Bolan looked around. There was an access door nearby, a locked steel portal of the type used to hide mall access corridors used by staff. At Eon's words, the door opened. More skinheads clad in bomber jackets and combat boots rushed out. One of them handed Eon a backpack.
"Take him!" Eon roared. "Kill him!" He snarled in fury. "I will not be thwarted, American! I will shout my triumph to the skies!"
That, Bolan thought as he drew the Desert Eagle, didn't sound good. He had lost the empty Beretta in the struggle; he had only his knife and the rounds left in the big .44. Without waiting, he put a Magnum round into the first of the skinheads, and then the second.
The Desert Eagle was empty and he had no more reloads. His opponents squared off, undeterred by the sudden deaths of their comrades. Eon limped off as the four men surrounded Bolan moving in menacingly. One of them stepped over the dead bodies of their fallen as if they had never existed.
One of the skinheads snapped open a switchblade. A second had a pair of brass knuckles already on his fist. The other two looked as if they would pull Bolan limb from limb for the sheer joy of it. For whatever reason, Eon had held this group back, perhaps knowing that if things went wrong, he would need more muscle. Well, things had gone wrong, and he was definitely benefiting from their efforts now. The soldier hoped that Eon would be stopped at the police cordon, but such things rarely worked out as they were supposed to.
Bolan prepared himself, balancing on the balls of his feet, with his knees slightly bent. The cultists were violent and they were tough, but they were amateurs. He could anticipate amateur mistakes.
The man with the knife lunged, trying to shove the blade into Bolan's abdomen. The soldier sidestepped the clumsy thrust, hooked the arm and slammed his right palm into the man's elbow. The joint snapped and the skinhead stumbled and fell, howling. Bolan had time to deliver a follow-up kick to the man's head as he tried to rise, putting him out of the fight completely. The knife fell to the floor.
Bolan dodged a brass-knuckled swing that would have taken his head off, only to take a knee to the stomach from one of the other men. He shrugged it off, hitting back fast and low with a series of brutal front kicks. The third man came in and went for the shoot, trying to tackle Bolan's knees and sweep his legs out from under him, but Bolan had been expecting that. He couldn't afford to let them take him to the ground and stomp him. Sidestepping the shoot, he balled his fist and punched the man as hard as he could in the junction between the skull and the neck. The skinhead sprawled on the floor and stopped moving.
One of the remaining two tried to scoop up the knife. Bolan met him with a kick to the face, then hammered an elbow down, bashing the skinhead to the floor with a sickening cracking of bone on bone. The man with the brass knuckles tried one last time. Bolan slammed his hands into the man's shoulder and inside his arm, stopping him short, and then hooked his right elbow through the man's face. The vicious blow sent him spinning. Bolan pursued.
The Executioner grabbed the stunned skinhead by the lapels of his bomber jacket, pulled him upright and slammed a palm heel into his chin. When the man dropped again, Bolan peeled the brass knuckles from his fist and tossed them aside.
The four men lay where they had fallen, unmoving.
Bolan took out his phone and dialed the number Rieck had given him. The Interpol agent answered on the second ring. "Cooper?"
"Eon got away," Bolan said. "Can you contact the police outside and see if they've noticed anything?"
"I did already," Rieck said. "I've been talking to them since you took off after him. There's been no sign of him."
"Then he's in the mall somewhere," Bolan said. "And we have to find him. He's got something with him, and I have a sinking feeling his plan B is still explosive."
"The hostages are being debriefed by a special tactics team," Rieck said. "Where are you?"
Bolan rattled off the names of the nearest stores.
"I can find you," Rieck said. "There's a directory here. I'm on my way."
"No," Bolan said, "we'd better split up. Take the opposite end. We have to see if we can find him."
"Any ideas?"
Bolan thought about that. To (he skies. Those had been Eon's words. "Look for roof access," he said.
He retrieved his war bag, reloaded his weapons, then found his knife. Cleaning the trusty Sting on one of the fallen skin-heads' shirts, he sheathed the blade.
