Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  Just before the Rovers drew level, he hauled up savagely on the hand brake lever. The lever, working the rear-wheel brakes only, didn't activate the brake lights.

  The panel truck shuddered, slewed and slowed as it fell behind. The police cars, already homing in from either side on a collision course with a now nonexistent target, clashed front fenders. With bumpers locked together, they skated across the hardtop and came to rest against a split-fence shield surrounding a sapling planted by the roadside.

  Bolan swerved outside them, released the lever and hit the pedal once more. One of the bikers, braking too hard, slid straight into the enmeshed cars; the other, taken completely by surprise when the panel truck lost speed so unexpectedly, ran up onto the central strip and fell off sideways as his machine stalled.

  Bolan continued as fast as he dared, keeping an eye open for Cobbold and the other police car.

  A few hundred yards before the overpass that carried the road out of the city and toward Heathrow Airport, he saw brake lights blaze all along the procession of vehicles ahead of him. Gradually the snarled traffic ground to a halt.

  This was a situation Bolan had feared. If he stayed with the panel truck, the only outcome could be a police interrogation, because it wouldn't take long for the bikers to resume the chase. And they could cut through this kind of bottleneck almost as fast as they could ride.

  A short private road led off the expressway at right angles here. Bolan coaxed the Ford across a grass strip and up to a turning circle at the end of the cul-de-sac. He reholstered Big Thunder, detached stock and silencer from the Beretta and shoved that back into its shoulder rig. Then, leaving the panel truck with the keys in the ignition, he walked past a row of neat redbrick houses, past clipped lawns bright with flowerbeds, back to the expressway.

  Lamplight gleamed on the roofs of the stalled vehicles choking the roadway, but beyond there was a brighter radiance, glowing then fading beneath a canopy of smoke. As Bolan hurried closer he saw the police Rover pulled up on the grass shoulder separating the road from a footpath.

  Fifty yards farther on, the Opel lay on its side against the posts of a sign warning of an intersection, with flames billowing out from beneath the hood and through the windows of the interior.

  A small crowd of motorists had left their vehicles and gathered in a wary half circle by the curb. Cobbold and the Marksman stood some way off with their backs to a tall fence.

  Bolan could see in the flickering light that the Marksman's face was bloodied from a gash in his forehead. Cobbold, incongruous in his gray chalk stripe, looked ruffled but unharmed. He was holding a heavy-caliber revolver in front of him. The Marksman had raised the Holland & Holland rifle to his shoulder, the twin barrels pointed at three uniformed cops halted a little way in front of the Rover.

  One of the cops moved slowly forward.

  "Stand back!" the Marksman snarled.

  The policeman continued to advance. The Marksman fired twice, the shots curiously flat over the crackle of flames from the burning car.

  The cop pitched forward, dead.

  A movement of recoil accompanied by shouts of outrage swayed the crowd. A woman screamed. Seeing that the killer was now temporarily unarmed, the two remaining police moved purposefully forward. Cobbold raised his revolver.

  From fifty yards away Bolan shot him with a single round from the Beretta. The 9 mm flesh-shredder pulverized his face at the level of his ginger mustache, blasting his teeth out through the back of his head. He thumped into the fence and slid to the ground.

  Bolan swung the gun toward the Marksman, but he had already disappeared over the fence and into the trees on the other side.

  After hastily filling in the police about the evening's events, Bolan decided it would be wise to return to France. He took the unexpected course and walked the remaining seven miles to Heathrow. After a snack at the new Terminal 4, he made the last Air France flight to Paris.

  Early editions of the next day's papers were already available on the plane. "London Police Foil Terror-Bomb Attack on Airline Office," he read with satisfaction on the front page. "'Baby Carriage Killer' Arrested." And then, lower, "Spanish Minister Escapes Assassination Attempt — Basque Separatists Suspected."

  The following morning he put in an early routine call to Julie Marco in Strasbourg.

