Fireburst

by Don Pendleton

  Finally getting back into motion, Bolan rode along in the featureless dark, straining to hear the half-track again.

  Slowly, the long miles passed with Bolan pausing at every side tunnel to check to see if the mercs had gone that way. Several times he was forced to use his cell phone as a light source to hunt for tire tracks in the reeking mud. However, all he ever found were big fat rats. Or at least something very ratlike, but much bigger. The animals hissed at his approach, and Bolan backed away quickly. A gunshot would echo for miles along the tunnels and give away everything.

  Only one of the rats was ever bold enough to attack. Moving fast, Bolan kicked it away, and the animal crunched against the side of the tunnel, leaving a gory trail of bloody intestines as it slid back down. Instantly, all of the other animals converged on their fallen brother, and that started a fight that steadily grew in volume and savagery.

  With the Beretta in his hand, Bolan retreated from the horrid feast and started the bike to quickly leave the area.

  Luckily, the mercs seemed always to be driving fast and straight. Which meant either that they were speeding past a known enemy, or else Bolan was dangerously close to their base of operations. Possibly both.

  Suddenly, Bolan saw a patch of sunlight ahead, and immediately braked to a full stop. Parking the bike, he eased forward with the Beretta and Black Arrow at the ready. Dimly, he heard the sound of splashing water, and came out of the tunnel into another culvert, a feeder pipe sticking out of the wall, and a stream of water arcing down to flow into a grated drain.

  Checking his watch, Bolan was surprised to find that it was now late afternoon. The sun was low on the horizon, and thick shadows covered the landscape.

  Using that to his advantage, Bolan crept along the muddy ground, zigzagging among the clumps of weeds and oddly perfumed bushes. He couldn’t identify the plant, but the smell was wonderful. A tiny bit of heaven hidden amid the cruddy weeds and muddy rats.

  The sloping side of the culvert was an easy climb, and Bolan reached dry ground without breaking a sweat. A paved road cut through a wide field, heading east and west. But Bolan spotted the tracks of the half-track and proceeded due north, past crumbling old buildings of unknown purpose, wrecked cars and tall shining towers of steel, their high-voltage power cables softly humming.

  Reaching the edge of a low cliff, Bolan looked down upon a huge automobile junkyard. Mounds of rusting vehicles stretched across the dark landscape in crude rows. A crane stood behind the ramshackle building, and parked in front of a garage was the half-track. Bingo.

  Unfortunately, the outer perimeter was tight, an outer fence of barbed wire that was topped with coils of concertina wire. The endless razor blades gleamed in the dying light. Then Bolan frowned. Correction, there were two wire fences, each twenty feet tall, and the space between them was clearly a dog run. He could spot the occasional pile of excrement and a broken leather collar.

  There had to be another way. If necessary, Bolan would blast a path into the place, but then he might accidentally kill somebody with useful information. No, same as before, this had to be a soft recon. Slip in, slip out. A ghost in the darkness.

  Scouting along the crumbling cliff, Bolan found an access road branching off to what appeared to be a major highway. Continuing onward, Bolan unexpectedly found an abandoned drive-in movie theater. He’d honestly had no idea that those were used anywhere other than North America.

  The huge sign out front was lacking any letters, and all of the light bulbs were either missing or smashed. However, a city sticker identified this as Devakottai. He had never heard of the place. The parking lot was laid out in neat rows of raised gravel so that each car could see over the one in front. There were rusty steel posts jutting from the gravel, some of them still containing speakers to hang from the car windows. But there was also a lot of windblown trash and huge potholes, a few of them growing trees large enough to bear fruit.

  Located in the exact middle of the drive-in was the two-story projection building. The walls were covered with graffiti in Hindi, and the missing doors revealed that the entire building had been stripped clean. The 35 mm cameras, winding plates, everything was gone.

  Oddly, the concession stand seemed intact, although the windows were so dirty they might as well have been sandblasted white. Bolan headed straight for the movie screen. That would be his way into the junkyard.

  The screen’s protective coating was badly ripped in the corner, and stained in numerous places from the weather, thrown sodas and decades of bird droppings.

  Vaulting over a wooden gate, Bolan circled past a rusty set of kids’ swings to reach the base of the screen. There was a ladder built into the frame. The inset handholds were covered with big flakes of corrosion. He tested one, and it seemed strong enough to take his weight. But there was only one way to know for sure.

  Listening to the wind for a few minutes to try to hear anything, or anybody coming this way, Bolan then started to climb. Several times, his hands slipped, coming away with a fistful of corrosion.

  Finally reaching the top of the screen, the soldier moved carefully forward through a thick morass of leaves, desiccated pigeon corpses, beer cans and hundreds of crumpled newspapers. Some of them were so old that they were printed in English, from back when the United Kingdom used to rule the former colony.

  From this angle, Bolan could see everything inside the junkyard: the mountains of spare parts, old refrigerators, farm tractors, electric ovens and hundreds of car bodies creating a desolate lunar landscape of enameled wreckage.

