Nuclear Reaction

“Turn back!” he snapped at Lahti. “Follow them!”

“Follow?” The concept didn’t seem to register.

“Yes, Lahti. Turn the steering wheel. Reverse direction. Follow them!”

“Yes, sir!”

Once Lahti understood an order, he would do as he was told. It would not cross his mind to question a superior. Lahti had found his niche in life, performing simple tasks by rote, relieved that someone else was always close at hand to tell him what came next.

Chandaka braced a hand against the jeep’s dashboard, as Lahti powered through a sharp U-turn. He saw the startled visage of the corporal who drove the second jeep in line. Chandaka pointed after the westbound vehicles, and shouted, “Follow them!”

There was no time to clarify the order. Lahti stood on the accelerator. Something rattled loosely, underneath the jeep’s drab hood, then power surged and they started gaining ground on the retreating vehicles.

Chandaka wished he had a rifleman beside him, but if it came to shooting on the highway, he would simply have to do the job himself. He had a Spanish CETME Model 58 assault rifle propped upright in the narrow space between his knees, butt on the floorboard, and now he hefted it, getting its feel.

He’d never shot a man before, or even shot at one, but training made the difference. When the time came, if it came, Chandaka knew that he would be prepared and would perform as his superiors expected. He was not afraid. Indeed, the feeling he experienced was closer to elation.

At long last, it appeared something was happening.

Lahti was bearing down, gaining ground, but the lieutenant felt obliged to chide him for the sake of feeling in control, being a part of it. “Don’t let them get away,” he ordered.

“No, sir!”

If Lahti took offense, it didn’t show.

The two cars were within one hundred yards, and the gap was narrowing. The army jeeps weren’t much to look at, but they had surprising power. No auto manufactured in the country could outrun them, and among the foreign imports, only certain sports cars or a Mercedes-Benz would leave them in the dust.

If that began to happen, Chandaka was prepared to win the race another way. He gripped his rifle tightly, drew the bolt back and released it, chambering a round. He did not set the safety.

They were already too close for that.

“Faster!” he urged, leaning forward in his seat, straining at the shoulder harness.

“Yes, sir!” the sergeant replied.

Sixty yards. Soon, Chandaka would be able to make out the license number of the second car. At that point, he’d decided he would radio headquarters and report himself in hot pursuit—something he should’ve done already if he had been going strictly by the book. Someone’s secretary could then begin to trace the license and find out who the rabbits were, or more likely come back with the news that he was following a stolen car.

“Get up there, Lahti, so that I can read the license plate!”

“Yes, sir!”

Lahti leaned forward, as if it would help them gain more speed. Chandaka almost smiled at that, but it was frozen on his face as someone in the car ahead of them began firing a submachine gun through its broad rear window, spraying bullets toward Chandaka’s jeep.

THE BLAST OF AUTOMATIC fire surprised Adi Lusila, nearly made him swerve the car into a roadside ditch. One moment, he was concentrating on the highway and Pahlavi in the car ahead of him, trying his best to leave the soldiers in his wake, and then Sanjiv Dushkriti blew the damned back window out, turning the car’s interior into a roaring wind tunnel.

Lusila shouted at Dushkriti. “What possessed you?”

“A great desire to stay alive,” Dushkriti answered, then craned back across his seat to fire another short burst from his L-2 A-3 Sterling submachine gun. One hot cartridge stung Lusila’s ear, then fell into his lap.

“Take care with that!”

“It’s no good from here,” Dushkriti said, by way of an apology, and turned to scramble awkwardly between their seats, climbing into the back. One of his boots glanced off the gearshift as he made the move. Lusila cursed at the grating sound it made.

The grating sound was followed by a loud clang.

“We’re hit,” Dushkriti said, and sounded almost pleased about it. “Do not worry, Adi.”

Idiot, Lusila thought. They were pursued by soldiers, with a foreign stranger driving Darius ahead of them, and now Dushkriti had provoked a running battle that would likely get them killed.

“Don’t worry?” Lusila said with a sneer.

A sudden laugh surprised him, coming out of nowhere and erupting from his throat. He was hysterical. It was the only diagnosis that made any sense at all. If he pulled over now, right where he was, perhaps there was a chance that he could plead insanity. Laugh all the way to jail and through his trial, praying to land in an asylum, rather than a basement torture cell or execution chamber.

Not a chance, Lusila thought.

