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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.
More damage to the rental, there, and Bolan knew he’d have to ditch it soon, or else risk drawing more attention from police. Before he thought about new wheels, however, there was still the matter of escaping from their present trap.
They weren’t clear yet. He was prepared to bet his life on that.
To prove his point, a navy-blue sedan bearing two or three men raced head-on toward Bolan’s vehicle, when he had barely cleared the gate of the municipal garage. The grim-faced driver seemed intent on ramming him, but Bolan called his bluff.
Another terse “Hang on!” to Dixon, and he held down the accelerator, holding steady on the steering wheel. Most hit men, in his experience, lacked the fanatic’s common urge toward martyrdom. In short, they shied away from suicide whenever possible—but there were always rare exceptions to the rule.
With thirty yards between them, Bolan wondered if the other driver had the grim resolve to take him out at any cost. A head-on collision at their current rate of speed meant almost certain death, regardless of the built-in air bags or the safety harness that he hadn’t taken time to buckle as they fled. No vehicle created for the world’s civilian markets could save its occupants if they were doing sixty miles per hour and they hit another car doing the same. That made the terminal velocity 120 miles per hour.
And the operative word was terminal.
“Jesus!” Dixon blurted out. “What are you—?”
“Doing,” or whatever else he meant to say, was swallowed by an incoherent squeal of panic, just before the chase car’s driver swerved to save himself, jumping the curb and scattering pedestrians as it decelerated brutally, tires smoking on the pavement.
Bolan took advantage of the lag, however brief, before his enemy could turn and follow him. Accelerating toward the nearest busy cross street, he decided slowing for the turn would be a costly waste of time, more likely to produce an accident than to avert one. It was all-or-nothing time, and Bolan’s life was riding on the line.
“Hang—”
“On, I know,” Dixon finished for him, clutching at the plastic handgrip mounted just above his door. “Just do it.”
Bolan did it, swerving into northbound traffic with a chorus of protesting horns and overheated brakes behind him. He was looking for police cars now, as much as shooters, hoping that it wouldn’t turn into a three-way race.
The press of traffic slowed him, but he still made fairly decent speed. Jakarta’s drivers didn’t dawdle unless they were stuck in traffic jams, and some of them were dare-devils in their own right. He watched for hunters, heading either way, and warned Dixon to do the same.
“I’m on it,” the agent replied, his voice sounding more normal than it had a moment earlier. “Sorry about all that back there.”
“It may not be your fault,” Bolan said, knowing even as he spoke that Dixon probably had missed some sign that he was being followed to the meet, and likely well before.
But, then again, it could’ve been his fault. They’d likely never know unless the trackers overtook and captured them.
How many in the hunting party? Bolan couldn’t say. He’d dealt with three men on the run, a fourth in the garage, with two more seen on foot and two or three in the chase car. Beyond that, he’d be guessing, which was usually a waste of time and energy.
If Bolan couldn’t count his enemies, he would assume they had him covered, both outnumbered and outgunned. He’d act accordingly, and put a damper on whatever latent cockiness he might’ve felt after a hell-for-leather getaway that left him and his contact more or less unscathed.
They weren’t clear yet.
And if he needed any proof of that, his rearview mirror gave it to him, framing a blurred image of the navy-blue chase car.
“Incoming,” Bolan told his passenger. “Get buckled up.”
Bolan followed his own advice, knowing the safety harness wouldn’t save him from a bullet, any more than it would help him walk away from sixty-mile-per-hour crashes into other speeding vehicles. Still, it was something, and he needed any small edge he could get right now.
To stay alive and find out what the hell was going on.
KERSEN WULANDARI CLUTCHED his Skorpion machine pistol so tightly that his fingernails and knuckles blanched, the weapon’s wooden grip printing its checkered pattern on his palm. He didn’t feel it, kept his index finger off the trigger only with an effort, craning forward in his seat and staring at the target up ahead.
“Get after them!” he snarled. “Don’t let them get away this time!”
His driver didn’t answer, fully focused on the street and the traffic that surrounded them. They were already well above the posted speed limit and still accelerating, but the other cars around them made a straight run at their prey impossible.
Wulandari couldn’t fault his driver for not crashing into their opponents’ vehicle outside of the garage. He had no wish to die for what he had been paid to do, the present job, although that risk was always present in Wulandari’s line of work. The trick, he knew, was making sure that other people died, while he survived to joke about their final, agonizing moments with his friends over a round of drinks.
Unfortunately, these damned Westerners weren’t the kind of targets he was used to. They were quick, courageous, deadly. He’d already lost at least three men pursuing them, and now Wulandari didn’t know what had become of those who’d chased the targets into the garage. The building’s steel-and-concrete structure interfered with messages after they ran inside, and there’d been nothing more since the Americans escaped.
All dead?
Wulandari didn’t know, nor, at that moment, did he care.
The men he’d chosen for this day’s assignment had proved adequate on other jobs. All ten were killers, tested under fire in gang wars with the triads and the Yakuza. They hadn’t failed him yet, but once was all it took to make a corpse out of a street soldier.
Three corpses. Maybe six, for all Wulandari knew.
And three more shooters still at large, somewhere, presumably attempting to make contact with the targets.
Scooping up a walkie-talkie in his free hand, Wulandari keyed the button for transmission, snapping at the air, “Car Two! Where are you? Answer!”
Agonizing second later, came the answer. “Passing the art gallery, westbound. Over.”
That had to mean Jakarta’s Fine Art Gallery, below Merak Expressway. They were headed in the right direction, anyway.
“We’re near the Puppet Theater,” Wulandari told his second chase car. “Target fifty meters up ahead. Hurry, before you lose us!”
“Coming!” the tinny voice said before the radio went dead.
Wulandari should’ve felt relieved, with help rushing along behind to join him, but his anger and frustration banished any positive emotion. Even as the fury raged inside him, he was fully conscious of his cardinal mistake.
Don’t get involved.
Killing and kidnapping for money was a business, he understood, and businessmen who let personal feelings cloud their judgment soon went out of business, losing everything they had.
In this case, that could mean Wulandari’s life.
