The driver, a man Jules did not recognise, whipped the steering wheel back and forth as he weaved through the traffic at more than a hundred klicks an hour. They passed a pair of police cruisers going in the opposite direction. The cops showed no signs of providing back-up today.
‘But is Granger okay, Shah? He looked terrible after the crash.’
The old Gurkha nodded. ‘He has sustained injury. But he shall live and probably recuperate. Mr Cooley is one of my best men. Even shocked and disoriented by the collision, he managed to hold off your attackers while our support vehicles closed in. He killed one of them, in fact, as the man was leaning into the car to shoot you both.’ This seemed to amuse Shah greatly, and his face lit up again, smiling with Taoist contentment.
‘Oh … I guess I didn’t notice,’ said Jules, not really believing the words as they came out of her mouth.
Had Granger blown some bugger’s head off right next to her? She shook her own head in wonder, aggravating the strained muscles in her neck again.
‘How many of them are there?’ she asked.
Birendra drew out his seatbelt so he could turn around to answer. ‘There were about thirty of them, Miss Julianne. Many more than we expected.’
‘I am certain we will find that Mr Cesky’s agents have secured support from one of my rivals,’ said Shah. ‘I recognised two of the men back at the intersection. Freelancers. And not in the way Mr Pappas is a freelancer. These men are scavengers. Not skilled or reliable enough to secure permanent employment with any reputable contractor, they sell their services on the grey market, doing work like this, one or two steps away from the agency holding the original commission.’
The driver swung hard left, taking them off the main drag past the airport and away from the thickening chaos of the traffic banked up there. Jules was not familiar enough with the city’s layout to know where they were headed, but down in her gut she suspected the destination was New Town. Shah leaned forward to mutter instructions to the driver, who sped up to the point where every course correction, every small turn of the wheel to whip them around a slower car, threw the Volvo’s occupants back and forth across the cabin.
Ahead of them, Julianne could just make out the rear of two late-model cars. Streamlined and low to the ground, they wove through the stop-start traffic like barracudas streaking through schools of slow-moving guppies. Flickers of flash suppressors could be seen as tracer rounds zipped towards them. One of the shooters emptied a clip into a passing civilian vehicle, causing it to slam into oncoming traffic.
‘Evasive,’ the radio crackled.
‘Oh shit,’ said Jules.
The driver cranked the wheel, taking their car across two lanes. He ran up the shoulder until he was clear of the collision site, before whipping back into the proper lane. The scenery outside changed in brief strobes of blurred imagery. The Volvo screamed through the wide, dusty streets of a factory and warehouse district before bursting out onto a wide four-lane arterial road that swept alongside the upper reaches of the harbour.
‘Speed increasing,’ the radio said. The pursuit vehicles were zeroing in on the fleeing hit squad. ’Closing. Fifty metres. I’m going to try and ram him …’
A black pepper cloud suddenly enveloped one of Shah’s Landcruisers, shredding the passenger compartment into disassociated bits of glass, flesh, metal and bone. Bursts of flame brewed up around the undercarriage as the vehicle turned over on its side. The other pursuit SUV whipped around their fallen comrades before ramming the offending vehicle off the road.
‘Stay with that one,’ Birendra ordered. ‘We’ll take the last one.’
‘Grenade launcher,’ Shah remarked, as they passed the burning ruins of his men. ‘This is most unfortunate.’
There, up ahead on the left, Jules could see the marina where the Rhino had moored his boat. Police tape still fluttered across the entrance near the manager’s hut. She then caught a sunburst flaring off the tinted rear windows of the car in front as it screeched through a hard right turn and disappeared into the diabolical labyrinth of the city’s red-light district.
‘Oh God, we’ll lose them,’ she said, despair in her voice.
‘They cannot move at speed now,’ Shah assured her.
Yeah Shah, but neither can we, she thought to herself.
