War of Shadows

by Leo J. Maloney

  “It looks like the armored variant,” he yelled to her.

  “Which one?” Alex barked back as she targeted the Sherpa’s left front tire.

  She fired, aiming perfectly. Nothing happened.

  “Mine variant,” Dan guessed.

  Alex shifted her aim to pinpoint the driver behind the thick windshield. It was the busboy. Out of her left eye Alex saw the woman in the passenger seat.

  “Don’t bother shooting the—” Dan started, but Alex had already pulled the trigger, only to watch the round skitter off the Sherpa’s wind- and, apparently, bulletproof shield.

  “I know!” Alex interrupted. “Ballistic variant!” She all but threw the SCAR away from her and grabbed the Mossberg 500 shotgun. “Let them get as close as possible without inflicting damage.” Alex had enormous faith in her father’s driving skills.

  “Gotcha,” Dan growled, spotlighting the Sherpa out the side view mirror. “Come to poppa, baby,” he murmured as both he and his daughter had the same thought.

  Why weren’t they shooting back? Then Dan remembered what the woman had said in the meat locker. If we wanted you dead, you’d be dead.

  “Take your time, Alex,” her father hissed through clenched teeth. “They intend on keeping me alive until they get what they want from me…”

  Both Morgans’ minds were whirling as Alex took careful aim at the Sherpa’s engine block, and Dan tried to return Anti-Zeta the favor by keeping a perfect half-car-length between the butt of the Honda and the nose of the Sherpa. He had no problem doing just that…and strangely, that worried him more than almost anything else.

  Are they toying with us…?

  Alex waited until the two vehicles were practically touching before she pulled the trigger and the full power of the twelve-gauge, full-bore, double-aught buckshot pounded the sneering grill of the Sherpa like an exploding cannonball.

  Alex had to fall back and roll away as the buckshot spread, ricocheted, and even bounced back. For a second it seemed that the shotgun had some effect because the Sherpa fell back a bit, but then it roared forward again, shifting lanes so it was to the CR-V’s right.

  “You okay?” Dan shouted back to his daughter, but before Alex could answer, the Sherpa pounded its nose into the CR-V’s side.

  Dan swore as he regained control of the Honda, doing some fast arithmetic. Even with all his modifications, it was the Honda’s five thousand pounds versus the Sherpa’s nearly five tons. It wasn’t hard to figure out which would win a shoving contest. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the woman. She was smiling at him—without humor—from behind her vehicle’s bulletproof glass.

  She motioned to the highway’s shoulder and mouthed the words “pull over.” He mouthed two other words back at her. One that started with an “f” and another that ended with a “u.”

  Then he hit the nitrous lever.

  Chapter 14

  The CR-V lurched forward, its speed erupting from ninety miles an hour to a hundred-fifty in nothing flat. Dan felt like a mule had kicked him deep into his seat, while Alex gave a surprised little shriek as she was splayed against the back of the SUV. And she was not, by nature, a shrieker.

  Dan felt his lips pull back from his teeth, imagining the king of all wolf’s grins on his face as he kept the Honda straight down the lane. But the grin dulled as two more simple words entered his brain.

  What now?

  Sure, he could win a drag race, but the Sherpa could run at seventy miles an hour for more than six hundred miles.

  Alex obviously had the same thought. She appeared beside him, clawing into the passenger seat.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked. “Lead the Peking Panda people all the way to Renard’s place?”

  Dan thought about how to lose their pursuers without losing precious time. They were in the New Mexico flatlands now, but in just a little while they’d be entering Albuquerque, and there would be no way to go a hundred and fifty miles an hour anywhere there.

  But then the decision was made for them. As Dan glanced into the side view mirror, he saw the far distant Sherpa lurch forward just as the Honda had.

  “Oh my lord,” Alex moaned, seeing the same thing in the passenger side mirror. “Not just ballistic and mine variants, but nitrous too.”

  Watching the Sherpa speed after them set off something in Dan’s brain.

