Altered State

The man she’d marked as their contact was one block out and closing fast, as Falk played catch-up with another quick scan of the scene. Behind her, parked outside a grocery across the street, a Volkswagen with four men in it sat, immobile, waiting patiently for God knew what.

Eight men, if they were working with the guys in the Toyota. And if any of them even knew Falk was alive.

Because she planned to stay that way, she would assume that they were enemies and act accordingly. But what, precisely, could she do?

The tall pedestrian, her maybe-contact, had closed the gap between them to a half-block now. She thought he had his eyes on her, although the mirrored aviator’s glasses made it hard to say for sure, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Wave him off? Ridiculous. If she was right about him, and he was her contact, she would just be marking him for anyone who hoped to take him out. And if he wasn’t there to meet her, nothing that she did or said would make sense to him anyway.

“There’s a Toyota,” Barialy said.

“Saw it the first time, thanks,” Falk answered.

“No. Another one.”

“Don’t point,” she snapped. “Just tell me.”

Barialy did, and there it was. A third car with four men inside, just sitting there, triangulating on the spot where she and Barialy stood. Thus making hash out of her futile hope that they were in the clear.

The tall, not-so-bad-looking stranger was almost on top of them. Falk hoped she wouldn’t spook him, reaching underneath her lightweight jacket for the Glock pistol that rode her hip.

“Matt Cooper,” the stranger said as he stopped in front of her.

Falk stared into his mirrored shades, ignored his outthrust hand and answered, “Pleased to meet you, Matt, but I’m afraid we’re in a world of hurt.”

“A RE YOU SURE ?” Bolan asked, shifting gears within a heartbeat.

“Sure as I can be, until they nail us. Three cars, four men each, triangulating.”

“You were followed, then,” he said. Not quite an accusation.

“They were here ahead of you,” she said. “So, yeah. Unless they got a tip somehow, they followed one or both of us.”

She didn’t try to dump it all on her companion, which showed class, but Bolan had no time to parse the etiquette of laying blame. It didn’t matter, at the moment, how twelve hostile men had found him.

All that mattered was evading or eliminating them.

“My ride’s a quarter mile behind me,” Bolan said. “Who’s got the closest wheels?”

“That’s me,” the DEA agent replied. “Four blocks, due north.”

“Past the VW,” he noted.

“Right.”

“Okay. We’ll let them earn their money. Are you packing?”

“Absolutely.”

Bolan shot a sidelong glance toward Edris Barialy. “You?” he asked.

“Me?”

“Are you armed?”

After a fleeting hesitation Barialy nodded, and caught the glare from his control agent. He blushed beneath his rich olive complexion.

“Right, then,” Bolan said. “Try to ignore them as we pass their car. If they get out, let me make the first move.”

“There are cops and soldiers all around the—” Falk began.

“None of them can help us now,” he interrupted her. “Our first priority is getting out of here, alive and in one piece.”

“Okay,” she said.

Her native sidekick bobbed his head in mute agreement.

Bolan led the way north, toward the waiting Volkswagen. He didn’t eyeball any of the men inside it, kept his scan of them peripheral and unobtrusive as he closed the gap, seeming to chat with Falk and Barialy about nothing in particular.

One of the men in the VW was talking on a cell phone, now, asking for orders or receiving them. Whatever happened in the next few seconds would depend upon those orders and the ultimate intent of the watchers.

If they’d been sent to take their prey alive, Bolan would have an edge. If they were simply triggermen, he’d have to put his trust in speed and hope that Falk, at least, could back his play effectively.

He put himself at curbside, with Falk on his left and Barialy beyond her, farthest removed from the street. Whatever broke within the next few seconds, Bolan was the front line of defense, trusting an agent he had never met before that day to watch his back.

Ten yards, and there was stirring in the Volkswagen, to Bolan’s right. As he drew level with the car, both doors came open on his side and two men heaved themselves out of the vehicle. Behind and beyond them, flowing traffic briefly blocked the driver and his starboard backseat passenger from exiting the VW.

A flash of metal told Bolan that one of his assailants had a weapon held against his right leg, not quite out of sight. The man was speaking to him now, Midwestern accent ruling out a Briton.

“Hey, you!”