The soldiers were already shooting at him, thanks to Dushkriti. Even if he stopped and raised his hands, with an armed madman in the car they wouldn’t grant him any time for pleas or explanations.

He would simply have to run, and when escape was clearly an impossibility, beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, then he would have to fight.

And die, of course.

What other outcome could there be when four men stood against some thirty-five or forty?

And it might not even be four men, Lusila realized. Pahlavi and the tall American might keep on going if he stopped to fight. They could use the distraction to escape and save themselves.

To carry on the mission.

Adi Lusila flinched from that idea, as if it were a stinging slap across his face. Pahlavi wouldn’t ask for such a sacrifice. He would give up his own life first, to save his friends. But losing him was not in the best interest of their cause.

A bitter taste had wormed its way onto Lusila’s tongue, matching the stench of cordite in his nostrils. In between the bursts from Dushkriti’s Sterling, he could hear return fire from the jeep behind them, now and then a bullet slamming home into his vehicle.

“Hang on!” he warned, and began to swerve across the two-lane highway, back and forth, hoping his serpentine progress would make it harder for the soldiers in the jeep to kill him, likewise spoiling any shot they might’ve had at Pahlavi and the American up front.

“My stomach!” Dushkriti cried.

“Are you hit?”

“Car sick!”

“So, puke and keep on firing!”

When a new stink filled the car, Lusila gave thanks that the rear window was gone. Let the foul odors from his friend blow back along the highway toward their enemies and sicken them, instead.

Dushkriti finished gagging, rattled off another burst of automatic fire, then growled, “I need another magazine.”

He hunched down in the back seat, fumbling in his jacket pocket, thereby giving Lusila his first clear view of their pursuers since the chase began in earnest. Even as he glimpsed the lead jeep in his rearview mirror, the officer in its front passenger seat shouldered his rifle, aimed and fired as Lusila swerved the car again.

He nearly outsmarted himself, turning into the shot, rather than away from it. The bullet whistled past Dushkriti’s head and clipped a corner of the rearview mirror, then punched through the windshield with a solid crack. Lusila cursed and started swerving more erratically, letting his fear dictate his moves as much as logic.

“Stop!” Dushkriti shouted. “I can’t load the gun!”

“Try harder, then!” Lusila snapped. “They almost took my head off!”

With a sharp metallic clacking sound, Dushkriti mated his magazine with the Sterling’s receiver, then cocked it once more and pushed up on his elbows, preparing to fire.

It was a fluke, Lusila thought, the soldier in the jeep behind them choosing just that moment to unleash another shot. What were the odds of it? Much less that he would somehow manage to anticipate Lusila’s movement of the steering wheel.

It was a miracle of sorts that the next bullet drilled Dushkriti’s forehead and exploded through his shaggy hair in back, spraying a gray-and-crimson mist across Lusila and the dashboard gauges.

It was his turn, then, to fight the rising tide of nausea and pray that he could keep his old car on the road while bullets hammered at it from behind.

“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Pahlavi asked, half turning in his seat.

Bolan glanced at the rearview mirror, then came back to focus on the long, straight two-lane road. “They’re under fire,” he answered. “Taking hits.”

“But fighting back, yes?”

“From the sound of it. You want to tell me where we’re going?”

“Five more miles,” Pahlavi said. “There is a road into the hills. It leads to my safe place.”

“It won’t be safe for long if we lead soldiers to the doorstep,” Bolan told him. “What’s Plan B?”

“Plan B?”

“Your backup. Something else on tap, when things go wrong.”

Pahlavi’s stricken face told Bolan there was no Plan B. “I did not think there would be soldiers here,” the Pakistani said. “They almost never pass this way in daylight.”

“‘Almost’ obviously doesn’t cut it,” Bolan said.

“I’m sorry. Let me think.”

“Think fast!”

More firing erupted from behind them, and the second car was definitely taking hits from one rifle, maybe a couple of them. In his mirror, Bolan saw a bullet chip the windshield from inside, before the driver started swerving like a drunkard. He guessed it was the best the other man could think of, while his partner laid down cover fire but couldn’t seem to score a solid hit.

“There are some woods ahead,” Pahlavi blurted out. “Perhaps three miles. If we can lead them there, perhaps—”

“It’s worth a shot,” Bolan said, even as he thought about the killer odds. He’d counted twenty-four men in the open truck, plus two inside the cab, two in the lead jeep, four more in the second, which meant they were outnumbered eight to one.

