24: Deadline (24 Series) (29 page)

If it had just been the two of them, Jack would have extended his distance, let the biker lose his momentum and waited for the ideal time to strike. That wasn’t an option here, though. There was little room to maneuver among all the workbenches and chemical drums, too many civilians at close range who might get in the way or end up as collateral damage. He would have to finish this one fast. The biker had three more friends to back him up, and Jack couldn’t expect Chase to handle those odds on his own.

The karambit sang as it described a horizontal arc through the air, level with Jack’s throat. He dodged, bending back to let the weapon pass, but he wasn’t quite fast enough to miss it entirely. The razor-sharp tip of the blade barely touched the skin over his left cheekbone, but it left a cold touch as it cut the flesh, heat burning in its place a split second later. Jack flinched at the jolt of pain but didn’t let it slow him. He saw the biker coming back the other way with a return swipe, hoping to bury the blade in his chest.

Jack’s arms caught the biker’s and brought them across each other in a motion like a pair of shears snapping closed. The move trapped the biker’s arm and cleanly snapped the radius bone halfway along its length, causing inches of it to rip out of his flesh and through the sleeve of his denim shirt.

The attacker released a yowl of agony and he lost his grip on the karambit, his hand opening with the shock of the pain. Even the meth he had smoked a while ago wasn’t enough to numb him, and he recoiled.

But not quickly enough. Jack caught the knife as it fell, snatching it before it hit the ground and bounced away. Without conscious thought, he mirrored the attack of his assailant and sent the karambit back to its owner. The tip of the blade pierced the left eye of the biker and Jack pushed it home, sinking it deep like a fishhook.

One down.

The biker tumbled to the floor, but even as he dropped a second man was bearing down on Jack, an enraged roar on his lips. This one was a lot bigger, one of the guards who had been walking around inside the drug factory. If not for the thick ponytail that fell to his shoulders, he could have been the brother to the man-mountain Jack had seen behind the bar at the Crankcase.

He rushed at him, catching Jack before he could sidestep out of the way. They collided with a freight train impact and he felt the MP5/10 submachine gun dangling from his shoulder snag on something and become lost. Before Jack could process that, the big Night Ranger had both of his thick, meaty paws around the front straps of his bulletproof vest. Jack felt the world turn around him as the towering thug dragged him off his feet and hauled him around in a fast, dizzying spin.

*   *   *

Chase ducked and wove, calling on old boxing moves as the rail-thin biker with the crackling cattle prod carved up the air in front of him. The bright, actinic glow of the prod’s electric discharge left muddy purple afterimages on Chase’s retinas, and he blinked furiously, knowing that all it would take to be beaten was one straight-on connection with the weapon. He had taken a Taser hit in SWAT training half a lifetime ago, a savage jolt through his torso to teach him and his fellow cops how to deal with such an eventuality. It wasn’t something he was in any rush to repeat.

He glimpsed a second figure joining the first and now there were two of them coming at him through the blur of motion and crackling electricity. One struck high and the other went low, forcing Chase to stay on the defensive. He tried to keep outside their reach, but he was aware they were backing him deeper into the drug factory, trying to limit his options. Chase let his training take over, dodging, moving, presenting a shifting target. For the bikers, it was like clutching at smoke, but they knew that all they had to do was wear him down. Sooner or later, Chase would plant a foot wrong and they would fall on him, and beat him into the concrete.

He couldn’t wait for that to happen. From the corner of his eye, Chase caught sight of a plastic drum in bright fire-truck red. Black stenciled letters and hazmat labels on the side of the container warned about the volatility of whatever it was full of, but Chase didn’t have the time to double-check. He threw himself at the cylinder, hearing cries of alarm as some of the captive workers scattered before him.

Chase put his weight onto the top of the drum and used that to rock it on the wooden pallet where it stood. It was half-full, and thick liquid sloshed around inside. He directed a kick at the base of the wobbling drum and that was enough to push it off the pallet. Gravity took over. The plastic container tipped on its side and the impact blew out the safety cap, vomiting the contents across the concrete floor. A noxious gush of industrial-strength iodine solution washed over the boots of the bikers, the spill lighting a surge of panic through the workers. They bolted for the doors, chaos erupting around the echoing concrete chamber.

