Altered State. Don Pendleton

      “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.

      Any thought of bringing Falk and her companions in alive had vanished when the unknown shooter took out four of Scanlon’s men, then tried to do the same with Eddie Franks and his three backups. Falk and her Afghani stooge would have been killed, in any case, but now all three had to die without being subjected to interrogation.

      Never mind.

      By killing them, Scanlon would either cauterize the threat or, at the very least, require his boss’s enemies to start again from scratch, inserting new players into Kabul. And when the new players arrived, they would find Scanlon and his people waiting for them.

      There was too much money on the table to permit the DEA’s fumbling investigation to proceed. Perhaps he should have killed Falk earlier—it was debated at the time, then shelved in favor of approaching her superiors with bribes—and next time Scanlon would be ready.

      Even if he had to act alone.

      But he’d take care of this mess first.

      Gunfire, away beyond two mounds of garbage to his right, distracted Scanlon from the hunt for all of two heartbeats. He never lost focus completely—he was too good at his job for that to happen—but he had to wonder whether Franks had met the enemy or if his men were firing at shadows.

      Scanlon lost sight of Farid Humerya as his driver moved around the garbage heap, scuttling after the point men Scanlon had dispatched ahead of them. He almost called Humerya back, then bit his tongue.

      The more the merrier, if they ran into trouble.

      And, as if in answer to his thoughts, there came a rapid pop-pop-pop of pistol fire. Nine-millimeter, by the sound of it, but swiftly joined by something heavier, maybe a .45. A strangled cry of pain raised Scanlon’s hackles as he waited for Kalashnikovs to answer the challenge.

      And heard nothing.

      Three down, that quickly? Was it even possible?

      Hell, yes, he thought. In combat, damn near anything was possible.

      Scanlon reviewed his options, listening to autofiring from the second, farther garbage heap, and made his choice. Someone had to survive this fucked-up set and carry word to headquarters, or it was all in vain.

      Cursing and flushed with shame, he turned and ran back toward his car.

      B OLAN MIGHT HAVE chased his three remaining enemies around the garbage heap all afternoon, but the retreating shooters met someone who put steel in their backbones, snapping orders at them in a fair approximation of demonic rage.

      “Where do you think you’re going, damn it?” stormed the unseen man in charge. “Both of you get your yellow asses back in there and fight!”

      It could have been a trick to stall him, keep him waiting while they circled to his rear and came up on his blind side, but he didn’t think so. There’d been too much anger in the loud, commanding American voice. If that was fake, the speaker ought to take home an acting award for Best Performance by a Heavy Under Fire.

      So, Bolan waited. Kneeling in the shadow of the refuse mountain, hard against it on his right, he sighted down the barrel of second hot Kalashnikov and covered the approach that was their only way to reach him from the front. He counted the seconds, feeling sweat bead on his forehead and begin the slow crawl downward toward unblinking eyes.

      Two of them came at him together. Bolan recognized the leader as the one who got away, and saw that he was none too thrilled about returning to the fight. His leading adversary clutched an AK in a white-knuckled death grip. The second in line was almost duck-walking, crouched to present the smallest possible target.

      Bolan gave the first one two rounds through the chest, punching him back into his waddling companion. Both fell together, the live one struggling to extricate himself from the other’s deadweight. Bolan waited until he’d almost reached his feet again, raising his gun, then shot him in the neck, with one more through the face to make it stick.

      And now, a cautious rush to find the one who gave the orders, wondering if he would stand and fight or cut and run. Would pride outweigh the man’s survival instincts when it counted?

      Bolan