The lead police car was about an eighth of a mile ahead of its two fellows. It rode the outside northbound lane, edging the shoulder. The southbound flying wedge of three black SUVs neared. The SUV in the second row, the easternmost of the duo in tandem, swerved into the same lane as the oncoming police car.
The state cop blinked first, cutting hard right at the last second to avoid a head-on crash. It slewed off the shoulder into the land bordering the roadside, kicking up a brown dust plume, sideswiping tall saguaro cacti, and mowing them down before hitting a ditch and losing control. The car went into a roll, pinwheeling sideways, turning over three or four times be fore flopping to a stop upside down, its underside with its four crazily spinning wheels turned up and facing the sky.
The second police car changed course, swerving for the gap between the SUV at the point and the one that had just run the first car off the road. The lead SUV moved to intercept, its trajectory curving to meet the newcomer. It hit the police car at a tangent, its left front fender plowing into the driver’s side of the other.
Metal crumpled, tires burst, windows disintegrated in both vehicles. Locked together, the SUV and the police car both blew sideways off the road, like two balls in a bank shot in a game of pool. Only, they were not billiard balls but machines. There wasn’t much left of either one when they finally came tumbling to a halt.
Osgood said a dirty word under his breath.
For an instant, it looked like the third police car was going to hit the fuel tanker head-on, but at the last instant it managed to squeeze between the truck and the second SUV, the easternmost one. This was accomplished primarily because the tanker gave ground, swerving west to allow the police car room to get through.
Why not? The tanker wasn’t looking to end its run yet, not before reaching its primary target of the toxic train, Steve Ireland told himself.
The police car flashed a few hundred yards further up the road before skidding to a halt. It turned around, pointing southbound and giving chase.
The two remaining SUVs and the tank truck kept on coming, their speed unabated. The helicopter flew low over the tanker, buzzing it. A dragonfly hovering over a silver tube on wheels. Garbled noises sounded as the copilot used a public-address loudspeaker system to order the aggressors to cease and desist.
Gunmen hanging out the windows of both SUVs opened fire on the helicopter, blasting away at it. A sharpshooter aboard the copter returned fire with an assault rifle, streaming lead into the cab of the SUV in the northbound lane, riddling the roof, blowing out the windshield and side windows.
The SUV fishtailed crazily, running off the side of the road and nosing into a ditch. It fell on its side.
The gang in the other SUV kept pouring their fire at the helicopter. A chopper can be a delicate thing, its rotors, fuel lines, and hydraulics susceptible to lead poisoning. The shooters must have scored because the copter suddenly veered off, up, and to the west. It gained height but lost forward motion, hovering and making distressed machine noises while smoke began pouring out of its underside.
Its nose dipped, pointing earthward. It descended fitfully, by leaps and starts, the pilot fighting to keep some kind of control all the way down. The last fifty or sixty feet or so, it just quit, plummeting like a stone. It came crashing to earth in a heap, the tail assembly breaking off, its rotor blades flying. It didn’t burn or blow up, though.
The last surviving SUV speeded up, pulling ahead of the tanker and taking the point. Now it and the Klondike were about to come to grips.
The Klondike had something the police cars hadn’t, though: a secret weapon. Mounted under the headlights were twin recessed pods, each containing automatic shotguns. The weaponry was controlled by a kind of joystick rising vertically out of the top of a boxy extension of the dashboard.
Closing for the kill, Steve Ireland flipped a toggle switch, which opened the panel lids of the pods, exposing the snouty twin muzzles of the auto-shotguns. Steering with his left hand, he wrapped his right around the joystick’s grooved handgrip. The stick was gimbal-mounted, allowing for the gun muzzles to be elevated to a maximum of thirty degrees or so above the straight-on horizontal.
He thumbed open the hinged top of the joystick, exposing the firing stud. He flashed on the thought that this was like one of those old-time World War I aerial dogfights, the kind fought by the likes of von Richtofen, Guynemer, and Frank Luke, only instead of being waged with canvas-and-wire Spads and Fokkers with machine guns, it was between well-armed, souped-up ground vehicles.
Then there was time for nothing but the combat at hand as the Klondike and SUV’s game of chicken neared its end. Lead spanged and smeared off the Klondike’s armor-plated front as SUV gunmen hanging out of the windows fired at the machine.