Within moments they had reached the same corner where their quarry had just entered New Town. The driver yanked the wheel once more and took them into the congested chaos, blowing through a pile of garbage as he did so. The stench of rotten eggs, meat and vegetable matter saturated the inside of the Volvo. Jules resisted the urge to gag.
She craned around awkwardly to see how much back-up Shah had. She could see one other SUV, an older Toyota of some sort. Red and blue flashers turned inside its grille work, adding their own urgency to the bubble the driver had placed on the roof. She might have shaken her head had it not been so painful to move. The longer she was in this city, the less she understood it.
‘Where are the police?’ she asked.
‘They will be back at the crash site,’ said Shah. ‘But Northern Territory and city law prohibits them from exceeding the speed limit by more than twenty kilometres an hour, even while in hot pursuit. There have been incidents. Pedestrian fatalities.’
As if to underscore that point, they passed a trio of bodies, lying face down in the bone-dry dust, their blood spilling into the earth. Crowds had gathered, but kept their distance, as if the corpses might somehow transmit the violence of their ending through simple proximity.
‘But we -‘
‘We do not answer to the city or Territory,’ he explained patiently. ‘We are licensed by the development authority.’
Birendra spoke up again from the front seat, where he was loading shells into a military-style shotgun. ‘They would not follow us into New Town anyway, Miss Julianne.’
‘Turning right,’ their driver said, giving another brutal hoist on the steering wheel. The Volvo scraped past a pair of pedestrians, the vortex of the vehicle’s passing yanking their hats off into the rubbish.
They roared past the Freaks Tattoo and body-piercing shop, where a cluster of pre-teens fitted with enough metal to build a small bicycle stood in the street, gawking at the chase. A bald-headed man with a white goatee came out waving a cricket bat, shouting curses at them as the front of the car knocked over a 55-gallon drum of rancid fryer oil from some nearby greasy spoon. The driver didn’t waste much time using the horn. He simply nudged, shoved and rammed vehicles out of the way with the crunch of plastic, metal and glass. Birendra was ready at the window, the muzzle of his shottie in prominent view.
The Volvo’s windows were tinted, allowing Jules to lean forward and search for Cesky’s men without having to squint into the fierce antipodean light. At this time of day, the sun burned with the intensity of an unshielded furnace. A nuclear fire rendering everything outside the car into flat, monochromatic severity. It was the wet season, but the monsoons had failed for three years running, and the urgency of their pursuit had thrown up thick clouds of dust and trash.
Vehicles blared their horns, and drivers leaned out to abuse them until they saw Birendra with his shotgun. Once they clocked that, they wasted little time in moving, to clear the way. Slower vehicles found themselves shoved into stalls, crushing product and proprietor alike. The rubber-neck brigade materialised at each individual tragedy to gawk and enjoy the spectacle without providing anything in the way of assistance.
As Julianne watched their target negotiate a left-hand turn at high speed, to take them even deeper into the district, her eyes went wide at the sight of a pedicab suddenly launched into the air a hundred metres ahead of them. The bright orange rickshaw, its driver and passenger separated as they headed into orbit, perversely reminded her of that old footage of the space shuttle coming apart after launch.
They followed the turn into a tighter alleyway, pushing past a cluster of what looked like military tents on the left, with a high climbing wa
ll of shipping containers to the right laced together with metal mesh walkways. The passage of Cesky’s team snapped free lines of laundry, adding to the confusion. The still airborne bits of tighty whities, naughty nothings and bed linen drifted down onto the windshield of the Volvo. A rain of rubbish, beer cans and bottles fell down upon them from directly above, thrown by enraged locals. The wipers came on when a particularly nasty bit of brown fluid hit the windshield, showing the exact contents of somebody’s poorly digested dinner from the night before.
The last vehicle took another turn, this time to the right, crashing through a chain-link fence.
‘Brace, brace, brace!’ the driver shouted.
He took the turn at high speed onto what appeared to be some sort of makeshift basketball court. A basketball bounced off the back of the Volvo as a mixed group of players stood in the vehicle’s wake, popping off rounds, which shattered the back windshield. ‘Suppress,’ Shah ordered.
