Don Pendleton - Conflict Zone

Bolan’s rearview mirror proved it, as the second dirt bike back in line veered to the right and plunged into the forest. Bolan couldn’t tell if she had hit the driver, his machine, or simply cracked his nerve with a near-miss, but she had taken out one of their enemies, in any case.

“Good work,” he told her.

“I’m not finished yet. I owe these pricks for—”

Bolan saw the muzzle-flashes in his mirror, ducked instinctively and heard one of the bullets from the lead Jeep strike the rear of his.

“Get down!” he warned.

Mandy obeyed, but only to a point. She peered around the backrest of her seat and raised her weapon for another shot. When she’d fired two without apparent hits, she answered, “What the hell. I’d rather die out here than go back in a box and wait to see what happens next.”

He couldn’t fault her logic or her nerve, but Bolan didn’t want to see her killed by stubborn anger. Mandy squeezed off three more rounds, then gave a little squawk and dropped back in her seat.

“Damn it! I’m shot!” she said.

“Show me,” Bolan demanded.

Mandy held her right arm out to him, showed him where blood spotted the sleeve.

“Call it a graze,” said Bolan. “Next time, it could be between your eyes.”

“They aren’t that good,” she said.

“They don’t have to be good, just lucky,” he replied.

The hunters wouldn’t need real skill until he stopped to fight on foot. And how long he could keep the Jeep on the road was anybody’s guess.

THE GRAZE ON Mandy’s arm burned furiously, but she recognized at once that she had suffered no great injury. Untended in the wilds of Africa, the wound might fester, maybe kill her with gangrene, but that took time.

And Mandy Ross knew time was running out.

She’d maybe hit one of the bikers, and she’d keep on trying for the others, but it was ridiculous to think that she could stop them all.

Still, she’d been truthful with the mysterious Matt Cooper. She would rather be shot in the forest than dragged back to camp, raped and tortured to death. If living wasn’t one of Mandy’s options, she would choose the quickest exit she could find.

It suddenly occurred to her that she could turn the borrowed pistol on herself, right here, right now, and end the whole ordeal. But while she might have done so in her prison cell, short moments earlier, the suicide solution didn’t appeal to her now.

Not yet.

Cooper was some kind of hellacious soldier, it appeared, and while there was a chance that he could reunite her safely with her family, Mandy would help in any way she could.

With that in mind, she craned around the stiff back of her seat again and triggered two quick shots at their pursuers. One bike swerved, but didn’t spill, and she supposed the sound she thought might be a bullet striking the lead Jeep had been illusory.

If she had hit the speeding vehicle, she didn’t slow it down.

More flashes from the Jeep now, and a lethal swarm of hornets hurtled past her, one drilling the Jeep’s windshield between her seat and Cooper’s.

Too damned close.

Gritting her teeth, she peered around the seat and fired again.

AZUKA BANKOLE CURSED bitterly, swerving his Jeep from left to right on the forest roadway, trying to keep an eye on the action ahead. He knew that shots were being fired, and he had passed the wreckage of one dirt bike without stopping, but he couldn’t get a fix on what was happening.

And in his haste to join the hunt, he had neglected to pick up a two-way radio before he left the camp. It was a clumsy error, but made little real-world difference, since none of his men in the other Jeeps had radios, either.

So far, only those in the lead vehicle had traded gunfire with the fleeing hostage and her savior. Firing from the second Jeep in line would put the forward troops at risk, while firing from Bankole’s, at the back of the procession, would be worse than useless.

Flooring the accelerator, feeling every bump and dip along the way as sharp blows to his spine and neck, Bankole gained ground steadily, until his grille was no more than eight or nine feet from the tailgate of the vehicle in front of him. At that speed, if the second Jeep stopped suddenly, collision was inevitable.

But he didn’t care.

If possible, he would have swept the other Jeeps and dirt bikes off the road, giving himself free access to the enemy. His men were good enough at fighting in most circumstances, better still when raiding unarmed villages, but they weren’t trained soldiers in any true sense of the word.

They would do their best, but was it good enough?

He had rushed out of the camp with nothing but his pistol, and its magazine was empty. Swallowing embarrassment, he shot an elbow toward the man beside him, ordering, “Reload my gun!”

“What, sir?”

“My pistol. Put in a fresh magazine!”

The soldier nearly blanched at that, but did as he was told, reaching across the space between them, past Bankole’s elbow and the gearshift, to remove his pistol from its holster. He extracted the spent magazine, then found himself with both hands full until he slipped the empty into his breast pocket.

“Sir?”

“Yes? What?” Bankole snapped, eyes on the narrow road.

“The other magazine, sir?”

“On my belt, for God’s sake!”

“Yes, sir.”

Fairly trembling, the soldier leaned closer, snaking an arm beneath Bankole’s, reaching for the ammo pouches on the left front of his pistol belt. The way he cringed and grimaced, he could have been mistaken for a creeping pervert in a porno theater, risking his life for an illicit hand-job.

“Hurry up, damn you!” Bankole gritted.

“Yes, sir!”

At last the job was done, the gun reloaded, safely holstered, while the nervous soldier wiped his sweaty face with a discolored handkerchief. Bankole almost had to laugh at that, but there was no room in his world for levity this night.

More gunshots echoed down the road, stinging his ears as he sped through the rippling sound waves, but the fugitives were still in motion, still retreating at top speed.

Could no one stop them now?

Enraged, he shouted at the troops who could not hear him. “Aim, you bastards! Make those bullets count!”

A BLOWOUT ALWAYS came as a surprise. On city streets, at thirty miles per hour, it was nerve-racking. At sixty-something on a freeway, it could kill you. Same thing in an unfamiliar forest, when you were being chased by twenty thugs with guns.

The blowout didn’t kill Bolan or Mandy Ross, but when a bullet ripped through the Jeep’s left rear tire, Bolan knew they were in for bad trouble.

“Hang on!” he warned, fighting the wheel to keep the vehicle upright and moving for at least a little while longer. They couldn’t travel far, dragging the Jeep’s tail in the mud and cutting furrows with a rusty rim, but just a few more yards…

“When I stop,” he said, “bail out my side into the woods.”

“You’re stopping?”

“Either that, or slow to a crawl and let them kill us where we sit.”

“So stop already. Jeez!”

Bolan slammed on his brakes and cranked the steering wheel hard-left, nosing the Jeep into a gap between two looming trees. Another second saw him out and seeking cover, slipping the Steyr AUG off its taut shoulder sling. Mandy Ross followed Bolan, then passed him and knelt by a tree of her own, gun in hand.

There was no time to talk about strategy, optimal targets or anything else. Headlights blazed in his eyes, wobbling this way and that as the bikers reacted and tried to avoid the ambush, framed in light from the Jeeps at their back.

They were just shy of good enough. One guy laid down his bike, rolling clear in the dirt, while the other veered off to his right—Bolan’s left—and plowed into a tree.