Sudden Death

by Don Pendleton

  He went with the tide.

  Yet something else clamored for attention…a task, a duty, an obligation that must be attended to before he could explore this wonderful new world.

  Concentrate. Glaring lights below, with music and many voices. The auditorium was full. Now each line was hard and sharp — strange that he hadn't heard them all come in.

  There was something he had to do.

  Of course. He tongued the third capsule from the clip behind his teeth and swallowed it. Apomorphine normalizes the metabolism and regulates the blood serum. Who said that?

  In a flash of clarity he heard the voice of Greg Toledo. "Dr. Charles Savage, of the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto, says that the psychotomimetics have a less profound effect when the subject has physiological tests to perform or manual skills to show off."

  More flashes now. A constant, aching flicker that transformed the auditorium below into a visual chaos that resembled the shattered electronic image on a badly adjusted TV screen.

  The tasks, though. Yes, there were the tasks.

  They were manual skills, weren't they?

  He rose upright and took the gun away from the wall.

  At once the picture cleared. The shift in position regulated the distortion, clarified the image. Waves of applause crashed around him like the raging of an angry sea. He peered over the rail of the catwalk.

  The enemy was below.

  The jet-set socialites lolling in their five-hundred-dollar seats didn't know it, but he was among the nine men seated behind a long oak table on the flag-draped, flower-bordered stage.

  Prince Rainier of Monaco in the chair. The secretary of state, burly and solemn. Three uniformed generals with clipped mustaches, their chests bright with medal ribbons, as alike as tin soldiers stamped from a mold. Troubleshooter Alwen Proctor, tall, pink-faced, with white hair crimped close to his skull. A couple of broad-shouldered aides who were probably security. And The Man.

  Bolan steadied an elbow on the rail. Organ music that had been thundering inside his head faded. He felt quite cold. The enemy was standing in front of the table, adjusting a microphone attached to a lectern. He was speaking. The echoes of his voice were lost in the loft.

  The cross hairs of the Balvar sight centered on the speaker's back. There was a fresh wave of applause.

  Kill the enemy.

  Bolan pressed the trigger.

  There were three shots in all.

  33

  Bolan was off the catwalk and into the duct before the shouts, screams and exclamations of outrage in the auditorium had reached their crescendo. In the shock and confusion over the killing of the man whose body still dripped blood from the lectern over which it was sprawled, it was not noticed at first that two others, sitting side by side in the tenth row, had also been shot.

  Bolan scuttled crabwise through the conduit. So far there were no sounds of pursuit. Gradually the echoes of the hubbub behind faded into silence. It wasn't until he rounded the corner at the top of the slope, where the duct led down to the roof of the adjoining building, that trouble loomed ahead.

  It loomed large. In the light from a grating he could see the huge bulk of Mazarin prone at the foot of the slope. Immediately behind him was the tough little chauffeur, Klaus. Mazarin's weight was on his elbows, and there was a .38 Police Special grasped firmly in his two hands.

  Clearly he had heard Bolan coming and was waiting for him to appear around the curve at the top of the slope before he fired. He was quick off the mark, too. Almost too quick. The blast of the shot in the confined space of the metal tube was deafening.

  Bolan ducked back his head as quickly as a tortoise retreating into its shell. In front of him a thin pencil of sunlight shone through the hole drilled in the duct by the heavy caliber slug.

  Breathing hard, he collected his thoughts.

  Mack Bolan, the Executioner, was at last imposing his will on Baraka, the programmed killer. Whether it was the positive action, the last capsule, or a delayed effect of all Beth McMann's magic potions, he didn't know. But now he was whole, he was one within himself, the programming was a remembered dream.

  He was Bolan.

  Colors and lights still flickered from time to time behind his eyes, the walls of the conduit tended to advance and recede, the metal beneath him risked softening, but mentally he was in control.

  And as Bolan he was faced with a problem.

