Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

This time the noises were too near and too obvious to be ignored.

  The gunman by the wall fired.

  An SMG as the Executioner had guessed. From the astonishingly rapid rate of fire he figured it was an Ingram. Heavy slugs ripped through the leaves, thunked into the branch behind him and stung his face with fragments of bark. The branch thrummed under the multiple impacts.

  Miraculously Bolan was untouched. He triggered a three-round burst just above the muzzle-flashes the instant the SMG spat fire.

  He scored. There was a high-pitched scream of agony. The gun rattled to the cobblestones; he heard the clattering stumble of a human knocked off balance and slumping to the ground.

  Bolan launched himself out and down.

  The drop to the yard was more than fifteen feet, but the gunman in the window was already slamming a deathstream up into the fig tree.

  The warrior landed with a thump that jarred the whole length of his spine, but he was upright, leaping for the shelter of the old truck before the killer switched his aim.

  The guy by the wall was still hollering. Bolan finished it for him with a well-placed trio and then whipped out the AutoMag to thunder a couple of skullbusters toward the window. It was too dark for the remaining gunman to pick him out against the irregular outline of the truck: if the guy believed two different guns meant two men shooting, so much the better.

  Bolan's shots were clearly wide or high because the hardman was quick — almost too quick — to reply.

  Flame flickered beneath the eaves of the farmhouse; the ear-busting detonations of a machine pistol split the night. A stream of slugs ripped through the rusted bodywork of the truck.

  The Executioner was already running. He felt the wind of the killstream pass over his head as he dived for a slight depression he remembered in the center of the yard, rolled, came up again and dashed for the wall of the building.

  The hardman swung the deadly spray his way. Bolan leaped and dived a second time.

  This time he was aiming up — for another vandalized window at the end of the farmhouse wall. He remembered there were a few shards of glass left in the frame and that half the space was covered by a loose wooden shutter weathered to matchwood by forty years of neglect.

  Face shielded by his upraised forearms, he hit the window like a battering ram and burst through into the interior in an explosion of glass and splintered wood.

  He had no idea of the building's floor plan, but there had to be some cover in there, and he would be no worse off in the dark than the killer.

  Also he judged from the second man's slower rate of fire that his SMG was an Uzi — six hundred rounds per minute against an Ingram's eleven hundred plus — and that meant a thirty-two-round magazine, much of which must have been expended by now.

  If he could tempt the bastard, provoke him into an exchange of shots, there would soon be an empty clip and Bolan could move in and clean up.

  He crouched on dust-covered boards amid the wreckage of the window. The only sounds he could hear were his own breathing, water from his sodden blacksuit dripping onto the floor and the persistent drumming of rain on the roof's remaining tiles.

  He waited.

  Very slowly, as his eyes adjusted, the stygian blackness arranged itself into separate elements of lighter and denser dark. A low rectangle could have been a fireplace. On the inner wall a particularly somber patch must be an open doorway leading to the rear of the house. There was another in the corner by the outer wall, a few feet from the window Bolan had crashed. He reckoned this led to a passage that would connect via intervening rooms to the one at the far end of the building where the gunman was holed up.

  It was the obvious approach.

  He wouldn't take it.

  Using all his urban guerrilla expertise, he rose half upright and moved stealthily toward the inner door. If the rooms interconnected, maybe he could enfilade the man or even come up on him from behind.

  Before each step he tested the ground ahead, probing with the toe of a combat boot for loose objects on the floor, his outstretched fingers searching for obstacles, the ball of his foot checking for creaks or crunches before he allowed his weight to fall on it.

  He reached the doorway. He paused, searching for the open door. Which way did it open? Was there room for him to squeeze through? Would it squeak?

  There was no door.

  Bolan moved silently through and waited again.

  He allowed his senses to map out the dark space in front and to either side.

  He was standing on flagstones instead of wood. Maybe the room ahead was the old kitchen?

  When he turned to the right, a deadness in the sound of his breathing, the minutest playback of warm air onto his cheek, told him that he was near a wall.

  Somewhat ahead a paler square indicated a window. Above this, in a corner of the ceiling, a darker one suggested a trapdoor, maybe with a ladder below. On the left there was space.

  A barely discernible current of cooler air told him that the corridor running along the back of the house that he hoped to find was actually there.

  Perhaps that was too obvious a move once again.

  If he could get out that window unseen and unheard, he could steal around the end of the building on the outside and surprise the hell out of a guy who was straining every nerve to locate him indoors.

  Crouched low to avoid making a silhouette, he moved over toward the paler rectangle. Two feet away from the wall he was brought up short, his hips hard against some obstacle. He explored with his hands.

  There was a wide, shallow stone sink beneath the window. And the window was closed; there was still glass in the frame.

  He realized it would be suicide to try to maneuver open a window that had probably been closed for years.

  It would have to be the corridor after all.

  Bolan moved back toward the doorway. He turned toward the passage that ran along the back of the house, probing warily ahead with his toe. His boot touched an obstacle, a second, a third.

  He crouched, feeling around with one hand.

