“Ding, you guys have me on GPS?”
Chavez responded, still looking at the dot on the map. “Affirmative. Looks like you’re running.”
“Damn right I am! Two armed bikers on my six.” Chavez could hear the roaring engines through the warren of apartment buildings off his left shoulder.
“We’ll catch up with you.”
“I need one of you to go for Hazelton. He took off to the water. He’s not over here to the west, so try to the east.”
Ding called to Sam as he ran on. “You go for Ryan! I’ll grab Hazelton!”
Colin Hazelton never stood a chance. The lead North Korean biker raced up behind the big, aging American, positioned his flat stiletto down by his side, and then thrust his arm out, stabbing the man from behind, once under the left shoulder blade, then quickly on the right side in the same place.
Both of Hazelton’s heaving lungs began deflating almost instantly, and blood pumped into the damaged organs. He ran on a few feet, no reaction in his stride to what he thought were just punches into his back, but soon he toppled over in the middle of the dark street, gasping. The bikers slowed and stopped, then both men dropped the kickstands on their Ducatis and climbed off, quickly but still casually. They stepped over to the wounded man, who was now trying to crawl away, and they knelt over him.
The leader began feeling through Hazelton’s pockets and then his shirt, finally laying his hand on the money belt hiding there. He yanked the hem up over the man’s corpulent midsection, used his stiletto to cut free the sweaty and bloody white Velcro money belt, and he quickly checked it to make sure the documents were inside. There was blood on one of the passports, but everything was there.
Hazelton lay on his side now, and he reached up for the documents weakly, his right arm extending fully and the whistling wheezes out of both his mouth and the holes in his back changing in pitch as he tried to yell.
The North Korean biker knocked the American’s feeble grasp away and stood up, then he turned back to his motorcycle. His partner joined him, his handgun low by his side and his helmet turning in all directions as he scanned, making certain no threats appeared in the street.
They started their engines and turned back in the other direction to join the hunt for the white photographer.
Ryan was five blocks away now, still in the warren of darkened streets and parking lots around the apartment buildings here by the Kenh Doi. He wondered what had happened to Hazelton. He had done all he could for the man, but he feared it hadn’t been enough. He’d seen the two women step outside the apartment building and in so doing distract the bikers. To his shock Hazelton took off toward the water. Jack thought this to be a terrible idea, unless of course Hazelton had seen something that gave him no hope he’d survive the encounter with the armed men.
Or else he was just drunk and he freaked out and he went for it, decided he was smarter, stronger, and faster than he actually was.
Ryan was betting on the latter.
To give the American ex — CIA man a fighting chance, Ryan had darted into the alley, demanded the attention of the bikers, and flashed his camera as a distraction, then he turned and ran for his life, hoping to draw at least some of the men off the older, slower Hazelton.
That part of Jack’s plan had worked. As he leapt over a pair of aluminum trash cans on the sidewalk he could tell from the lights and noise of the two Ducatis on his tail that they were no more than fifty feet behind. They crashed through the cans just three seconds later, sending them and their contents flying. Jack leapt over a wooden pallet lying on the curb and then turned, flicking it up into the path of the bikers, but the pallet shattered against the bikes and didn’t slow the men down at all. He ducked around a tree in a planter, then changed direction again.
The Ducatis spun toward him and increased speed again.
Ryan worried the men might tire of the chase and just open fire, so he tried to keep his sprint erratic, moving from left to right, leaping over garbage or parked scooters or boxes on the sidewalk, racing around electric poles and switching direction unpredictably.
But the bikes stayed on him, he wasn’t going to shake them as long as he stayed on the road.
Sam Driscoll came over his earbud, yelling at Jack to stand still a minute so he could get a GPS fix on the map long enough to find him in the narrow alleyways. But Jack was hardly in a position to comply; he just kept running, ducking under low wires that hung over a narrow pathway next to an office building. He made a hard left, then took a flight of concrete steps that ran down to a parking lot alongside an apartment complex. The bikes took the steps down as well, and they closed to within feet of their prey.
The crack of a gunshot and the flash of sparks on the ground at the bottom of the stairs told Ryan the men behind him had been given the all-clear to use lethal force by whoever the hell was controlling them. Of course Ryan had no idea why these men were trying to kill him. He and his mates had stumbled onto something big here in their tail of Colin Hazelton, but Jack didn’t have time to think about it now. He had to get out of the line of fire.
A satellite dish stuck out from a second-floor balcony at the bottom of the long flight of concrete steps. It was eye level in front of him now, but if Jack wanted to grab hold of it he’d have to make a running jump of nearly fifteen feet. Jack leapt off the stairs, using the momentum of his run, the kicking of his legs in the open air, and his high position on the staircase to give him as much distance as possible.
His hands just grasped the metal arm of the four-foot-wide satellite dish, his legs swung out below him from the momentum as if he were an Olympian on the horizontal bar.
The two riders on their bikes raced down the staircase below him. When they reached the parking lot at the bottom of the steps, they spun around on their front wheels to face him. Their tires screeched in unison.
Jack’s legs had gone horizontal to the ground during his swing on the sat dish’s arm, but he was unable to kick high enough to climb up on the balcony. Instead, he swung back down, tried to pull himself up to take hold of the metal balcony railing.
Suddenly the mount for the arm gave way under the strain of Ryan’s weight, tearing off from the balcony railing and breaking free, attached only by a thick band of wiring.
Jack dropped ten feet to the steps below. The satellite dish fell part of the way with him but was then caught by the wiring. Jack landed well initially but then tumbled forward and down the steps, ending up dazed on his back in the parking lot, just twenty feet from the bikers.
Jack looked up at the armed men. The bikers glanced at one another quickly, as if to marvel at their luck, then one man raised his pistol.
But before he could fire a bearded man dressed in black appeared on his right at a sprint, slamming into him like a linebacker making a tackle in the open field, and knocking both the rider from his bike and the gun from his hand.
The second helmeted man on the other Ducati spun his arm around toward the movement, but the bearded man — he was clearly a Westerner — swung his backpack off, hurled it overhand, and it connected with the biker’s firing arm, knocking it down. A gunshot ripped through the night, the entire parking lot exploded with an instant of light, and the biker fell back onto the pavement. He rolled quickly to his knees, but before he could stand the bearded man was on him, kicking him once in the visor of his helmet. The padded ballistic plastic absorbed the impact, but the blow torqued his neck back and he fell hard onto his back, slamming his head onto the unyielding surface of the parking lot and knocking him out cold.