Satisfied that his opponents would be no trouble to anyone for a while, the Executioner continued on.
At the end of the corridor, he found a stairwell, which he took, leaping the stairs two and three at a time, moving upward. When he reached the stop, there were two doors. One led to the upper-most level of the mall. The other was marked Dach. His German was limited, but he understood that much. The door moved readily, and he realized the lock mechanism had been pried open.
He pushed the door slowly.
Dumar Eon stood there, wearing the backpack on his broad shoulders. He was staring out over the city of Berlin. The gray of morning was giving way to a beautiful day as the clouds parted. Eon had lifted his face to the light and seemed to be soaking it in.
The Executioner raised his Desert Eagle.
"You won't need that," Eon said. He sounded strangely calm. From his position he could not see the gun, but it was a good guess.
"Turn around," Bolan said. "Slowly."
Eon did as instructed. His mangled arm was tucked into his suit jacket. He had wrapped a rag around it, but he was very pale and the rag was soaked through. He swayed unsteadily on his feet.
"Admit it," Dumar Eon said. "You are Phineas reincarnated."
Bolan said nothing. He had no idea what Dumar was talking about. "Lie down on the roof. Do it now."
"No," Eon said, smiling. He sounded strangely disconnected. Either the blood loss was taking its toll or he had ingested some drug. His face as almost beatific, as if he was experiencing supreme joy.
"Down!" Bolan said. "Or I will put you down!"
"Please do so," Eon said. "You see, I was wrong, American. I let my own pride come before the work. I never thought... Well, it does not matter now. But Phineas, he knew the way. When his work was done, he partook of the gift. It has been my time for too long now, but I denied that. Now I know it is my turn. Will you do this thing for me? Will you strike me down, so that I may know joy?"
Bolan didn't like the sound of that and he wasn't about to play this madman's games. "Eon, lie down"
"I've told you no." Eon said. "What is so hard to understand about that? I intend to meet my gift with dignity. There were so many who did not. Even my... even my name. I am not Dumar Eon. I am Helmut Schribner. I should have been proud, but I was not. It was wrong."
He stumbled and then fell to his knees.
Bolan approached cautiously.
"What's in the backpack?" he said.
Eon looked up at him, ignoring the question. "Who are you, American?" he asked quietly. "What are you? How much death do you have on your hands? To how many have you brought the gift?"
"I'm not a charity," Bolan said. "I'm a janitor."
Dumar Eon laughed. "That is an interesting way to look at it." He coughed blood, the spasms shaking his body. "You have hurt me badly."
"I'll hurt you worse if you don't surrender."
"Oh, I have." Eon waved a hand. "There is nothing left. No more battle. No more cause. There is only the end. It is fitting that I meet the end with you. I have for so long believed death to be my companion, my tool, my reward. I see now that I was wrong. You, American. It is you."
"What?"
"You are death," Eon said simply.
"Enough," Bolan said. The killing intent in his opponent's eyes was unmistakable. "The backpack."
"Another bomb, of course," Eon said. "It is counting down. The case is tamper proof. Any attempt to open it or to move it more than a few feet from my body will cause it to explode. The bomb has a sensor, keyed to my heartbeat."
"Shut it
off."
"I cannot." Eon shrugged. "The timer, once started, cannot be terminated. I've given myself enough time to gather my thoughts. To enjoy my last moments. You may leave, if you do not wish bliss." He waved his hand again, weakly, a magnanimous king dismissing a subject.
Bolan considered that. Eon offered no resistance as Bolan searched him. He had no weapons, and his physical strength seemed to be ebbing moment to moment. Bolan risked leaving the cult leader where he was, running to first one corner of the roof, then another. An explosion up here might collapse a good portion of the mall. The hostages and some law-enforcement agents were still in the building. Bolan couldn't allow Eon to do any more damage.
At the third corner, he saw what he wanted. There was a marked police car below.
He took out his phone and called Rieck. "Rieck," he said when the Interpol agent answered. "I need you to square something with the locals for me. There's not much time." He explained what he wanted.
