Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  He could hear the voices, but echoes under the cavern roof blurred the words into an unintelligible mumble. No chance of guessing from the conversation how long she was likely to linger before she returned to that damned elevator.

  He poked his head far enough out to recon the wall between and beneath the arches. Smooth rock. No footholds, no pipes, no shelves within leaping distance, no fire stairs.

  No way.

  No, if he had to lie low in this blocked passage until everyone was gone, it would have to be the elevator. He moved quietly back toward the door leading into the lobby.

  He opened the door a crack.

  One of the lights on the switchboard was flashing. There was nobody behind the desk.

  Bolan opened the door and moved softly into the lobby.

  There was a metallic clunk behind him. He whirled to see the empty elevator cage sinking from sight.

  The blonde had taken it down. She hadn't returned yet — most likely she was calling it right now, to bring her back.

  So if she had to call it, if it had been at this level, someone else must have brought it up after she had gone down. Someone leaving the fortress.

  Someone who, if they hadn't made the discovery already, would at any moment stumble on the trussed-up body of the unconscious doorman.

  Unless of course the elevator was one of those that returned automatically to the point of departure each time the grille clanged shut after use.

  Bolan wasn't prepared to take the chance.

  If they started a search for the doorman's attacker, he would have to hide. But where? There wasn't too much choice. The dead-end passage was too obvious; there were no possibilities in the alcove halfway along. The bright, bare lobby offered no suggestions. It was too late to use the elevator.

  It had to be the storeroom on the far side of the shaft.

  He opened the door and went in there.

  He switched on a light. That chance had to be taken if he was to find a hiding spot before the hounds were unleashed. He would switch off as soon as he heard the baying.

  If there was a hole to be found.

  The stacked crates of electronic merchandise filled most of the available space. Maneuvering his tall frame along the narrow lanes between each stack, the Executioner found that most of them were too heavy for him to shift unaided. The only place that looked halfway possible was in back, opposite the door. There, a couple of dozen wooden cases of computer hardware were ranged as high as his head along the wall.

  But there was a stone ledge eighteen inches high running along the foot of the wall. Between the wall and the upper part of the stack there was therefore a gap.

  Wide enough for an agile guy to squirm in there?

  Affirmative.

  Not that this was a sure-fire hole where a fugitive could rest easy and escape the most rigorous search: the swiftest glance, the mere flick of a flashlight beam would mean discovery. And the search would be rigorous: apart from the dead-end passage, the storeroom was the only place on this level an intruder could be.

  Bolan bit his lip. Would they know for sure that he hadn't taken the elevator and pressed the Down button? Was there an Up? If the answer in both cases was negative, they'd tear the place apart. So?

  Maybe it would be better if he simply stood behind the door and came out with guns blazing when they passed by.

  Backing awkwardly out of the narrow space, he realized with a start of surprise that he had moved one of the cases.

  It was big, tall enough to take a four-drawer steel filing cabinet and a little wider. And it was empty, the opened side toward the back wall. Above it, a two-by-four carton was heavy, packed full of insulated coaxial cable, according to the stenciled lettering along one side.

  Bolan tried the empty crate and found that he could wedge himself in there. And the interior… yeah, inside the box were ranged the wooden slats that had originally been nailed over the opening.

  He returned to the door, cut the light and felt his way back to the ledge. Inside the empty crate, he crouched and propped up half a dozen of the slats to block the opening, holding them in place with his two forearms. A searcher leaning his head against the wall to squint along the space above the ledge would now see no more than the backs of a row of cases, all of them apparently nailed up with the lids in place.

  With luck.

  Less than a minute later he heard the voices.

  Angry, querulous, sometimes shrill, all talking at once, they created a blast of sound that conveyed no meaning to a man hidden behind so many baffles of wood and plastic and wire.

  The door of the storeroom burst open.

  Now he could hear words.

