Читать книгу Extreme Justice - Don Pendleton - Страница 11

San José

Wednesday, June 20

A bullet struck the rear of Bolan’s rented vehicle and spent its force somewhere inside the trunk. Bolan stood on the accelerator, racing down the narrow alley, scattering trash cans in his wake.

The chase car’s driver didn’t seem to mind. He kept a lock on Bolan with his high beams, plowing through the refuse heaped across his path and battering aside the upended cans.

There were at least two shooters in the chase car, one in the front shotgun seat, another in the backseat, on the driver’s side. Bolan knew that much only from their muzzle-flashes, since the high beams in his rearview mirror ruled out any head count.

Two guns minimum, and Bolan knew the driver would be armed, as well. The odds weren’t bad, compared to some he’d faced.

Suddenly, a second pair of headlights joined the chase, behind the first pursuit car, gaining rapidly along the alley’s dark and narrow track. Bolan ruled out police, because the second vehicle displayed no flashing lights, sounded no siren.

Beside him, Blanca Herrera swiveled in her seat, her face blanched by headlight beams. She watched the chase cars, while Gil Favor huddled in the backseat, offering the smallest target possible under the circumstances.

“Here they come!” Herrera advised him, as if she thought Bolan might be unaware of the pursuit.

“I see them,” he replied. “Hang on.”

Almost before she could react to that warning, they cleared the alley and he cranked the Ford into the sharpest left-hand turn he could manage, startling a pair of jaywalkers who squealed and ran for safety on the sidewalk. Gunfire echoed from the alley at his back, even before the first chase car emerged. The pedestrians went prone.

Bolan was making all the haste he dared on residential streets, watching the sidelines where his own headlights and those closing behind him cast distorted, moving shadows. Any one of them might mask a another late-night rambler, possibly a child, and Bolan had to balance that thought with the threat of death that rode his bumper. At the same time, if he drove too fast and lost control, smashed up the Ford, he and his passengers were facing sudden death, the failure of his mission.

Triumph for Antonio Romano.

“I need someplace where I can deal with this,” he told Herrera. “Ideas?”

She blinked at him, eyes bright with fear, then said, “Maybe the riverfront? They have warehouses, docks. Few people at this hour. Also waste ground.”

“Good.”

Bolan was already speeding northward, in the general direction of the Rio Torres. All he had to do was stay the course and hope the gunners trailing him didn’t get lucky with a bullet to his gas tank or a tire.

“Could you distract them for me?” he asked Herrera.

“What?”

“Shoot back.”

His words seemed to confuse her for a moment, then she powered down her window, leaned into the wind-rush gale and fired a pistol shot at the nearer chase car. Bolan saw it swerve, the driver taken by surprise, losing acceleration just as Herrera fired again.

“Try for the radiator,” Bolan called out to her.

“What?”

“Between the headlights!”

“Sí!”

She triggered two more shots, and while the chase car lost a bit more ground, Bolan had no idea if any of the bullets found their mark. Regardless, he took full advantage of the other driver’s lapse and put more road between them, speeding through dark intersections with a silent prayer that there would be no damned fool driving with his lights off, no foot traffic crossing just as Bolan barreled past.

Gil Favor’s neighborhood boasted some of the smallest street signs known to man, perhaps another mark of high-priced exclusivity. It was impossible to read the signs in the glare of his headlights, racing through the streets at speeds he normally reserved for freeway driving, while two carloads of assassins tried to run him down.

Instead, Bolan reviewed the street map he had memorized that afternoon, while they were killing time. He knew that he must be a good half mile below the riverfront, at least, but he was heading in the right direction, making decent time. If he could just—

The Ford’s rear window suddenly imploded from a bullet’s impact. Herrera bit off the greater part of an instinctive scream, while Bolan ducked and heard—or felt—the slug zip past his face. It struck his rearview mirror, sent it spinning to the floor somewhere, and drilled a neat hole through the windshield as it exited.

Now he was blind in back, except for side mirrors that shrank the chase cars down to toy size. He didn’t need the printed warning that reflected objects May Be Closer Than They Seem.