"They're not going to like it," Rieck said.
"Tell them about the bomb. Tell them what I'm doing."
"Will do," Rieck promised.
The agent called back a moment later. "You're good," he said. "Be careful."
Bolan closed his phone. He walked to Eon, grabbed him by the straps of his backpack and hauled him to his feet.
"What... what are you doing?"
Bolan dragged the cult leader to the edge of the roof.
And threw him over.
Eon screamed. He landed on the back of the police car, shattering the rear window and leaving a significant dent in the trunk. Bolan jumped after him, landing on the roof, bending his knees and rolling for the hood, every inch of his body jarred by the fall. His knee was wrenched, too, and would give him some pain, but he had survived. Eon was groaning weakly, lying in a dent the size and shape of his torso, covered in broken pieces of safety glass.
A German police officer had come running. He had keys in his hand, which he tossed to Bolan. The soldier caught them, climbed into the car and started it up. The abused cruiser responded despite the damage he'd dealt it. Bolan put his foot on the pedal and raced for the nearest point of the cordon.
The police units scrambled to get out of the way. Bolan slammed the pedal to the floor and brought the police cruiser screaming onto the street beyond the roadblocks, its siren hee-hawing and its LED lights blazing.
Dumar Eon groaned something unintelligible from the back of the car. He had made no attempt to move and probably couldn't.
Motorcycles came up on either side. Bolan looked left, then right. The men on the cycles wore helmets and leather jackets. He couldn't see their faces, but it was obvious who they were when the guns came out. Each man drew an automatic pistol from his jacket and started to shoot at Bolan. Eon made weak hand gestures at the pursuing cyclists. So the cult leader's backup plans hadn't included just the skinheads inside the mall; he had planned for an escort should he make his way to freedom.
Bolan wondered if these cultists knew their leader was a time bomb. If they did, would it make a difference? He wasn't sure. He didn't need to wonder how they had found him, though; in Eon's position, he would have stationed motorcycle teams near the major exits, and instructed them simply to pursue any likely vehicles or foot traffic that emerged. Bolan imagined that a half-crushed police cruiser with Dumar Eon planted in the trunk was a fairly obvious indicator that the cultists' services were desired by their leader.
The soldier squeezed as much speed as he could out of the damaged police car. There was traffic in the streets, and he was concerned about stray bullets and their danger to civilians, so he took a less-busy side street. There he parked the cruiser, got out and hid behind the engine block.
The motorcyclists rounded the corner, hot on his heels. He brought his Desert Eagle up, sighted, and fired, aiming for the front forks of the lead machine. The big .44 Magnum slug did its work. The front tire blew and the rear wheel drove the back of the light motorcycle up and over, throwing the driver onto the street, where the motorbike hit him for good measure. The second motorcyclist slammed into the overturned machine of the first, but managed to dump out without going down hard.
Bolan skirted the police cruiser, watching Dumar Eon out of his peripheral vision. There wasn't much time left, and he didn't want the bomb to go off on this side street, too close to the buildings facing either side. He dived left as the second cultist triggered several shots from his handgun. The answering .44 slug punched through the man's faceplate. He stood there, a marionette on cut strings, for a split second before dropping in a boneless heap. The helmet bounced on the pavement with a sickening thud.
Bolan grabbed the first man and dragged him to his feet. He put the barrel of the Desert Eagle under the man's chin.
"One chance," he said. "Give up."
"Eίsen-Donner!" the man muttered. He bit down hard on something; Bolan pushed him away. The soldier had caught just the faintest whiff and knew that to breathe any more would be his death. Cyanide.
Shaking his head, he climbed back into the car. Eon was still groaning, but he had long ago stopped making sense. The soldier would have written him off completely, but suddenly he started speaking in whole words again.
"Wait! Pull...pull over," Eon said. "I was... wrong. I can... I can stop the bomb.... I... There is still time.
There wasn't time, as Bolan saw it. Even if he thought trusting the cult leader was a good idea, the man was in no kind of physical shape to disengage the explosive he wore. His wounded arm had to be completely useless, for example. No, Eon had sealed his own fate. He could live — and die — with that knowledge.
