24: Deadline (24 Series)

by James Swallow

  Perhaps the guy Jack had killed with the knife had been a blood brother of this towering biker, or perhaps he was just deep in his rage and out for murder. Whatever the reason, the big man seemed ignorant of all the property damage he was doing and product he was destroying. He just wanted to beat Jack to death.

  Jack tasted blood in his mouth as he struck the racks again, feeling the rebandaged bullet wound beneath his shirt rip open afresh. He was on the edge of a concussion, losing his grip on the fight, suddenly caught by the undertow of fatigue that he had been fighting off since he left New York City. If he lost his grip now, that would be the end of it.

  No. Jack arched his back and threw up his hands. Before the big man could react, he brought them both down in hard chopping motions on either side of his thick neck. The double blow was enough to jar the biker out of his rhythm, and Jack followed it up by jerking forward again. He brought his forehead down as hard as he could on the bridge of the man’s nose and was rewarded by the crunch of breaking cartilage. Abruptly, he was out of his assailant’s powerful grip and falling to the floor as the biker snarled and clutched at his face. Jack landed badly and cursed, scrambling back to his feet as quickly as he could, ignoring the cascades of pain rolling up along his torso.

  Streaked with blood, the long-haired biker gave a wordless bellow of fury and reached for Jack again, hands out before him in grasping talons.

  Jack grabbed the first thing that would serve as a weapon—a glass chemical bottle—and hurled it at the other man. It broke against his chest and instantly an acrid, sickly sweet stench filled Jack’s nostrils. Where the liquid in the bottle had struck, the biker’s shirt, his jacket, his bare skin were burning ghost-white with a vicious acidic reaction. The big man’s eyes widened and he forgot all about Jack, instead clawing at the spreading patch of hissing, melting material. He screamed and staggered backward as the concentrated hydrochloric acid ate into him. Before Jack could get clear, the wounded man’s flailing motions sent the man pitching into another workbench, where an unshielded gas burner was alight with yellow flames. Fire caught the biker’s trailing hair and it instantly became a torch. He knocked the burner on its side and Jack saw the flames escape across the span of the bench, greedily devouring everything they touched.

  There was a hot surge of smoldering air, and for the second time that night Jack turned away as an infernal heat beat at his back.

  * * *

  The belch of fire from across the meth factory was so bright, so sudden, that it made Chase hesitate—and that was the moment his attackers had been looking for. The closest man went for him with the cattle prod, leading with a jabbing motion. Chase tried to parry the blow, making the block through pure reflex action, but it was ill-timed and missed the motion. Instead the metal tines of the prod glanced off the flesh just above his wrist, in the meat of his forearm muscle.

  It hit him like a hammer. Fireworks detonated behind Chase’s eyes and a shuddering shock went through his entire body as every sinew in him seemed to go taut at once. But Chase fought back, he chewed down the pain and forced it away. The sharp, quick bolt of agony was not new to him. He had felt the same kind of brutal burn through his damaged flesh more than once, and it did not lay him out as that Taser shot had, all those years ago in training. Maybe it was the wound, the places where the nerves in his severed and reattached hand had never truly healed. Maybe that kind of pain was something he had become insensate to. It didn’t matter.

  Chase struck out with his good hand and grabbed the cattle prod before his first attacker could reel back and away. He deflected the sparking tip of the weapon away from his midriff and forced it back into the chest of his assailant. Chase slammed the deadened palm of his bad hand into the base of the prod where the trigger button was located, and before he could stop himself, the biker was forced to discharge his own weapon into his torso. A buzzing crackle cut through the Night Ranger’s shirt and he went into a twitching spasm, crying out as his legs turned to water.

  Disarming him as he fell away to the chemical-slicked floor, Chase spun around to meet the attack he knew was coming from the other biker. He batted the other man’s cattle prod away with the one he had taken, and triggered it into the face of the second assailant. The electro-conductive tines didn’t make contact with flesh, but the searing burst of discharge was enough to flash blind the other man at such close range. While he was clawing at his eyes, Chase rocked forward and clubbed him hard about the head, putting down the third of them.