A quick burst from the PKM in the rear brought the gangland protest to a stop.
Jules heard the metallic snap and lock of Shah ramming home a magazine into his G-36. He was careful to ensure the safety was still on, leading her to check her own weapon. It suddenly felt inadequate.
The surface was rough, testing the XC 90’s suspension, but at least it was sealed, after a fashion. As the driver wrenched them around into the side street down which the car ahead had sped, she felt and heard the loss of traction once the wheels hit a section of dirt road. It was probably bare earth from when this place was … what, a garbage dump? Five or six years ago? She couldn’t remember.
The congestion was much worse in here than it had been out on the wider, main avenue. Granger had told her something about most of the cross-streets in New Town being unsurveyed, as though the back routes and minor alleys were contingent spaces, pathways through the crush left over by accident rather than design. She could see that here. The streetscape was bedlam, a derangement of building styles that couldn’t even agree on a common footpath. The covered verandas of two bars - she assumed they were bars, because of all the drunks spilling out to gawk at the chase - pushed out a good metre or two deeper into the roadway, creating a dead space where traffic could not flow. Some cars and motorcycles, and even one horse, were parked in there. Or tied up in the case of the horse.
On the opposite side of the street, another building appeared to have burnt down recently, and the vacant lot had been occupied by street vendors, offering not just games of chance, stolen electronics or salvaged goods from America, but an open-air distillery, and even a butcher. She was amazed to see gutted hogs hanging from poles, covered in flies, while scabrous half-feral dogs fought over piles of entrails beneath their carcasses.
In here, there was no chance of forcing a passage by brute speed, and the way ahead was quickly blocked. Stalled traffic, meandering pedestrians, animals, sightseers, they all conspired to bring the pursuit to a halt.
‘And we’re done,’ announced the driver, as he braked and cut the engine.
Birendra was out of the door and racking a round into his shotgun before Jules could even get her seatbelt undone. She flinched as the weapon roared twice, then three times.
‘What the fuck?’ she said.
But Shah was already gone, taking the machine pistol and the spare clips with him. Both he and the driver charged ahead into the space created by Birendra when he’d fired his warning shots into the air. Their second car skidded to a halt a few inches from the Volvo’s rear bumper and three more men, all heavily armed, emerged at a run. A nearby club pumped out Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre’ loud enough for Jules to make out all the words. Nelly wanted his bitch to take off all her clothes.
‘Better get a move on if you want to be in for the kill,’ grinned this new driver. He was obviously staying to guard the vehicles. He was armed with a long black shotgun, just like Birendra’s, but he also took out a taser, and fired it up experimentally.
Jules didn’t fancy his lot, having to protect two expensive cars, filled to pussy’s bow with the sorts of goodies this crowd of cut-throats and ne’er-do-wells would love to get their hands on. As she set off after the others, she heard him tell the crowd, ‘First bloke who tries it on gets a couple of thousand volts up the arse. Anybody wants to have a go after that, I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off as per the operational guidelines of the Free Port Development Authority, section 56, paragraph B, regulations pertaining to the use of force by contracted fuckin’ security consultants.’
Jules was sorely tempted to see how that turned out, but she had to run on to keep up with Shah and his men. She heard no gunfire from behind, so perhaps the unlucky soul on guard duty would be all right. She really didn’t doubt that he would stick that nasty-looking taser up somebody’s bottom. He seemed just the type for it. Then again, so was she.
Ahead of her, however, she could hear the first crackle of gunfire from somewhere beyond a green-fronted payday loans shop. The gunfire expedited the emptying of the street life into the relative safety of the Lone Star Bar and Doug’s Tattoos and Smoking Accessories. She felt a thousand eyes on her as she ran through the rapidly vacated streets with her SIG Sauer pistol in hand, ignoring the stitch in her sides, dodging and jumping over potholes and ditches filled with raw sewage. Piles of rubbish and debris reached as high as the second storey of many of the shops, where children picked through the bits to see if there was anything to eat or sell.
