Radical Edge

He took the Camry up over the curb, praying the wheels would hold as he struck it at speed. Nothing popped. He managed to get the vehicle back on the road, drawing a line of gold paint across three parked cars doing so. Well, the Camry’s owner probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference… .

Bolan shook his head again and deliberately squeezed the steering wheel. The jolt of pain brought his eyes back into focus. The Chevrolet missed by inches a woman crossing the street. She shouted something he couldn’t hear as the Camry rocked past her.

He had to stop this. He had to stop it now. The danger to innocent pedestrians and drivers and passengers in other cars was too great for a sustained pursuit. Bolan picked his angle. The Caprice was a big, rear-wheel-drive vehicle, much less nimble than the borrowed Camry. It was heavier, but Bolan knew the physics of what he was about to do. He could make it work.

He needed to make the Chevy turn.

Bolan reached to the back of his web belt and found the cylinder of a smoke grenade. The skin of his fingers cracked as he unclipped the lethal orb. Blood smeared the grenade as he wrenched the pin free with his teeth and waited, counting silently in his head. When the canister was almost ready to burst in his fist, he hurled it with all his strength through the broken window of his driver’s door.

The grenade burst in the air. The driver of the Chevy broke right, avoiding the smoke. Moving at high speed, he wouldn’t process that the smoke was harmless; he would simply avoid the potential danger.

As his quarry veered to the side, Bolan cut the arc, aiming the nose of the Toyota for the rear quarter of the Chevy.

It was unorthodox, but it worked. The Chevrolet spun, scraping its passenger-side door along a telephone pole. The two men inside, opting for confrontation over flight, started to climb from the vehicle.

Bolan threw the gearshift into Reverse and jammed his feet on the brakes. The transmission banged heavily and then threw him forward. Slamming on the gas, he shifted again. The Camry lurched ahead once more.

The driver was wearing a black T-shirt, jeans and a windbreaker, and he had a SIG Sauer pistol in his hand.

His eyes were very wide as Bolan crushed the life out of him, pinning him between the open door of the Chevy and the grille of the Toyota. Blood erupted from the man’s mouth. As Bolan backed up again, feeling the Camry’s tire fight against its crushed right front fender, the dying man collapsed back into the Caprice.

Bolan grabbed the back of his vehicle’s passenger seat. Pain shot up his arm. Looking over his shoulder, he wheeled around the stricken Caprice. He was going to use the same tactic again. Bullets ripped holes in the roof and smashed through the windshield only inches from his face. The gunman with the Uzi was hosing him down.

The rear of the Camry ripped the passenger door from the Chevy. Bolan’s stolen ride stuttered under the abuse he was heaping on it, then stopped when he struck the same telephone pole. The gunman ran his magazine dry and, rather than reload and try again, dived back into the Caprice. Suddenly, the Chevy’s engine was roaring and the vehicle was mobile once more.

Bolan threw his door open and jumped from the Toyota. He landed on his feet, stumbled, and managed to recover. The FN P90 was barbed wire in his damaged palms as he brought the weapon to his shoulder and tried to acquire his target.

The Caprice struck another telephone pole. The gunman, practically on top of his dead colleague, went for something out of sight on the floor of the car.

Bolan dropped to one knee and took careful aim. The pain in his hands had the sights jumping around in his vision. The beat of his pulse was a metronome of punishment that rocked its way up his arms with every thud of his heart.

Traffic around the danger zone was slowing. Frightened drivers were honking. Others were screaming. Bolan had to stop this now, before someone wandered into the impromptu battlefield.

His shot was clear.

Bolan squeezed the trigger. Even the light recoil of the 5.7 mm cartridge caused a fresh blossom of pain in his palms when the P90 went off. He fired again and again, punching rounds through the side of the Caprice, trying to hit the Uzi gunner before he could pop up and start spraying the neighborhood anew.

Bullets peppered the pavement by Bolan’s feet. His enemy was shooting back through the car door, crouching down below the window. The danger of ricochet had to be severe, yet he kept on. He was either insane or very daring.

Bolan shifted, duck-stepping from his kneeling position. The Uzi gunner was firing blind. The danger was greater for innocents than to Bolan himself, but thankfully, the area behind him was free of pedestrians. It was, in fact, a small parking lot, where some of the parked cars were taking bullet holes. A car alarm went off.