Bolan drew the Jericho 941 as he turned, squeezing the pistol’s double-action trigger as he found his mark between the stranger’s eyes. The shot slammed home at point-blank range and snapped the dead man’s head back, shattered skull rebounding from the car’s door frame behind him as he fell.

The second target was Afghani, trying for a crouch and bringing up his automatic weapon as the Jericho swung toward him, already too late to save himself. Bolan’s next shot wasn’t precision-perfect, but it did the job, drilling his target’s cheek below the left eye, angling downward through the sinuses to clip his brain stem, heading off the mental signal to his trigger finger.

Bolan crouched and lunged, firing twice more into the Volkswagen. He caught the backseat gunner rising through a half-turn, punched a slug through his rib cage but knew it wasn’t lethal, even as the man dropped out of sight.

The driver fumbled with his weapon, tried to swivel in his seat, but found the steering wheel a deadly obstacle. The fourth round out of Bolan’s pistol struck him just below the right nostril, slamming the driver to his left and likely knocking him unconscious, even if it didn’t kill him.

Bolan spent a precious second scooping up the AKSU rifles that his first two enemies had dropped as they were dying, then straightened to find Falk and her Afghan agent gaping at him. Somewhere at his back, tires screeched on pavement, the Toyotas peeling out.

“We’re done here,” Bolan snapped. “Move out!”

CHAPTER TWO

They moved.

Bolan had no idea where he was going, but he ran as if his life depended on it, which it did. Deirdre Falk kept pace with him, Glock drawn and held in her right hand, while Edris Barialy lagged a step or two behind.

“Another block,” Falk told him. “Left on the side street.”

Bolan’s four shots had unleashed pandemonium around the Volkswagen, where he’d left two men dead without a doubt, two others badly wounded at the very least. So far, no shots had answered his, but growling engines and the cry of tortured rubber told him that pursuit was under way.

They reached the side street Falk had indicated, turned left into it, their weapons scattering pedestrians. Cars lined the curb on both sides of the street, narrowing two slim lanes to one and change, but Bolan didn’t have a clue which vehicle was Falk’s.

She solved the riddle for him when she palmed a key and pressed a button that unlocked the doors on a new Ford Focus that might have been silver or gray. In passing, Bolan noted that the agent’s car did not display a crimson maple leaf.

Falk threw herself into the driver’s seat, while Bolan claimed the backseat for himself and left Barialy to ride shotgun. If they got a running start, Bolan knew that the primary danger would come from behind, and his two liberated assault weapons gave him an edge for repelling attackers.

Unless they were trapped at the curb where they sat.

“We should go now,” he said as Falk revved the Ford’s L14 Zetec-E engine.

“We’re going!” she told him, reversing to butt her way clear of an old car parked too close behind them. “It’s damned tight in here.”

“And about to get tighter,” Bolan said as one of the Toyota chase cars swung into their street.

Bolan leveled one of his hot SMGs at the charger, but Falk spoiled his aim with a lurch that put the Ford in motion, barreling along the narrow street in a general northerly direction. Bolan kept the chase car in his view and saw its mate approaching seconds later, just as Falk cranked through another squealing turn.

The backseat of the Focus wasn’t coffin-tight, but it was cramped: four feet two inches wide, to Bolan’s six-foot-plus stature, with three feet, eight inches of head room. It was awkward for defense, but Bolan blessed the windows that gave him a clear 180-degree view of his unfolding battleground.

“Is this car registered to you?” he asked.

“Some kind of lease deal through a paper company,” Falk answered.

“So, you won’t mind if I make some alterations, then?”

She didn’t ask what Bolan had in mind, just shot a hard glance at him from the rearview mirror and replied, “Do what you gotta do.”

The lead Toyota was almost on top of them, its backup car running some thirty yards behind. Bolan wanted to get them off Falk’s tail—or, at the very least, to slow them down enough for Falk to try some fancy footwork, maybe lose them in the maze of Sharh-e-Khone without a higher body count.

He wasn’t squeamish, but every extra body added heat. Or would, if those he killed were men with influential friends.

“So, what’s the plan?” Falk asked him when they’d cleared another block.

“You drive,” Bolan replied. “I’ll shoot.”

And as he spoke he squeezed the AKSU’s trigger, shattering the Ford’s rear window into flying beads of safety glass.