  His escape from the Sporting Club auditorium had been programmed, too, worked out to the last detail — but worked out for Baraka, the assassin of the President. The plan was to get him away from the police, the security guards, the secret-service men, who wouldn't discover the killer's firing point initially, but who would take up the chase like crazy men once they found the hole in the rooftop air duct.

  By which time Baraka would be away over the roofs and down the elevator shaft to safety and a getaway car.

  But the first shot from the Arisaka Type 99 didn't kill the President. Instead it blew away Dr. Alwen Proctor, the White House hawk, who was about to introduce him to the audience.

  Dr. Alwen Proctor, whose money and political clout were widely supposed to subsidize LAFF — the Loyalists of America Freedom Fighters, whose antisemitic, racist, neofascist activities were threatening the stability of the West and South.

  Dr. Alwen Proctor — plain Al to his friends and fellow plotters — whose twisted brain had fashioned the evil and ingenious plan to goad the European Left into protest action that could be stamped on ruthlessly by the Extreme Right. A ruthlessness that the public would accept because the protest could be presented as yet another example of the terrorist violence of which everyone was so sick.

  Mastermind Proctor, a contender in the coming presidential election, whose scenario, financed by Mideastern money, would permit him, along with the oil barons and multinational tycoons who supported him, to clean up once the panic was over.

  The second and third shots had disposed of Schloesser and Hansen, the infamous medics whose perverted skills had allowed Proctor to make his domination dream a reality.

  Or would have done if it hadn't been for the Executioner.

  Bolan himself hated killing as such, but here he had no compunction. His targets, directly or indirectly, were responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of innocent men, women and children. They deserved to die. Alive they would somehow have continued their deadly work. Publicly exposed, they would have risked only prison sentences — commuted or quashed if smart lawyers plugged the no-hard-facts line of defense.

  So Bolan had overcome the drugs. But crossing up Nasruddin and the others had left him with one hell of a problem.

  Because the escape route was known to them. As Baraka, he had planned it with their cooperation to the smallest detail.

  And, yeah, they'd sure be gunning for him now — as Bolan.

  They had acted fast. But Mazarin would only be the first line of attack.

  Bolan had to get out of the air duct.

  There was only one thing he could do. The Police Special was already trained on the curve at the upper end of the slope. By the time he could raise and sight the unwieldy Japanese rifle, he would be dead meat.

  He unhooked a lightweight Misar MU-50 plastic grenade from his belt, pulled the pin and lobbed the egg-shaped seven-ounce antipersonnel destroyer against the wall of the duct on the far side of the curve. It hit the metal, bounced and rolled down the slope.

  Bolan heard a single hoarse cry from Mazarin… and then the deadening, thumping, concussive roar of the explosion.

  He waited until the acrid brown smoke forced up the conduit had been sucked away behind him, then he slid feet first down the slope to the twenty-foot hole blown in its lower section.

  The legs and lower half of Klaus's torso lay in a puddle of blood and viscera several yards behind the breach. The remainder of his flesh and bones, together with all that was left of Mazarin, was spread in a gory fan over the roof outside the jagged edges of the shattered
pipe.

  Bolan ran across the stained asphalt to recover his Beretta and its shoulder rig. He was fastening the clasp when the door at the top of the elevator shaft opened and Mokhaddem walked out onto the roof. "You infidel pig!" he cried, his voice shaking with rage. "Worthless betrayer. I warned you!"

  There was a Makarov automatic in his hand, and it was aimed straight at the Executioner's heart.

  Bolan had no time to draw the sleek Beretta. And once more he was looking death in the eye. Incongruously he almost burst out laughing at his plight, after all he'd been through. Almost. Instead he fired the Arisaka from the hip.

  The yellow rose that adorned the Arab's immaculate lapel disintegrated. In its place a larger, scarlet decoration blossomed, frothing and bubbling as Mokhaddem went down. Bolan fired again, the last round in the rifle magazine, before the Arab hit the roof. The high-velocity .303 nickel jacket cored through the top of his head and pulverized his brain.

  As he twitched once and then lay still, yellow rose petals were still drifting down to settle on his contorted face.

