headed, but down in her gut she suspected the destination was New Town. Shah leaned forward to mutter instructions to the driver, who sped up to the point where every course correction, every small turn of the wheel to whip them around a slower car, threw the Volvo’s occupants back and forth across the cabin.
Ahead of them, Julianne could just make out the rear of two late-model cars. Streamlined and low to the ground, they wove through the stop-start traffic like barracudas streaking through schools of slow-moving guppies. Flickers of flash suppressors could be seen as tracer rounds zipped towards them. One of the shooters emptied a clip into a passing civilian vehicle, causing it to slam into oncoming traffic.
‘
‘Oh shit,’ said Jules.
The driver cranked the wheel, taking their car across two lanes. He ran up the shoulder until he was clear of the collision site, before whipping back into the proper lane. The scenery outside changed in brief strobes of blurred imagery. The Volvo screamed through the wide, dusty streets of a factory and warehouse district before bursting out onto a wide four-lane arterial road that swept alongside the upper reaches of the harbour.
‘
A black pepper cloud suddenly enveloped one of Shah’s Landcruisers, shredding the passenger compartment into disassociated bits of glass, flesh, metal and bone. Bursts of flame brewed up around the undercarriage as the vehicle turned over on its side. The other pursuit SUV whipped around their fallen comrades before ramming the offending vehicle off the road.
‘Stay with that one,’ Birendra ordered. ‘We’ll take the last one.’
‘Grenade launcher,’ Shah remarked, as they passed the burning ruins of his men. ‘This is most unfortunate.’
There, up ahead on the left, Jules could see the marina where the Rhino had moored his boat. Police tape still fluttered across the entrance near the manager’s hut. She then caught a sunburst flaring off the tinted rear windows of the car in front as it screeched through a hard right turn and disappeared into the diabolical labyrinth of the city’s red-light district.
‘Oh God, we’ll lose them,’ she said, despair in her voice.
‘They cannot move at speed now,’ Shah assured her.
Within moments they had reached the same corner where their quarry had just entered New Town. The driver yanked the wheel once more and took them into the congested chaos, blowing through a pile of garbage as he did so. The stench of rotten eggs, meat and vegetable matter saturated the inside of the Volvo. Jules resisted the urge to gag.
She craned around awkwardly to see how much back-up Shah had. She could see one other SUV, an older Toyota of some sort. Red and blue flashers turned inside its grille work, adding their own urgency to the bubble the driver had placed on the roof. She might have shaken her head had it not been so painful to move. The longer she was in this city, the less she understood it.
‘Where are the police?’ she asked.
‘They will be back at the crash site,’ said Shah. ‘But Northern Territory and city law prohibits them from exceeding the speed limit by more than twenty kilometres an hour, even while in hot pursuit. There have been incidents. Pedestrian fatalities.’
As if to underscore that point, they passed a trio of bodies, lying face down in the bone-dry dust, their blood spilling into the earth. Crowds had gathered, but kept their distance, as if the corpses might somehow transmit the violence of their ending through simple proximity.
‘But we -‘
‘We do not answer to the city or Territory,’ he explained patiently. ‘We are licensed by the development authority.’
Birendra spoke up again from the front seat, where he was loading shells into a military-style shotgun. ‘They would not follow us into New Town anyway, Miss Julianne.’
‘Turning right,’ their driver said, giving another brutal hoist on the steering wheel. The Volvo scraped past a pair of pedestrians, the vortex of the vehicle’s passing yanking their hats off into the rubbish.
They roared past the Freaks Tattoo and body-piercing shop, where a cluster of pre-teens fitted with enough metal to build a small bicycle stood in the street, gawking at the chase. A bald-headed man with a white goatee came out waving a cricket bat, shouting curses at them as the front of the car knocked over a 55-gallon drum of rancid fryer oil from some nearby greasy spoon. The driver didn’t waste much time using the horn. He simply nudged, shoved and rammed vehicles out of the way with the crunch of plastic, metal and glass. Birendra was ready at the window, the muzzle of his shottie in prominent view.
The Volvo’s windows were tinted, allowing Jules to lean forward and search for Cesky’s men without having to squint into the fierce antipodean light. At this time of day, the sun burned with the intensity of an unshielded furnace. A nuclear fire rendering everything outside the car into flat, monochromatic severity. It was the wet season, but the monsoons had failed for three years running, and the urgency of their pursuit had thrown up thick clouds of dust and trash.
Vehicles blared their horns, and drivers leaned out to abuse them until they saw Birendra with his shotgun. Once they clocked that, they wasted little time in moving, to clear the way. Slower vehicles found themselves shoved into stalls, crushing product and proprietor alike. The rubber-neck brigade materialised at each individual tragedy to gawk and enjoy the spectacle without providing anything in the way of assistance.
As Julianne watched their target negotiate a left-hand turn at high speed, to take them even deeper into the district, her eyes went wide at the sight of a pedicab suddenly launched into the air a hundred metres ahead of them. The bright orange rickshaw, its driver and passenger separated as they headed into orbit, perversely reminded her of that old footage of the space shuttle coming apart after launch.
They followed the turn into a tighter alleyway, pushing past a cluster of what looked like military tents on the left, with a high climbing wall of shipping containers to the right laced together with metal mesh walkways. The passage of Cesky’s team snapped free lines of laundry, adding to the confusion. The still airborne bits of tighty whities, naughty nothings and bed linen drifted down onto the windshield of the Volvo. A rain of rubbish, beer cans and bottles fell down upon them from directly above, thrown by enraged locals. The wipers came on when a particularly nasty bit of brown fluid hit the windshield, showing the exact contents of somebody’s poorly digested dinner from the night before.
The last vehicle took another turn, this time to the right, crashing through a chain-link fence.
‘Brace, brace, brace!’ the driver shouted.
He took the turn at high speed onto what appeared to be some sort of makeshift basketball court. A basketball bounced off the back of the Volvo as a mixed group of players stood in the vehicle’s wake, popping off rounds, which shattered the back windshield. ‘Suppress,’ Shah ordered.
A quick burst from the PKM in the rear brought the gangland protest to a stop.
Jules heard the metallic snap and lock of Shah ramming home a magazine into his G-36. He was careful to ensure the safety was still on, leading her to check her own weapon. It suddenly felt inadequate.
The surface was rough, testing the XC 90’s suspension, but at least it was sealed, after a fashion. As the driver wrenched them around into the side street down which the car ahead had sped, she felt and heard the loss of traction once the wheels hit a section of dirt road. It was probably bare earth from when this place was … what, a garbage dump? Five or six years ago? She couldn’t remember.
The congestion was much worse in here than it had been out on the wider, main avenue. Granger had told her something about most of the cross-streets in New Town being unsurveyed, as though the back routes and minor alleys were contingent spaces, pathways through the crush left over by accident rather than design. She could see that here. The streetscape was bedlam, a derangement of building styles that couldn’t even agree on a common footpath. The covered verandas of two bars - she assumed they were bars, because of all the drunks spilling out to gawk at the chase - pushed out a good metre or two deeper into the roadway, creating a dead space where traffic could not flow. Some cars and motorcycles, and even one horse, were parked in there. Or tied up in the case of the horse.
On the opposite side of the street, another building appeared to have burnt down recently, and the vacant lot had been occupied by street vendors, offering not just games of chance, stolen electronics or salvaged goods from
