Altered State. Don Pendleton

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