“Give them a few more rounds,” he ordered Herrera, guessing that she’d fired off roughly half her pistol’s magazine already.

“Right!”

She scrambled to obey, as Bolan held the pedal down and waited for his first glimpse of the waterfront.

BLANCA HERRERA GRIMACED, mouthing silent curses as the wind from behind her whipped long hair around her face, stinging her eyes. It was already bad enough, men she had never met trying to murder her, without betrayal from her own hair in the bargain.

She had practiced often enough with her HK4 pistol to feel confident with stationary, inanimate targets, but this running battle through the streets of San José was something else entirely. In her wildest fantasies, Herrera had thought that if she ever tried to shoot another human being it would be in some classic film noir setting, possibly a city park at midnight or the murky hallway of a derelict motel.

The last thing she’d imagined, when she set out with Matt Cooper to retrieve his witness from a mansion in the heart of San José, had been a bullet-riddled car chase leading to the riverfront.

If they survived that long.

She saw more muzzle-flashes from the nearer chase car and replied with two rounds from her own weapon. The sharp reports, though swiftly blown away, still stung her ears. The target vehicle swerved jerkily, but once again she couldn’t tell if either of her bullets had made contact.

In the excitement, Herrera had forgotten that she was supposed to count her shots. Had she fired six or seven? Since the pistol’s slide was closed, she had at least one cartridge left before she had to fumble for the spare clip in her handbag.

Now the second car was gaining ground, trying to pass the first or pull abreast so that gunmen in both chase cars could fire at her and Cooper. Angry at the presumption of her enemies, Herrera triggered her first shot at the second car—and saw her pistol’s slide lock open on an empty chamber.

“Damn it!”

She ducked back inside the Ford’s window, wind-tangled hair obscuring her vision as she reached down for her purse. She’d dropped it on the floor between her feet, after they shoved Favor into the car, before their enemies had shown up and begun the chase.

She snatched the bag and opened it, rooting past wallet, lipstick, compact, facial tissues, hairbrush, searching for the one thing that might save her life. Of course the pistol’s extra magazine had slithered to the very bottom of her bag, beside a jingling key ring.

She dumped the purse into her lap, snatched up the slim black magazine and let the other items spill between her legs, onto the floorboard. One touch of a button dropped the empty magazine out of her pistol’s grip, and she replaced it, thumbed the catch to close its slide and put a live round in the chamber.

Ready.

I’ll count this time, she thought, and know when I run out of bullets.

When she was unarmed, helpless against her enemies.

“We’re getting there,” Cooper said from the driver’s seat.

She knew he meant the riverfront, but couldn’t say how far they’d traveled while she was exchanging gunshots with the enemy.

“I’ll try again,” she said, kicking the contents of her purse aside and turning toward her open window.

“Wait. How many rounds do you have left?” he asked her.

“Eight.”

“What caliber?”

Another bullet struck the Ford, making her wince as she replied, “Three-eighty.”

“Better save them for the main event,” he said. “I can’t replace them.”

Main event, she thought. Kill or be killed.

“But if they overtake us—”

“Two blocks, tops,” he promised her. “We ought to have some stretch then. See what happens.”

As if answering his comment, two more bullets whispered through the broad rear window’s vacant frame and punched holes through the windshield. Herrera was surprised that it did not collapse entirely.

With windows blown away or open, Herrera smelled the Rio Torres well before she saw it, with the docks along its southern bank. Another moment, and she saw warehouses where the merchant ships unloaded cargo seven days a week. Some also docked at night, she reasoned, but she saw no crews at work in the immediate vicinity.

What now? she wondered, startled when Matt Cooper answered her. She wasn’t aware that she had spoken.

“Now we improvise,” he said. “No rules. We need an edge of some kind, but I haven’t found it yet.”

Cooper had turned onto the waterfront. Behind them, Herrera saw the chase cars following.

Squeezing the pistol in her fist until her knuckles ached, she watched their enemies and told him, “I think we have run out of time.”

“WE HAVE THEM NOW,” Armand Casale said. The anger that had burned inside his gut during the chase was fading now, relaxing into satisfaction.