  Pulling out the monocular, Bolan could see the garage and the half-track. There was nobody in sight at the moment, but he knew that wouldn’t last for long. The Executioner had only a few minutes to get inside and back out again before being discovered. Time was very much against him.

  Going to the far edge of the platform, Bolan found that the towering movie screen cast him into shadow darkness, streamers of dying sunlight dappling the landscape like a kitchen colander. That would hide him from anybody on the highway. He grunted. This was probably why the mercs had taken the location. The screen of a drive-in theater had to be isolated from the headlights of passing cars or else the movie would be ruined. Out of sight, out of mind.

  At the end of the screen, Bolan discovered that he was only a few yards away from the double fence. However, the drop was a good twenty feet. He couldn’t risk injury. An old Reliance Gasoline sign hung from a streaked pole squeaking steadily as it blew back and forth.

  Retreating as far he could, Bolan took off in a full run and launched himself into the air. He hit the pole hard and almost rebounded free, but his fingers clawed along the metal, and he managed to find purchase. Wrapping both his arms and legs around the pole, the soldier slid down the entire length, disturbing a great cloud of rust before landing on the hood of an old Verma sedan.

  Trying to maneuver off the roof, Bolan slipped and went sailing to land on the vented hood of an ICML Rhino. The impact knocked the breath out of him, and Bolan lay there for a few moments, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Slowly, the Earth got back on its axis once more.

  Sliding off the Rhino, Bolan crawled across a Chevrolet sedan to reach the ground. Crumpled cars and trucks of all sorts surrounded him on every side, tireless wheels jutting randomly and the ground sparkling with thousands of tiny squares of busted safety glass. Pausing for a moment in the growing shadows, he listened for any approaching sounds. But apparently nobody had heard hi
s arrival.

  Checking the Beretta, he proceeded around a collection of rusty sawblades and headed toward the garage. The building was silent, and the door was locked. However, that wasn’t a problem. Removing a set of lockpicks from his pocket, Bolan went to work and gained entry in only a few moments.

  Using his cell phone again as a makeshift flashlight, he quickly moved through the building in search of a computer. The mercenaries had to have gotten their orders over the internet. Anything else was much too risky. They had sat phones, but their base had to have a computer. If he could find that email, and extract an ISP address, he would have the first solid lead to the people behind these attacks.

  If his EM scanner were still working, Bolan would have simply done a sweep for anything with a strong magnetic field. But now he was reduced to physically checking every room in the garage.

  Unfortunately, there was no personal computer that he could locate. However, he did find a cache of stun grenades and tucked a couple of the flash-bangs into a pocket for later. Getting into the junkyard was going to prove much easier than getting out again. But first, he needed that computer! Or the man in charge. Either would do.

  Starting along a hallway, Bolan opened a door and found himself looking directly into the face of a titanic guard dog, the colossal animal looked to be three feet tall at the shoulder, and possessed a head even larger than his own.

  Uncharacteristically baring its fangs, the monster-size dog snarled, and Bolan was forced to pistol-whip it across the forehead. The stunned animal dropped heavily to the floor.

  From behind another door, a man asked a question in Hindi, and another man answered with a guttural laugh. Deciding to take a gamble, Bolan softly whimpered like a dog in pain. The voices talked to each other, then the door unlocked.

  Instantly, Bolan lashed out a boot, driving the door into the person on the other side. There was an explosion of words, followed by a clatter of wooden chairs falling over. As the door swung closed once more, the Executioner kicked it again, and this time a man shouted in pain.

  Charging into the next room, Bolan saw a man on the floor nursing a bloody nose, while another man was stumbling away, cradling a hand to his chest. Before either of them could react, the big American clubbed them both down with the Beretta. One man fell to the floor with a low moan, while the other dropped lifeless in the corner, blood pouring from his open mouth.

  Quickly checking them both, Bolan recovered a pair of cell phones, both with internet capability. Tucking both of the phones safely away inside his body armor, the soldier decided that he had pushed his luck hard enough and headed for the exit.

  He was almost at the door when a powerful engine surged into life somewhere close, and Bolan recognized it as belonging to a Russian half-track.

  Arming a stun grenade, Bolan tossed it out the exit and waited until he heard the blast and saw the flash before charging outside. Night had fallen, but he could still see a dozen men clawing at their faces, while six more lay sprawled unconscious on the littered ground.

  Triggering the Beretta machine pistol, Bolan mowed down the disorientated men with a hail of 9 mm Parabellum rounds. They tumbled backward into forever just as a pair of older men appeared from around a mountain of crushed cars. They blinked in surprise at the sight of Bolan, then clawed for weapons under their windbreakers.

  Emptying the Beretta’s magazine, Bolan removed them from this plane of existence, then quickly reloaded only seconds before a bald man came out of the garage with a Jackhammer shotgun blasting death in every direction.