“G ET AFTER THEM , goddamn it!”

“I am trying,” Farid Humerya stated.

“Then try harder! Christ! We’re losing them!”

Red Scanlon might have said that he’d seen everything during his years of soldiering, but he’d been startled—make that shocked—when the tall stranger shot his four men just like that.

Bam-bam-bam-bam.

Four up, four down.

Scanlon knew two of them were dead, for sure. He’d seen the head shots strike, and there was no mistaking how their bodies dropped like puppets with their strings cut. That was brain death, even if their hearts and lungs kept pumping for a few more minutes. On the other two, he wasn’t positive, but they were down and showed no signs of rising as the Prius passed them, following the Camry that was closer to the shooting scene.

The bastard was quick and cool, Scanlon would give him that. Most shooters hesitated for at least a fraction of a heartbeat in a face-to-face encounter, and some of them—especially Americans—were still hung up on John Wayne etiquette, giving the other guy a chance before they drew and fired.

Fuck that.

Scanlon had stayed alive this long by shooting first and generally not bothering with any questions afterward. Somebody threatened him, or seemed about to, and he hit them with a terminal preemptive strike.

When in doubt, take ’em out.

The men he’d handpicked for this job all had the same philosophy, all had sufficient notches on their guns to qualify as shooters and survivors, but the stranger had dropped four of them like it was nothing, cutting Scanlon’s force by thirty-three percent in something like two seconds flat.

That was embarrassing.

It simply couldn’t be allowed to go unpunished.

“There!” he snapped. “They’ve got a car now!”

“Yes, I see it,” Humerya said.

“Shit! What’s Eddie doing?”

Eddie Franks being his second in command for what had been envisioned as a relatively simple job. Follow the bitch from DEA, using a GPS tracking device that one of Scanlon’s men had planted in or on her car, find out who she was meeting and take care of them.

Easy.

With twelve men on the job, it should’ve been like swatting gnats with a sledgehammer.

Now the whole damned thing had blown up in his face, and Scanlon had begun to worry that he couldn’t make it right.

Scanlon was leaning forward in his seat, willing Humerya and their car to greater speed along the narrow crowded street, when someone in Deirdre Falk’s car opened fire on Eddie Franks’s Camry with an automatic weapon. Scanlon couldn’t actually see it, but the rattling sound of a Kalashnikov was unmistakable.

Humerya seemed to flinch at the first sound of gunfire, then stomped on the Toyota’s accelerator to compensate for his flicker of weakness. The Prius surged forward, sideswiping an aged pedestrian and leaving him sprawled in their wake, his packages scattered from curb to curb.

“Closer!” Scanlon barked at his driver. “Get me a shot!”

But that meant two lanes, at the very least, and Humerya couldn’t widen Kabul’s streets, regardless of his skill behind the wheel.

Humerya didn’t answer Scanlon, but he kept his foot down, speeding on in hot pursuit of the Camry and Deirdre Falk’s Ford. Whether he’d ever catch them was a question Humerya couldn’t answer at the moment.

But he knew one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt.

He couldn’t go back and report that he had failed, until he had exhausted every trick at his command.

T HE FIRST BLAST from Matt Cooper’s automatic rifle sounded like one of those 20 mm Gatling guns, inside the narrow confines of the vehicle. Deirdre Falk wished for earplugs but had none at hand, so she focused on driving the Ford like a bat out of hell.

She checked the rearview, trying to see if Cooper had scored any hits, but the chase cars were weaving as much as they could between vehicles parked on each side of the street, while the point car’s shotgun rider tried to aim a weapon through his open window.

Cooper fired again, but Falk had to focus her gaze on the roadway ahead. She felt more than saw Barialy crouch in his seat to her right, his hideout revolver now clutched in his lap.

“Don’t shoot yourself with that,” she chided. “And for God’s sake, don’t shoot me .”

“I won’t,” he promised, and forced a nervous laugh that could have been incipient hysteria.

Another burst from Cooper, as she made a sharp right turn and watched startled pedestrians scramble for safety. They would soon be leaving the Old City, roaring into the Chindawol district one of Kabul’s poorest neighborhoods, where overcrowding and horrendous sanitation made cholera outbreaks a daily fact of life.

