The road ahead—
Impact!
He was still swimming in the warm gutswirl of car control. Flash of twilight blue in one wing mirror, metallic screech of impact from the rear. Jolt of the crash, the seatbelt webbing grip across his chest. He braked instinctively, remembered the transporter and slewed the Saab hard right. The automated vehicle’s collision alert split the air, blaring banshee outrage above and behind him. He didn’t have time to see if it had braked. Mike Bryant’s BMW shot past on the left, shedding speed and hauling across to stay with the Saab. Forcing the duel, right here, right now, right under the grille of the transporter.
He swam the blind spot, Chris knew numbly. Shadowed the automated vehicle from the front until he spotted Chris in the depths of the wing-mirror, falling back on the left as Chris overtook right, timing it on instinct, pinning the Saab’s blind spot as it emerged ahead of the transporter, getting up close for the ram—
Even drunk, even like that, he’s the best I’ve seen.
He’s harder and faster than you—
Chris saw the BMW coming side-on and hauled over savagely. The two cars met with a shriek. Flayed paint and sparks in the crushed air between. Counterforce tried to push them apart again. Chris kept the clinch, steering against the other car so the grating scream ran on like nails down a blackboard. Bryant rode it, forcing him back and closer to the central reservation. The BMW’s greater weight was telling, the plan loomed massively clear. Side impact at this speed would smash the barrier down but not clear it. The wreckage would kick the Saab into the air like a toy.
Options.
Behind them somewhere, the automated transporter came on, an unknown quantity Chris didn’t have time to look for.
Desperation crept out, flicker-tongued in his guts.
He floored the accelerator, but the BMW’s nose already had him blocked. Bryant had locked with careful malice, a half metre ahead of neck-and-neck, enough to cut off any escape forward. Now, through both side windows, he looked over at Chris and ripped a cocked thumb across his own throat. He was grinning. The crash barrier—
Chris hit the brakes with everything he had.
The Saab staggered. Jerked free of the sparking, sandpapering fury on its left flank. There was time for a flash glimpse of the transporter coming up and he hauled hard left across Mike’s rear, across the centre lane and out of the automated vehicle’s path. Another blaring of machine rage and the transporter thundered past on his right cutting off vision of the BMW and what it was doing. Chris gritted curses and let them both go. Junction eight. His speed bled down to an unsteady ninety. Adrenalin reaction sloshed in his guts.
He caught a distant glimpse of the BMW disappearing down the incline towards the underpass.
It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was coming.
He had about a minute, he reckoned. After that—
After that, somewhere down in the gloom of the tunnel, Mike Bryant would have executed his one-hundred-and-eighty degree crash-stop turn, would be barrelling back up the road towards him for the head-to-head chicken.
That old number. The Mike Bryant profile – fearless, headlong, savage. Conservative to the end.
Chris built speed. Cranked his nerves back up to drive tension. He passed the transporter again. Head buzzing with calculation.
Two outcomes for this. The head-to-head kills the duel, one way or another. Saab or BMW out of the game, turned too hard, too late and tumbled, into the path of the long-suffering transporter maybe, or maybe both cars, clipped against each other, tossed effortlessly apart with kinetic energy raging off at all angles, looking to shed itself in impact and flame. Or—
Or we both make it, and you’re south, up and into the Gullet, no way to fight but slow down and let him ram you off into space like Hewitt did to Page, or try for the turn, a hundred and eighty screaming degrees on a vaulted highway only two lanes across.
He thought of this. He thought it out. Three-stage play, the crash barrier, the head-to-head, the end game in the Gullet.
And he knows you can’t make that turn.
The BMW bloomed in the road ahead.
Up out of the tunnel ramp. Very fast.
He had time for a glance at the speedo, saw a hundred and something insane, doubled it in his head for Bryant’s share of the speed, saw the BMW’s armoured snout coming at him, rock steady and directly ahead—
He’s harder and faster than you—
—and yelled, and hauled hard right.
The BMW flinched fragments of a second later. Flashed past.
Was gone.
Chris floored the accelerator and the Saab dived for the tunnel. Again, he had a minute at best. Not the time he needed, he’d have to make some more. The tunnel flew past in the hollow roar of the Saab’s echoed passing. Up, out of the gloom and into sudden, watery sunlight. The Gullet flung itself down at him like a massive asphalt loading ramp. He rose to meet it, took the first curve at the very edges of his driving ability. Felt his heart stumble as the Saab palpably gathered enough sideways momentum to skid. He dared not brake, there wasn’t time. He needed the straight at speed. He unhinged the angle of the turn a miserly couple of degrees, slewed back across the double lane, fishtailing, muttering imprecations to the car. The Saab came back to him. He picked up the long rise-and-fall of the straight and ran for the next curve.
Almost to the end of the gut-tickling swoop, almost on the curve, he choked off his speed and threw the Saab into a shrieking, gibbering handbrake turn.
For one very long moment, he thought he’d fucked up. Thought he’d lose a tyre and then the car and plunge with it through the crash barrier into the zones below. The car slithered, tripped drunkenly across a badly mended pothole, screamed protest and tyre smoke he could suddenly smell—
And stopped.
Not the hundred and eighty. Just a ninety-degree sprawl across both lanes, blocking the Gullet like a bone in the throat.
Back along the straight, the BMW came over the rise.
He grabbed the shotgun from the passenger side footwell, threw open the driver side door and tumbled out of the car. Found his feet, found the BMW and cranked the action of the tactical pump.
Curiously, now that the situation was drawn, everything seemed very quiet. The Saab had stalled out in the turn, and the BMW’s engine noise seemed almost inaudible past the distant ocean roar of his own pulse in his ears. The wind came and tugged at his hair, but gently. The sprawl of cordoned zone housing below seemed to be holding its breath.
He let Bryant come on for another second, then put the first shot into the driver-side half of the windscreen.
The familiar boom – he’d done a solid hour down in the armoury firing ranges, a final tuning of his earlier unexpected love affair with the long gun.
The BMW’s windscreen cratered and crazed. He saw the splinter lines.
No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle. The parchment-dry conclusion of the legal board of inquiry after the Nakamura playoff. No substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. Provided these directives are adhered to—
Bryant’s windscreen was armoured glass. Even with the state-of-the-art vehicle shredder load the armourer had shown him, care of Heckler and Koch – the roadblock ammunition of choice for all your urban enforcement needs – even with that, at this range there’d be no substantial destruction.
He pumped the action, fired again. The spider-webbed screen resplintered, almost to opaque.