  Panting and shaking, he turned to hear the snap-clack of a round being racked into the breech of a shotgun.

  * * *

  With the drug factory now alight, the last Night Ranger guard decided to ignore Jack’s warning about uncontrolled gunplay inside the garage bunker and opened fire with a pump-action Winchester M12, blasting away with heavy-gauge buckshot that blew ragged holes in water tanks and shredded debris across the workbenches.

  Jack dove for cover as a glass carboy full of chemicals blew apart behind him, spilling more poisonous liquids into the growing slick across the concrete floor. Streamers of orange flame crawled up the nearby walls and gathered along the ceiling. His throat stung with the cut of toxic gasses that were building up inside the enclosed space. Every worker had broken and run, leaving whatever they had been doing to boil over, catch fire or otherwise turn lethal.

  He moved, hunched low, as more shotgun blasts peppered the workbench to his side. The biker with the gun was yelling something, but Jack didn’t listen. This fool was standing between him and the exit.

  He drew the M1911 pistol from his jacket pocket and in a smooth, continuous motion, Jack burst out of his cover and into the open, the gun rising into a Modified Weaver stance as the sights came level with his eyeline. The shotgunner was already aiming in Jack’s direction—to hesitate would mean it was game over.

  Jack fired a single .45 ACP round that caught the biker center-mass, striking his chest just below the sternum. The man went down, the ragged cavern the penetrating bullet tore through his lungs filling with blood.

  He kicked the shotgun away from the dying man’s grip and cast around. It was getting hard to breathe now, and the noxious smoke filling the chamber made his eyes sting. Jack saw movement, and a figure lurched out of the haze toward him.

  “Chase…”

  The other man nodded, handing him the MP5/10 he had lost in his earlier fight. “Thought you’d want this back.”

  Jack nodded and holstered the pistol, breaking into a jog as he checked the SMG and brought it to the ready. “Let’s go!”

  “Right behind you…”

  Acrid, sour vapor billowed out of the open bunker door, and Jack and Chase stumbled blindly through it—and into a storm of gunfire.

  The Night Rangers gathered outside had witnessed the sudden, mass exodus of the workers from the old tank garage, and their reaction had been a predictable one. Weapons came out, and they opened fire on their captives, shouting at them to go back. Caught between a building inferno and a rain of bullets, they had scattered. Many had been cut down or badly wounded as the bikers reacted with violent reprisal.

  Jack switched his Heckler & Koch to burst-fire and shot back into the ranks of the Night Rangers, and they reacted with shock, never expecting to take withering salvos of 10mm bullets from what they had thought were unarmed targets. Chase did the same, spraying three-round jolts across the open parade ground. Shooters caught unawares were hit and went down hard, but it only took a few seconds for the rest of them to locate the source of the incoming fire.

  Finding temporary cover behind a stack of wooden forklift pallets, Jack unloaded the rest of his rounds with a blind burst and reloaded. Behind them, the open doors of the bunker were like the mouth of hell, the hot breath of the fire searing and poisonous. He glanced at Chase as the other man picked off his targets. “The bus,” said Jack, inclining his head toward the battered old Greyhound. “Can you drive it?”

  “Sure, if there wasn’t
ten guys between me and it.” Chase flinched as bullets chewed splinters out of the pile of pallets.

  “Get the captives on board and get them the hell out of here. Don’t stop for anything.”

  Chase gave him a level look. “And you’re gonna be doing what, exactly?”

  “I’ll draw them off.” Chase opened his mouth to say something, perhaps to suggest that was a damned stupid idea that could get him killed, but Jack didn’t wait around to hear it.

  He burst out from behind his cover with a shout on his lips, running as fast as he could in a diagonal path across the open ground, firing the MP5/10 from the hip in chattering bursts of fire.