  "Bastard has to be someplace around here. I don't see where else…"

  "Shut your mouth and look! Didn't Willi give you an idea who he was, what he looked like?"

  "Willi's still out. He walked into a heavy one."

  "Let's take a look at the storeroom. He's got to be…"

  "…lousing up an important meet this way. The more time we waste up here…"

  Light streamed between the slats of wood. Bolan held his breath. He heard footsteps, panting, the scrape of wood. "Would one of you mothers help me shift this damned crate?"

  The light brightened, faded again. A flashlight beam explored the space above the shelf. "Not a sign. I can't think what…"

  "Hey!" Someone shouted from the lobby. "Willi came round, and he says it was Bolan who jumped him!"

  "What the hell…?"

  "How could he have found…?"

  "Would you guys just cool it?" The deep voice, unruffled as ever, was surely Max Nasruddin's. "Listen, I'm telling you it doesn't matter. Surely you're not so dumb you can't see that? It's not important. Leave him be. If he's in, he won't get out."

  "Yeah, but…"

  "Forget it. We have more important things to talk about right now. Willi has to go back to his job. When we leave, Gerhard and Rizzo can remain here in the lobby. If he wants out, he has to come this way, and they can block him. If not… what the hell. So he stays and the medics fix him later. Don't you see, it don't matter a goddamn whichever way."

  A click and the darkness was back. The door closed. Bolan heard the voices fade, the jarring of the elevator gates, the descending whine of the car.

  So they were leaving a pair of hardmen when the others completed their business and split. Okay, it seemed he had zero chances of finding out what this business was while they were still inside the fortress. But two guys he knew for sure would be outside the door in the lobby, two guys who already believed the storeroom was clean — hell, the odds weren't too long there. He would wait until Max and the others left, and then he would try his luck.

  It was a long wait.

  The luminous dial on his watch told him it was eight minutes past five when the elevator cage finally groaned upward with its cargo of… what? Terrorists? Murderers? Screwball lab researchers?

  They were jabbering away in the lobby. Among the voices he could identify those of the guy who had brought the news of Willi, the biker girl, a guttural German accent he took to be Klaus, the chauffeur, and Nasruddin's cool, insolent drawl.

  The elevator whined down and returned with a second shipment. The volume of talk on the far side of the door increased. Bolan could pick no more than an occasional word from the babel.

  Somebody wanted to know how long they had to wait until "the Spanish thing" took off. A deep voice announced that the RNA molecules in the brain manufactured special proteins that were related to the function of memory. The girl asked if someone could give her a ride into Strasbourg. Nasruddin was quoting dates.

  Finally they did leave… in twos and threes, allowing a couple of minutes between each group. They didn't want to make too much of a road show as they left the abandoned farm and picked up their transport wherever they had hidden it, the Executioner imagined.

  At last it was quiet.

  Bolan tried to imagine the two hardmen he knew were on t
he other side of the door. They didn't talk. He heard a scrape of shoe leather, the flare of a match. From time to time one of them whistled some out-of-key tune. He tried to guess their positions in the bright-tiled, well-lit lobby, to visualize the guns they would hold.

  He squirmed out of the crate and stood upright. His knees cracked like pistol shots in the silence, and Bolan froze. He smiled wryly to himself when he realized that no one else had heard. He drew a deep breath, easing open the latch on the door.

  With a gun in each hand, he flung the door wide and erupted into the lobby.

  A warrior fighting the forces of evil, Mack Bolan could feel no pity. In a war you didn't ask questions first and then shoot if the answers didn't please you. Whether or not these were the hands that planted the explosives, fingers that set the timer or squeezed the trigger, the two men were examples of collective guilt, morally responsible for hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent deaths.

  He was squeezing two triggers himself as he hurled himself across the lobby toward the entrance door.

  There was a man in a windbreaker behind the desk. He was sitting with a mini-Uzi laid across his knees. The other guy was older, thickset, standing by the door to the dead-end passage — a pockmarked, rock-hard face above a cradled H&K MP-5 submachine gun.

