Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  "I know what the Marksman looks like from the Baraka tapes, but I don't have a face for the Corsican. Do you have a photo in your files?"

  "No way. Max runs a dead stop on visuals. No evidence. There's not a photo of anyone in the whole place." "What does he look like?"

  "He looks like… well, like a Corsican. Bulky, tanned, big black mustache, short curly hair. Very dark shades all the time."

  "Got it. No special distinguishing marks?"

  "No, not that anyone could see when he's dressed. Oh, by the way, you will drop by the fort and leave traces, won't you?"

  "As I promised."

  "Good. There's nobody there tonight or tomorrow. It's all in the dossier I activated. Top left-hand drawer of the desk in the office. It's not locked."

  "Relax," Bolan said. "Even if they find out I know, you'll be in the clear."

  "Great. Everything I told you is in there."

  "Thanks, Julie," Bolan said. He heard a click, then replaced the receiver.

  As soon as it was dark, Bolan left the hotel. When he was ready, he'd allow himself to be found again, offer himself as a guinea pig — as long as Greg Toledo had found some chemical to counteract the drugs they would use on him.

  Meanwhile there was this Spanish hit. Bolan knew the surveillance team or teams had lost him, and he wanted it to stay that way, which meant he had to lie very low indeed.

  He took the bike. He left the old town, riding through the network of narrow, twisting streets past steep-roofed old houses with overhanging carved wood gables dwarfed by the soaring red sandstone tower of the Gothic cathedral.

  It took him some time to find the abandoned farm again. From Selestat onward, through the vineyards and up along the forested ridges of the Vosges, one steep unmarked lane looked much like another. Also, when he had left with Julie, he had thought only of getting back to the city and hadn't paid much attention to the route.

  But finally he found the rutted track that led to the ruin, bumping along it and out into the yard. He cut the engine and leaned the bike against the wall. There were no stars tonight, and the wind was stronger. Bolan guessed there would be rain before dawn. He wished he had brought some kind of jacket to cover his blacksuit.

  The two sagging doors of the barn were chained together, with a rusty padlock joining the links. But he had no difficulty pushing them far enough apart to squeeze through.

  This time he had brought a larger flashlight. He switched it on as soon as he was inside. Dust motes danced in the brilliant beam, and a bat flew squeaking through the tunnel of brightness as he directed the flashlight upward to locate the roof beam with the electric button behind it.

  The hatch's panels were thick — half-inch steel plates covered with twenty inches of compounded earth covered in straw. He saw with astonishment as they whined apart that the whole storeroom ceiling had been hinged to open in two sections.

  He stood at the edge and played the beam downward. The top of the tallest crate was ten feet below him. He leaped lightly down, scrambled to the floor and went through into the lobby.

  Only then, when the storeroom door had closed, did he switch on the lighting master control. He didn't want any illumination escaping through the hatch and out the barn doors to alert any curious passerby that there was an occupant within the farm.

  The lights blazed on, dimmed, then brightened again as the generator automatically cut in. Bolan took the elevator down one level and went through to the walkway and the office.

  The dossier was in the drawer as Julie had told him. He leafed through the three pages of typescript. The briefing was as she had outlined it. The only additional factor was the mention of a British contact called Cobbold, who was to help the snipers with locations and arrange a getaway car for the woman.

  Bolan closed the file. Leaving it open on the desk was a little too obvious he decided. He would make it look as if an attempt had been made to cover up.

  He placed the folder awkwardly among the other papers, so that it stuck out of the rest, then pushed the drawer not quite shut and knocked over a tall vase full of dried grasses so that it smashed on the floor. He went back to the elevator, rode up to the lobby, cut the master switch and reentered the storeroom in the dark.

  Groping his way through the blackness, he found the big packing case and clambered to the top. It was going to be quite a leap to make the top edge. He stood upright.

  His head cracked against something solid.

  Bolan swore. He unclipped the flashlight from his combat belt and shone it upward. Eighteen inches away, the light dazzled back at him from a polished steel surface.

  The two loading panels that made up the room's ceiling had been closed.

  For a heartbeat the Executioner stood totally immobile. The darkness was total; he couldn't hear any sound except his own steady breathing.

  Okay, either Julie Marco was a plant and had double-crossed him so they could grab him once more, or, unknown to her, Nasruddin had followed up the Executioner's elimination of his watchdogs by posting an all-night sentry outside the redoubt, someone to stay there even when the place itself, as she had correctly reported, was empty.

  He rejected the first idea. If that was the case, why would they have waited while he went into the fort and did his number with the dossier? Surely they would have jumped him the moment he hit the farm. In any case, Julie knew where to find him in Strasbourg.

  No, he must have arrived when the watchman was temporarily absent, maybe taking a leak someplace up among the trees, smoking a forbidden cigarette or returning to wherever he had hidden his transport to fetch a sandwich.

  Seeing the hatch open when he returned, the guy would have closed them in order to force the intruder to exit via the trapdoor, the cellar and the tunnel behind the fig tree. That way he could be one hundred percent sure of covering him when he showed.