Steve’s thumb depressed the firing stud, triggering twin bursts from the front-mounted auto-shotguns. Their yammering blasts were slightly terrific. He fired short bursts, pouring them into the front of the SUV, unleashing tremendous firepower. Finding the range, he used the joystick to elevate the angle of fire, raking the front of the SUV, ventilating engine and cab.
Grabbing the wheel with both hands, he broke off the engagement and the collision course, swerving right to avoid the SUV and the tanker truck.
The vehicles whooshed past each other. Behind the tanker, the police car that was chasing it swung into the outside western lane to steer clear of the Klondike.
Steve threw the emergency brake, whipping the wheel around to send the Klondike into a sliding, screeching bootlegger’s turn. The wheels burned rubber, laying down a cloud of gray-black smoke, as the Klondike executed a 180-degree turn.
Fred Osgood swore again, not under his breath this time but out loud. Steve released the emergency break and stomped the gas pedal, the south-pointing Klondike leaping ahead to resume the chase.
The tanker was experiencing difficulties. The SUV had turned from a vanguard striker to a corpse-wagon, courtesy of the Klondike’s twin auto-shotguns. It was just so much deadweight, no longer a road-clearer but a roadblock.
The tanker cab nudged the SUV to its right, bumping it, nudging it off the side of the road, clearing the way for the final assault on the toxic train, perhaps no more than a mile away.
Steve floored the Klondike, rapidly overtaking the tanker. The police car was trying to pass the tanker on the right. The tanker swerved right to block it, running it off the road into the field.
But the maneuver gave Steve the opportunity he needed to pass the tanker on the left. Overhauling it, he flashed past it. The V-12 engine showed its mettle, winding up and out on the rpms, widening the distance between it and the tanker.
All the while, though, the distance between the vehicles and the town and train was steadily decreasing. No more than a half mile separated them now.
Steve had been reluctant to rely on the auto-shotguns’ firepower, formidable though it was, to take out the tanker from the front, head-on. He wanted a sure thing. Now that he had enough of a lead, he readied his big move. Working the wheel and brakes, he swerved the car so that it glided sideways down the road, a move known to Nascar drivers and street racers, a variation of the technique sometimes called the Tokyo Drift.
The result was that the the Klondike squealed to a halt on the shoulder at right angles to the north-south road, with its front facing west.
The tanker came rushing past in the southbound lane, exposing its left flank to the Klondike’s auto-shotguns.
For a flash, Steve glimpsed the man in the driver’s seat, a long-faced fanatic whose distinguishing mane of high, wavy silver hair marked him unmistakeably as Khalid Khan, Tehran’s ace international executioner:
The man called Darius.
Steve thumbed the handgrip’s firing stud, unleashing stuttering bursts of auto-shotgun blasts that sieved the side of the cab and tore searing white-hot lines of force through the cylindrical tank loaded to the brim with inflammable gasoline.
He held down the stud for one final cont
inuous blast, the recoil from the twin auto-shotguns rocking the Klondike on its framework.
The guns fell silent, empty, only to be followed a few heartbeats later by rising crescendo of man-made thunder that seemed to announce the heavens were coming asunder.
It was the crack of doom as the contents of the tanker truck ignited and exploded in a titanic fireball that obliterated all but the outlines of the truck in the incandescent fury of its purifying inferno.
Roiling, expanding like a genie loosed from a bottle, it thrust skyward, climbing into a pillar of fire of biblical proportions.
Chunks of flaming debris rained down from the sky, while the skeletal framework of what had been the tanker rolled to a halt a quarter mile from the toxic train, which was still poking along in its sluggish way as it lumbered through Brigade to continue the final lap of its westward trek to a different kind of purifying inferno, the incinerator at Red Mesa.
Once he’d caught his breath, Fred Osgood let loose with a string of obscenities whose general theme was the mad recklessness of a certain so-and-so named Steve Ireland.
Steve grinned and took it, letting Osgood go on until he’d gotten it out of his system. He couldn’t blame him for it.
When Osgood was done, Steve shook his head in mock sadness and said, “Oh, ye of little faith! You should’ve known I wouldn’t come out second best—in a dogfight.”
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2009 William W. Johnstone
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 0-7860-2247-7
Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
COPYRIGHT
Revenge of the Dog Team Page 24