Bryant’s BMW lay on one side, jammed into the central barrier and leaning jauntily. The vehicle’s roof faced out, windscreen showing spiderweb cracked in the weak spring sunlight. Bryant was pinned in clear view, struggling with his belt. Jones snarled a grin and came off the brake, slamming in the gear as the cruiser freewheeled backward, accelerating hard against the inertial drag. The Kaigan’s engine shrilled and the cruiser sprang forward.
Trapped and twisted against his own seatbelt, Mike Bryant heard the sound and flailed about to look. By the time he had forced his head round far enough to see, the Mitsubishi was almost on him.
He just had time to scream.
‘Ah, fu—’
And the cruiser was gone, jolted past, and there was a titanium-grey Saab crunched to its tail. Two engines in savagely low gear, roaring against each other, and the shriek of steel under stress.
‘Chris?’
Chris’s voice drifted into the upturned space, laconic.
‘Be right back.’
Metal tore down one wing of the Nakamura car and ripped clear, exposing the driver’s side rear wheel. Jones shrieked abuse in Japanese, her English abandoned in momentary fury. Chris was already past, yelling into his mike with sudden urgency.
‘Makin, where are you?’
‘Up ahead.’ There was a tight edge of panic in the other man’s voice. ‘I’ve got both these motherfuckers on my tail. I think they’re going to lock me up same as Mike.’
‘On my way.’
Chris spotted the Nakamura wingmen a pair of seconds later, dancing spirals behind and alongside Makin’s BMW. As he watched, the left-hand car slipped in and struck the Shorn car a glancing blow. Makin jerked sideways and the other Mitsubishi rammed him from the rear. It was consummate teamwork, Chris had time to reflect briefly, something that the young guns at Shorn could learn from and probably never would. Then he was on the left-hand car. He hit it at full acceleration and felt the impact down to the roots of his teeth.
‘Right,’ he muttered.
The Nakamura car tried to pull away but didn’t have the power. Chris gave up a hand’s breadth of space, then floored the pedal and hit again. This time the wingman tried to skate sideways right. Chris matched the move. He gave up the hand’s breadth again and when the Nakamura driver slewed to the left, he let him. He went with the move and forced it. Another jolt and he was jammed onto the rear fender, driving the other car towards the grass bank that lined the left-hand hard shoulder.
It could have been better – could for example have been the drop on the other side of the carriageway – but it would have to do.
Something flashed in his peripheral vision, the glossy black of the other Nakamura car. The other wingman was coming to his comrade’s aid. Chris fought down the urge to let go and face the new threat. His voice went gritted into the mike.
‘Makin, get rid of this fucker, will you?’
‘Done.’
The BMW was there, twilight blue jostling with the black for position. The two cars peeled away as the Nakamura driver fled. Chris turned his full attention back to killing the man in front of him.
The rapid rumble as they crossed the cats-eye line of the hard shoulder and the wingman finally panic-braked as he neared the bank. It was far too late. Chris hit the overdrive on the Saab’s gear box and drove his opponent hard up the fifty-degree incline. As soon as the other vehicle was fully off the road, he braked savagely and dropped back. Denied the power of the Saab’s pushing, and subject to his own desperately applied brakes, the wingman slithered back down the grass, hit the road surface with an overload of kinetic energy to shed and tumbled across the three lanes into the crash barrier.
The Mitsubishi exploded.
‘Bonus,’ said Chris to nobody in particular, and threw the Saab into a U-turn crash-stop.
A kilometre back along the highway, he saw what he’d been expecting. Mitsue Jones’s battlewagon heading directly for him, trailing wreckage from one wing like a shark with prey in its jaws. Chris engaged the Saab’s launch gear. The rear wheels squealed on the road, scrabbled for purchase and found it. The Saab leapt forward.
Past the egg-yolk yellow and billowing black smoke of the crashed and burnt wingman, back down the slope towards the bridge where the duel had kicked in. The hungry roar of the engine seemed to recede as he plunged back towards the Nakamura car. He had time to notice the marred lines of the other vehicle as it ballooned in his windscreen, time to notice the pewter cloud formations smeared across the sky behind, time even to see the gusting wind blowing the grass flat along the embankment to his right—
At the last possible moment, Jones flinched left, covering the torn wing damage as he guessed she would. He ploughed into her righthand rear side with brutal precision. The Saab spaced armouring held and opened a huge gap over the Mitsubishi’s rear tyre. Chris hit the brakes and at the relatively low speed he’d developed the U-turn came comfortably. He was back on Jones’s tail before she’d made five hundred metres of road away from him.
The Mitsubishi was crippled, limping at barely a hundred. He matched speeds and glanced across at the other car. Polarised glass hid Jones from view.
Finish it.
He slewed sideways, caught the exposed rear tyre on the leading edge of his front fender and braked. Textbook manoeuvre. The tyre ripped and exploded with a muffled bang. He felt the front fender unstitch along half its length with the force of the impact, but the rest held.
Yes! Carla, you fucking beauty!
The Kaigan jerked and began to skid. Chris worked his pedals, gunned the engine and rammed into the rear of the Mitsubishi as it floated past ahead of him. The skid built, the car wallowed on the road and Chris steered back across and around. Another sharp jab at the retreating side of the car. The driver’s side door dented inward, and Mitsue Jones was irretrievable. The Nakamura battlewagon skated a figure of eight in towards the bank and hit with an audible crump.
Chris brought the Saab to a screeching halt, braking clouds of rubber smoke off the asphalt as he slid past Jones’s wreck. A three-sixty sweep showed no other vehicles in either direction. He engaged the reverse and backed up gingerly to check on his handiwork.
‘Chris?’ It was Bryant’s voice, distorted over the comset.
‘Yeah, Mike. I’m here.’ The strange calm was back, the sky and windswept landscape pressing down on his consciousness like a thumb on an eyeball. He gave the status report through lips that felt slightly numb. ‘One wingman down, flamed out. Think Makin got the other. You okay?’
‘I will be as soon as someone comes and cuts me out of this fucking wreck. What about Jones?’
He stared at the wrecked battlewagon. The sleek bodywork was torn and crumpled, sunk on tyres that had blown out somewhere in the crash. Steam curled up from the gashed radiator grille like smoke, was whipped away by the wind. And in amidst all that calm, it looked as if Jones was trying to kick the driver’s side door open. The buckled metal quivered but didn’t shift.
Finish it.
‘Jones is out of the game,’ he said.
Mike’s whoop came through, bristling with static and overload distortion. Chris dropped his hand to grasp the gear lever, and with the motion a small ripple arose in the pit of his stomach. It was nothing much, the feeling of having eaten too much sweet food, but as his hand touched the lever, he was suddenly slightly sick of the whole thing.