  Bolan dropped the rifle, hurried to the door and opened it, lowering a foot toward the first rung of the ladder.

  He gasped, fighting back an unexpected twinge of vertigo. He was staring down into a ten-floor void, a perspective of parallels that converged on the elevator car's roof at the bottom of the shaft. Someone had called it back down.

  Behind him now, over the bray of police sirens and ambulance bells, he could hear distant shouts. Looking back over his shoulder, he could see figures on the Sporting Club roof. He had to get out of there fast. In the eyes of the law, murder was murder, whatever the justification, however evil the victim.

  Drawing a deep breath, he leaned in and seized one of the oiled wire elevator cables just below the pulleys at the top of the shaft and slid down into the yawning space until his feet rested on the great rectangular iron slab that formed the counterweight.

  Way down at street level someone shouted. The wires jerked. Bolan saw the roof of the car advancing toward him.

  The counterweight sank.

  It was suspended on two hawsers, one at each side, with just enough space for a man between them. Grabbing hold of one cable, Bolan unleathered the Beretta with his free hand.

  The car rose rapidly.

  He was sure that at least one member of Nasruddin's gang, if not more, would be inside. But the three mirrored walls of the car were solid wood on the outside, and the inner doors, although they had glass panels, couldn't be opened while the car was moving. So although they were going to pass, halfway up the shaft, almost within inches of each other, the Executioner would be unable to see who was inside. And the occupants, if they had been tipped off by the man below that Bolan was there, wouldn't be able to spot the Executioner, particularly as the counterweight slid up and down the shaft behind the car.

  This, of course, assumed that the warrior could flatten himself sufficiently on his perch above the weight not to be scraped off, mangled and then dropped sixty or seventy feet to his death in the inspection pit at the foot of the shaft when the two passed.

  He angled his feet outward so that the toes wouldn't project, squared his wide shoulders, pulled in stomach and chest and held his breath, one arm at full stretch to hold the cable, the one with the gun held straight down by his side.

  The elevator car approached, slid past and continued on up. Bolan expelled his breath in a sigh of relief. The paneled back had been so close to the waist buckle of his shoulder rig that he felt the displaced air beneath his chin.

  The car reached the tenth floor, stopped and at once started to drop back down the shaft. Nobody had entered or left.

  That could only mean one thing: whoever was inside was looking for him.

  The point was proved on the return journey.

  Silenced shots were fired from the interior as the car passed the fifth floor level; panels splintered and cracked as slugs cored through the wood to penetrate the mesh surrounding the shaft. Inside the car glass shattered. Fortunately the killers had miscalculated. Because of the space difference between the elevator floor and the inspection pit when it was at street level, and the top of the shaft and its roof when it was at the tenth floor, the travel of car and counterweight were unequal: they didn't pass each other exactly halfway up the shaft.

  So the first volley passed above Bolan's head. And the second, when the car rose next time, splatted against the counterweight beneath his feet.

  In between the counterweight itself with Bolan on it had dropped to the bottom of the shaft.

  Standing outside the gate was the guy who had shouted — the tall crew-cut murderer with pale eyes. He was holding a large-bore automatic — it looked like a .45 caliber Detonics Combat Master — fitted with a silencer. The long cylinder of the suppressor tube was trained on Bolan as he descended.

  Like many professionals in close combat, he aimed for the head. There was no comeback if you scored, while a body hit could leave an opponent free to fire back. But it was this very professionalism that saved Bolan's life. He ducked suddenly, dropping faster than the weight. The gun moved faster to cover him, but not quite fast enough, and the slug slammed into the gate, flattening itself on the junction between two of the crisscross steel braces.

  Before the guy could correct his aim, the weight reached the limit of its travel. In the instant of inertia before it began to move up again, Bolan sighted the silenced Beretta through one of the diamond-shaped spaces in the grille and punched out a single upward-angled round that took away the hardman's crew cut and most of the cranium beneath it. The 9 mm slug continued on its way to star the top of the entrance lobby's mirrored wall.