  He found a hard, irregular shape the size of a walnut, which crumbled in his hand, then another, smaller one, a flat fragment with jagged edges. It too crumbled when he tightened his grasp. The floor of the corridor was strewn with rubble — plaster that had fallen from a collapsed ceiling.

  It was impossible to move along it without making a noise.

  Bolan bit his lip. In the instant that he hesitated, he became aware of movement — nothing so much as an identifiable sound, but certainly movement — in the room he had left.

  He froze.

  Yeah, as faint as the whisper of a slight breeze over cut grass… something.

  Abruptly the rain stopped.

  Water dripped, ran, splashed, but the drumming on the roof had ceased.

  The silence was almost tangible.

  Except that there was someone breathing in the next room.

  While he had been trying to work out ways of creeping around behind the gunman so that he could be taken in the rear, the guy had been playing the same number on him!

  With more success.

  As far as movement was concerned, Bolan was trapped. If the gunner was already in the room that Bolan had dived into, he was in a no-escape situation. He'd be shot down before he could break out of the window above the sink. The plaster-strewn corridor was probably too long for him to make the far end before he'd be in the killer's sights.

  The Executioner decided that he had no choice then but to trade shots with the gunman and hope he himself had faster reaction times.

  And if it was to be the last exchange of all… well, he would have gone down the way he wanted to. Just as quickly, he dismissed the defeatist train of thought. He had to win, this time like all the other times. The Baraka deal must be seen through to the bitter end. He owed that to Brognola, to Julie Marco, to all those who would suffer if he failed. He owed it to himself.

  The Beretta was reholstered. With Big Thunder
in his right hand, Bolan backed up cautiously toward the sink, feeling behind him with his left. As he had hoped, the sink was flanked by a counter — a solid wood surface built against the wall with cupboards and drawers beneath.

  He climbed onto the counter and stood with his head just below the ceiling.

  The killer would expect his target to be standing, crouched or flat on the floor; he wouldn't be ready for an opponent up near the ceiling.

  A board creaked.

  By now the guy would know he had left the front room.

  Bolan had been holding his breath; now he allowed his breathing to be heard.

  There was a darker shape in the doorway, blurred against the rectangle of the wrecked window. The gunman was moving in for the kill.

  The SMG spit flame as the gunner opened fire, knowing the target must be in that kitchen, stitching a superfast figure eight from wall to wall, from waist height to the floor.

  With each flash from the muzzle of the SMG, a giant shadow leaped onto the wall behind him, jerking in and out of vision as quick as the image on a hand-cranked silent movie.

  Bolan fired at the substance, not the shadow.

  Big Thunder roared once, the explosion deafening in the confined space beneath the roof. Glass tinkled from the window. Plaster fell.

  The edge of the counter below the Executioner's feet was shredded, but that was as near as the killer got. The gunman hurtled back with a 240-grain boattail tunneling through his shoulder, brought up the barrel of his SMG — and heard only a click above the empty magazine.

  His snarled curse died in his throat as the second two-handed shot from the AutoMag smashed through his breastbone with frightful power and cored a fist-sized hole between his lungs.

  Bolan jumped down from the counter and unclipped the flashlight.

  The hood lay on his back in the doorway — an unshaven Nordic blonde with pale eyes that stared sightless into the beam. The rivers of bright blood that had run out from beneath him were already filming over with dust from the floor. Bolan thumbed shut his eyes and left him there.

  He climbed through the window and went in search of the bike.

  Seventy minutes later he was back in his hotel room in Strasbourg, dialing the local airport at Entzheim to make a reservation on the midday flight to Paris, with an onward booking to London, England.

  22

  The Connaught Rooms on London's Great Queen Street was a white Portland stone building of neoclassical pretensions with a pillared front. Although the place was actually a Masonic headquarters, it looked more like something Mussolini might have commissioned to celebrate the conquest of Abyssinia. There were reception suites and lecture theaters inside, and these were much in demand for sales conventions, international conferences and office parties.

  It was in one of the largest of the reception halls that Alfonso Velasquez, minister for tourism in the Spanish government, was to attend a gala reception on the evening of the twenty-ninth. The reception was to be preceded by an address to the members of the Anglo-Hispanic Society, delivered by the minister himself.

  On the afternoon of the twenty-seventh, Mack Bolan strolled the length of Great Queen Street for the third time. On the fringe of London's theaterland, it was a short street, not more than three hundred yards long, and unusually wide for the old Covent Garden market neighborhood that also included the Opera House, Bow Street police headquarters and courtroom, and a couple of newspaper offices.

  Eight o'clock in the evening was both a good time and a bad time for a hit.

  The broad flight of steps leading from the sidewalk to the pillared entrance left a target without cover for the maximum time, especially for a sniper on the rooftops opposite. And it would still be light at that time on a summer evening.

  On the other hand, it was also theater time: the complex network of streets from Drury Lane to Shaftesbury Avenue, from Long Acre to the Aldwych, would be choked with cabs and drivers desperately trying to locate a parking space.