In the distance, above the cacophony, the first sirens could be heard.

Bolan sprayed out the 50-round magazine on the FN P90, holding the trigger all the way back, grouping his rounds in the car door, where his enemy had to be hiding. The soldier then changed magazines, moving quickly. Even that act hurt him. When he slapped the new magazine home, he saw bloody, partial fingerprints on the plastic. He retracted the cocking lever and adjusted his aim for the rear of the Chevy, where the Uzi shooter seemed to be creeping. He was using shadows on the pavement to gauge the enemy’s movements.

“Hey!” the Uzi gunner shouted. “You out there! Are you law?”

“Justice Department!” Bolan shouted back. “Lay down your weapon! Come out now with your hands where I can see them!”

“No way, pal.”

“Identify yourself!” Bolan barked.

The sirens were louder, but still far enough off that much could happen before emergency personnel complicated the situation. While Bolan normally hoped for the combat stretch to resolve things himself, without endangering others, he had to admit that backup might be useful in this situation. His vision kept fuzzing at the edges.

“Identify yourself!” he repeated. “Who are you? Are you with Hyde?”

“Hyde’s filth!” the gunner yelled.

“What’s your involvement?” Bolan called back.

“Every last one of them is going to die,” the man shouted. “They all deserve it. Don’t try to tell me they don’t!”

“That’s not your call!” Bolan said. “This is bigger than whatever play you’re making.”

There was a pause. Then, from the Chevrolet: “You’d die for them? For white supremacist garbage?”

“I don’t intend to die for anybody today,” Bolan retorted. “Last chance!”

The gunner rolled on the asphalt, his Uzi held before him, stretched along the pavement. Bolan had expected something like that. The blast went wide, as the soldier thought it might; an automatic weapon, especially a subgun, was no easy thing to control on the fly. He took careful aim, braced himself mentally for the slap to his palms, and fired on full automatic, walking his 5.7 mm rounds up the road and into the gunner.

The man saw it coming and tried to roll back. Bolan’s fire stitched him across his shoulder and tore holes in his back. He crawled back behind the Chevrolet, trailing blood without a word.

The passenger door opened. Bolan, on his feet, came around the Chevrolet, his head swimming. He was close to passing out, but cleared the rear bumper of the Chevy in time to see the gunman pulling a leather shoulder bag from the car.

The wounded man’s hand came up with a grenade.

No, Bolan thought. Not a grenade. An incendiary device. The red canister was clearly marked. There were more of the weapons visible in the leather bag. It was possible the gunner and his driver had been a mop-up crew, whose job may well have been to burn the safe house to the ground—and shoot down any stragglers in hiding within, who would be driven outside by the flames. It was a proved tactic when cleaning out a nest of vermin.

The hostiles, whoever they were, hadn’t counted on being interrupted. Bolan’s presence had to have thrown them off their game. Then again, the fire raging in the kitchen would have consumed the house eventually. The occupants of the Chevy might have been waiting to see if that happened, saving them from leaving behind more evidence that wouldn’t quite fit with a nice, clean theory of gang warfare among skinheads and other criminals.

The theories flitting through Bolan’s mind were sound enough but, he realized, disjoined and oddly timed. He was fading on his feet. The muzzle of the FN P90 began to drift… .

The wounded man saw his opportunity and took it. He popped the pin on the incendiary and made as if to throw it.

Bolan shot him.

The Executioner tried to snap his weapon back into position, but his knees were turning to rubber beneath him. He managed to hit his enemy in the chest.

The incendiary, pin freed, fell into the bag of similar bombs.

Every hardwired instinct Bolan had told him to go, and go fast. He turned and found himself stumbling, dragging, rolling. Clawing at the pavement, he nearly fell flat on his face, but then was up and running, pumping his legs, screaming. He let the P90 fall to the end of its sling and bellowed at the bystanders who had not already sought cover from the gunfight.

“Go! Bomb! Run!”

They fled before him, trying to escape the seemingly crazed, bloody man flapping his scorched limbs at them.

The first incendiary went off. Almost, but not quite in the same beat, the others erupted. A white flash and a ball of heat punched Bolan in the small of his back, burning his neck, singeing his hairline. He tried to turn, tried to cover himself, tried to bring his arms up to protect his head.