Those weren’t the worst odds he had ever faced, granted, but Bolan didn’t know how skilled his companions were at combat. If the one’s wild shooting with the submachine gun was any indication, they might be more liability than help in a firefight.

A tiny splash of color in his rearview mirror drew the warrior’s eye, in time to see the second car in their high-speed procession swerving more erratically than ever. Bolan couldn’t tell who’d been hit, the shooter or the driver, but he worked it out a second later, when the car stayed on the road and didn’t stall.

One down, he thought, judging from all the blood. And since the driver couldn’t likely fight off thirty hostile troops while racing down the two-lane blacktop, Bolan guessed that he would soon be number two with a bullet.

“Adi and Sanjiv!” Pahlavi moaned. “We must stop for them!”

“Get real,” Bolan said.

“We must!”

“Did you drive out here just to die?” Bolan asked. “I had the impression there was something you’ve been trying to accomplish.”

“But my friends—”

Pahlavi turned again and looked down the road in time to see the second car whip through a fair bootlegger’s turn, using a technique requiring fair coordination of the brake and the accelerator, which when executed properly reversed the direction of a vehicle 180 degrees in a fraction of the time required to make a U-turn.

“What’s he doing?” Pahlavi asked.

“Buying us some time,” the Executioner said with approval.

Having reversed himself, Lusila accelerated once again toward the short convoy pursuing him. He had his right arm out the window, blazing at the soldiers with a pistol while he closed the gap between them, taking heavy hits along the way.

Bolan supposed Pahlavi’s comrade might’ve rammed the lead jeep—if he’d lived that long. Instead, the rifle bullets found him when his charger and the jeep were still some twenty yards apart. Maybe his foot slipped off the clutch and let the engine stall, or maybe other rounds had ripped in through the grille and hood. In any case, his vehicle veered off the pavement, coasting to a smoky halt with its blunt nose and front tires in a ditch.

“We’re on our own,” Bolan advised Pahlavi. “How much farther to those woods?”

“Not far,” Pahlavi said, speaking as if he had something caught inside his throat.

“I hope you’re right. “Either way,” the Executioner informed him, “we’ll be running out of time within the next few minutes.”

“We can fight them, yes?” Pahlavi asked. “For Adi and Sanjiv!”

“They’re done,” Bolan reminded his grief-stricken passenger. “Try fighting for yourself.”

“Of course. We must survive to finish what we’ve started.”

“Right,” Bolan replied. “And maybe if we do, you’ll tell me what that is.”

“Fight first, talk later,” Pahlavi said. “Yes?”

“I’ve heard that song before.”

Flicking his eyes between the highway and his rearview mirror, Bolan searched the roadside for a hint of woods. An endless ninety seconds later, he saw shadows on the roadside ahead, and recognized them as a mass of trees.

One smallish forest, coming up.

And thirty-two trained riflemen to make it one more patch of Hell on Earth.

3

The first round from the lead jeep’s shooter ricocheted from Bolan’s trunk and chipped the frame of his rear window prior to hurtling off through space. Instead of weaving crazily across the road, he poured on all the speed he had to offer, hunching lower in his seat to give the rifleman a smaller target.

Beside him, Darius Pahlavi had regained enough control to draw his pistol, swivel in his seat and return fire from his side window. It was awkward, but at least it let him shoot right-handed without smashing out their back window.

Bolan supposed incoming rounds would do that soon enough, unless he reached the woods before the soldiers on his tail improved their aim.

He had a quarter mile to go, and then he had to hope there was some kind of access road into the forest, or he’d wind up parking on the berm and leaping from the car in full view of the soldiers who were primed to kill him. Bolan hoped Pahlavi had more sense than that, but their acquaintance was too brief for him to judge the man’s state of mind.

Rattled was one term that immediately came to mind, but now that he was fighting back, Pahlavi seemed to have a better grip, reaching inside himself somewhere to find his nerve.

After his third shot, Bolan’s passenger gave out a whoop of triumph. Bolan checked the rearview mirror and made out a spiderweb of cracks covering half of the jeep’s windshield. It hadn’t stopped them, but it slowed the soldiers a little. They fell back to blast at Bolan’s car from a position out of pistol range.

