And when he caught up to the runners, more were bound to die.
Chapter Fifteen
Westbound on East Byrd Street
Randall Darby held the Escalade at 80 miles per hour, give or take, eyes flicking constantly between his rearview mirror and the road ahead of him. Most of the lunchtime traffic on East Byrd Street had finally ground to a halt, drivers aware that something verging on apocalyptic had occurred in front of them. Most didn’t know exactly what had happened, cursing their bad luck, but they knew enough to stop, instead of plowing into other halted cars.
“Jesus! Watch out up there!” his passenger blurted as Darby swung around one vehicle, nearly sideswiped another in his haste, and kept on plowing straight ahead.
“I’ve got this,” he replied. “Just keep your eyes open for black-and-whites.”
There had been no sign of any local cops so far, but rising sirens told him they were on their way.
Distance was critical right now—putting sufficient space between them and the catastrophe they’d left behind—so he could slow the Caddy a bit and try to blend with the traffic, rather than alert any hostile eyes with excess speed and reckless driving.
In the Escalade’s backseat, if Darby craned his neck a bit, he could make out the two black duffel bags of cash, the ultimate reward of all his planning, leading up to treason and the knowledge he was never going home again.
So what?
The US Army was the only home he’d known for fifteen years, and he was sick of it. Time to retire and do some living by his own rules now.
As if reading his mind, Tanner inquired, “How much you think we’ve got back there?”
“Enough,” Darby assured the former captain, biting off the rest of it. And all for me, you poor, dumb sap.
“Enough, right,” Tanner echoed. “But I mean—”
“Shut up a second,” Darby ordered, eyes locked on his rearview now. Behind them, gaining rapidly, a jet-black SUV had captured his attention for its speed, weaving through traffic much as Darby was himself.
“What is it?” Tanner challenged.
“Maybe nothing, but...” Darby looked closer, swallowed back a bitter curse. “No. It’s a tail.”
Tanner twisted around to eye the chase car through the Escalade’s rear window. “Are you sure?”
“Watch it. Do you think he’s chasing us or not?”
Another second and Tanner replied, “You’re right, damn it! Who do you think it is?”
“The Secret Service. Maybe someone else,” Darby replied. “Don’t know, don’t care. We have to lose them, period.”
Tanner was grappling with his M-4 carbine and trying to climb into the rear, over the center console, but there wasn’t room enough for him to pull it off. Turning the air blue with profanity, he raised his weapon, braced it, and lined up on the charging enemy as best he could from where he sat.
“Slow down a little, Major. I can take him out.”
“Screw that,” Darby replied. “I didn’t take evasive driving for the fun of it.”
“I wouldn’t count on losing him,” Tanner objected, eye still focused through his M-4’s optic sight. “If he just gets a little closer, I can—”
Darby cut him off by swerving from their lane, across oncoming traffic with a squeal of rubber from the Caddy’s tires. Horns bleated in protest, drivers giving him the finger, mouthing imprecations that he’d never hear as he cut across their line of travel and accelerated like a demolition derby driver high on crack.
“Hang on!” he warned Tanner, too late, lips drawn back in a fierce grin as his passenger began to curse again.
* * *
Bolan knew he would have to stop the Escalade at any cost, and hopefully before its driver started plowing into other cars, killing or injuring civilians in his rush to get away. He couldn’t fire his AUG one-handed from the open driver’s window without risking stray rounds cutting through cars occupied by bystanders. But if he tried another angle of attack...
Bolan drew his Desert Eagle from its holster on his hip. The heavy pistol was already loaded, eight .44 Magnum rounds in its magazine and one more in the pipe. As Bolan shifted hands, he thumbed back the weapon’s single-action hammer to cock it, the ambidextrous safety already released, as he thrust his right arm through the driver’s window, elbow locked and braced against the padded windowsill.
Firing a heavy pistol from a moving car took skill and practice, most particularly when the shooter was driving simultaneously and couldn’t lean out the window, using iron sights as he would if he were on a firing range. Aside from fighting the recoil, he had to estimate the proper angle, gauge windage and elevation, then hold steady on his target and discover whether he was on the mark or not.