  “Okay,” he said, “if that’s how you want to play…”

  Something in his tone both concerned and exhilarated Alex. She knew her father better than almost anyone. She prepared herself for anything.

  Dan checked the road. It was empty except for them and the Renault. He checked the surroundings. Serene, beautiful New Mexican landscape. They were coursing through one of the lowest population densities in the country. Filling his eyes was the state’s trademark rose-colored desert, bordered by heavily forested valleys, sweeping up into broken mesas.

  “Fine.” Dan sighed grimly as the Sherpa rapidly caught up to the slightly slowing CR-V. “Two can play at this game.”

  Dan slammed on the brakes while whirling the steering wheel. The CR-V made a screeching, smoking, seemingly impossible one-eighty, winding up facing the other way—right at the nose of the Sherpa.

  He gave his daughter and the Peking Panda people less than a second to deal with that reality before tromping on the Honda’s accelerator again. The specially conditioned wheels screeched and smoked once more as he shot at his pursuers, going the wrong way on a one-way road.

  “Two things,” Alex heard him humming as she flattened herself back in the seat. “One, they don’t want to kill me…”

  He hardly got the words out before the sight of the Sherpa filled their windshield. Alex managed to keep from shrieking again as she braced for impact.

  But then, Dan’s arms moved again, and the Sherpa was wrenched from their sight as if yanked off stage by a cable. The CR-V was launching itself off the Interstate to the countryside beyond.

  “Two,” she heard. “They can’t drive like me!”

  She held on for dear life as he rumbled across a rocky grassland toward a copse of rocks and trees.

  Alex heard a clamor behind them and whirled to catch a glimpse of the Sherpa launching itself off the highway to try cutting them off. She looked at her father. He was intent, concentrating on the lack of road. Had he misjudged it this time because of pressure, repeated assaults, and lack of sleep?

  She knew the Sherpa was designed as an off-road vehicle. It could navigate gradients of sixty percent. It could cross obstacles up to two feet high, and trenches three feet deep. No matter how well Dan had safeguarded the Honda, it was still basically a tricked-out family van.

  They both felt the Sherpa nudge the back of the CR-V again. But this time the nudge felt different, like a sarcastic kiss rather than a warning slap. Dan concentrated on his goal, but Alex spun around in her seat to see why. Although it was small, Alex’s eyes locked on a new intrusion as if it had neon arrows pointing at it.

  The Peking Panda people had attached an iron hook through the rear sniper slot.

  Alex snarled like a cornered cat. She grabbed the side and ceiling of the SUV and moved toward the hook before she saw a chain running from the hook to a reel attached to the Sherpa’s bumper.

  “Not on my watch,” she hissed as she swung the SCAR onto her back with one hand and grabbed the Honda’s passenger side door handle with the other.

  Dan was concentrating so hard on his driving that he only became aware of what his daughter was doing when he felt hot desert sand slap the right side of his face. By then she had already swung out and up onto the CR-V’s roof.

  “Alex!” he heard himself blurt. “No!”

  He cursed himself for the useless exhortation and redoubled his attention to his driving. It was especially important now, lest he become responsible for knocking her of
f the vehicle.

  Alex saw what was going on as soon as she flung herself onto the roof. Holding herself splayed there, she watched the busboy nimbly scramble back across the Sherpa hood toward his passenger door. He had crawled out to grab the hook—usually used to pull other vehicles out of mud or water—and locked it onto the CR-V.

  The Asian woman was behind the wheel, and the cunning, triumphant look on her face told Alex everything else she needed to know. Once the busboy was safely back inside, the woman would brake, and the Sherpa’s five tons would anchor the Honda like the iceberg had anchored the Titanic. The Honda would stop as if hitting the Great Wall of China, only it wouldn’t crumble and shatter. It would wrench and leap up, all the glass shattering while hunks of plastic and metal would rip off like bitter tears. Then it would come slamming down, shattering some of the Morgans’ bones, but, as their pursuers hoped, probably not killing them.

