Ripple Effect

This time.

But while he felt at home, in some respects, Bolan was also well aware that he stood out among the locals, obviously alien. He made an easy target in the crowd, and might not see the hunters coming if they played their cards right. It was really their home, after all, and he was just a visitor with the wrong eyes, wrong hair, wrong skin.

Just like the man he was supposed to meet.

Two strangers in a strange land, who had never met each other previously, but whose movements were directed by a higher power. In Bolan’s case, that power was a man named Hal Brognola, operating out of Washington, D.C. His contact also marched to drums from Washington, but had no clue that Bolan and the team he served existed.

All that was about to change, together with the contact’s life, his whole conception of the world.

And Bolan’s?

He would have to wait and see.

Unlike his contact, Bolan had been forearmed with a photograph to help him spot his fellow round-eye at Kelapa Harbor. If their meeting was aborted for whatever reason, they were supposed to try again that afternoon, at the Jakarta Ragunan Zoo. A hookup near the tiger pit.

For his part, Bolan hoped to get it right the first time, but he always liked to have a fallback option, just in case.

He’d come prepared, to the extent that climate and propriety allowed. With temperatures in the nineties, he could hardly wear an overcoat to cover automatic weapons, so he’d opted for a large, loose-fitting shirt, with slacks and running shoes. Beneath the shirt, he had replaced his usual Beretta with a Glock 19, a compact version of the classic semiautomatic pistol that retained its firepower—two rounds better than the Beretta Model 92—while eliminating the external hammer and safety. Two extra magazines weighted his trouser pockets, with a folding knife that resembled a Japanese tanto.

Bolan had purchased those weapons, and some others that he couldn’t sport in public, from a local dealer recommended by Brognola, who acquired the name and address from an unnamed source. That suited Bolan, since the source wouldn’t know his name, either, or the reason why Brognola needed guns in Indonesia, several thousand miles beyond his legal jurisdiction.

Bolan didn’t know if his contact was armed, or if he had been trained to any serious degree in self-defense. The U.S. war on terror, winding down its first decade with no clear end in sight, had thrown together many strange bed-fellows with a mix of capabilities, knowledge and skills that was almost surreal. Homeland Security, for instance, was neither restricted to the continental U.S.A. nor limited in operations to securing airports, borders and the like. Its agents might be anywhere.

Even Jakarta, on a steamy morning when the city smelled like spice and death.

Bolan had memorized a photo and description of his contact, and he had a name. Tom Dixon. He could pick the man out of a crowd, particularly on these streets, but finding him was only step one of the job at hand.

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!”

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.

“They found us!” Dixon told him as the gray Toyota leaped out of its parking space.

“Hang on!” Bolan said to his passenger. “It’s all downhill from here.”

CHAPTER THREE

Three shooters formed a fragile skirmish line across the exit ramp as Bolan’s hired car hurtled toward them, gaining speed with an assist from gravity. The middle man carried some kind of Uzi submachine gun knockoff, while his flankers brandished shiny semiautomatic pistols. When they saw that Bolan wasn’t slowing, the bookends dived for cover, while their seeming leader opened fire.

Too late.

His first round cracked the gray Toyota’s windshield, two or three more struck the window frame and roof with glancing blows and all the rest were wasted as the bumper clipped his knees and rolled him up across the hood, then tossed him high and wide over the speeding car.

Wild pistol shots rang out behind them, none finding their mark, and Bolan’s vacant rearview mirror told him that the bookends had decided not to mount a hot pursuit.

He slowed when they were out of range, hoping to pass the exit booth without another incident, but then he saw the cashier craning a look from his window, obviously trying to pinpoint the source of gunfire. Bolan floored the gas then, surging forward as the clerk ducked backward, out of sight. They hit the flimsy wooden barricade at fifty, smashed on through it and were gone.