moment later, they ran out of fish stalls, but the street beyond was every bit as crowded as the marketplace, with bikes and cars thrown in to make progress more treacherous.

“Go right!” Bolan commanded, satisfied as Dixon made the turn and kept on running.

Bolan, for his part, glanced back in time to see an Asian shooter aiming at him with some kind of automatic weapon. As he fired, Bolan lunged forward, pushing through the crowd.

“WHERE ARE THEY?” Kersen Wulandari barked into his handheld radio. “Report!”

Instead of the immediate responses he expected, Wulandari heard more shooting from the fish market, this time a submachine gun’s ripping sound, and he could feel his stomach clenching painfully.

“Report at once!” he shouted, noting but not caring that his driver winced. It made no difference to Wulandari if pedestrians outside the car heard what he said. They wouldn’t understand it, and they’d never volunteer to testify against him.

After several seconds more, with shots, police whistles and screaming from the fish market, a breathless voice came back to Wulandari.

“Targets moving east on Laks Martadinata. Hard to see with crowd.”

“Close in!” Wulandari barked. “Stop them!”