  A score of buckshot hit Bolan in the chest and he was slammed backward into the mountain of cars. Spinning away, he took cover behind a pile of tires as the bald man fired again, this time the spray of double-O pellets riddling the tires and shattering a sideview mirror.

  A used tire slammed into the Executioner’s head, almost knocking Bolan out. The world went blurry for a second, and he blindly fired at the bald man, trusting his combat instincts. As the Beretta coughed twice, the man screamed, and the shotgun clattered to the ground.

  Just then, the garage door began to rise. Quickly arming another stun grenade, Bolan bounced it off the ground to land inside the garage. But just as it thunderously flashed, the door exploded into pieces as the half-track crashed through.

  As Bolan reloaded the Beretta, the half-track ran over several of the unconscious men, the tires and treads reducing them to unrecognizable gore. Then the headlights turned on, twin yellow beams lancing across the junkyard to banish the night.

  Diving to the side, Bolan raked the cupola with a full magazine from the Beretta, but the flurry of 9 mm rounds merely glanced off the old Soviet Union armor to musically ricochet away.

  Somebody inside the cupola thrust the barrel of an assault rifle out a gunport and started shooting back. The 7.62 mm rounds raked across the rusty piles of metal, punching holes in the bodywork of the cars and slapping hard into old tires.

  Bolan armed his last stun grenade and charged the half-track, scrambling into the open rear compartment.

  Angry voices came from inside the cupola at the front, and as a gunport opened, Bolan rammed the grenade inside. It hit the metal floor with a clatter. The men inside snarled in rage, then the cupola exploded with blinding light and deafening noise.

  Instantly, the voices stopped, and the half-track began to sharply veer to the left, heading straight for a pile of old iron sinks.

  Scrambling over the side, Bolan hit the ground running. More voices were coming toward the garage, and a second dog had joined the hunt. He recognized the breed as a Presa Canario, a widely feared animal.

  As Bolan raced around the piles of wrecks and refuse, the Soviet half-track plowed into the pile of sinks, smashing them aside in a ringing cacophony that was louder than the grenades. Suddenly, lights appeared all across the yard, and men rushed to join the fray, AK-47s up and ready.

  Heading for the entrance to the junkyard, Bolan shot out a cluster of halogen bulbs just as a big man stepped out of a wooden hut carrying a flashlight.

  Seeing that the fellow was unarmed, Bolan switched targets from the man’s chest to a leg, and shot him in the knee. Howling in agony, the man fell and reached behind his back to produce a 9 mm Tokarev pistol. Now, Bolan fired again just as the mercenary squeezed off a shot.

  He missed; Bolan did not.

  Reaching the front gate, the Executioner saw that it was made of heavy wooden timbers covered with barbed wire, and closed with an enormous padlock that would have seemed right at home on a bank vault.

  With more men appearing, Bolan shot off the padlock with a burst from the Beretta. As the gate swung open, he charged down the access road, then angled across a marshy field. His combat boots sank into the soft mire, slowing him to a jerky walk.

  Suddenly, a siren began to wail, and Bolan redoubled his efforts for speed. Assault rifles began chattering, the bullets zinging through the dense weeds. More dogs started barking. Then a shotgun boomed, and a round slammed Bolan in the middle of the back, driving him into the mud.

  Rolling aside, he got back on his feet and was sprinting forward when he was stabbed in the unprotected part of his arm with something sharp. Darts! Instinctively, he twisted away just as a terrible racking pain filled his body and the whole world went black.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Aboard the Red Rose, Atlantic Ocean

  As the huge cargo ship steamed steadily toward the southwest, a tense hush fill
ed the control room while Major Armanjani carefully studied a large, three-dimensional map of North America that completely filled the main monitor.

  “Is this real-time?” he demanded with a darkening scowl.

  He was still seething over the foolishness of the White Tigers that had cost them the sale to the rich Yakuza. He felt almost drunk with the overpowering need to spill blood. A half-billion dollars gone! Somebody had to pay for the crime.

  “Yes, sir, absolutely real-time,” Dr. Khandis replied, tapping the screen with a laser pen. “Check the time-stamp for yourself.”

  “Bah, are there no storms in America?”

  “None, sir.”

  “Anywhere?”

  “All right, there are a few,” Khandis relented grudgingly, touching the screen in several places to magnify that part of the image. “But none of them are near anything significant.”

  “Very well, Doctor,” Armanjani stated, folding his arms. “What other targets do have a storm nearby? Any U.S. Navy ships at sea will do for now.”

  “Choose for yourself,” Khandis replied, typing on a keyboard. A list of possible targets scrolled on the screen.

  “Hold right there!” Armanjani commanded as a smile grew. “Yes, that will do nicely. Can you show me any details?”

  “Of course, sir,” he said, adjusting some controls.

  The satellite image on the monitor shifted into an aerial view of heavy cloud banks.

  “How can I see anything with the storm in the way?” Armanjani snarled in annoyance.