It was a gamble, sure, and lives were riding on the line—in this case, people he had never met or even seen before, their faces masked behind the glare of windshields glinting back at Bolan from the growing traffic jam on East Byrd Street. One miss could mean a fatal hit on someone who expected lunch with friends instead of sudden death exploding through a screen of safety glass to take them out.
But he had to fire, and so he did.
The Desert Eagle kicked against his palm, its recoil traveling up Bolan’s arm to shoulder height and stopping there. Its ear-numbing explosion sent 240 grains of lead and copper hurtling downrange at 1,475 feet per second, far outdistancing the Ford’s 70 miles per hour plus.
Where would it land?
Bolan received his answer as the Escalade’s tinted rear window buckled inward, giving him his first clear view of two men hunched in the front bucket seats, shocked to discover they were on the firing line again.
And if he’d done it once...
* * *
“Shit!” Tanner blurted. “What’s he got back there, a howitzer?”
“Screw what he’s got,” Darby replied through gritted teeth. “Use what you’ve got and take him off the board.”
“Yeah. Right.”
Tanner began returning fire in 3-round bursts, but from the curses he appended to each one, he wasn’t having much luck. Darby saw that much, himself, watching the chase car and its single occupant swerve left and right, avoiding slugs that came his way.
The one-time major saw that in his rearview mirror, then a muzzle-flash erupted from the open driver’s window of the speeding SUV and Darby heard a mini freight train rattle past his right ear, taking out the mirror and the windshield its post was fastened to. One second he was racing down the highway, then a storm of pebbled safety glass blew out across the Escalade’s black hood, some of it tumbling back with wind rush from their passage, falling into Darby’s lap.
“Bastard’s got our range!” Tanner blurted before firing another futile burst from his carbine.
“What was your first clue, Einstein?” Darby goaded him.
“Hey, Major, this shit’s not my—”
Fault, he likely meant to say, but then another heavy slug passed through the Cadillac from rear to front, ripping the fabric overhead and taking out a dome light in a spray of shattered plastic. Part of it sliced Darby’s cheek, releasing warm, fresh blood, but he was focused on his driving now, and on surviving long enough to spend the stolen cash that waited for him in the Escalade’s backseat.
“Hang on!” he cautioned Tanner, cranking hard left on the steering wheel and barely making it between two eastbound cars as they swerved off southward. As it was, they clipped the front end of a yellow taxi with the Caddy’s right-rear fender, taking out one of the cab’s headlights and prompting yet another round of shouting in their wake.
“Where are we going?” Tanner asked, clinging to a leather-covered handle set into the door frame overhead.
“The graveyard,” Darby answered through a fearsome grin.
“Say what?” Tanner demanded, but there was no time for any furthe
r questions as they jumped the curb and made a beeline for a pair of tall, elaborate cemetery gates, chained shut and padlocked against entry.
* * *
Bolan triggered a third .44 Magnum round and hit the Escalade, but missed both of its passengers again. At least the Ranger in the shotgun seat had given up trying to pot him with a lucky burst from his autocarbine. Likely startled as Bolan’s shot clipped off the Caddy’s rearview mirror, blew a broad gap through its windshield and unnerved the driver just enough to make him give the steering wheel a jerky little twist.
Before his adversaries could recover from that shock, Bolan squeezed off a fourth round from the Desert Eagle, scored another hit inside the Escalade, and saw the other driver clap a hand against the right side of his face. Some kind of fragment, he surmised, either a stray piece of his jacketed hollowpoint slug or something from the Cadillac’s interior blown loose on impact.
Either way, it didn’t slow the fleeing Rangers, but seemed to change the driver’s mind about where he was headed. Bolan was lining up a fifth shot with his massive pistol when the Escalade swerved sharply to the left, sideswiped the front end of a taxi to produce a blaring horn and shaken fist, then bounced across the westbound curb and homed in on a looming wrought-iron gate set into seven-foot brick walls.
