Don Pendleton - Nuclear Reaction

It was a fluke, Lusila thought, the soldier in the jeep behind them choosing just that moment to unleash another shot. What were the odds of it? Much less that he would somehow manage to anticipate Lusila’s movement of the steering wheel.

It was a miracle of sorts that the next bullet drilled Dushkriti’s forehead and exploded through his shaggy hair in back, spraying a gray-and-crimson mist across Lusila and the dashboard gauges.

It was his turn, then, to fight the rising tide of nausea and pray that he could keep his old car on the road while bullets hammered at it from behind.

“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Pahlavi asked, half turning in his seat.

Bolan glanced at the rearview mirror, then came back to focus on the long, straight two-lane road. “They’re under fire,” he answered. “Taking hits.”

“But fighting back, yes?”

“From the sound of it. You want to tell me where we’re going?”

“Five more miles,” Pahlavi said. “There is a road into the hills. It leads to my safe place.”

“It won’t be safe for long if we lead soldiers to the doorstep,” Bolan told him. “What’s Plan B?”

“Plan B?”

“Your backup. Something else on tap, when things go wrong.”

Pahlavi’s stricken face told Bolan there was no Plan B. “I did not think there would be soldiers here,” the Pakistani said. “They almost never pass this way in daylight.”

“‘Almost’ obviously doesn’t cut it,” Bolan said.

“I’m sorry. Let me think.”

“Think fast!”

More firing erupted from behind them, and the second car was definitely taking hits from one rifle, maybe a couple of them. In his mirror, Bolan saw a bullet chip the windshield from inside, before the driver started swerving like a drunkard. He guessed it was the best the other man could think of, while his partner laid down cover fire but couldn’t seem to score a solid hit.

“There are some woods ahead,” Pahlavi blurted out. “Perhaps three miles. If we can lead them there, perhaps—”

“It’s worth a shot,” Bolan said, even as he thought about the killer odds. He’d counted twenty-four men in the open truck, plus two inside the cab, two in the lead jeep, four more in the second, which meant they were outnumbered eight to one.

Those weren’t the worst odds he had ever faced, granted, but Bolan didn’t know how skilled his companions were at combat. If the one’s wild shooting with the submachine gun was any indication, they might be more liability than help in a firefight.

A tiny splash of color in his rearview mirror drew the warrior’s eye, in time to see the second car in their high-speed procession swerving more erratically than ever. Bolan couldn’t tell who’d been hit, the shooter or the driver, but he worked it out a second later, when the car stayed on the road and didn’t stall.

One down, he thought, judging from all the blood. And since the driver couldn’t likely fight off thirty hostile troops while racing down the two-lane blacktop, Bolan guessed that he would soon be number two with a bullet.

“Adi and Sanjiv!” Pahlavi moaned. “We must stop for them!”

“Get real,” Bolan said.

“We must!”

“Did you drive out here just to die?” Bolan asked. “I had the impression there was something you’ve been trying to accomplish.”

“But my friends—”

Pahlavi turned again and looked down the road in time to see the second car whip through a fair bootlegger’s turn, using a technique requiring fair coordination of the brake and the accelerator, which when executed properly reversed the direction of a vehicle 180 degrees in a fraction of the time required to make a U-turn.

“What’s he doing?” Pahlavi asked.

“Buying us some time,” the Executioner said with approval.

Having reversed himself, Lusila accelerated once again toward the short convoy pursuing him. He had his right arm out the window, blazing at the soldiers with a pistol while he closed the gap between them, taking heavy hits along the way.

Bolan supposed Pahlavi’s comrade might’ve rammed the lead jeep—if he’d lived that long. Instead, the rifle bullets found him when his charger and the jeep were still some twenty yards apart. Maybe his foot slipped off the clutch and let the engine stall, or maybe other rounds had ripped in through the grille and hood. In any case, his vehicle veered off the pavement, coasting to a smoky halt with its blunt nose and front tires in a ditch.

“We’re on our own,” Bolan advised Pahlavi. “How much farther to those woods?”

“Not far,” Pahlavi said, speaking as if he had something caught inside his throat.

“I hope you’re right. “Either way,” the Executioner informed him, “we’ll be running out of time within the next few minutes.”

“We can fight them, yes?” Pahlavi asked. “For Adi and Sanjiv!”

“They’re done,” Bolan reminded his grief-stricken passenger. “Try fighting for yourself.”

“Of course. We must survive to finish what we’ve started.”

“Right,” Bolan replied. “And maybe if we do, you’ll tell me what that is.”

“Fight first, talk later,” Pahlavi said. “Yes?”

“I’ve heard that song before.”

Flicking his eyes between the highway and his rearview mirror, Bolan searched the roadside for a hint of woods. An endless ninety seconds later, he saw shadows on the roadside ahead, and recognized them as a mass of trees.

One smallish forest, coming up.

And thirty-two trained riflemen to make it one more patch of Hell on Earth.

The first round from the lead jeep’s shooter ricocheted from Bolan’s trunk and chipped the frame of his rear window prior to hurtling off through space. Instead of weaving crazily across the road, he poured on all the speed he had to offer, hunching lower in his seat to give the rifleman a smaller target.

Beside him, Darius Pahlavi had regained enough control to draw his pistol, swivel in his seat and return fire from his side window. It was awkward, but at least it let him shoot right-handed without smashing out their back window.

Bolan supposed incoming rounds would do that soon enough, unless he reached the woods before the soldiers on his tail improved their aim.

He had a quarter mile to go, and then he had to hope there was some kind of access road into the forest, or he’d wind up parking on the berm and leaping from the car in full view of the soldiers who were primed to kill him. Bolan hoped Pahlavi had more sense than that, but their acquaintance was too brief for him to judge the man’s state of mind.

Rattled was one term that immediately came to mind, but now that he was fighting back, Pahlavi seemed to have a better grip, reaching inside himself somewhere to find his nerve.

After his third shot, Bolan’s passenger gave out a whoop of triumph. Bolan checked the rearview mirror and made out a spiderweb of cracks covering half of the jeep’s windshield. It hadn’t stopped them, but it slowed the soldiers a little. They fell back to blast at Bolan’s car from a position out of pistol range.

It gave Bolan the edge he needed, while his enemies were putting on their brakes, maybe a little shaky in their haste and from the shock of a near-miss. He took advantage of it, burning up the road and gaining back some of the ground he’d lost in the pursuit. It was two hundred yards or so until they reached the first trees, and he was looking for a turnoff, any place where he could leave the two-lane blacktop for a while.

“There, on your left!” Pahlavi urged him, pointing, and the road appeared almost by magic, cut for the convenience of emerging eastbound traffic, but still good enough for Bolan’s exit, heading west.