The soldier scanned the streets as he drove. Finally, he found what he was looking for: a small, closed parking area, with no people in evidence and only a few vehicles. He slammed on the brakes. The car screeched to a halt on smoking tires. Then he shifted to Reverse, put the police cruiser as far from everything as he could, threw open the door and hit the pavement running.
"Wait!" Eon called after him again. "It is destiny! It is time! We must go to oblivion!"
"You first," Bolan said softly.
The police cruiser erupted in a fireball that broke out windows in every building on the block.
19
It felt good to be back in the United States. As often as he traveled abroad, Bolan always looked forward to coming back. This was the nation for which he had fought, and the nation for which he still fought. The battlegrounds had changed, the war had changed and the enemy constantly changed, but the reasons for his endless war never varied.
Bolan followed the coast road in his Chevy Malibu rental with the window down, enjoying the sunshine and the warm weather. A cool breeze relieved the heat of the day, and gulls wheeled above the Pacific Ocean. He had his secure phone pressed to one ear and was listening intently.
"We've had confirmations coming in for the last few weeks," Hal Brognola was saying. "The phones turned out to be the perfect tracking devices. International sweeps have been picking up Iron Thunder members in all of the industrialized nations. Even the Chinese had a few, it turns out, though they've refused our help and we'll never know into what hole they dropped the ones they found."
Bolan grimaced but let that go. "What about our friend in Interpol?"
"Who do you think has been coordinating the sweeps?" Brognola said. For the first time in a long time, he sounded almost cheerful. Bolan could picture the big Fed chewing an unlighted cigar, firmly planted behind his desk at his office in Wonderland. "A certain Adam Rieck sent a request through channels. He asked that, if anyone on this end could pass on a message to a Matthew Cooper, he wished to express his gratitude and to say he was, in fact, 'having fun.'"
Bolan chuckled at that. "Barb says the Germans gave him some kind of medal."
"They did," Brognola said. "It seems he's gotten most of the credit for the hits on Iron Thunder in Berlin."
"He said he'd take the heat for me."
"There's been plenty
of that to go around," Brognola said. "Officially, the Germans are grateful for the intervention that has led to the removal of a dangerous group of terrorists. Unofficially, they're mad as hell. Between your war on them both and the fighting between the Consortium and Iron Thunder, there were so many bodies lying around that it looked like a zombie movie. The Germans are saying we unleashed a plague on them. Though they're not saying it too loudly to anyone but us."
"I'm sorry for your heartburn, Hal," Bolan said.
"Oh, I'll live," Brognola said. "I'm just glad it worked out as it did."
"What about the Consortium itself?" Bolan asked.
"Well, the government has been dickering about that for some time," Brognola told him. "It seems Dumar Eon — whose name really was Helmut Schribner, it turns out — was so thorough that there weren't any investors left to put in charge of the company. The government offered a buyout and there's been talk of partially nationalizing some of the Consortium's assets. At the very least, the strategic industries involved will be better protected from exploitation, from within or without."
"Well, that's good news," Bolan said. "And the Syrians?"
"Assan Bashir," Brognola said, "turned out to be the third son of the Bashir family, who are not unknown in the realm of international terrorism. They're reasonably wealthy, but more importantly, they've been maneuvering for years to try to stage a takeover of the Syrian government. A good old palace coup, if you will. I won't lie to you and say that State didn't consider whether the Bashirs could be used as an asset."
"I'm not surprised," Bolan said. "What came of it?"
"Nothing," Brognola said. "If anything, the Bashirs are even more hostile to the West than the current Syrian regime. And the rumors that they're sitting on those mysteriously disappearing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would indicate that the Bashirs' possession of more such weapons didn't really deal the family into any high-stakes games. We eventually leaked information of the Bashirs' plans to the Syrians through indirect channels. I'm sure we can trust them to take whatever measures are necessary to remove the threat to their continuity of government."
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