*   *   *

There was a dizzying moment when Jack was actually flying through the air; then he collided with one of the water containers, bouncing off it with a hollow, echoing clank. He tried to get to his feet, but the big man was already there, already hauling him up again by the straps on the vest. Jack kicked and punched, but his blows didn’t seem to have any effect. The giant biker threw him to the right and the left, back and forth, slamming him into the drying racks over and over again. Showers of meth rocks exploded around him, raining down, trays full of freshly cooked crystal tipping over and grinding to powder beneath the boots of the man trying to bludgeon him to death.

Perhaps the guy Jack had killed with the knife had been a blood brother of this towering biker, or perhaps he was just deep in his rage and out for murder. Whatever the reason, the big man seemed ignorant of all the property damage he was doing and product he was destroying. He just wanted to beat Jack to death.

Jack tasted blood in his mouth as he struck the racks again, feeling the rebandaged bullet wound beneath his shirt rip open afresh. He was on the edge of a concussion, losing his grip on the fight, suddenly caught by the undertow of fatigue that he had been fighting off since he left New York City. If he lost his grip now, that would be the end of it.

No
. Jack arched his back and threw up his hands. Before the big man could react, he brought them both down in hard chopping motions on either side of his thick neck. The double blow was enough to jar the biker out of his rhythm, and Jack followed it up by jerking forward again. He brought his forehead down as hard as he could on the bridge of the man’s nose and was rewarded by the crunch of breaking cartilage. Abruptly, he was out of his assailant’s powerful grip and falling to the floor as the biker snarled and clutched at his face. Jack landed badly and cursed, scrambling back to his feet as quickly as he could, ignoring the cascades of pain rolling up along his torso.

Streaked with blood, the long-haired biker gave a wordless bellow of fury and reached for Jack again, hands out before him in grasping talons.

Jack grabbed the first thing that would serve as a weapon—a glass chemical bottle—and hurled it at the other man. It broke against his chest and instantly an acrid, sickly sweet stench filled Jack’s nostrils. Where the liquid in the bottle had struck, the biker’s shirt, his jacket, his bare skin were burning ghost-white with a vicious acidic reaction. The big man’s eyes widened and he forgot all about Jack, instead clawing at the spreading patch of hissing, melting material. He screamed and staggered backward as the concentrated hydrochloric acid ate into him. Before Jack could get clear, the wounded man’s flailing motions sent the man pitching into another workbench, where an unshielded gas burner was alight with yellow flames. Fire caught the biker’s trailing hair and it instantly became a torch. He knocked the burner on its side and Jack saw the flames escape across the span of the bench, greedily devouring everything they touched.

There was a hot surge of smoldering air, and for the second time that night Jack turned away as an infernal heat beat at his back.

*   *   *

The belch of fire from across the meth factory was so bright, so sudden, that it made Chase hesitate—and that was the moment his attackers had been looking for. The closest man went for him with the cattle prod, leading with a jabbing motion. Chase tried to parry the blow, making the block through pure reflex action, but it was ill-timed and missed the motion. Instead the metal tines of the prod glanced off the flesh just above his wrist, in the meat of his forearm muscle.

It hit him like a hammer. Fireworks detonated behind Chase’s eyes and a shuddering shock went through his entire body as every sinew in him seemed to go taut at once. But Chase fought back, he chewed down the pain and forced it away. The sharp, quick bolt of agony was not new to him. He had felt the same kind of brutal burn through his damaged flesh more than once, and it did not lay him out as that Taser shot had, all those years ago in training. Maybe it was the wound, the places where the nerves in his severed and reattached hand had never truly healed. Maybe that kind of pain was something he had become insensate to. It didn’t matter.

Chase struck out with his good hand and grabbed the cattle prod before his first attacker could reel back and away. He deflected the sparking tip of the weapon away from his midriff and forced it back into the chest of his assailant. Chase slammed the deadened palm of his bad hand into the base of the prod where the trigger button was located, and before he could stop himself, the biker was forced to discharge his own weapon into his torso. A buzzing crackle cut through the Night Ranger’s shirt and he went into a twitching spasm, crying out as his legs turned to water.