It gave Bolan the edge he needed, while his enemies were putting on their brakes, maybe a little shaky in their haste and from the shock of a near-miss. He took advantage of it, burning up the road and gaining back some of the ground he’d lost in the pursuit. It was two hundred yards or so until they reached the first trees, and he was looking for a turnoff, any place where he could leave the two-lane blacktop for a while.

“There, on your left!” Pahlavi urged him, pointing, and the road appeared almost by magic, cut for the convenience of emerging eastbound traffic, but still good enough for Bolan’s exit, heading west.

“Hang on!” he said, and swung the steering wheel to make it, rocking with the vehicle as the tires complained, then found their grip again and powered over gravel, onto rutted, hard-packed soil.

The road would be muddy, miserable in the rainy season, but the day was bright and dry. Bolan hung on as they shuddered along the washboard surface, barely one lane wide. It was too much to hope the army truck might find the road impassable, but maybe its progress would be retarded. Let it fall behind the jeeps a bit, spread out the hunting party, and it might work out to Bolan’s benefit.

“They’re after us!” Pahlavi warned.

“That’s no surprise. Is there another turnoff anywhere ahead?”

“Half a mile, I think. The road begins to circle back, but there’s a branch off to the left.”

Even alert, Bolan almost missed it, braking at the last instant and swerving hard into a narrow access road that cut off to the south-southwest. The surface was rougher, punished by the elements for years without repair or even simple maintenance. Still, Bolan held his steady speed as best he could, praying the shock absorbers and the ball joints wouldn’t fail him.

After roughly a hundred yards, they reached a clearing in the woods, with room enough for five or six pup tents around a campfire. Bolan used the space to turn, tires spitting dirt and gravel, until he was facing the direction of the access road. He killed the engine and sat a moment, listening to the hot metal ticking as it cooled.

“What are you doing?” Pahlavi asked with a nervous tremor in his voice.

“No way they missed our turnoff,” Bolan said. “No way we can get past them, going back the way we came. That only leaves one option.” He was reaching for the duffel bag behind him as he spoke. “We fight.”

“So many of them?”

“That, or let them take you down.”

Pahlavi didn’t have to think about it. “No,” he said.

“Then I suggest you get out of the car and find some cover while you can.”

Matching his words to action, Bolan stepped out of the vehicle, taking the keys, and started running hard in the direction of the tree line, thirty feet away.

SACHI CHANDAKA WORRIED that he might be following his prey into a trap. It seemed bizarre that bandits would deliberately sacrifice two men, but if he thought about it in another way, it did seem possible that he had stumbled on some small conspiracy, put them to flight, and only now would they attempt to kill him with an ambush.

This was bandit territory, beyond any doubt. Why shouldn’t one gang or another have a stronghold somewhere in the woods around him. Maybe those he was pursuing had a cell phone or a two-way radio, allowing them to call ahead to set the trap.

“Slow down a bit,” he ordered Lahti. “Keep the car in sight, but don’t be hasty.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chandaka couldn’t tell if Lahti was relieved or not, and he did not particularly care. Glancing behind him, the lieutenant saw the second jeep and open truck behind it keeping pace, jerking with every rut and pothole in the miserable unpaved road. There would be aching bladders in the truck, he guessed, but they would have to wait.

Ahead, he saw the car they were pursuing leave the main track, veering left onto another narrow road, its surface even rougher than the one they traveled. Chandaka held his rifle, finger on the trigger, peering through the windshield veined with cracks that radiated from a central bullet hole.

“Sir, shall I follow them?” his driver asked.

“Of course, but cautiously.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lahti slowed a little more, the vehicles behind them doing likewise. By the time they cleared the turn, Chandaka couldn’t see their quarry anymore. He nearly panicked, fearing he had lost the bastards after all this effort and would have to back out of the woods, exposed to hidden riflemen on every side.

“Hurry!” he ordered, contradicting his original instruction. “Find them!”

“Yes, sir.” No enthusiasm whatsoever sounded in the sergeant’s voice.

They jounced along the narrow track, tree branches almost meeting overhead, casting the roadway into shadows that seemed sinister under the present circumstances. Lahti kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead, leaving Chandaka to watch out for snipers, booby traps, and any other rude surprises that their enemies might have in store for them.

The clearing took Chandaka by surprise. One moment, they were running through a narrow corridor of trees, the next, they nosed into an open space some sixty feet across, walled in by forest on all sides. He saw the bandit car ahead, its grille aimed toward his jeep, but with the doors open and no one left inside. Which had to mean—

“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.