Combat Machines

by Don Pendleton

  At least, not yet. He smiled while leveling his weapon at the tailgate of the SUV, intending to fire as many bullets as it took to eliminate the shooter.

  About to squeeze the trigger, he heard the ululating scream of more French police vehicles approaching, and glanced behind him to see a pair of motorcycles speeding through traffic toward him.

  Panshin calmly aimed and fired at the vehicle ahead, even as the shooter popped up and fired several rounds, this time aimed at his SUV’s engine.

  Slugs drilled into the Range Rover’s rear door, and he knew at least one of them had to have penetrated—the only question was had it penetrated the shooter?

  Even as he tried to see, a gout of white smoke or steam—Panshin wasn’t sure which—burst from under the hood of his vehicle, which lurched and began to slow, shuddering as it lost power. Red warning lights bloomed on the dashboard, and the steering wheel felt sluggish under his hands.

  As it rolled to a stop in the middle of the lane, traffic flowing around it, Panshin saw the two police officers pull to a stop several yards behind him.

  “Throw out your weapons and come out with your hands up!” one of the officers commanded, first in French, then in English, his pistol aimed at the driver’s window.

  Glancing at the full duffel bag on the passenger seat beside him, Panshin smiled as he reached for the door handle.

  * * *

  “THAT’S THE LAST ONE!” Darsi shouted as he hurled the flaming bottle at the still-pursuing SUV. This one glanced off the hood but didn’t shatter, arcing high into the air to come down well behind it and turning the street into a pool of fire that made oncoming cars screech to a halt.

  “At least it’s a diversion for anyone behind them,” Nejem said as she whipped back and forth, trying to get some distance between them and their pursuers. “Where the hell is Alexei?”

  “Maybe he ran into other police?” Darsi called from his vantage point poking up out of the roof. “Or perhaps that dark-haired man?”

  “Regardless, we can’t keep this up much longer. If they get within range, we’ll be shot to pieces.”

  “I’m open to suggestions!” Darsi said.

  “Well, first we’ll try to lose them in traffic,” Nejem said as she cut across two lanes of traffic, the long limo sideswiping a Renault sedan, which honked furiously as she turned left onto the Rue Quentin-Bauchart, a one-way street. “You might want to come back inside.”

  “You’re going where?” Darsi asked as he dropped into the rear passenger area in time to see the blindingly bright headlights of oncoming traffic heading straight for them.

  The next two blocks and fifty-eight seconds were among the most harrowing of Nejem’s and Darsi’s lives. Not even shooting their way out of the Hôtel de Marigny could compare to avoiding the cars, trucks and panel vans clogging the street, often by just a layer or two of paint. Once, when both lanes were blocked, Nejem screeched to a halt just enough so she wouldn’t crash into a Lexus in front of her. However, she didn’t stop either, smacking into the luxury sedan hard enough to shove it out of the way with a long, ugly dent and scrape down its passenger side. Gunning the engine again, she forced her way through the narrow opening, losing both side mirrors in the process.

  “They’re still behind us,” Darsi said. “I could take a shot—”

  “Save your bullets. We may need them later,” Nejem said through clenched teeth as she spun the steering wheel back and forth, only her superior eye-hand coordination and razor-honed reflexes preventing them from piling up on more than one occasion. “Let Alexei know we’re going to ground!”

  Finally, they were through, and burst onto the short portion of Rue François 1er before hitting the T-intersection where it met with the Avenue George V. Hauling hard left on the wheel, Nejem bashed her way through nearby traffic waiting to merge and turned left again, heading toward the Seine. Their destination was less than a half mile away now.

  “Almost time for us to ditch this car,” she said to Darsi. “Grab the gear and get ready for a swim.”

  “What gear?” he asked even as the SUV, which had had an easier time following in their wake, tried pulling alongside again. Nejem drifted left to stop them, but it had been a feint, and they swung wide right and tried to pull up.