Disarming him as he fell away to the chemical-slicked floor, Chase spun around to meet the attack he knew was coming from the other biker. He batted the other man’s cattle prod away with the one he had taken, and triggered it into the face of the second assailant. The electro-conductive tines didn’t make contact with flesh, but the searing burst of discharge was enough to flash blind the other man at such close range. While he was clawing at his eyes, Chase rocked forward and clubbed him hard about the head, putting down the third of them.

Panting and shaking, he turned to hear the
snap-clack
of a round being racked into the breech of a shotgun.

*   *   *

With the drug factory now alight, the last Night Ranger guard decided to ignore Jack’s warning about uncontrolled gunplay inside the garage bunker and opened fire with a pump-action Winchester M12, blasting away with heavy-gauge buckshot that blew ragged holes in water tanks and shredded debris across the workbenches.

Jack dove for cover as a glass carboy full of chemicals blew apart behind him, spilling more poisonous liquids into the growing slick across the concrete floor. Streamers of orange flame crawled up the nearby walls and gathered along the ceiling. His throat stung with the cut of toxic gasses that were building up inside the enclosed space. Every worker had broken and run, leaving whatever they had been doing to boil over, catch fire or otherwise turn lethal.

He moved, hunched low, as more shotgun blasts peppered the workbench to his side. The biker with the gun was yelling something, but Jack didn’t listen. This fool was standing between him and the exit.

He drew the M1911 pistol from his jacket pocket and in a smooth, continuous motion, Jack burst out of his cover and into the open, the gun rising into a Modified Weaver stance as the sights came level with his eyeline. The shotgunner was already aiming in Jack’s direction—to hesitate would mean it was
game over
.

Jack fired a single .45 ACP round that caught the biker center-mass, striking his chest just below the sternum. The man went down, the ragged cavern the penetrating bullet tore through his lungs filling with blood.

He kicked the shotgun away from the dying man’s grip and cast around. It was getting hard to breathe now, and the noxious smoke filling the chamber made his eyes sting. Jack saw movement, and a figure lurched out of the haze toward him.

“Chase…”

The other man nodded, handing him the MP5/10 he had lost in his earlier fight. “Thought you’d want this back.”

Jack nodded and holstered the pistol, breaking into a jog as he checked the SMG and brought it to the ready. “Let’s go!”

“Right behind you…”

Acrid, sour vapor billowed out of the open bunker door, and Jack and Chase stumbled blindly through it—and into a storm of gunfire.

The Night Rangers gathered outside had witnessed the sudden, mass exodus of the workers from the old tank garage, and their reaction had been a predictable one. Weapons came out, and they opened fire on their captives, shouting at them to go back. Caught between a building inferno and a rain of bullets, they had scattered. Many had been cut down or badly wounded as the bikers reacted with violent reprisal.

Jack switched his Heckler & Koch to burst-fire and shot back into the ranks of the Night Rangers, and they reacted with shock, never expecting to take withering salvos of 10mm bullets from what they had thought were unarmed targets. Chase did the same, spraying three-round jolts across the open parade ground. Shooters caught unawares were hit and went down hard, but it only took a few seconds for the rest of them to locate the source of the incoming fire.

Finding temporary cover behind a stack of wooden forklift pallets, Jack unloaded the rest of his rounds with a blind burst and reloaded. Behind them, the open doors of the bunker were like the mouth of hell, the hot breath of the fire searing and poisonous. He glanced at Chase as the other man picked off his targets. “The bus,” said Jack, inclining his head toward the battered old Greyhound. “Can you drive it?”

“Sure, if there wasn’t ten guys between me and it.” Chase flinched as bullets chewed splinters out of the pile of pallets.

“Get the captives on board and get them the hell out of here. Don’t stop for anything.”

Chase gave him a level look. “And you’re gonna be doing what, exactly?”

“I’ll draw them off.” Chase opened his mouth to say something, perhaps to suggest that was a damned stupid idea that could get him killed, but Jack didn’t wait around to hear it.