  Total surprise, violent movement from an unexpected direction — the soldier relied on these for the tenth of a second advantage that he needed. His faith wasn't misplaced.

  With Big Thunder in his right hand, the Beretta in his left, he roared out firing blind for the second time on this mission, a tornado of flaming death.

  One arc of hellspray found a target right away: Big Thunder's 240-grain boattail flesh-shredders homed in on the guy at the desk before he could grab his Uzi. The Beretta's lethal hail fell on stonier ground: the shots went wide of the gorilla flattened against the passageway door. He lifted the gun while splinters of tile gouged from the wall by the 9 mm slugs were still in the air and triggered a couple of shots at the Executioner.

  But Bolan was already diving into a shoulder roll: the H&K deathstream streaked over his head while he was on the floor. He came up out of it by the entrance door before the thunderous echoes of that first volley had died away in the low-ceilinged room. The hardman thumbed the SMG onto full-auto and swung the barrel, but his reaction time was too slow.

  From his half crouch by the door, Bolan unleashed a three-round burst from the Beretta that cored the gorilla's chest in the instant that he fired. It was followed by a single pulverizer from the AutoMag that found no target. For the 93-R's 9 mm rounds had punched the guy hard enough to burst open the passage door and send him sliding on his back on the floor several feet beyond.

  Three small jets of dark crimson fountained momentarily from his chest and then subsided as his heart stopped beating.

  Bolan swung around to the deskman.

  He was still breathing, but only just. One of the AutoMag's slugs had torn away the top of his left arm, another had creased him above the ear and a third had clearly punctured a lung. He was slumped in the chair that had tipped back against a wall cracked and starred by the near misses. Most of his blood was in his lap or puddled on the floor beneath, but an obscene pink froth swelled and deflated over the hole in his chest.

  Glassy eyes swung upward as Bolan stood over the desk. He saw through the gory stains marking one side of the gunman's face that it was the biker kid who had ridden in with the girl. If he'd been left as end-stop, that explained why the girl was looking for a ride.

  There was a gargling sound from the bloodied face. The guy was trying to speak. Bolan bent toward him.

  The voice was a whispered croak, with pauses to allow blood bubbling in the windpipe to subside. But the words when they came were clear enough at first. "You didn't have to… you shouldn't… we only had or… orders to hold you. We weren't to… take you out. Shit, all we had… do… only to keep… keep…" The voice died away into a mumble.

  "Keep what?" Bolan said. "Orders to keep what?"

  "Keep… you… for next…" the words were now as toneless as the wind rustling over dead leaves "…for the next… session…"

  "What session?" Bolan said urgently.

  The wounded man's mouth was gaping. A thread of red spittle swayed from his lower lip. He gave a deep groan, struggling to push his head away from the wall. Dry lips twisted into a contorted grimace, and a curious spasmodic choking noise shuddered the top half of his body. He was laughing.

  The eyes swiveled to fix on the Executioner. Briefly a puzzled expression flitted across the guy's face.

  "As if… you… didn't… know!" he gasped.

  "Know what?" Bolan cried. "What do you mean?"

  But the man choked again on the next word, gagging as blood gurgled from his mouth. He stiffened suddenly, and then went totally limp, his head lolling sideways as he slid slackly from the chair to the floor.

  Bolan sighed, then straightened. He thumbed shut the eyes of both dead men and went to the elevator. He pressed the lowest button. The grille slammed shut; the cage sank down into darkness.

  18

  Before he attempted any detailed investigation, the Executioner decided to make a swift recon of the entire underground complex. That way, in an emergency, during any future visit, he would have the layout of each level, together with its potential of attack and retreat, fixed firmly in his mind.

  Because he knew he would be coming back. And when he did there was going to be trouble — most of it, he hoped, for others.

  The elevator deposited him in the gymnasium.