“Where are we going?” she asked Cooper, speaking to the rearview between bursts of autofire from the back window.

“You tell me,” he countered.

“Not the office,” she replied, thinking aloud. “And sure as hell not to the Ministry of Justice.”

“No,” he granted, and unleashed another short burst from his stolen SMG.

“We need to lose these guys and ditch this car, then find another one,” she said.

“And pick up mine,” he added. “All my gear is in the trunk.”

“We’re rolling into Chindawol,” she told him. “That’s a big-time slum, and Rika Khana is another one, just over Jadayi Maiwand. We won’t find any decent rides there, but if we can dump these turkeys without winding up on foot, I know where we can make the switch.”

“I’ll do my best,” Cooper replied, and fired another 4- or 5-round burst at their pursuers.

“Listen, Edris,” Falk said to the man huddled beside her. “If we have to leave the car and separate, don’t go back to your flat. Hear me? Somebody may be watching it.”

“I hear you,” Barialy said.

“And don’t go wandering around the streets with that thing in your hand,” she added.

“I am not a fool,” he answered.

“Who told you to bring it with you, anyway?”

“Perhaps I had a premonition that we would be killed,” the slim Afghan replied.

“Hilarious. You doing stand-up now?”

“Excuse me?”

“Never mind. Forget it. Just be careful where you’re pointing that antique.”

The city’s odor changed as they drove into Chindawol, from market stalls and roasting meat to sewage and despair. The streets and sidewalks were as crowded as before, but not with vehicles, since virtually no one in the district could afford to buy a car or keep it running.

“What I need,” Bolan announced, “is combat stretch.”

“Say what?” Falk asked.

“Some room to move,” he said. “At least to turn the car around, instead of leading a parade all over town.”

“We’ve got some waste ground coming up,” Falk said. “If we drive into it, I can’t swear we’ll get out again.”

Bolan considered that for something like a second and a half, then told her, “Try it, anyway.”

“Okay. It’s a half mile up ahead.”

The rearview showed her Cooper switching auto weapons as the first ran out of ammunition. Thirty rounds left, she surmised, and they were back to pistols. Against six or eight Kalashnikovs.

Better to end it while they had a chance.

If they still had a chance.

One last stand, coming up.

Falk focused on the road again, watching for vacant lots ahead and praying that she hadn’t missed her turn.

S CANLON HAD TRIED a long shot through his open window, knowing it was risky, but he couldn’t pull it off. It wasn’t shooting with his left hand that defeated him—he’d trained himself to become nearly ambidextrous with weapons—but the weaving, rocking motion of his car and the obstruction of the Camry traveling in front of him.

Last thing I freaking need, he thought, is shooting Eddie or one of his people.

Scanlon ducked back inside the Prius, spitting road grit or some kind of garbage that was thrown up by the two cars running hot and fast ahead of him. He didn’t even want to think about the garbage that was dumped in Kabul’s gutters every day, or how a person actually inhaled tiny particles of everything he smelled.

It was enough to make him envy the people who lived in plastic bubbles, isolated from the outside world until something broke down and they died like fish out of water, gasping for air.

Another burst of AK fire erupted from the DEA Ford, and this time Scanlon nearly mastered the involuntary flinch that came with it. They’re not shooting at me, he reminded himself. It’s on Eddie.

But still…

The bastards would be shooting at him, if they had a chance, and if anything happened to Eddie, Scanlon’s ass was next on the line.

“I need a better angle,” he announced, already knowing that his driver couldn’t manage it. The streets of Chindawol were so damned narrow, shops and housing crowded on both sides, that vehicles could only pass each other by mounting the sidewalk and threatening lives.

And even then, he knew it wouldn’t be enough. There’d still be people in his way—at least, until the Prius flattened them—and he’d still have a moving target.

Need to stop that, he decided.

Scanlon palmed his cell phone, hit Eddie’s number on speed dial, waited through two agonizing rings, then started barking orders as soon as he made the connection.

“Take out the driver!” he snapped. “If you can’t do that, blow the tires!”

He cut the link before Eddie could answer or object that he was trying. Trying was a lame excuse that losers used to cover up inadequacy. So far, it hadn’t lodged in his vocabulary.