  She corrected with a vengeance, smashing the limo into the side of the SUV and rocking it over onto its left tires for a moment. The impact rebounded her car to the other side of the road, and for a moment she faced oncoming traffic again before getting back into her own lane.

  They had just passed the Rue de la Trémoille when the SUV caught up with them again. This time it stayed back, and the two shooters on the passenger side began trying to take out the rear driver’s-side tire. After several shots, one of them hit, and the tire blew out with a bang.

  The limo slowed, but Nejem kept the gas pedal crushed to the floor, urging the crippled car to keep moving forward. She could see the lights of the Pont de l’Alma in the distance, but first she had to navigate the busy intersection of several main thoroughfares that met right before it.

  Leaning on the horn, Nejem shot the wobbling limo into the intersection, with the SUV hard on its tail. Cars screeched to a halt and rear-ended one another as their drivers tried to avoid hitting the speeding black car, only to end up getting nailed themselves by other drivers.

  They had just reached the Cours Albert 1er when it happened. A car had just started to pull out, and Nejem couldn’t avoid hitting it. She did manage to jerk the wheel to the left just enough to avoid a head-on collision, but the right front corner of the limo exploded in a crumpled spray of plastic and glass as its head-and turning lights disintegrated in the impact.

  The other car spun out of the way, and she goosed the faltering car onto the bridge. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” he replied as he buckled his seat belt. “But I think you might want—”

  His words came too late. The moment she was sure they were over the water, Nejem cranked the wheel hard right. The limo jumped the curb, blowing out both tires in the process, and leaped awkwardly into the air, smashing through the glass-and-metal guardrail and plunging toward the dark water several yards below.

  It would have hit the surface, if there hadn’t been a sightseeing boat approaching the bridge at that exact moment. Falling like a three-tonne rock, the limo punched through the boat’s fiberglass-and-wood prow, and continued on its way into the river, leaving the panicked tourists and crew to abandon ship as best they could.

  Once the car was completely submerged, Nejem and Darsi freed themselves from their seat belts and maneuvered through the open windows, swimming underwater until they were several hundred yards downstream of the accident. Finding a deserted dock, they hauled themselves out of the water and began walking away.

  * * *

  “DAMN IT!” MIKHAIL SEVARON smacked the SUV’s roof in frustration.

  With all eyes on the accident in the Seine, the Russian cleanup team had taken the opportunity to leave the scene before they were spotted. However, Sevaron wanted to keep an eye on what was happening with the car, so they drove to the next bridge and parked by the side of the Cours Albert 1er.

  Using binoculars, they watched the efforts of the French police, river patrol and other boats as they rescued the soggy passengers from the sunken boat. A crowd had gathered to rubberneck, and sometimes the Russian team could barely see over them. With Sevaron standing on the running board of the vehicle, he looked just like any other nearby gawker.

  “Any sign of either of them?” Natalya Zimin asked.

  From inside the SUV, Sergei Bershov shook his head. “They won’t be here anyway.”

  Sevaron blew out an exasperated breath. “He’s right. They’ve escaped by now and could be anywhere along the river.”

  “You don’t think they could still be in the car?”
Illya Krivov asked.

  “If you want, you can hang around until they raise it and find out,” Sevaron said as he turned on his heel and stalked back to their SUV. “But I’ll bet you a year’s salary it’s empty.”

  “You pick up anything yet?” he asked the big man, who had an earpiece in his ear to listen to the police frequencies.

  He nodded. “A motorist shot two police officers and stole a bike. Last spotted heading west on the Champs-Élysées.”

  “Let’s go. I’ll drive.” Sevaron closed the passenger door and ran around to the driver’s side.

  “If he’s on a motorcycle, we’ll never catch up to him,” Krivov pointed out.

  “We’re already in too deep over this whole mess, and we’re still the closest we’ve been to them since getting here,” Sevaron said as he swung into the driver’s seat. “We’re going to keep following them until either they or we drop, and it better be them first.”