  Shots from the Night Rangers sliced through the air around him, heavy-caliber rounds spanking off the ground near his feet as he sprinted toward a cluster of tumbledown buildings that had once been shower blocks. He heard the choking snarl of motorbike engines behind him and the white glow of a headlight washed across his path like a search beam. A too-close shot hummed past his ear, so near it made him flinch and almost stumble over the broken brickwork surrounding the fallen blockhouse. Jack ducked around the side of the building as guns boomed and more rounds lanced after him.

  “Get that sucker!” Jack heard someone shouting, baying for his blood. “Get the bikes, run him into the dirt!”

  More engines growled to life after the first, and he knew the hunt was on. He smiled. Good. The more of them after him, the better chance Chase had to do what they had come here for.

  The white beam that had briefly silhouetted him as he pounded across the parade ground now swept over the sides of the blockhouse, and Jack knew that the leading rider would be upon him in moments. Slinging the MP5/10 over his shoulder, he grabbed a section of rusted rebar lying amid the ruins of the half-collapsed shower block and went flat against the wall.

  The bike came thundering around the corner of the blockhouse, a matte black Harley-Davidson Iron 883, its engine emitting a nasal, big-cat snarl. The rider—a Night Ranger from the Dakotas charter—had only a fraction of a second to process the flash of movement from the corner of his vision before Jack struck out with the iron rod. The length of rebar hit him across the chest, instantly dislodging the biker from his saddle and pitching him back over the rear wheel. Ribs shattered by the impact, the Night Ranger could only lie there and fight for breath.

  The riderless bike wobbled and fell over, slewing to a halt in a spray of gravel. Jack sprinted to it, pitching the Harley back onto its wheels with a grunt of effort. He slipped easily into the saddle and gunned the throttle, bringing the motorcycle around toward the direction it had come. With the MP5/10 in his hand, Jack accelerated away, back down the narrow alley between the shower blocks. He shot out in front of the rest of the Night Ranger pack, spraying bullets in their direction as he slewed the bike away from the tank garage and the motor pool hangar.

  The night was torn by more howling engines as the bikers turned the pursuit into a hunt, hurtling after Jack on his stolen mount, following him as he wove a slalom course around abandoned vehicles and potholed sections of the old base’s wide streets. Fort Blake’s derelict buildings echoed with the noise. Jack dared to throw a look over his shoulder as he pulled the submachine gun’s trigger again. The weapon’s breech locked open with a metallic snap as the last round in the magazine was expended, but the shots fired had made a mark. One of the bikes snapping at his heels abruptly twisted into a sideways skid, veering into a mud-choked ditch. Jack let the spent weapon drop on its sling again and hunched forward over the Harley’s gas tank, cutting the air resistance as it pulled at his jacket.

  The roadway ahead terminated in a T-junction. The footprint of the army base’s ghost town roads was just three or four blocks square, laid out in a wide grid that doubled back on itself. For a moment, Jack wondered about cutting the head off the junction and blazing a path out across the tall grasses beyond—but the heavy Harley was no cross-country scrambler, and if he hit a hidden gulley out there, it would all be over.

  Instead, waiting until the last possible second, he pushed into a leaning turn that followed a sharp race-line curve to the left, powering the bike through as the rear tire left black streaks on the crumbling asphalt. Guns barked behind him. Some of the riders were trying to get off a lucky shot in hopes of knocking him out of the saddle. Jack worked the handlebars, putting the bike through a sidewinder slide to throw off their aim.

  “Jack! Jack?” It took him a long second before he realized that the faint voice he could hear was issuing out of the tactical radio still clipped to his belt. “We’re on the move,” he heard Chase say. “Rolling out. You copy? Jack, do you copy me?”

  He couldn’t risk letting go of the handlebars to toggle the radio and respond. Jack could only hope that Chase would be able to get the bus and the press-ganged workers away from the base before the bikers realized they had been blindsided.

  * * *

  “Holy crap!” Fang cried out as the little business jet screamed low over his head and turned in a wide, sharp bank before lining itself up with the middle of the highway. He blinked and grinned as he realized what was going to happen. “Well, lookit. This is gonna be interestin’.”