  "I've been told to start two more dossiers," she told him. "There's a fifty kilo bomb due to demolish the International Culture Center in Liege, Belgium, at midday tomorrow. And Baraka's going operational — they're aiming to bring you in pretty damn quick to set you up for the big one…"

  24

  In theory it was a mission after the Executioner's own heart — almost an urban version of one of his lightning jungle raids in Vietnam.

  The formula was the same: efficient recon, a study of the intel, then quickly in, do the job and quickly out again.

  All the recon he would need had already been processed by Julie Marco. She had told him the aim of the enemy operation, the place, the time, the MO, even the outward appearance of the terrorists involved.

  So far as the evaluation and eventual use of this intel was concerned, Bolan required only to refresh his memory on the layout of the town plan of Liege, and then buy a first-class round trip railroad ticket to the Belgian city.

  Bolan took the reservation-only Paris-Cologne flyer, which left the Paris Nord station at seven-thirty on the morning of the thirty-first.

  On the train, German waiters served him an ample breakfast. The French and Belgian immigration and customs officials glanced only casually into the first-class compartments as the train crossed the frontier, and didn't even ask to see passports.

  Very convenient, Bolan mused, feeling the comforting weight of Big Thunder on his right hip and the bulge of the Beretta beneath his left arm. If you happened to be a terrorist loaded with firearms and explosives and you wanted out of one country and into another, all you had to do was travel first class. The second-class passengers were asked if they had anything to declare, had their ID checked and in some cases were asked to open luggage or remove jackets. Money, as usual, bought immunity!

  The train stopped at Charleroi and Namur, depositing him in Liege at two minutes past eleven o'clock.

  Fifty-eight minutes in which to foil the terrorists' attempt to bomb the Culture Center.

  Just under an hour to put one more spoke in Max Nasruddin's evil wheel.

  Bolan took a cab around the boulevard that circled the old town and paid the driver off at the opera house. He aimed to walk down to the Culture Center, which overlooked the Meuse River, by way of the cathedral square and the coal-black Gothic church building that presided over it — because that was the route he had been told the terrorists would take.

  They would be pushing a four-wheel trolley loaded with packing cases supposedly full of archaeological specimens, similar to clerks pushing dress racks through the streets of New York's garment district. Some of the cases would be packed with specimens. One wouldn't be.

  Bolan hurried down the rue Lulay, once the hub of the red-light district, now a showplace for chic boutiques, cut through to the university and made it to the river by the junction on the near side of the Kennedy Bridge.

  On the way he passed through a shopping arcade where a long-haired youth strummed a guitar, accompanied on the flute by a willowy brunette.

  As the Executioner turned out of sight at the far end of the arcade, the music was cut short as the boy disconnected his guitar from the amplifier. He plugged in a hand mike, turned a knob and spoke quietly for fifteen seconds.

  The girl packed away her flute, and they walked toward the river.

  The Culture Center was behind a thirty-story tower block that faced the aquarium and zoological institute across the sluggish yellow flow of the Meuse. The entrance was in the rue Mery. And the whole length of the street was taken up by the long horizontal length of the charcoal-gray building that housed the Center. The clifflike facade was pierced laterally
by street-long slits behind which windows were hidden.

  Bolan circled the block. There was a loading bay for the Center near the exit from a multistory parking garage.

  A workman in blue coveralls was winding down a steel grille to block off the storage area in back of the platform at the far end of the bay. Behind it crates and cartons were stacked with cans of film and tall thin packages leaning against a wall that could have been the flats for a stage set or the elements of an exhibition display stand.

  Crates?

  Hairs prickled on Bolan's nape. Was he too late? Should he try to raise the alarm?

  There was no sign of an unloaded trolley. He had seen nothing on his walk down from the opera house. A three-ton Mercedes flatbed backed up into the bay had nothing between the cab and the tailgate.

  He looked at his watch. It was 11:37.

  The man winding down the grille had completed the job and gone back inside the building. Secretaries and clerks emerged from the staff entrance in twos and threes. The red-and-white-striped barrier pole at the exit from the parking garage rose and fell as executives drove away.

