Nuclear Reaction. Don Pendleton

sir.”

      Chandaka couldn’t tell if Lahti was relieved or not, and he did not particularly care. Glancing behind him, the lieutenant saw the second jeep and open truck behind it keeping pace, jerking with every rut and pothole in the miserable unpaved road. There would be aching bladders in the truck, he guessed, but they would have to wait.

      Ahead, he saw the car they were pursuing leave the main track, veering left onto another narrow road, its surface even rougher than the one they traveled. Chandaka held his rifle, finger on the trigger, peering through the windshield veined with cracks that radiated from a central bullet hole.

      “Sir, shall I follow them?” his driver asked.

      “Of course, but cautiously.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      Lahti slowed a little more, the vehicles behind them doing likewise. By the time they cleared the turn, Chandaka couldn’t see their quarry anymore. He nearly panicked, fearing he had lost the bastards after all this effort and would have to back out of the woods, exposed to hidden riflemen on every side.

      “Hurry!” he ordered, contradicting his original instruction. “Find them!”

      “Yes, sir.” No enthusiasm whatsoever sounded in the sergeant’s voice.

      They jounced along the narrow track, tree branches almost meeting overhead, casting the roadway into shadows that seemed sinister under the present circumstances. Lahti kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead, leaving Chandaka to watch out for snipers, booby traps, and any other rude surprises that their enemies might have in store for them.

      The clearing took Chandaka by surprise. One moment, they were running through a narrow corridor of trees, the next, they nosed into an open space some sixty feet across, walled in by forest on all sides. He saw the bandit car ahead, its grille aimed toward his jeep, but with the doors open and no one left inside. Which had to mean—

      “Look out!” he barked at Lahti. “Stop!”

      Lahti slammed on the brakes, heedless of the vehicles behind him, and Chandaka fancied he could hear a short cry of alarm from Corporal Dekhar in the second jeep before it struck the rear of his vehicle with impressive force. A lance of pain tore through Chandaka’s neck and shoulder blades, but he had no time to consider it, as gunfire crackled from the tree line.

      “Ambush!” he called out to no one in particular. A glance at Lahti told him that the sergeant couldn’t hear him. He slumped sideways against his shoulder harness, dark blood spilling from a bullet hole above one eye.

      Cursing his pain, Chandaka threw himself out of the jeep, clutching the CETME rifle to his chest. He hit the ground running, gunfire ringing in his ears, as bullets filled the air around him.

      He had no idea how many bandits were unloading at him from the forest, but his own men were returning fire in awkward fashion, spraying bullets here and there in lieu of finding clear-cut targets. It was a wasted effort, but Chandaka couldn’t blame them. They were panicking, taken completely by surprise.

      And it was all his fault.

      Chandaka stopped, crouching, and sought a target of his own. Where were the bastards? Had they cut him off? Was it too late to slip away?

      The thought shamed him. Chandaka held his weapon in a tight, white-knuckled grip and started edging back in the direction of the jeeps and truck. They were his only cover, short of plunging right into the trees, and that was clearly hostile territory.

      He would rally his command, devise a strategy, and make the bandits sorry they had ever crossed his path, or he would die in the attempt.

      And at the moment, Chandaka knew it could still go either way.

      BOLAN SQUEEZED OFF a burst from his AKMS and watched one of the soldiers topple screaming from the open truck. He hadn’t planned on waging war against the native military quite this soon, but he was in it now, and there was nothing left to do except his best, fighting to stay alive.

      He’d lost track of Pahlavi when they separated, no time to coordinate their action, but he hoped the young man would be circumspect, fire only when he had a target, and conserve his ammunition for the shots that he could make. Perhaps he could retrieve another weapon from the field, if he ran out of ammunition for his pistol, but whatever happened, he was on his own.

      Bolan kept moving, stopping long enough to fire a short burst from the shadows, constantly in motion when he wasn’t lining up a shot. The duffel bag was slung across his shoulder, riding heavily against his left hip as he moved, but short of pocketing its contents Bolan couldn’t let it go. He needed the spare magazines, the frag grenades, to help him shave the odds against these unexpected adversaries.

      He was halfway through a 30-round box magazine and had reduced his distance from the truck by forty feet or so, when he decided it was time to give his enemies another shock. Palming one of the RGD-5s, he pulled the pin, mentally counted down from six seconds to four, then lobbed the green egg toward the jeeps where they sat nose-to-tail, with gunners crouched behind them.

      No one saw the grenade coming, not until it landed on the broad hood of the second jeep with a resounding clang and wobbled for a heartbeat, as if making up its mind which way to go. The RGD-5 wasn’t round, and so its path was unpredictable. It bounced, then slipped into the small space left between the two jeeps, where the second one had rammed into the first.

      Bolan hunched down and waited for the blast. Before it came, one of the soldiers recognized the danger. Calling out to his companions, he rose and turned to run. He wasn’t fast enough. The blast rocked both vehicles, its shrapnel taking down the would-be runner like a point-blank shotgun blast. It also burst the lead jeep’s fuel tank and ignited a spare can of gasoline on the rear deck of the passenger compartment, instantly enveloping both vehicles in flames.

      Watching from cover, Bolan saw a handful of soldiers burst from cover, all of them on fire and beating at the flames with blistered hands. They ran instead of dropping to the ground and rolling, partly out of panic, and because the turf around them was on fire, as well. A lake of burning fuel surrounded them, allowing nowhere to go except a mad rush for the tree line that would offer no help, no shelter.

      Bolan left them to it, ready with his automatic rifle as the other troops began to reassess their situation. Knowing they were all at risk, the soldiers redoubled the outpouring of their aimless fire into the forest, bullets flaying bark from tree trunks, clipping branches, ventilating leaves.

      Bolan was relatively safe from being spotted, in those circumstances, but a stray round through the head or chest was just as deadly as a sniper’s well-aimed killing shot. He stayed low, took advantage of the cover, firing only when he had a target dead to rights and in the clear.

      Where was Pahlavi? he wondered.

      Never mind.

      Survival was the first priority. If he could deal with the remaining soldiers and emerge alive, there would be time enough to look for his elusive contact. In the meantime, it was strictly do-or-die.

      The jeeps were destroyed, but the Executioner heard the truck’s big engine cranking, as someone tried to get it started after stalling it.

      Bolan rose and sighted on the cab. The soldiers surrounding it were firing wildly. His angle wasn’t optimal, he had no real view of the man in the driver’s seat, but he was lined up on the left-hand door. Taking a chance, he held the autorifle’s trigger down and used the last rounds in his magazine to ventilate that door, spraying the inside of the cab with sudden death.

      The engine fell silent, and the troops around the truck’s cab scattered, seeking better shelter from the storm that had enveloped them. Reloading in a rush, Bolan moved on.

      4

      Darius Pahlavi was no longer terrified. Somehow, somewhere between the death of his two friends and his arrival in the forest clearing with Matt Cooper, he had passed from numbing fear to a sensation that he barely recognized.