One of the East Byrd Street cemeteries. Right. Bolan didn’t even try to see its sign or guess which one. He took a chance before starting his own turn, triggering shot number five while broadside to the Escalade and hoping he could take out its driver, but varying momentums spoiled the shot. Instead of striking flesh and bone, he hit the driver’s wing mirror and sheared it off the vehicle as cleanly as a saber might have done.
The outraged taxi driver had begun to inch his cab forward again when Bolan cut him off, scraping a strip of black paint from the flank of the Secret Service vehicle. Whatever oaths the cabbie shouted after him were lost as Bolan jumped the curb and sped after his last two fleeing enemies.
* * *
Crashing the cemetery gate had scarred the Escalade from grille to flanks, peeling paint in long strips, but its solid construction kept it from stalling on impact and reminded Randall Darby that its name referred to a tactic of scaling ramparts in a siege, with the aid of ladders or towers.
The windshield was already gone when they rammed through the gate, so no glass had flown into the passenger compartment. All airbags on the dash and front doors had deployed, of course. Darby took a moment slashing at them with his knife, then cut his safety harness as he reached down to unlatch the driver’s door. Beside him, Captain Tanner moaned and cursed, then shook it off and emulated Darby, hacking at the white balloons around him to release him from their envelopment.
“Get moving!” Darby ordered, just in case a haze still hung between his fellow Ranger’s ears. “Retrieve your duffel and come on!”
“Come where?” Tanner replied as he was sliding from his seat and out through the passenger’s door.
Darby decided he might as well speak plainly now, if he was ever going to. “Just go,” he said. “From here on out, it’s each man for himself.”
“But I—”
“No arguments, Captain. Whoever shot us off the road is right behind us. Once we’ve dealt with him, we split and make a run for it. Case closed.”
Tanner decided not to argue further, but he did his share of glaring as he got the Caddy’s starboard back door open, grabbed his heavy duffel of loot and slung its strap over his shoulder once again. He double-checked his M-4 carbine, making sure the weapon hadn’t jammed, then told the major, “Ready, sir.”
Darby was watching East Byrd Street. He saw the Ford Explorer they’d been dodging from the ambush site swinging across oncoming lanes of traffic, heedless of the hoots and horns, pursuing them toward the mangled cemetery gate.
“Pick a direction, then,” he told Tanner, “and get your ass in gear. I’m heading for the back wall of this boneyard. You go somewhere else.”
“I’ll try the east,” Tanner told him. “If we don’t meet up again—”
“We won’t,” Darby assured him, then began to run as best he could with so much bundled money on his back, leaving the shooter who’d pursued them to decide which man he’d chase on foot.
One or the other, so the major’s odds were fifty-fifty, starting out.
He ran, and didn’t bother looking back to check the progress of the shooter tracking them. From grim experience in other combat zones, Darby knew he’d receive notice of looming danger when the guy triggered another of his Magnum slugs. If Tanner was the mark, that shot would tell Darby approximately where his enemy was situated, and he’d go to ground, try waiting out the enemy until he had a clear shot of his own.
And if the bullet came his way...well, then he’d know how bundled, shrink-wrapped currency served as a supplemental form of body armor.
One way or the other, Darby knew, the first phase of pursuit would end right there, among the dead and buried. It had been inevitable, and he’d settle it by killing, or by dying on the spot.
But if he lived and made it clear of the brick cemetery walls, then he was on a roll and one step closer to the life he’d planned, starting the moment when he’d first conceived the notion of a sham defection, a jihadist “manifesto” and the rest of it.
Do or die. Go big or go back to the dust he had come from.
And either way, given a choice, Darby would go down fighting like the Ranger he had been.
As he loped across the graveyard, he repeated snippets of the Ranger Creed and came down to the core of it. “Surrender is not a Ranger word.”
Damn straight.