  The dead terrorist was slammed against the glass, leaving a semiopaque patch of brain tissue pricked out with bone splinters to cloud the reflection of the elevator gate before he and his image slid to the marble floor.

  Like Baraka, there had been two of him; like Baraka, he was through.

  But there were two real guys in the elevator car; Bolan could hear their voices.

  As the insane seesaw continued up and down the shaft, he realized that he had a temporary advantage. From outside, he could judge the height of a man standing inside the car, whereas the occupants could only guess at the counterweight's position by counting the floors as they passed. And they no longer had a lookout below.

  On the third pass, holding the Beretta tight in above his hip, the Executioner opened fire on the rear panel of the car, which was now peppered with holes and scarred where wood splinters had been gouged out. But unlike his enemies, Bolan scored. He heard a cry of pain, a stumbling fall. The car shook on its cables.

  One down.

  A second grenade was clipped to his belt. Should he drop it onto the car? He decided not to. The roof was metal; it might not kill. But the blast could cripple the car, jam it in the shaft, fracture a cable and send him to the bottom of the shaft with it. Apart from which, unless he wanted to brave the security men hunting the rooftops, the only way he was going to get out of this damned shaft was through the car. There was no other way that the exit gates on any floor could be opened.

  The next time the car rose, it was halted at the seventh floor. Bolan guessed the remaining man was doing what he himself would have done: he had opened the hatch and was climbing onto the roof.

  Lying flat there, with a gun trained over the edge, he would have the whole of Bolan's body to fire at as it rose toward him, while almost all of his own would be shielded by the car.

  The cables tremored. The elevator was coming down.

  Surprise was the warrior's only hope, and there was only one surprise he could pull.

  Instead of standing centered on the weight with a cable on either side of him, he moved outside the right-hand cable, bracing one foot against the edge of the weight, holding the cable with his left hand and allowing his body to swing out over space with the Beretta in his free hand.

  This way he would be displaced more than
a yard to one side of his expected position.

  It wasn't much, but he would give it a try.

  The floor of the car sank past his head. Over the lip around the approaching roof, he saw a hand holding a Walther PPK automatic. The trigger finger tightened. The gun spat fire. The guy was firing blind, aiming between the two cables, hoping Bolan would rise automatically into the deathstream.

  Three and a half feet off to one side, the splintered panels of the car brushing him as they slid past, Bolan held the Beretta across his body and let loose a single shot, coring the gunman's wrist at almost point-blank range.

  He heard a yell of pain and rage as the hand was snatched back, the Walther spun away and dropped to the roof of the car and blood spurted into the shaft. Bolan's head rose above the level of the roof, and he stared into the hate-crazed face of Max Nasruddin.

  As the counterweight carried him farther up and the car sank beneath him, he jumped onto the roof.

  Nasruddin rolled away to pick up the gun in his left hand. He moved quickly, and flame jetted from the muzzle before the Executioner could reach him.

  Bolan felt a searing pain in his right shoulder, temporarily paralyzing the arm. The Beretta dropped through the open trapdoor into the elevator car.

  The terror boss was on his knees, lining up the Walther for a second left-hand shot, but this time Bolan was too near. He kicked the gun out of Nasruddin's grasp, and it hit the mesh sidewall of the shaft and fell from sight.

  "Fucking doctors," Nasruddin snarled. "I knew I should never have trusted them to…"

  The sentence was never completed. Bolan's roundhouse left caught him on the mouth, and he crashed over backward, bounced off the counterweight cables and slipped down into the gap between the wire mesh and the back wall of the car.

  For an instant he clawed desperately for a hold with his good hand, his burly body rubbed between the moving car and the wire like cheese against a grater, then he lost his grip and plunged with a wild cry down the counterweight channel into the chasm below.

  Bolan dropped through the hatch. The casualty was Willi, the Maginot doorman and would-be bomber of Liege. His left lung was punctured near the heart, and pink froth bubbled from his slack lips where he lay slumped in a corner. The Executioner picked up the Beretta and finished him with a mercy round in the back of the neck.