Killing was the best part, always.

“After them,” Casale ordered, settling back into his seat as his driver stepped on the gas. Off to their left, the other chase car kept pace, both engines growling in the night.

Casale didn’t know these people who had snatched his target out from underneath his very nose, killing a number of his people in the process. Given half a chance, he would’ve liked to question them at length, but something told him that they were not likely to surrender.

Fine.

Eliminating them would be the next-best thing—more satisfactory for him, in fact, than keeping them alive. Above all else, he had to carry out his main assignment and make sure Gil Favor’s mouth was shut for good.

Casale carried a submachine gun manufactured from a Ruger Mini-14 automatic rifle, designated the AC-556F. It had a folding stock, unlike the parent weapon, and could fire full-auto or in 3-round-burst mode, using a custom brake to keep the muzzle from climbing. If he needed backup with a little extra kick, the stainless-steel Colt Anaconda in a shoulder rig below Casale’s left arm ought to fit the bill.

Casale didn’t care about the men he’d lost so far that evening. They were expendable, no friends of his, and could be easily replaced. Only his duty to Antonio Romano mattered at the moment, and that duty was to guarantee that prosecutors in New York would have no traitors to support their case against the Don.

The Rio Torres waterfront appeared to be deserted at that hour, no one to disturb them or to summon the police. Casale clutched his weapon as they sped along behind the bullet-scarred sedan, wondering whether any of the shots they’d fired so far had wounded Favor.

Maybe he was dead or dying even now, huddled inside the vehicle.

Be sure. And kill the others, too.

No witnesses.

It was a rule that always served Armand Casale well.

So far, he hadn’t fired his weapon during the pursuit, but that would change as soon as they were close enough for him to reasonably guarantee a hit. He had spare magazines, along with other tools and weapons, but Casale hated wasting ammunition—hated wasting anything, in fact, except the people he was paid to waste.

And this time he was being paid quite well.

The bullet-pocked Ford was doing sixty miles per hour, based on the speedometer on Casale’s own dashboard. Granted, his vehicle was stolen, like the other chase car, but its gauges seemed to function properly.

At that speed, his intended prey would soon run out of waterfront.

As if on cue, the unknown driver whom they were pursuing hit his brakes, the taillights flaring, while he whipped the steering wheel hard to his left. Casale knew it was the left, because the Ford spun to his left, tires shrieking as the sedan made a quick one-eighty and rocked to a halt, maybe a hundred yards in front of him.

Now, what the hell…?

The old guys back in Jersey called that fancy driving a bootlegger’s turn, something from their whiskey-running days, before Casale’s parents had been born. The faceless driver had a certain style, but what he didn’t have was any hope of getting off the riverfront alive.

“Slow down,” Casale told his wheelman. “Let’s see what he’s got in mind.”

The driver slowed but didn’t stop. The other chase car took its cue from Casale’s, keeping pace.

“He wants to go down fighting,” Luca offered from the backseat.

The faceless driver who had let Gil Favor live on borrowed time was revving his engine now. Not going anywhere, just goosing it, the way street racers do at traffic lights sometimes.

Was it a challenge? Casale wondered. Did he want to play a game?

Let’s play a round of chicken, Casale thought. And I guarantee you I won’t flinch.

Of course, it didn’t really matter what the nameless driver wanted. Once they closed the gap a little more, Casale meant to kill the stranger and his passengers. His firing would unleash the other members of his crew, and they would turn the Ford into a giant colander.

Only a few more yards…

When they were almost there, the bullet-punctured Ford leaped forward and charged directly toward the narrow space between Casale’s stolen chase car and its mate.

“IS THIS THE MAIN EVENT?” Blanca Herrera asked.

“This is what we’ve got,” Bolan replied. “Soon as we’re close enough, unload with everything you have.”

Eight rounds, he thought. Not much, but maybe she’d get lucky.

Maybe.

“Now!”

He stamped on the accelerator and released the parking brake. Some kind of gasping, squeaking noise came from Gil Favor, lying on the rear floorboards, then Bolan lost it in the clamor of his engine and their guns.