A woman chose that moment, God knew why, to dart in front of the Toyota. Scanlon felt a surge of panic as her clothing fanned across the windshield, momentarily blinding him and his driver. Farid Humerya dealt with it efficiently, giving the wheel a little twist that jigged the car from left to right and dumped her at the curb.

It seemed to energize the driver, somehow, and Humerya put his full weight on the gas pedal, running up close behind the Camry.

If the lead car crashed now, could they stop in time?

Scanlon clutched the AKSU in his lap and offered silent prayers to a long-forgotten God.

T HE PROBLEM WITH A RUNNING firefight was, of course, the running. Moving while you fired shots at a target that was also moving, maybe even shooting back, could spoil the most experienced marksman’s aim. Throw in civilians by the dozen, ambling around downrange, and it became a soldier’s nightmare.

“How much longer to that waste ground?” Bolan asked his driver.

“One block,” Falk replied. “I see it now.”

“Pull off, if you can, and turn around. We’ll make them come to us.”

“Okay,” she said. “But if we get stuck—”

“First things first,” he interrupted her.

“Got it.”

And Bolan’s first thing was one more attempt to slow the leading chase car’s progress. Lining up his sights before the Camry’s shotgun rider could unload on him, Bolan pumped three rounds through the Toyota’s radiator.

“Here we go!” Falk warned, and then the Ford was swerving to her left, jumping a broken curb of sorts and bouncing over the topography of a large vacant lot.

Bolan had no idea if shops and houses once had stood there, or if it was undeveloped all along, nor did he care. His eyes picked out the mounds of rubbish dumped by passersby and neighbors, some still smoldering where they’d been set afire the previous night or by sometime in the recent past.

It was a little glimpse of hell on Earth, and kids were playing there, or maybe hunting rats. They scattered as the Ford snarled toward them, with the Camry losing speed now in pursuit, a Prius bringing up the rear.

Bolan kept watching while he could, as Falk raced halfway across the lot, then worked wheel and brake through a sliding 180 that placed them between two looming piles of garbage, facing back the way they’d come through clouds of settling dust. He saw the Toyotas separate, one going right, the other limping to his left before it stalled. Doors opened, gunners spilled out.

Bolan did likewise, warning Falk and Barialy, “Use whatever cover you can find.”

With Barialy’s nerve untested and his skill unknown, Bolan treated the odds as four to one. It could be worse.

Would Bolan’s enemies be edgy, since he’d dropped one-third of them in nothing flat, before they’d fired a shot? Or would it make them more determined to exact revenge? He could have tossed a coin on that one, but there wasn’t time.

Bolan went to his left, saw Barialy trailing Falk off to the right, around the other garbage Matterhorn, and wished them well. His pile of cast-off junk was ten or twelve feet high, which seemed to be the norm. It smelled of dust and something rotten that he couldn’t place, offhand.

Gunshots rang out behind him, but he couldn’t focus on that now, much less retreat to help Falk and her agent. They were on their own, while Bolan faced the Camry’s crew.

He heard one of them coming for him. Or was it only one? Footsteps on loose dirt could deceive the ear, and Bolan tried his hand at mind-reading, hoping that he could reason out what his opponents would do next.

Split up and flank the garbage pile from both sides? Send a man to check the Ford, and then circle around behind Bolan or Falk? The one thing he was reasonably sure they wouldn’t do was scale the garbage piles, going for higher ground.

Two men suddenly appeared in front of him, both swarthy Afghanis, looking startled. Bolan fired on instinct, from the hip, and caught the nearest shooter with a rising 3-round burst to the chest. The guy went down, while his companion bolted, ducking out of sight and shouting what could only be a warning in some language Bolan didn’t recognize.

Damn it!

Now he would have to track the others down, while they were hunting him.

And hope that this time Death was on his side.

R ED S CANLON LET THE OTHERS go ahead of him. He wasn’t frightened, but he wasn’t crazy, either. He had paid Farid Humerya and the others for their services that day, and so far all they’d done was ride through Kabul.

It was time they earned their money.

He’d been quick enough to see the Ford’s three occupants bail out, knew two of them by sight but still had no name for the third. With any luck, he would be taking ID from the stranger’s corpse before much longer, and he could deliver it to headquarters for further research.