  In Great Queen Street itself, however, a getaway car could easily double-park for the necessary length of time and then make it out into Kingsway — a broad commercial thoroughfare deserted after the offices closed. From there it was less than a quarter of a mile to Waterloo Bridge and an escape to the wilderness south of the river.

  Bolan glanced up at the rooftops on the far side of the street — a mixed bag of buildings, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century, most of them narrow, between five and six stories high, some with dormer windows set in the steep, slated roofs. He saw parapets, multiple chimney stacks, air-conditioning vents, elevator housings and the gable ends and television antennae of taller buildings in the next street.

  It was perfect for a sniper with murder in his mind. And the Marksman at least — Bolan knew from the videotapes in the old Maginot fortress — favored rooftop shooting.

  Someone mounting the steps in front of the conference center would be a sitting duck for a man equipped with a sniperscope above any one of the houses along the entire length of Great Queen Street.

  And there would be two killers aiming at the same target.

  Plus a bomb-crazy woman wheeling a baby carriage loaded with explosives in front of the Spanish airline offices.

  Clearly Bolan couldn't handle it all on his own.

  He didn't like to call on the police or the army — in any country. Too much red tape, too many questions, not enough urgency… and, sadly, not always enough efficiency either.

  He couldn't see British cops acting with enough ferocity and determination to protect Velasquez from murderers as cold and professional as the Marksman and the Corsican. If they believed in the threat at all, they would detail a couple of men — maybe even specialists with Home Office permits to carry arms — to accompany the minister in the role of bodyguards.

  Which would achieve precisely nothing if, as Bolan guessed, the killers were someplace up among the chimneys across the street.

  What was required was a guard manning the access to every single rooftop over there.

  The alternative would be someone who could finger the two terrorists, tail them to their chosen firing points and take them out before they could take out their target.

  The Executioner realized that since he couldn't rely on the police, he'd have to handle it in his own way.

  Alone.

  But first he had to get a line on one or both of the killers — preferably the Marksman; at least he knew him by sight.

  And the only way he could do that in a city of eleven million inhabitants was to stay put and hope that they would show. Because they would have to recon the location, find suitable positions, then liaise with the contact named Cobbold, who was to drive the getaway car. And for all of these things they would have to visit Great Queen Street.

  Bolan had been tipped off by Julie Marco that they couldn't have done this already: they weren't due to arrive in London until some hours after the warrior himself.

  So he would hang in there until they did show. And after that… well, he would play it by ear.

  Meanwhile there was the problem of the Iberia bomb.

  No two ways about this one: he would have to alert the local authorities and rely on them to do their duty.

  He went into a public phone booth in Holborn subway station and dialed 999, the British alarm call combination.

  Someone with a maddeningly calm voice on the other end grilled Bolan with the most inane questions about the bomb threat. Bolan tried his best to retain his composure, but shook his head and hung up.

  The guy probably thought he was humoring a crank caller.

  The Executioner figured they would likely put a trace on all calls connected with this kind of threat, and he had no wish to spend the evening answering any more questions from the police.

  He had only just made the sidewalk when a prowl car screeched to a halt outside the station and two plainclothes cops jumped out and made for the row of phone booths at one side of the newspaper kiosk.

/>   Bolan got out of there fast.

  He had no way of knowing whether the metropolitan police would take his call seriously or not. No matter, he'd done his job.

  * * *

  Early the following morning, the twenty-eighth, Bolan went to a car rental company and hired a small panel truck. Before rush-hour traffic, he eased the truck into a parking space and fed the meter.

  From the cab it was possible to squeeze past a sliding door into the rear. Bolan went through and used the blade on his knife to scrape away a couple of small holes in the coating of black-tinted rear windows. From there he could keep watch, through one hole or another, on the whole length of the street.

  It wasn't until late afternoon that he struck pay dirt.

  Not long before the offices closed, a man strolled along the sidewalk from the direction of Holborn subway station, glancing casually at the buildings on either side of the street. Before he reached the Connaught Rooms he crossed over to the other side — a bulky, florid man with dark, curly hair and a bushy mustache.

  The Corsican? Bolan figured he had to be.

  The Executioner got out of the panel truck and followed at a discreet distance.

  The guy entered a doorway of one of the narrow, older houses about eighty yards past the conference center. It was a town house transformed into office suites. Bolan read the names of lawyers, an accounting firm and a book publisher on the brass plates at one side of the entrance.

  At street level there was an antiquarian store selling prints, engravings and ancient maps. He could see through the display window that the Corsican wasn't in there. He climbed to the next floor. A blonde in high heels was locking the mahogany outer door of the accounting office. She flashed the Executioner a smile as she dropped the keys in her purse and hurried downstairs.

  The lawyer's premises on the floor above were closed. That left the book publisher. Bolan went on up. Glass-paneled doors blocked the stairway: evidently the publisher occupied both of the top two floors and the attics — if there were any.

  Bolan pushed through the doors and found himself in a reception area furnished with a desk, leather armchairs and a stack of magazines on a low table. Judging from the samples on display in glass cases around the room, the publisher specialized in political commentaries and polemics on the European situation, all of them with a markedly right-wing tendency.