  Starting the engine, he leaned on the horn until the small crowd that had gathered even this far away slowly parted. “God save me from people with nothing to do,” Sevaron grumbled as he eased the SUV through to clear road. “Guide me, Sergei.”

  “Well, right now they’re on back on the Champs-Élysées,” Bershov said, showing him a possible route. “If you take these roads, we might be able to come out just behind them.”

  Sevaron’s only reply was to stomp on the gas pedal, making the SUV rocket forward onto the street.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Where are they?” Palomer asked as they drove farther down the boulevard. “It’s like both vehicles just up and disappeared.”

  “Get on the radio and see what you can find out,” Bolan said, still watching behind them. If the police took that assassin into custody, he’d want to talk to the man before he went to trial.

  From the front, he heard Palomer talking in rapid-fire French. Bolan took the time to contact Akira Tokaido at the Farm.

  “I need eyes on the Champs-Élysées,” Bolan said, “looking for two people in a limousine heading west-northwest, followed by four in an SUV. Gunfire and improvised explosives were exchanged between the two vehicles.”

  “I’ve got a lot of commotion along the river,” Tokaido replied, “but not too much on the road—Wait a minute... I’ve got someone coming up behind you at a high rate of speed.”

  “What? Where?” Bolan stared down the long, straight avenue, but there were too many lights from oncoming cars to pick out a single one easily.

  “They’re approximately five hundred yards out and closing rapidly. A limousine went into the Seine a few minutes ago, damaging a cruise boat as it did. Is that anything?” Tokaido asked.

  “I don’t know—hang on.” Above the traffic noise, Bolan heard the high whine of a motorcycle. He thought he saw its headlight, but there were no sirens.

  “How about a report of two police officers shot and a motorcycle stolen on the Champs-Élysées?”

  “Damn it, that’s the one! Stay on him, Akira! Marie, we’re going to have company!” Bolan said, even as bullets chopped into the body of the SUV. A blur streaked by them, flame and slugs spitting from the submachine gun held by the driver.

  Caught by surprise, Palomer hadn’t gotten a chance to try to take him down with the vehicle. Instead, she’d hunched down as the assassin had shot by, then punched the gas again. “Damn it, he’s not getting away from us!” she said as she pushed the SUV ahead ever faster.

  But the man on the motorcycle was a veritable demon on two wheels. He shot through gaps Bolan thought he himself might have difficulty making, and in one instance used a Porsche 911 in the opposite lane as a ramp to clear a traffic snarl stretching across all eight lanes. Palomer lost precious seconds clearing the sidewalk so she could go around and resume the pursuit.

  Despite how fast they seemed to be going, they hadn’t gotten more than a few miles from the Hôtel de Marigny. She had radioed in their position, and sirens could be heard in the distance, but they were too far off to set up any sort of effective cordon or roadblock.

  “I’m tracking him now—wait a sec,” Tokaido said. “He’s slowing. He’s stopping at the Arc de Triomphe...he’s ditching the bike and heading into the Metro, Charles de Gaulle-Etoile station.”

  “Metro station at the Arc, hurry!” Bolan said. “Keep tracking him, Akira.”

  “I’m on him.”

  The giant marble arch was visible in the distance, but it still took an agonizing minute to get close enough to get out and continue on foot after radioing in their location. Bolan and Palomer ran though the arched corridor and down the stairs into the broad tunnel.

  The platform was sparsely populated, with only a couple dozen people standing along the edge waiting for the next train. Trying to quiet his breathing, Bolan quickly scanned up and down the platform, looking for the dark-haired man without trying to look conspicuous. Even the lightly populated area could become a bloodbath if the man pulled his gun and began shooting again.

  “I don’t see him anywhere, do you?” Palomer asked.

  “No. He must be hiding among these people. Let’s head down to the end and take it all the way back.”

  Bolan hadn’t gone more than a half dozen steps when he saw the man leaning against the wall near where the train would enter the station. He’d ditched his black tuxedo jacket, and had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, hanging between his body and the wall as he stared at his phone, just like most of the passengers were.

