A side impact jarred through Bryant.

‘No fucking way.’ Chris yelled his results. ‘They’re locked on tight, Mike. You’ve got to crash-stop.’

‘Can’t afford to lose the momentum, Chris. You know that.’

‘You can’t afford to stay in theah, Mike.’ The crisp edge of control in Makin’s tone made him sound almost prissy. ‘Chwis is wight. Dwop out, pick it up after.’

‘No fucking way.’

Up ahead, the long, low Mitsubishi battlewagon whipped around on shrieking tyres and came back up the highway towards the locked-up Shorn leader.

‘Nick,’ Bryant’s voice was strained. ‘That’s Jones up ahead. Get out there and see if you can’t derail her.’

‘On it.’ Makin’s BMW flashed on the edge of Bryant’s vision as it accelerated away from the three-vehicle clinch. Bryant blew out breath, hard and fast, and settled into his speed.

‘What about me?’

‘You hang back, Chris. This doesn’t work, I’m going to need you.’

Up ahead, he watched as Nick Makin drove hard at what had to be Mitsue Jones’s vehicle. A hot knot of hope pulsed through his guts in defiance of the icy knowing that told him Jones would not be stopped. The Nakamura team had set him up with consummate skill, and they’d left him with only two options. Slam stop and lose the duel inertia; in effect drop out of the combat, admit Nakamura’s tactical superiority and have to drive catch up for the next two hundred kilometres—

An image of Chris’s chessboard flashed through his mind.

Symbolic defeat.

Or—

The Mitsubishi flinched aside and left Makin stalled across the highway. Bryant grimaced and floored his accelerator. The two Nakamura vehicles matched it effortlessly. The battlewagon came on.

‘Chris, this is going to be messy,’ he gritted. ‘Get yourself clear.’

Seconds from the chicken head-to-head, the two Nakamura wingmen peeled away as if their vehicles were under the command of a single driver. Bryant caught a face grinning at him from the left-hand vehicle and a hand lifted in farewell. Jones’s car was almost on him. The radio crackled at him.

‘Sayonara, Bryant-san.’

Mitsue Jones must have jerked the wheel at the last possible moment. Bryant misread it and stayed on line, but Jones had left the rear of the Mitsubishi in his path. The BMW hit at speed and the front left wing of the car kicked into the air. Bryant yelled, incoherent with shock as his vehicle left the road. The Omega turned lazily in the air and came down on its side, trailing a carpet of sparks across the asphalt. Three seconds into the skid, it ploughed into the central reservation.

Jones heard the yell but had no time for anything other than fighting her own vehicle back under control. The Mitsubishi whipped about on the impact and staggered sideways. For three seconds the wheel was like a live thing under her hands, and then she had it back. She braked the cruiser towards a smoking halt, facing back the way she’d come.

Bryant’s BMW lay on one side, jammed into the central barrier and leaning jauntily. The vehicle’s roof faced out, windscreen showing spiderweb cracked in the weak spring sunlight. Bryant was pinned in clear view, struggling with his belt. Jones snarled a grin and came off the brake, slamming in the gear as the cruiser freewheeled backward, accelerating hard against the inertial drag. The Kaigan’s engine shrilled and the cruiser sprang forward.

Trapped and twisted against his own seatbelt, Mike Bryant heard the sound and flailed about to look. By the time he had forced his head round far enough to see, the Mitsubishi was almost on him.

He just had time to scream.

‘Ah, fu—‘

And the cruiser was gone, jolted past, and there was a titanium-grey Saab crunched to its tail. Two engines in savagely low gear, roaring against each other, and the shriek of steel under stress.

‘Chris?’

Chris’s voice drifted into the upturned space, laconic.

‘Be right back.’

Metal tore down one wing of the Nakamura car and ripped clear, exposing the driver’s side rear wheel. Jones shrieked abuse in Japanese, her English abandoned in momentary fury. Chris was already past, yelling into his mike with sudden urgency.

‘Makin, where are you?’

‘Up ahead.’ There was a tight edge of panic in the other man’s voice. ‘I’ve got both these motherfuckers on my tail. I think they’re going to lock me up same as Mike.’

‘On my way.’

Chris spotted the Nakamura wingmen a pair of seconds later, dancing spirals behind and alongside Makin’s BMW. As he watched, the left-hand car slipped in and struck the Shorn car a glancing blow. Makin jerked sideways and the other Mitsubishi rammed him from the rear. It was consummate teamwork, Chris had time to reflect briefly, something that the young guns at Shorn could learn from and probably never would. Then he was on the left-hand car. He hit it at full acceleration and felt the impact down to the roots of his teeth.

‘Right,’ he muttered.

The Nakamura car tried to pull away but didn’t have the power. Chris gave up a hand’s breadth of space, then floored the pedal and hit again. This time the wingman tried to skate sideways right. Chris matched the move. He gave up the hand’s breadth again and when the Nakamura driver slewed to the left, he let him. He went with the move and forced it. Another jolt and he was jammed onto the rear fender, driving the other car towards the grass bank that lined the left-hand hard shoulder.

It could have been better - could for example have been the drop on the other side of the carriageway - but it would have to do.

Something flashed in his peripheral vision, the glossy black of the other Nakamura car. The other wingman was coming to his comrade’s aid. Chris fought down the urge to let go and face the new threat. His voice went gritted into the mike.

‘Makin, get rid of this fucker, will you?’

‘Done.’

The BMW was there, twilight blue jostling with the black for position. The two cars peeled away as the Nakamura driver fled. Chris turned his full attention back to killing the man in front of him.

The rapid rumble as they crossed the cats-eye line of the hard shoulder and the wingman finally panic-braked as he neared the bank. It was far too late. Chris hit the overdrive on the Saab’s gear box and drove his opponent hard up the fifty-degree incline. As soon as the other vehicle was fully off the road, he braked savagely and dropped back. Denied the power of the Saab’s pushing, and subject to his own desperately applied brakes, the wingman slithered back down the grass, hit the road surface with an overload of kinetic energy to shed and tumbled across the three lanes into the crash barrier.

The Mitsubishi exploded.

‘Bonus,’ said Chris to nobody in particular, and threw the Saab into a U-turn crash-stop.

A kilometre back along the highway, he saw what he’d been expecting. Mitsue Jones’s battlewagon heading directly for him, trailing wreckage from one wing like a shark with prey in its jaws. Chris engaged the Saab’s launch gear. The rear wheels squealed on the road, scrabbled for purchase and found it. The Saab leapt forward.

Past the egg-yolk yellow and billowing black smoke of the crashed and burnt wingman, back down the slope towards the bridge where the duel had kicked in. The hungry roar of the engine seemed to recede as he plunged back towards the Nakamura car. He had time to notice the marred lines of the other vehicle as it ballooned in his windscreen, time to notice the pewter cloud formations smeared across the sky behind, time even to see the gusting wind blowing the grass flat along the embankment to his right—

At the last possible moment, Jones flinched left, covering the torn wing damage as he guessed she would. He ploughed into her right-hand rear side with brutal precision. The Saab spaced armouring held and opened a huge gap over the Mitsubishi’s rear tyre. Chris hit the brakes and at the relatively low speed he’d developed the U-turn came comfortably. He was back on Jones’s tail before she’d made five hundred metres of road away from him.