Ripple Effect. Don Pendleton

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.

      He didn’t plan to die that afternoon, but neither had the men he’d lost so far. Wulandari guessed that all of them had counted on another night of drinking, sex and restful sleep after a job well done. For three of them, at least, those plans were rudely swept aside and cast onto the rubbish heap.

      Wulandari didn’t care to join them.

      “Speed up, damn you!” he grated, striking at his driver’s shoulder with the hand that clutched his radio. The wheelman grunted, flinched, his jerky move reflected in their auto’s swerving progress.

      “Hold steady!” Wulandari barked, but he recognized his own irrationality, refraining from another blow.

      The car surged forward, somehow finding still more power underneath the hood. They brushed against a slower vehicle, passing too closely on Wulandari’s side, but he dared not complain. His driver was obeying orders, narrowing the gap that separated them from their appointed targets.

      Wulandari found the power button for his window, held it down until the tinted glass was fully lowered and a rush of wind filled up the car. He propped his elbow on the windowsill, bracing the Skorpion, but hot wind made his eyes tear, blurred his target as he tried to aim.

      He couldn’t tell the driver to slow down, but if he couldn’t see…

      Wulandari reached into his shirt pocket, heard fabric rip as he retrieved his sunglasses and slipped them on. It was a little better when he again poked his head outside the speeding car. Not perfect, but at least he had a chance to aim.

      And have his head ripped off or shattered, if his driver brushed against another vehicle.

      “Be careful now!” he shouted, words torn from his lips by rushing wind.

      Sighting as best he could, Wulandari pulled the trigger, spraying five or six rounds from the Skorpion’s 20-round box magazine. A march of bullet holes across the gray Toyota’s trunk rewarded him, before his weapon’s muzzle rose and sent the last two rounds hurtling downrange, wasted.

      “Closer!” Wulandari shouted, reaching with his left hand to extend the Skorpion’s wire shoulder stock.

      His driver muttered something unintelligible in the roar of wind, but he produced another surge of speed. Wulandari smiled, lips drawn back over crooked teeth, and steeled himself to try again.

      “THAT’S TOO DAMNED CLOSE,” Dixon said, his shoulders hunched against the prospect of a bullet drilling through his seat.

      “Tell me about it,” the grim man at the wheel replied.

      Dixon had drawn his Glock but knew he couldn’t make a decent shot under the circumstances, swiveled in his seat and leaning out the window where he’d have to fire left-handed. He was in this stranger’s hands, with killers rolling up behind them, spraying the Toyota with machine-gun fire.

      Terrific.

      “There’s more company,” his wheelman said.

      Turning so quickly that he sent a bolt of white-hot pain searing along the right side of his neck, Dixon picked out a second chase car gaining on the first. He knew it wasn’t just another crazy native driver, from the way it swerved through traffic, breaking all the rules to overtake the dark sedan bristling with guns.

      We’re toast, he thought, but kept it to himself, as if afraid that saying it would realize his fears.

      “Hang on,” Bolan said.

      “Right.”

      It had become their litany, damned near the only conversation passed between them since their mad race from the drab parking garage. He wondered if the man they’d struck was dead or dying, mildly startled to discover that he hoped so.

      One less to come back and bite them in the ass, he thought.

      But there were still enough behind them to kill him and the man he knew as Matt Cooper. All the men and guns they needed were in the two chase cars. He didn’t know if Cooper could evade them, doubted it, and doubted even more his own ability to come through any kind of urban gunfight with body and soul intact.

      Dixon had trained for this, after a fashion, but he’d never really taken any of it seriously. No one in his graduating class believed that they’d be shooting anyone. They were paper pushers, marginal investigators, only dubbed field agents out of courtesy. Even the posting to Jakarta, with the various advisories upon departure, hadn’t driven home the point.

      But he was thrashing in the deep end now, and no mistake about it. Under other circumstances, Dixon might’ve said he had a choice—to sink or swim—but as it was, his choices seemed to be preempted by the driver of the vehicle in which he sat, and by the killers burning up the road behind him, shooting as they came.

      “You know this neighborhood?” Bolan asked.

      “More or less,” Dixon replied.

      “I need some kind of cul-de-sac or parking area where I can get some combat stretch, maybe to turn around.”

      Dixon thought hard enough to give himself a headache, which was no great trick just then. “Okay,” he said. “You’re heading for a turnoff to the lake. Penjaringan. It’s on your right. Take that and go down toward the water. There’s a parking lot for tourists. Shouldn’t have too many cars, this hour on a week day.”

      “Let’s find out,” Bolan said, as the sign rushed at them. This time, when he made the screeching turn, there was no warning to hang on. Dixon was ready for it anyway, and gripped the handle overhead as if he’d been aboard a subway train racing at top speed through the dark.

      “We’ve got at least four guys behind us,”