Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

“Bishop! Hard right now!” The electronic voice of Deep Blue crackled strangely, as if the software used to mask his identity wasn’t sure how to interpret his urgency.

There was a broad paved boulevard running almost parallel to the narrow access road on which they now drove, but neither Bishop nor King saw any sign of the turn Deep Blue was telling them to take.

“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.