  “I’ve got him, six yards ahead, against the wall,” he said quietly to Palomer. “I’m going to take him. Cover me.”

  She nodded, pulling her pistol and keeping it down at her side as she fell in a pace behind him.

  Bolan kept moving forward, covering the distance between him and his target in three long strides. But when he unleathered his pistol, the man was already turning toward him, bag held at his side—with his other hand inside it.

  In that moment, Bolan realized his mistake. “Yves” was going to shoot through it! The Executioner lashed out with his foot, connecting with the bag and shoving it up as the man pulled the trigger. The end of the duffel exploded in fire and lead, and the sustained chatter of the burst echoed loudly down the tunnel.

  At the same time, Bolan pulled the trigger of his pistol, the bullet hitting the guy in the lower abdomen.

  Screams erupted along the platform as people scrambled to get away from the shooter. Palomer shouted something, hopefully instructions for people to evacuate, but Bolan couldn’t pay attention to that, as he had his hands full.

  The man’s phone hand shot out and slapped Bolan’s pistol away, hard enough to throw off his balance for just a moment. His opponent’s leg snapped out, and Bolan managed to pivot just enough to avoid taking the foot in his crotch. Instead, the blow landed on his thigh and was strong enough to make him stagger backward.

  Shaking it off, the Executioner tried to bring his pistol back on line, but the guy was coming at him now, and he moved fast. Bolan thought he had a bead on him, but he dodged out of the way, and the next thing he knew, his adversary had grabbed his pistol and stripped the slide off with one hand, dropping the pieces to the ground.

  Then the assassin stepped closer and aimed a palm heel strike to Bolan’s nose. He barely dodged it, feeling the man’s hand displace air as it grazed the side of his head, then he felt pain there, and realized the guy had turned his hand to gouge at his ear and cheek on the return.

  Bolan had faced many opponents in his time, going up against every sort of combat expert in the world. His own style of fighting was swift and deadly, and rarely could anyone stand up to it for very long.

  He grabbed the man’s hand as he pulled it away, but his opponent freed it before he could get a solid grip. No matter. Still holding the bottom of his pistol, he threw it at the man’s head, uns
urprised to see him duck. That was unimportant, however, as it had only been a feint anyway.

  Bolan stepped in and lashed out with another snap kick, this one aimed at the man’s stomach. The simple, powerful blow often stopped a fight cold if executed correctly, and this one was a masterpiece, striking the other man squarely in the pit of his stomach—right where he’d shot the man, as well—and should have dropped him to the ground, puking his guts out.

  That, however, didn’t happen.

  The first thing Bolan noticed was how solid the guy was. He might as well have been trying to kick a brick wall. Also, the guy took the shot, stepped back just a bit with the impact, then trapped Bolan’s foot, obviously intending to pull him off his feet and slam him to the floor.

  Instead, the Executioner launched himself into the air, intent on kicking the man in the face with his other foot while both hands were occupied. Stunned by the shot to the face, the man would release his foot, and Bolan would be able to pull at least one of them back to land. It was a risky move, requiring incredible physical control and split-second timing that few martial artists in the world could pull off, but its surprise factor guaranteed that no one would be able to stop it.

  This man, however, did. He got a hand free and up to intercept the blow before it connected, pushing his attacking foot upward. With his other shoe still held firmly, Bolan crashed to the concrete platform, hard.

  But the assassin wasn’t done yet. Before Bolan could recover, the man twisted his opponent’s foot, hard enough to make him flip over to avoid breaking his ankle. The only problem with that was that he was already on the edge of the platform, and now he went over, crashing onto the tracks a yard below.

  The man jumped down behind him and took off into the dark tunnel.

  “Are you all right, Agent Cooper?” Palomer asked from above.

  “Yeah,” Bolan said as he rose to his feet, even though he didn’t feel all that great—not physically, but because he had underestimated his opponent. “Where’s this tunnel lead?”