  Bolan glanced up and down the rue Mery. There must be a lot of packing cases in Liege. If he attempted to alert the authorities, was it likely that he could persuade someone official, with no hard evidence to support him, to get a bomb disposal expert to the Center within twenty minutes? At the beginning of the lunch hour?

  No way.

  And even if he did, there was a chance that all of the crates visible behind the grille could be entirely harmless.

  In the distance he heard a rumbling clatter. At the far end of the street, on the corner of the rue de l'Universite, two men in white coveralls pushed a four-wheel trolley loaded with packing crates toward the river.

  Bolan ran.

  As he neared the street corner, he could see that the two men answered the descriptions he had been given by Julie Marco — a grizzled guy of about fifty with close-cropped hair and a beer belly, and a stocky, muscular type with Germanic features and a bullet head, obviously Willi, the guard he had knocked out in the cellar entrance to the Maginot redoubt.

  They rounded the next corner onto the embankment and pushed the trolley more slowly up a rise toward the bridge and the thirty-story tower block, which was called the Residence Kennedy.

  Had Julie been mistaken about the target? Many officials from the European Iron and Steel Federation owned apartments in the block. So did the leader of the Belgian steelworkers' union and a couple of Eurocrats from the OEEC headquarters in Brussels. Wouldn't that be a more impressive hit than the Culture Center behind the tower?

  Hearing running footsteps, Willi glanced over his shoulder and saw the Executioner. He snapped some comment to his companion out of the side of his mouth, and they began to hurry, half running themselves as they labored up the slope with the heavy trolley. The crates, Bolan saw as he drew near, were stenciled Fragile — Objets d'Art.

  It was 11:44.

  Bolan palmed the Beretta.

  The two terrorists continued pushing. Bolan couldn't shoot. Three people walking in the opposite direction — an elderly couple, a woman with a poodle on a leash — had just passed the trolley. He had to wait until they had passed him too and were safely on the pedestrian crossing leading to the sidewalk that overlooked the river. And by that time the trolley load was no more than thirty yards from the glassed-in entrance to the Kennedy tower.

  Bolan called out and fired a single shot over the heads of the two men.

  They stopped, swinging the trolley broadside on to the slope and dodging behind the stack of crates. "Go ahead," Willi jeered. This confirmed Bolan's suspicions that the crates were loaded with high explosives.

  He thought quickly. Unless the contents of the crates were liquid nitroglycerin, it was hardly likely to be detonated by the relatively slight shock of a slug thwacking into a neighboring crate. And even if he scored on the crate itself, the odds on a direct hit on a detonator were long. In any case he didn't see Willi and his companion as carbon copies of the Beirut Palestinian kamikazes, who were prepared to be blown to pieces along with their booby-trapped cars. The crate with the explosives was probably on the far side of the trolley, away from the Executioner's gun, and the delayed-action timer would already have been set, almost certainly with the usual wristwatch device.

  He decided to call the bluff. He pumped three shots from the Beretta just above the upper of the two rows of crates.

  The two men swore and ducked behind their load, Willi managing to get off a quick round from a small automatic before he vanished. Bolan whipped behind a cast-iron mailbox set in the sidewalk and fired again.

  It was 11:53.

  The next few minutes were hectic, but Mack Bolan was never able to recall the action as anything other than a series of freeze-frames.

  The man with the beer belly leaning around the edge of the crated trolley to aim a heavy caliber revolver at Bolan's legs, partly exposed on either side of the steel shaft supporting the bulk of the mailbox.

  The small puff of smoke beside the crates.

  The vibration tingling through his body as the bullet splatted against the shaft and set the whole box trembling.

  His own lightning three-round reaction that winged the gunman before he had time to get back under cover; a silver fountain cascading over the sidewalk as one of the slugs shattered a glass door in the tower block entrance and the midday sun glittered on the falling glass.

