Ripple Effect

To his driver, he added: “Hurry! You heard the street.”

The black sedan surged forward, winding through a maze of slow and stationary vehicles, cyclists who seemed suicidal and pedestrians who made a game of stepping into traffic without looking either way. Such traffic was one of the main reasons why Kersen Wulandari hated cities.

That and the police.

Given the choice, he much preferred escorting rural drug convoys, but Wulandari would do any job that paid him well enough. This one paid very well indeed, but now he worried that it was about to end in failure and rejection of his claim for payment.

Maybe worse.

The people who had hired him didn’t—what was the American expression?—mess around. Upon receiving word of failure, they might kill him as an object lesson to the next shooters in line.

The good news was that his employer hadn’t specified live capture of the two round-eyes. That would’ve made Wulandari’s task a hundred times more difficult, and killing them was hard enough already.

They reached the intersection of Hajam Wuruk and Laks Martadinata, where his driver turned left into more abominable traffic, leaning on his horn to clear oblivious pedestrians out of the way. Seething with anger and frustration, Wulandari held the radio close to his ear, as if proximity alone could make the others speak to him.

And to his great surprise, it worked.

“Crossing the street,” one of his soldiers blurted out. “I see!”

Which was a damned sight more than Wulandari could assert. Somewhere ahead of them, he heard more gunfire, sounding like a string of fireworks in the middle distance. His foot soldiers were outrunning Wulandari, yet another reason for his anger to be spiked at fever pitch.

“Catch up with them,” he told the driver.

“But—”

“Just do it! Now!” As Wulandari spoke, he reached into a canvas satchel set between his feet and lifted out a Skorpion machine pistol.

“Yes, sir!” the driver answered smartly, giving one more bleat of warning to pedestrians and all concerned before he swung the steering wheel and stepped on the accelerator.

In front of them, three teenage boys, their faces stamped with childish arrogance, slowed down in answer to the driver’s horn, one of them fanning a rude gesture toward the driver. Wulandari smiled at the resounding thump of metal striking flesh, saw one youth cast aside as if he had weighed nothing, while the seeming ringleader was sucked beneath the car. More satisfying sounds emerged from underneath it as the driver floored his gas pedal and caromed into traffic, gaining ground by fits and starts.

It wasn’t easy going, even with a nervous madman at the wheel. They still had to negotiate around the bulk of other vehicles, while scattering pedestrians and cyclists. Wulandari didn’t care how many peasants suffered injury or worse, as long as he wasn’t included in the final tally of the dead.

And if he completed this job, if the men behind it then refused his payment or tried playing any other kind of dirty game with Wulandari, he would make them all regret it to their dying day.

Ahead, he glimpsed men running pell-mell in the street, one brandishing a pistol overhead. He also heard police whistles, their shrill notes grating badly on his nerves.

The targets were to be eliminated, not delivered to the law for questioning. If they were jailed alive, it meant an even greater failure than if they escaped completely. Wulandari didn’t understand the reason for the contract, but he knew that much with perfect certainty.

The targets had to be silenced. That was paramount in the instructions he’d received.

“Get after them!” he shouted at his driver. “Never mind this rabble. Go!”

AS THEY WERE CROSSING Laks Martadinata, dodging bikes and cars, Bolan turned back to catch a quick glimpse of his enemies and gauge their progress. They were gaining, he discovered, and it came as no surprise.

The hunters knew these streets, and they had no compunction about firing in to the crowd to clear a path. Although denied that option, Bolan still had choices, and he chose to exercise one now.

The nearest gunner, lank and wiry, carrying a small machine pistol, unleashed a burst that fanned the air a yard above his targets, peppering an office block directly opposite. Before he had a chance to fire again, Bolan made target acquisition, stroked his trigger once and closed the gap between them with a single hollowpoint round.

The shooter’s head snapped back and he went down, dead index finger clenched around the trigger of his SMG and spraying bullets toward the sky. A driver coming up behind him tried to stop but couldn’t make it, thumping hard over the twitching corpse.

Bolan spun and sprinted after Dixon while the traffic snarled behind him, several cars slamming into one another after some kind of homemade pickup truck rear-ended the small sedan that had flattened his enemy. Cyclists swerved to miss the pileup, several of them toppling from their two-wheelers to the pavement.

Confusion was good.

It would slow the police and maybe the shooters still fit to pursue him. As curious spectators rushed toward the accident scene, Bolan’s stalkers would find it more difficult bucking the tide. With any luck, he thought, the small delay might let him reach his car.

Maybe.

And maybe not.

No choice, he told himself as he began to overtake Tom Dixon. There were limits to how far the pair of them could run, and while Dixon might be familiar with Jakarta’s streets, he wouldn’t know them as well as the natives who hunted them. Sooner or later, fatigue and superior numbers would spell defeat for Bolan and the contact he had barely met.

The parking garage was just three blocks away. If they made it that far, if they could reach his rental wheels, they had a chance.

Bolan refused to entertain defeatist thinking. Catching up with Dixon now, he called out, “Left. Two blocks.” His contact turned at the next intersection, ducking as a bullet struck the wall above him, spraying concrete chips into the crowd.

Another backward glance showed Bolan two shooters when he could readily identify, and he had no good reason to believe they were alone. If even one of them was in communication with a mobile team, somewhere ahead or even running parallel, then Bolan’s race could end in seconds flat with blazing automatic weapons.

He ran on, goading Dixon from behind, and saw the tall, ugly shape of the parking garage up ahead. They’d have to cross the street again, through traffic, but it was a risk they could afford, compared to the alternative.

They covered another block, with no more shots behind them, and he called to Dixon, “The garage. Across the street.”

“Okay,” the young American replied, and with the briefest glance to either side, he plunged into the flow of bikes and cars.

The guy had nerve, at least.

Bolan pursued him, dodging vehicles, ignoring tinny protests from a dozen horns. Behind him, another brief crackle of SMG fire made him dodge to the left, using an ancient panel truck for fleeting cover as the bullets struck a windshield and a motorcyclist to Bolan’s left.

Collateral damage, and he couldn’t do a thing about it in his present situation. Bolan hated it when bystanders were sucked into his war, but in each case where that occurred, the choice belonged to someone else. One of his enemies. To Bolan’s certain knowledge, he had never injured a civilian noncombatant beyond minor cuts and bruises, in the most extreme of situations. Shrapnel did its own thing, and to hell with consequences, but he specialized in strikes of surgical precision, taking out his targets without any street-gang drive-by nonsense that was typically a waste of time and ammunition.

Clearly, those pursuing him had other views on how a battle should be fought.

The hell of it was that they still might win.

Dixon had reached the other sidewalk now, and Bolan joined him a second later, shoving him for emphasis when Dixon slowed to see if he was keeping up.

“Third level,” Bolan rasped at him. “A gray Toyota four-door, backed into space 365.”

“Got it!”

They’d passed the stairs already, which meant running in a long, slow zigzag pattern up one sloping ramp after another, to the third floor of the vast parking garage. There were at least a hundred parking spaces on each level, overhead fluorescent lighting casting pools of shadow between cars that could conceal an army of assassins, if they knew where he had parked.

They don’t, he thought. Why chase us, otherwise?

That logic got them to the third level, but Bolan half imagined running footsteps just below them. Shooters catching up? Maybe a rent-a-cop who’d glimpsed his pistol as they entered?

Bolan palmed the rented vehicle’s keys and thumbed the button to unlock its doors. The dome light flared, helping direct Dixon to the car. While the agent threw himself into the shotgun seat, Bolan slid in behind the wheel, cranked the ignition and released the parking brake.