“Turn,” Deep Blue repeated, even more stridently. “Right turn.”
With unexpected suddenness, the road ended and merged onto the main thoroughfare…going the wrong way.
Bishop realized his mistake a moment too late. He stomped on the brake and hauled the wheel hard to the right, but it was an impossible angle, and the stolen SUV had too much momentum. The brakes locked, and there was a tortured scream of metal and rubber as the Toyota went into a spin.
The next few seconds were a blur of movement, but when King’s disorientation passed, he became aware of honking horns and the headlights of traffic on the main road swerving around the now stationary SUV. He also saw a pair of headlights coming from a different direction, and he realized they were the lights of the pursuing Hilux Surf, still on the access road, but about to reach the intersection. The vehicle carrying the team had spun around too many times to count, but had come to rest facing back the way they’d come.
“Bishop! Go!”
The big man, thankfully, didn’t ask him to specify a direction, but cranked the wheel hard to the left and stomped on the accelerator.
Nothing happened.
The spin out had caused the engine to stall.
Bishop frantically threw the shift selector into neutral and jiggled the keys until the whining noise of the starter sounded, but the engine refused to turn over. He tried again, once more with no success.
“It’s flooded!” Rook shouted from the back seat.
King didn’t think it was possible to flood a modern fuel-injected engine, but Bishop didn’t challenge the diagnosis. Instead, he pressed the accelerator to the floor and held it there as he tried the starter once more.
The engine roared to life with a plume of blue smoke, and the smell of burning petroleum wafted into the interior through the shattered rear window, momentarily overpowering the pervasive sulfur odor of gunpowder. Bishop threw the SUV into gear and they lurched into motion, joining the flow of traffic heading west, at almost the same instant that the vehicle carrying the Chinese thugs reached the intersection.
Their pursuers had to slow to make the turn, but the spin-out and stall had cost Chess Team several seconds of their lead. The pursuing headlights continued to get closer until Bishop was able to build up a head of steam.
King couldn’t see the speedometer, but it felt like Bishop was doing close to seventy miles an hour. He swept around the other vehicles on the road like they were standing still, weaving in and out, and sometimes creating his own lane with a blaring horn. Unfortunately, the pursuing vehicle didn’t have to contend with the same obstacles, because Bishop was clearing a trail for them, and so despite his best efforts, the gap continued to close. Two hundred meters…a hundred…fifty.
The triad thugs hadn’t fired at them again, and King thought he knew why; they wanted Sasha back — alive and preferably unharmed. But if the pursuing vehicle got much closer, the gunmen inside would be able to shoot out their tires and bring the chase to an abrupt end.
“Rook. If they get any closer, use those cannons of yours to take them out.”
Rook grinned as he drew his Desert Eagle pistols, and then leaned over the back of his seat and took aim. Before he could fire though, the SUV swerved left, out of his field of view, and made a move to overtake them.
Without prompting, Knight aimed his XM8 out the window and tried to hit the Surf’s front tires. He squeezed off a few shots, but the moving target eluded him, and his rounds just sparked off the vehicle’s chassis or burrowed harmlessly into the pavement.
Now the Surf was beside them, only a few yards away and nearly even with them. Knight gave up trying to hit the tires and instead aimed at the windshield, which he could now see was already fractured with a spider web pattern from earlier impacts.
Something was happening on the far side of the vehicle, but because his attention was fixed on the picture in his gun sight, Knight didn’t see what the others did: a figure had crawled out of the rear driver’s side window and was clambering onto the roof of the SUV. Queen saw it and so did Rook. The latter leaned over his fellow passengers and tried to aim his Desert Eagle up at the man on the roof, but before he could fire, two things happened almost simultaneously: Knight fired a burst from his carbine that shattered the front passenger window and filled the interior of the chasing vehicle with lead, and the figure on the roof coiled like a spring and then jumped.
The pursuing SUV abruptly veered right, evidently out of control, and ground against the side of the team’s vehicle. Just as quickly, it rebounded and careened to the left, going off the pavement to smash into the exterior of a building. The members of Chess Team barely noticed the demise of their pursuers however; their attention was consumed by the crunch of something heavy landing on the roof of their vehicle.
“We’ve got a stowaway!” Rook shouted.
Bishop reacted immediately by tapping the brakes. Everyone inside was hurled forward by the sudden deceleration, and King expected to see their unwanted passenger thrown from his perch like a stone from a catapult, but that didn’t happen. Instead, something crashed down on the windshield right in front of Bishop, but somehow, impossibly, it refused to be dislodged.
King stared at the outline of their attacker, splayed out on the other side of the glass, arms and legs stretched out, feet digging into the narrow seam between the hood and the windshield, and he understood how the man, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics, had managed to hang on.
Man was perhaps the wrong word.
The thing clinging to the front of the SUV was human in the literal sense, but one look told King that this was no ordinary foot soldier of the Chinese mob. The head and unkempt hair were that of a Burmese youth, perhaps in his mid-twenties, but the arms and legs were grotesquely muscled, straining at the fabric of the man’s clothes. The torso was malformed, as if he had been taken apart and reassembled by someone who had only the vaguest grasp of human anatomy.
This was one of the monstrosities they had fought in Myanmar — a frankenstein — but unlike those, this one seemed to be a new-and-improved model.
The thing dropped its head low and peered into the interior of the SUV, swiveling its gaze back and forth, searching for something.
It was looking for Sasha.
It found her.
The thing released one of its clutching hands, drew back, and punched through the windshield. The blow would have broken a normal person’s hand, but this creature was in no way normal. The fist smashed out the upper corner of the glass, folding it over like a dog-eared page in a book. Just as quickly, it grasped the exposed metal of the Surf’s roof in both hands and then braced its feet against the hood as if getting ready to lift something.
That something was the SUV’s roof. With a torturous shriek, the metal skin of the Toyota began peeling back like the lid of a sardine can.
King brought his XM8 up and let lead fly. The already compromised windshield fractured into a web of cracks, and beyond it, the bullets tore into the monstrosity’s chest. Blood, erupting from the exit wounds and blown back by the wind, sprayed across the windshield, but the thing barely flinched from the wounds. Driven by rage and augmented by a stew of chemical enhancements, it shrugged off the lethal wounds like they were mosquito bites, and commenced giving the Surf a ragged sunroof.
Rook stabbed one of his Desert Eagles in the direction of the thing’s exposed head, but even as he pulled the trigger, unleashing a thunderclap of noise in the semi-enclosed space, the creature moved. It ducked out of the way, and then with a gymnast’s agility, vaulted from the hood, up and over the opening to land behind the gap, impacting the roof with such force that the vehicle bounced on its suspension.