  This absence told Bolan two things: one, that there was no second sentry; two, that the watchman wouldn't know for a fact that it was Bolan inside the fort.

  This brought with it a disadvantage. If the guard didn't know that the target was Mack Bolan, a man his bosses desperately needed to keep alive, he would probably shoot to kill.

  Very quietly the warrior lowered himself to the floor. He left the storeroom, walked through the lobby to the long tunnel and made his way up the ladder to the trapdoor. He pushed the trap open and climbed up into the cellar. For a moment he switched off the flashlight.

  Somewhere on the far side of the steel door, the killer would be waiting for him.

  Bolan concentrated all his thoughts on the layout of the entrance. He tried — as he always did in combat situations — to put himself in the position of the enemy, and then formulate his own plans.

  The guy wouldn't be waiting immediately outside the door. The door opened inward, and there was too much chance that Bolan would erupt with guns blazing, the way he had in the lobby on his last visit.

  It was unlikely that the watchman would choose to station himself farther along the blocked tunnel outside. Once Bolan left the cellar they would be even — and the gunman would be trapped while the Executioner could simply turn and run.

  No, the guy would be posted someplace out in the yard — under the wrecked truck, on the bank above, up in the branches of the fig tree, perhaps around the nearest corner of the farmhouse with a spotlight ready to pin Bolan like some lab specimen once he heard the steel door open.

  In any case he would be trigger-happy, because he would know by now that the intruder knew he was wise to the break-in. Closing the loading hatch would have proved that.

  Also, he couldn't be certain that there was only one intruder — any more than Bolan himself could be certain there was only one guard.

  A team would have left a sentry outside to guard the exit and the escape route. If it was a duo… well, both of them might have gone in. He had to take that into account.

  Finally, he wouldn't know for sure that the intruder or intruders had been here before.
The interior layout of the redoubt was complex. First-timers might be checking it out quite a while; the fact that Bolan was emerging after so short a time might give him a slight edge.

  Once again the element of surprise.

  Yeah, but emerging how?

  Flat on his face, crawling on elbows and knees with a gun in each hand — to be annihilated from above with a stream of slugs in the back?

  To be crucified against the blackness of the tunnel mouth while the gunner shot down the beam of light that was illuminating him?

  To make a dash for it and rush out into the center of the yard with two deathbringers at the ready, only to find that he was a perfect target for a marksman concealed behind any one of a hundred bushes around the yard?

  No way.

  And then it struck him.

  He had been thinking all along of the blocked tunnel: the yard exit at one end, the rockfall at the other.

  But why was it blocked? How come the rockfall?

  If his memory wasn't at fault it was because the roof had caved in. There was shattered brickwork in the debris blocking the passageway.

  With a collapsed roof, there was a possibility that a determined man might be able to claw his way through to the open air.

  It was worth a try.

  The Executioner slowly turned the wheel that withdrew the bolts securing the door. They were well greased but made metallic noise as they slid through the iron guides. The door screeched quietly, grinding a speck of gravel into the cement floor as he swung it open.

  He stole out of the tunnel and turned away from the exit. Before he started walking he checked that each of his guns was primed for action. The snick of the AutoMag's slide sounded disconcertingly loud in the silence.

  Once around the corner in the passageway he counted his paces. At twelve he halted, listening. The drip of moisture that he remembered was near. Masking most of the lens with his fingers, he switched on the flashlight. In the dim illumination he could see that the rubble slant was ten feet ahead of him.

  He splashed through the stagnant pool, almost gagging as the odors of decomposition and decay rose to his nostrils. His feet sank into the damp earth between the fragments of rock and brickwork forming the slope.

  When his head was at the height of the tunnel roof, he removed his hand from the lens, chancing that the two curves in the underground passage and the curtain of leaves covering the entrance would kill any telltale glow that could give his position away.

  He shone the beam upward. Judging from the depth of the grassy bank above the farmyard wall, the tunnel couldn't be far — perhaps eight or ten feet — below the surface.

  He saw an irregular, funnel-shaped opening, its narrow end upward, with here and there a stone projecting through the earth, and gnarled tree roots snaking outward.

  Bolan braced himself on the slope. He reached up and began digging into the earth with the fingers of his left hand.

  The earth crumbled away easily enough. It was the opposite side of the funnel that was damp. Bolan continued clawing a passage up past the tree roots.

  He came across a large stone, about the size of a man's head, that was blocking the hole he was excavating. He clipped the flashlight back onto his combat belt and felt around the stone with both hands, gouging away the earth, probing up into the dark, trying to loosen the obstruction.

  A stream of earth and pebbles fell around his feet. Abruptly the big stone dislodged itself and dropped, narrowly missing Bolan's shoulder. It bounced down the slope, scattered spray and slime from the pool and rumbled a few yards along the brick floor of the tunnel. It was followed by a sudden rush of earth and sand that thumped down with numbing force and buried the Executioner almost up to his waist.

  Cursing silently, he struggled to free himself. The damp breeze cool on his face was a relief after he had sweated so much in the fetid atmosphere of the tunnel.

  Damp air? Fresh air?

  He freed the flashlight and shone the beam upward once more.