  He noted the variety of the equipment, walked through to an anteroom and saw that an escalator led down from there to a level that was still lower — an excavation, he realized, that must recently have been quarried from the rock because there was no indication of anything that far down on the old chart he had seen.

  This lowest level was the firing range. Bolan whistled when he saw the scope of the armament stacked there. Racked at the back of the stand were Winchester repeaters, Mannlicher Express hunting rifles, specialized snipers' guns and every modern infantry weapon from an M-16 to a Parker-Hale M-82, from a Heckler & Koch caseless assault rifle to a Czech-made Makarov.

  Uzi and Ingram SMGs jostled for pride of place on a long counter with Walther MPKs and Bergmann, Schmeisser and Skorpion machine pistols.

  But it was the handgun collection that really took Bolan's breath away. There was everything from an old .38 Police Special to the latest VZ-82 fabricated by Omnipol in Prague. He saw Pythons and PPKs, Berettas and Brownings, Combat Magnums and Cobras. There was more than one version of the Parabellum automatic, incorrectly known as a Luger, a Webley service revolver and even an old, angular, long-barreled Mauser Military from World War I.

  Labeled trays of ammunition gleamed behind flaps of Plexiglas; three or four dozen manuals and instruction booklets were ranged along a shelf above the SMG counter.

  At one end of the stand, a glass door led to a small armorer's workshop where a Russian-made Kalashnikov had been dismantled and laid out for cleaning. On the same bench, Bolan recognized a number of one-off, one-shot weapons that didn't look like guns at all. They were in the form of fountain pens, flashlights, cigarette lighters, women's vanity cases and other domestic gadgets.

  What was screwy, too — it was clear from notices and warnings pinned up here and there — was that this was no secret arms dump, no cache destined to equip elitist future terror groups. The weapons here were supernumerary — for teaching, familiarization and practice only!

  The guys running the show, Bolan reflected as he walked to the butts, sure as hell were in the money.

  He whistled again when he saw the stack of photo faces waiting to be fixed to the pop-up target figures on the snap-shot mechanism. There were more than thirty of them, and the names read like a directory of Europe's most eminent, most powerful and most talked-about headliners. They were certainly training a mean assassination squad here.

&nb
sp; He took the moving stairway back to the gymnasium and explored the galleries on the other side of the elevator shaft. First, the lofty computer cavern, then a projection studio equipped for film and video viewing. In back of this small room, a spiral stairway rose to a comfortably furnished office suite.

  Beyond the wide desk, the liquor cabinet and the filing bank, doors opened onto the iron catwalk that ran along one wall above the computer complex. The left-hand end of the railed gallery abutted on the rock wall of the cave; on the right there was an arch.

  Bolan went through and found himself in a passageway that took him past the elevator shaft to a biochemical laboratory he judged to be above the gymnasium. Washrooms, kitchens and a refectory separated this from an electronics workshop. Research here seemed to be concerned with the perfecting of middle-range microbugs. An enlarged diagram of a two-headed Continental 0011 hung on one wall, several types of FM handset receivers lay on the bench, and he saw at least a dozen miniaturized transmitters in transparent plastic boxes.

  At the far end of the workshop an arch led to a cement-walled hallway. This was roughly circular in shape. Through a second archway immediately opposite, Bolan saw the humped shapes of a generator and turbine casings. Six doorways opened off the remainder of the hallway.

  One of these gave access to the lecture theater, another revealed a stairway leading down to the gymnasium anteroom, a third — blocked by a locked steel grille — wound upward into the dark. He imagined this must lead to the old casemates and the site where the armored observation tower had once been, the highest level inside the fort.

  The three remaining doorways were bricked up. Bolan figured they closed off passages running out to minor firing points designed for snipers and machine gunners.

  Okay, so there were two ways, apart from the elevator, of switching from one to the other of the two main levels — the stairway linking hallway and gymnasium; the spiral between the office suite and the viewing room. Had he missed out on any others? He decided to make a second lap and headed for the stairs.