Altered State. Don Pendleton

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      “G ET AFTER THEM , goddamn it!”

      “I am trying,” Farid Humerya stated.

      “Then try harder! Christ! We’re losing them!”

      Red Scanlon might have said that he’d seen everything during his years of soldiering, but he’d been startled—make that shocked—when the tall stranger shot his four men just like that.

       Bam-bam-bam-bam.

      Four up, four down.

      Scanlon knew two of them were dead, for sure. He’d seen the head shots strike, and there was no mistaking how their bodies dropped like puppets with their strings cut. That was brain death, even if their hearts and lungs kept pumping for a few more minutes. On the other two, he wasn’t positive, but they were down and showed no signs of rising as the Prius passed them, following the Camry that was closer to the shooting scene.

      The bastard was quick and cool, Scanlon would give him that. Most shooters hesitated for at least a fraction of a heartbeat in a face-to-face encounter, and some of them—especially Americans—were still hung up on John Wayne etiquette, giving the other guy a chance before they drew and fired.

      Fuck that.

      Scanlon had stayed alive this long by shooting first and generally not bothering with any questions afterward. Somebody threatened him, or seemed about to, and he hit them with a terminal preemptive strike.

      When in doubt, take ’em out.

      The men he’d handpicked for this job all had the same philosophy, all had sufficient notches on their guns to qualify as shooters and survivors, but the stranger had dropped four of them like it was nothing, cutting Scanlon’s force by thirty-three percent in something like two seconds flat.

      That was embarrassing.

      It simply couldn’t be allowed to go unpunished.

      “There!” he snapped. “They’ve got a car now!”

      “Yes, I see it,” Humerya said.

      “Shit! What’s Eddie doing?”

      Eddie Franks being his second in command for what had been envisioned as a relatively simple job. Follow the bitch from DEA, using a GPS tracking device that one of Scanlon’s men had planted in or on her car, find out who she was meeting and take care of them.

      Easy.

      With twelve men on the job, it should’ve been like swatting gnats with a sledgehammer.

      Now the whole damned thing had blown up in his face, and Scanlon had begun to worry that he couldn’t make it right.

      Scanlon was leaning forward in his seat, willing Humerya and their car to greater speed along the narrow crowded street, when someone in Deirdre Falk’s car opened fire on Eddie Franks’s Camry with an automatic weapon. Scanlon couldn’t actually see it, but the rattling sound of a Kalashnikov was unmistakable.

      Humerya seemed to flinch at the first sound of gunfire, then stomped on the Toyota’s accelerator to compensate for his flicker of weakness. The Prius surged forward, sideswiping an aged pedestrian and leaving him sprawled in their wake, his packages scattered from curb to curb.

      “Closer!” Scanlon barked at his driver. “Get me a shot!”

      But that meant two lanes, at the very least, and Humerya couldn’t widen Kabul’s streets, regardless of his skill behind the wheel.

      Humerya didn’t answer Scanlon, but he kept his foot down, speeding on in hot pursuit of the Camry and Deirdre Falk’s Ford. Whether he’d ever catch them was a question Humerya couldn’t answer at the moment.

      But he knew one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt.

      He couldn’t go back and report that he had failed, until he had exhausted every trick at his command.