  Alex only had seconds, and she took them. Skittering across the CR-V’s roof from cab to stern like a cross between a squid and a spider, she grabbed the back lip of the SUV’s rear hatch with one hand, and wrenched the SCAR around with the other.

  For a split second, her eyes locked with those of the Asian woman. As Alex returned her attention to the matter at hand, her mind recognized the Asian woman’s changing expression. She knew what Alex was preparing to do, and was not going to let it go unanswered.

  Alex had less than a second. She rammed the muzzle of the eight-pound, short-stroke, forty-five caliber weapon against the nearest chain link and pulled the trigger—just as the Asian woman slammed on the Sherpa’s brakes.

  The SCAR’s forty-five caliber rounds were faster than the woman’s leg muscles. The lead came shattering out at six hundred rounds per minute as the driver’s slippered foot tromped down on the armored vehicle’s stiff brake pedal. If anything, her braking helped the chain link snap, and snap it did—so sharply that even Dan heard it from the front seat.

  Three things happened then. First, the Sherpa continued its skidding and squealing stop. Second, the chain whipped upward, the right side putting a pock mark in the Sherpa’s hood, and the left side stinging Alex’s right arm. And third, the CR-V’s left tire went over a well-worn rock.

  Unladen, the CR-V had a ground clearance of seven point eight inches. But this bulletproof, super-powered monstrosity Dan had created was anything but unladen. The snapping chain hadn’t really hurt Alex, but it stung just enough to wrinkle her concentration. When the SUV bounced, she lost her grip on both the SCAR and the rear lip of the roof.

  Dan felt it. Worse, he saw it out the side-view mirror. His daughter Alex bounced up into the air, tumbled at least four feet to the left, then came dropping down. He didn’t see her hit, but the Asian driver and busboy did.

  She may have snarled like a cat, but she didn’t land like one, which in the long run was a good thing. Thankfully she had gotten a lot more training than just sniper practice, and the first thing they were all taught in self-defense was how to fall. The rest of the lessons had been supplemented by experience, especially recent battles on, in, and around a Trans-Siberian Express, which had been going a lot faster than the off-road slowed SUV.

  The woman in the Sherpa watched Alex use a cactus like an awning, then twist and somersault onto creosote bushes before rolling across burrograss that both slowed and cushioned her fall. The man in the Sherpa watched the SCAR assault rifle slam on and skitter across the ground some thirty feet away.

  Dan slammed on his brakes, and watched as brown and red dust clouds billowing up and showering down on the semiarid plains. He grabbed the P30 automatic and jumped out of the still shuddering CR-V, intent on racing to his daughter’s side. But as soon as his boots hit the tobosa grass he froze. Alex was not where he had seen her land.

  His eyes shifted over toward the Sherpa. The Asian woman stood outside the driver’s side door, holding the SCAR rifle. A small, knowing, even sympathetic, smile played on her cruel lips. The busboy was kneeling in front of their vehicle’s bumper, holding the broken but still long chain in his fists. Dan knew the chain was still long because most of it was wrapped around Alex’s throat as it stretched her across the busboy’s lap.

  “You,” the woman said to Dan, “we will not kill.” She motioned toward Dan’s daughter and the busboy. “I cannot say the same about her.”

  Dan felt the urge to charge, but he fought it, knowing that he would not make it in time. Either Alex’s neck would be snapped or there was still a bullet in the SCAR’s magazine. Even if there wasn’t, he was certain his daughter’s skull could be broken with one swipe of any of their arms. He felt a second urge, to try shooting both the woman and her busboy, wild west style—but he wasn’t exactly feeling like the Duke or Dirty Harry.

  “All right,” he said, sounding more tired than he had in years. “What do you want?”

  The woman motioned for him to drop his weapon and approach. “What we have always wanted,” she said. “For you to come with us.”

  “You will leave her be.” It wasn’t a question or request.

  The woman looked like she wanted to show what a poor bargaining position he was in, but then gave an eminently pragmatic shrug. “We have no use of her, so we will not take her.” She motioned again, in the expressive way she had—first to raise his hands, and again, to approach.