  Earth, wet this time, and still crumbling away. More tree roots. Stones that glistened with moisture. A patch of blackness, of dark nothing, a gap in the center of which all at once he saw the glitter of a single star.

  He was through to the open air!

  With a gasp of relief, Bolan dragged himself free of the earthfall. Slipping this way, slithering back as his feet slid on the precarious mound of rubble, he managed at last to reach up, grasp stronger roots and haul himself up and out through the hole in the ground.

  He was in the middle of a stand of young trees about fifty feet away from the wall and the farmyard.

  The gap in the clouds closed over, and the star vanished. A sudden freshening of the breeze heaved the branches of trees; there was a sudden loud pattering among the leaves. It had begun to rain.

  Boots scuffing aside the undergrowth, Bolan took advantage of the sudden, unexpected rustling all around and made his way to a rise topped with tangled brier just before the farmyard wall.

  He lay beneath the overhanging branches of a flowering bush, eyes straining to pierce the pool of near darkness that lay between him and the black bulk of the old farm buildings. Someplace down there a guy with a gun — probably an SMG — was waiting, tense as Bolan himself, for a figure to emerge from the tunnel mouth.

  Ten minutes passed.

  Bolan saw no sign of movement; no denser blur shifted against the dark. His ears caught no stealthy slither of feet, no scrape of a shoe, no rasp of cloth against stone or metal. The rain fell more heavily, drumming on the cobblestones of the yard, spattering the leaves, beating a tattoo on the Executioner's back. Somewhere down below an overflow of water gurgled away.

  Bolan decided there was one way to bring the enemy into the open. He felt around in the wet grass until his fingers encountered a stone half buried in the earth. He pried it loose. It was about the size of a man's fist. Kneeling, he drew back his arm and threw the stone as far as he could in the direction of the rutted track that led to the road.

  It crashed among bushes with a satisfyingly loud noise, thumped onto something hard and rolled.

  "What the hell was that?"

  The voice was so close — about ten feet away, below the wall, on his left — that Bolan started. His forefinger curled around the trigger of the AutoMag.

  "How the hell do I know? You ain't here to ask goddamn questions. Wait in silence and then shoot, Max said."

  The second voice spoke through the broken, flame-scorched window on the lower floor of the farmhouse. Bolan caught his breath. So there were two of the bastards!

  He remained in a kneeling position, mentally evaluating the possible moves in this life or death chess game in which there were only three pieces on the board.

  There was a possibility that he could take out the guy in the empty window — he remembered approximately its position, and he thought he could distinguish it as a more intense rectangle of darkness against the wall of the building.

  But it would need a burst rather than a single round, and that would be self-defeating because the muzzleflash would dazzle him enough to negate his aim: he would be firing blind at an imagined target rather than correcting the aim after a first ranging shot.

  And that same muzzle-flash would pinpoint Bolan himself accurately enough for the man by the wall to drop him.

  If on the other hand he went for the second man, he would have to stand and lean out over the wall to get anywhere near him, and even then he wasn't exactly sure of the guy's precise position, which would make the warrior himself an even easier target for the killer framed in the window.

  No, it was his own position that would have to be changed. He would have to shoot from a more protected location, someplace where the flashes and the man behind them were at least partially screened by leaves, branches or a swell in the ground.

  He rose to his feet and trod quietly along the top of the rise toward the section that was above the wrecked truck and the tunnel mouth.

  By the ti
me he reached that, he reckoned, he would have passed above the guy by the wall, so that he would have both the killers in the same field of fire, rather than one on each side of him.

  The rain was pelting down through the leaves hard enough now to drown out any slight noise he made, but there was a risk that the grass and the ground beneath it would become so waterlogged that his footsteps would squeak and signal his presence.

  He had to take into account also that the men below had been smart enough not to be fooled by the stone he had thrown; they hadn't automatically fired in the direction of an unexpected, unexplained noise and given their location away.

  The situation called for stealth — and speed.

  A few yards past the upper branches of the fig tree that grew by the wrecked truck, a second fig grew on top of the rise. Its trunk was thick, and the branches were strong and widely splayed. Bolan remembered seeing it when he'd first visited the farm in daylight…

  Holstering both guns, he reached up carefully into the dark until his fingers touched a limb thick enough to bear his weight. Moving a quarter-inch at a time so that his shoulders didn't displace the leaves and send a telltale extra shower of raindrops below, he drew himself up among the branches.

  The limb projected over the yard. Through the topmost leaves of the lower tree he could still make out the dark blotch he believed to be the scorched window frame. The guy by the wall would be immediately below, about ten yards beyond the truck.

  Bolan moved farther out along the branch. He unleathered the Beretta, shifting his position slightly to get a wider angle on the place he believed the man to be.

  The ridged rubber sole of his combat boot, which had gripped well enough on the wide trunk of the fig tree, slipped on the smooth bark of the narrower limb.

  Hampered by the gun in his right hand, Bolan almost fell, clinging on with both arms wrapped around the branch as one leg swung down into space.

  The branch creaked protestingly. Moisture cascaded down onto the stones below. An involuntary gasp of breath was forced from his lungs.