Although the sun was almost directly overhead, she was soon running in shade as the side street narrowed dramatically, becoming little more than a crooked shaft bored deep into a squalid mass of tumbledown shacks, hovels and filthy open-fronted bars, wrought out of shipping containers in a fashion not unlike the office complex at Shah’s business premises. Unlike him, however, the owners of these bottom-feeding operations had not a care for good order or cleanliness.
In one place, which seemed to service a purely Chinese market, blood was pooling under the barstools of its patrons, who all turned on their perches to watch her run past. She had no idea where the blood was coming from, or whether it was human. Impassable to road traffic, the undrained passageway doglegged around to the right, between two saloons that appeared to loom over the laneway - this being due to the verandas on their upper floors cantilevering out to such an extent that only a few inches separated them, creating the effect of a tunnel. As narrow as the path was through here, at least it was clear.
She could see why now, even in the gloom. Brass shell cases gleamed in the mud, picking up the reflection of neon lights, and red candlelit lanterns from what she assumed was the door of a Chinese brothel. A man lay dead, face down in the filth. Dark arterial blood leaked from five or more bullet holes punched into his torso. The wound that had killed him, however, was almost certainly a shotgun blast that had carried away the better part of his head, spraying it over the fibrous cement panels of the saloon in front of which he’d died.
One of Shah’s men was waiting for her a short distance ahead, nodding when he saw her and gesturing for her to hurry up. He waited next to a solid steel door that opened onto a gloomy staircase. A short Chinese woman ranted at him in a language neither of them understood, undeterred by the presence of the man’s weapons. ‘They fucked off in here,’ he said.
Jules heard the cough and bark of back-and-forth gunfire from somewhere inside. She could also hear what sounded like the roar of a crowd. ‘What the hell is this place?’ she asked, as she flicked off the safety on her pistol.
‘Fight club,’ he said without further explanation. ‘Come on.’
They plunged into the darkness, past a drunk lying in his own vomit and shit. The stench of him was sick-making.
Shah’s man took the stairs, leading upwards, two or three steps at a time. Julianne’s body was seizing up, her muscles clenching and stiffening painfully after the shock of the crash. She had trouble even raising her head to follow his progress. Nonetheless, she charged after him without hesitation. For the first tim
e in months she felt like she was finally ahead of the play. If they could just lay hands on these fuckers …
An automatic weapon coughed in the dark, and her escort lifted off his feet before crashing into the wall and sliding to the floor, leaving a dark organic smear behind. Another man stepped out of a doorway and jumped when he saw her.
Jules dived for cover, pumping rounds down the hallway while ducking through a door into a red-lit room full of candles.
The man roared in pain. ‘Bitch! I’m gonna fuck you up!’
American, she thought. Jules heard his footsteps. Scrambling back to the inside corner of the room, she waited for the asshole to step inside.
The muzzle of his weapon came through first as he charged in without sweeping the area. Jules took her time to line the front of her SIG Sauer up with the side of the bastard’s head and squeezed off a double tap that dropped him like a sack of shit.
She flinched and shuddered as blowback splattered her with skull chips and small gobs of grey matter. Biting down on her revulsion, she scrambled out past the body and checked on the man Shah had left behind to look after her, but his sightless eyes could see her no more. She swore, once, and picked up his G-36 to supplement her handgun.
The confidence she had felt rushing in behind him had evaporated entirely. She’d expected they would sweep in behind a trail of dead men left by Shah and Birendra and their comrades. Where had the guy she’d just killed come from? He was a white male, American. And that’s all she knew. He could have been one of Cesky’s men, a hitter who’d hidden himself to ambush stragglers like her, before doubling back to take Shah from behind. Or he could have been some unfortunate punter, or an employee of this ‘fight club’, who was simply defending his place of business from a pack of murderous buggers who had just invaded it.
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