  Dan Morgan dropped the P30 on the desert floor, then raised his hands. He took his first step toward them.

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess we’ll all be finding out exactly what’s going on with…”

  He never got to finish his sentence because the Sherpa’s windshield started cracking with needle-sized holes, the Sherpa’s right side began to get torn apart like paper, and the Sherpa’s left side began sprouting punctures as if being punched by an invisible heavyweight champion.

  Chapter 15

  The Peking Panda woman and busboy only had a moment to react in utter surprise and confusion before Alex Morgan jammed the VIPERTEK heavy duty stun gun against the young man’s arm with one hand, and shot the woman full in the face with the SABRE three-in-one pepper spray in the other.

  Fifty-three thousand volts pumped through the busboy’s nervous system, making him dance like a spastic puppet, while the combination of stinging pepper, facial-burning tear gas, and ultra-violet marking dye made the woman lurch back as if being yanked off a galloping horse by a hangman’s noose.

  Alex had pulled both out of her jacket as soon as her captors were distracted by the vicious, new, unexpected ambush. The Peking Panda people had been so busy grabbing her and dragging her back to their vehicle that they hadn’t bothered to search her. After all, they had already collected the SCAR assault rifle, hadn’t they?

  As soon as Dan saw Alex had her own rescue well in hand, he scooped up the P30 and fired in the direction the needles, tears, and punches had come from while backtracking as fast as possible. Alex managed to re-pocket the small stun gun, but had to drop the pepper spray in order to grab the SCAR, which had fallen from the screeching woman’s hands as she frantically clawed at her eyes.

  Alex took one step toward the CR-V when a hailstorm of needles sent her slamming back against the Sherpa’s hood. Swinging the SCAR around to target the newly arrived, but still as yet unseen enemy, she found herself staring at the Peking Panda woman, who had somehow managed to open up her livid eyes to stare back.

  Alex saw the other’s surprise, agony, and sudden fear, then watched as the woman’s head peeled opened like a pineapple chopped by an invisible machete.

  Alex’s own head snapped forward so her eyes locked with her father’s. There she saw anger, frustration, and, worse, helplessness, as he kept firing to the right, left, and above her, simply trying to find a target. It was no time to have a chat about plans or strategy. As the Peking Panda woman’s half-headed body collapsed in on itself, burbling guts out onto the grassland floor, Alex whirled around, then sp
rung up onto the Sherpa’s grill.

  Dan felt the instinctive urge to shout “no” at her again, but recognized it as a knee-jerk parental response. He let the seasoned agent inside him elbow aside the father and take over. Alex was right. There was no way she could get to him without being hit by diamond-tipped needles, lasers, or concentrated air punches. And the only thing between her and those things was the Sherpa. More specifically, the center of the Sherpa, since the edges of the vehicle were being demolished all around her.

  Dan backed up toward the CR-V as he watched her scramble over the middle of the Sherpa’s hood. Since he had made it back to the Honda without getting punctured, chopped, or air-punched himself, he decided that he was out of effective range. So he used this supposed safety zone to reach inside his vehicle and grab at the other weapons that were left: the Glock 17 and the Mossberg shotgun. As he reemerged into the sun, he shoved the handgun into his belt and brought the shotgun up.

  Over the thirty-inch barrel, he saw his daughter trying to figure out a way to get into the Sherpa without getting perforated. The doors were open, but each of the portals was being pounded by the hi-tech weapons—most likely being wielded by the helmeted, bulletproof baddies they had met in the Beacon Hill alley.

  Of course she wanted to break through the windshield, but she had found out the hard way that it was amply bulletproofed. Both father and daughter knew there wasn’t time to wait. She’d have to risk swinging inside, hoping she didn’t get too badly punctured, pulverized, or sliced.

  Dan decided for her by bringing the Mossberg up. Both the Glock and shotgun had an effective range of fifty yards, but the handgun had slugs, while the shotgun had shot. In other words, the Glock had a single finger. The Mossberg had a whole hand.