  Beer Belly tumbling, spilling into the roadway in front of a speeding red sedan accelerating fiercely as the driver jumped a red light at the end of the bridge.

  The blood and guts steaming on the blacktop.

  The trolley, which Willi shoved violently in his direction before he fled, careering down the slope, jumping the curb and rocketing across the roadway to burst through a railing above the road emerging from the junction underpass.

  The explosion.

  The first millionth-of-a-second flash that dimmed the brightness of the sun would always remain printed on Bolan's memory, but he would never have any recollection of the thunderous concussion or the searing blast that hurled him fifty yards back down the slope to end up half stunned against the front wheel of a parked taxi.

  As he struggled dazedly to his feet, the vast mushroom of brown smoke roiling skyward from the crater blown in the lower road was still showering concrete fragments, asphalt and pieces of masonry into the river and glass was still falling from the upper windows of the Residence Kennedy.

  A man with blood trickling from a cut in his forehead got out of a car that had run up onto the sidewalk and smashed its windshield. He helped Bolan to his feet. "Goddamn gas mains," he fumed in French. "Last month one exploded in an apartment block out at Maloune. Killed four people."

  Bolan thanked him, refused a ride to a hospital and limped back up toward the bridge. The red sedan was lying on its side in the center of the road, near the remains of Beer Belly.

  There seemed to be no other casualties. Bolan figured there would soon be a crowd. He shouldered his way through the stream of people erupting from the tower block, running across the bridge, materializing the way they always did when there was some kind of disaster. His Beretta was lying on the sidewalk at the foot of a flight of steps. It seemed undamaged. He picked it up and shoved it back into the shoulder rig. People were too taken by the disaster to notice.

  It would be useless to try to pick up Willi's trail now. He crossed the street and took the footpath at the side of the bridge.

  Below, traffic was already jammed on each side of the huge smoking hole by the exit from the underpass.

  Halfway across the bridge, a long-haired youth with a guitar case was packing away his amplifier. Beside him a tall, slender girl held a flute.

  As Bolan approached, the boy straightened. He was holding the guitar case horizontally, the strap over one shoulder. Too late the Executioner saw that the top of the neck had been cut away, saw the circular gleam of a gun
muzzle inside the case.

  The young man swung toward him. "There's a gun in here, mister," he said. "If I was you, I'd turn left toward the parapet and admire the view across the river."

  Bolan halted in midstride, hesitated.

  "Fast," the boy said. "The gun's silenced."

  Bolan turned. He approached the parapet.

  The girl moved behind him. She raised her flute to her lips, but instead of blowing across it she put her mouth to one end and puffed. Instinctively Bolan raised a hand to brush away the tiny sting at the nape of his neck. But before his fingers touched flesh, the minute feathered dart had done its work and the day blacked out on him.

  The couple moved quickly. The youth leaned the guitar case against the parapet. The girl glanced right and left across the bridge. "Okay," she said. "They're all watching the hole."

  Together they hefted the Executioner's inert body onto the coping. A barge was chugging very slowly beneath the bridge. Over the hatches on its foredeck an awning had been rigged on four tall posts — an unusual awning, for instead of the usual canvas or sunshade material it was made of fine-mesh netting.

  As the prow of the barge passed beneath the bridge arch, the net was immediately below the parapet. The boy and the girl gave a quick heave and pushed Bolan over.

  He dropped down and fell into the center of the net.

  The guitar player and his accompanist picked up their gear and walked unhurriedly across to the far side of the river. As they turned along the road following the east bank, the clock in the tower above the zoological institute began chiming twelve times.

  25

  "You don't understand," Max Nasruddin said angrily. "It doesn't matter that they missed the Kennedy tower block. There was a bomb explosion. All the papers carried scare stories. Now everyone is wondering how much worse the terror will get, why the authorities aren't doing something. What more do you want?"

  "It would have been perhaps more… impressive," Farid Gamal Mokhaddem said, "if there had been casualties."