  The jet dropped toward the white line running down the middle of the road, the running lights on the wings and the undercarriage dazzling as it came nose-on. Fang heard the squealing of the tires hitting the asphalt and then the rolling thunder of the engines as they went into reverse. Wheel brakes screeched as the aircraft frantically bled off speed, shaking and shuddering as it bounced over a surface never designed for the relatively smooth ride a jet plane required.

  Sitting atop his bike, it didn’t occur to Fang to get out of the way, unlike some of the other Night Rangers who had come out here with him, past the outer limits of Deadline. They backed off, but he kept waiting, grinning at the jet as the distance between the aircraft’s nose cone and the handlebars of his panhead grew less and less. After all, Fang had once faced down a brown bear and lived to talk about it. That was how he had gotten his nickname. He didn’t see this as any different.

  The biker could see the faces of the pilot and copilot clearly by the time the plane rolled to a halt no more than twenty feet from his idling motorcycle. He gave them a jaunty salute, which neither man returned. Fang chuckled to himself and got off, wandering to the side of the plane as the cabin door dropped open.

  An angry-looking guy in a suit filled the doorway. “You’re not Rydell.”

  “Naw,” Fang admitted. “I’m the welcoming committee. You gotta be Special Agent Hadley, yeah?” He nodded at the plane. “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one, huh?” He gave a low whistle.

  “Where is he?”

  Fang gestured back in the direction of the town. “He’s puttin’ something together for ya.”

  Another man, young and serious, appeared behind Hadley. “Where are we?”

  Fang spread his hands. “Welcome to Deadline!” He pointed out a car—a dusty Ford Contour that the MC kept around for the times when they needed a cage—and tossed the keys to Hadley. “Got ya some wheels for while you’re visitin’. Y’all can leave your bird here and follow us.” He wandered back to his bike and revved the motor, turning it around, aiming it back down the highway. Around him, the first drops of rain started to fall from the sky.

  He heard the other FBI agent asking a question. “What have you done, Hadley? What’s going on?”

  “I’m making use of available resources,” he snapped. “Get the others. We’re on the move.”

  18

  The Night Rangers were still on him as Jack veered the stolen Harley-Davidson off the cracked roadway and down a narrower side street that threaded between a line of low, wide hangars. Sheer sheet-metal walls reared up on either side of him, capturing the howl of the bikes and reflecting it back. Off to one side, Jack could see the growing pillar of smoke rising from the burning drug factory and he used it as a landmark, orienting himself. There was little light here, n
othing but the glow from his Harley’s headlamp, nothing to warn him of a sinkhole ahead or a lethally broken stretch of asphalt until it was too late. One of the bikes pursuing him had already fallen to such a hazard, and Jack didn’t want to go out the same way.

  To his right he saw that one of the hangar doors was partly open, a tall and thin gap wide enough for two men abreast. At the last second, Jack jerked the handlebars and veered off the road and into the echoing space. He thought he heard a bullet clank off the doors but then he was through and roaring across the empty, warehouse-sized area.

  He hoped that there would be another open door on the far side, but immediately he saw he had been mistaken. Nothing but walls were visible in the spill from his headlight, and Jack knew he would have to act quickly. His miscalculation could see him trapped in here, and then the bikers would have him.

  The Harley bounced over something and he glimpsed the corroded length of discarded chains snaking across the dusty concrete. Jack pumped the brakes and slowed down, leaning out of the saddle so he could snatch up a fat steel link and pull it to his chest. The chain rattled as he accelerated away again, and Jack switched off the bike’s headlamp, plunging the view ahead into darkness.

  Other bikes had come charging into the hangar after him and they lit the space with their own shifting illumination. Jack aimed the stolen Harley at his pursuers and set off like a missile, feeling the chain tug and clatter across the ground as it came with him.

  Too late, the other riders saw him racing back toward them and tried to veer off; but Jack spun the rusted chain up and over his head like a lasso, throwing it with all his might toward his pursuers. He sped past, aiming for the open door, hearing the catastrophic crash of metal meeting concrete at high speed as bikes and riders went down behind him.