* * *
The Caddy Escalade was standing with its four doors open when Mack Bolan pulled alongside it in his borrowed Ford Explorer. Both occupants had bailed, and he could see them running off in different directions, burdened by fat duffel bags containing what could only be loot stolen from the Secret Service convoy’s second armored truck.
How much? He didn’t know and didn’t care. Much more had been abandoned at the ambush site, perhaps as planned from the beginning, when the holdup scheme was hatched and then disguised as group defection from the Rangers, masked by Islamist rhetoric to keep Washington guessing and off balance.
Now the only question was which man he should go after first.
Spotting them from behind, he didn’t know which one was Randall Darby or his sole surviving comrade from the shootout on East Byrd Street, Walton Tanner Jr. Both of them were highly dangerous, but Bolan reckoned Darby was the brains behind the operation, thus more likely to have a cohesive exit strategy in place, assuming he survived the daylight raid.
So far, he had—and Bolan meant to change that, starting now.
First thing, as he cleared the Ford, Bolan holstered his Desert Eagle and reached back inside the SUV to grab his Steyr assault rifle. Its caliber was smaller, granted, but its Swarovski Optik sight with black-ring reticle with basic rangefinder gave him an extra hundred yards over the pistol’s maximum effective range. Pair that with a muzzle velocity nearly tripling the .44 Magnum pistol’s, with three times the ammo capacity, and it was no contest.
Virtually anyplace within the cemetery’s gently rolling grounds was fair game for the Steyr AUG, so Bolan chose the target nearest him, lined up his telescopic sight on what he could see of the runner’s retreating scalp, then reconsidered. Too small a target, and he didn’t want to lightly graze his adversary; not if he could bring the one-time Ranger down and stop him cold.
So, try the fat, black duffel bag. Why not?
Bolan made the small adjustment, framed his target so the enemy completely filled its reticle and then fired a single shot in semiautomatic mode. Downrange, he saw the bullet strike its target, saw the ripstop fabric pop and recoil from impact, and then his man went down.
Down but not out.
Though o
bviously stunned, the runner salvaged something from his fall, powering forward on his knees and elbows, till he’d ducked around an old, moss-covered monument to some departed family from long ago, likely forgotten now by everyone except surviving kin they’d left behind.
Wounded or only dazed?
The Executioner knew there was only one way he could answer that: by following his mark and finding out, then ending it.
Meanwhile, he still had another man on the run, covering ground.
Chapter Sixteen
Walton Tanner fought to catch his breath after a slug had drilled into the bag of cash he carried on his back. Crouching behind a tombstone five feet high and four feet wide sapped his remaining energy while he tried to recover, setting his M-4 carbine on the grass, ducking his head to clear the wide strap of the duffel that spanned his heaving chest.
How close was that?
He couldn’t say, in terms of inches from the bullet finding flesh, but its impact into the armored vest had felt like someone kicking him in the back during a full-contact karate match. Once he had moved the strap aside, he breathed a little easier, chest less constricted than it had been seconds earlier.
Small favors, Tanner thought, and made a wry face as he sat, listening to hear his enemy approach.
There’d been no second shot, which meant the man who’d gunned him down had not tried bagging Major Darby the same way. Why not?
Tanner immediately put that problem out of mind and concentrated on his more immediate concern: surviving long enough to clear the bone orchard and grab some transport for the next step in his getaway.
Cursing the major for abandoning him, when they could have made it two-on-one against their common enemy, would be a waste of precious breath and time. The shooter, whoever he was, must have him spotted now—or, anyway, the monument he’d gone to ground behind. If Tanner budged an inch from cover, he’d be open to another shot, and that one might not simply knock the wind out of his lungs.
So wait. And if he couldn’t see his enemy, then do the next best thing and listen. Soft grass underneath his feet told Tanner his adversary could approach him quietly, but who was really, absolutely, silent in the scheme of things? Darting his eyes from left to right, he knew the enemy wasn’t outflanking him. It had to be a straight-on walk up to the grave marker. If he gauged the time and distance properly...
Enemies Within Page 16