Blood Rites

by Don Pendleton

  It made a satisfying sound and helped light his way besides, but it didn’t reveal the man Bolan was searching for. Plain logic told him Quarrie must be somewhere on the grounds, seeking a method of escape, but if he’d bolted for the woods first thing, he would be nigh onto impossible to track.

  Don’t think that way, he silently told himself.

  The posse boss wasn’t a woodsman, had probably never spent an hour of his life hiking around a forest. He’d be lost in minutes and would fear that. No. He’d try to flee the same way any other civilized offender would: on wheels.

  Which narrowed down the prospects.

  Backlit by the house, half of it burning briskly now, Bolan began a counterclockwise sweep of the compound. Passing a pair of off-road motorcycles, he reached down to slash their spark plug wires and leave them useless. The next ride he encountered was a dusty SUV with windows bullet-punctured, but the rest of it intact. He knifed both right-side tires, then drove his Chaos blade into the radiator, through the grille, loosing a gurgling stream of water mixed with coolant.

  Three down, and without a bullet wasted to attract attention from the frantic soldiers running every which way, stopping here and there to spray the night with gunfire. Passing corpses of two men he hadn’t killed himself, Bolan knew things were starting to unravel for the Viper Posse crew.

  He found another car, this one a sporty MG F from Britain, navy blue. He stabbed the front tires, for variety, then popped the hood and cut the wires attached to the engine’s distributor cap, turning the car into a pricey paperweight.

  * * *

  SPOTTING THE CAR was one thing. Reaching it, as Holbrook soon discovered, was another thing entirely. Anything could happen with a battle going on, and while it helped to have the Viper Posse’s leader at his elbow, neither one of them was bulletproof. The stray rounds flying through the compound were unable to discriminate.

  Just ask the witch doctor.

  He’d been telling Quarrie something about riding with Holbrook—“Bad luck to travel with a white man”—when the left side of his face erupted, spewing blood and mangled flesh. Holbrook took a second to decipher that he’d been shot from the right, a through-and-through that killed him where he stood and dropped him straight down.

  Quarrie stood gaping at the body for another second. “You stupid bastard! Serves you right, you fake. Can’t even save yourself? Who are you to tell me anything?” He drove a vicious kick into the dead man’s ruined face, then turned to Holbrook, snapping, “Are we going, or not?”

  “We’re going, absolutely,” Holbrook told him, turning from the faceless corpse and picking up his pace. Speed made him a more difficult target, at least in theory.

  They reached the car, its diplomatic plates an idiotic joke under the circumstances. Holbrook pressed a button on the key fob and the taillights flashed at him, a loud squawk threatening to draw attention. Up close, he saw that several slugs had struck the vehicle already, one piercing the driver’s door, another taking out the window just behind it, yet another through the right-rear window post. The impact dents were bright and shiny, perfect circles where the paint had flaked away on impact.

  Holbrook spent a panicked moment circling the car, checking its tires—none flattened yet—and peering at the hood. No damage there, and nothing leaking from below the engine or the radiator. If he quit dicking around and got his ass in gear, they should be good to go.

  He cursed the glaring dome light as he slid behind the steering wheel. Quarrie stood waiting for a heartbeat at the other door, as if expecting someone from the sidelines to open it for him, then he did the job himself and settled in the shotgun seat, clutching his short Kalashnikov.

  “Come on!” he snapped. “Don’t linger here!”

  “Who’s lingering?” Holbrook replied—and promptly dropped his key somewhere between his feet. “Son of a bitch!”

  He missed the dome light now, but wouldn’t risk it. Fumbling on the floorboard, cheek against the steering wheel, he thought this was the moment when he’d die, a bullet crashing through his window, piercing his skull, and that would be the end of him.

  But no.

  He found the key, inserted it, gave it a twist. The smallish engine came to life immediately. Holbrook was careful not to flood it as he reached down for the parking brake, released it, cranked the gearshift into Drive.

  “Hang on,” he said, and slammed the pedal down.

  * * *

  WHEN HE’D FIRED the last round from his shotgun, dropping two men with a single cloud of buckshot, Clancy Reckford drew his pistol. He dodged toward the nearest building, where he crouched in pitch-black shadow to reload.

  The shotgun was a 12-gauge Ithaca 37 pump, capable of slamfiring, wherein a shooter held the trigger down and pumped the slide-action to spray death at his enemies in rapid-fire.

  A helpful trick at times like this.

  He jacked one round into the shotgun’s chamber, then slipped seven more into the magazine before he put the Browning Hi-Power away. No one had tracked him to the corner where he’d hunkered down, but he couldn’t afford to linger there.

  Not if he wanted Jerome Quarrie for himself.

  He’d still seen nothing of the stranger who’d led him here, to what might be his final night on Earth. At times, Reckford thought he could track the man’s movement by the shifting tide of battle, but he wasn’t sure, since some of Quarrie’s soldiers seemed to be shooting at each other. High on rum or ganja, maybe panicked by the havoc that surrounded him, they made it easier for Reckford.

  Rising to join the battle once again, Reckford wondered if officers were on the way to break it up. He hadn’t called for help and wanted none, even if members of the JCF in Portmore had been willing to respond. He knew a few of them from casual encounters through the years, and most of the instructors at the JCF Academy in nearby Spanish Town, but couldn’t say which ones were on the Viper Posse’s payroll. Calling ahead was pointless, anyway, since he’d been suspended and his new civilian status might be in the system, marking him as an outsider undeserving of consideration.

  Neva mind, he thought, his brain slipping into the old patois of childhood. He’d come to do this job himself, without backup from the Special Anti-Corruption Task Force. Whatever happened, it was down to him, with or without the American.

  And he would see it through alone.

  * * *

  BOLAN WAS ON his fifth vehicle, bending down to knife one of the crew’s pickup trucks, when three of Quarrie’s soldiers spotted him and rushed at Bolan, howling like berserkers.

  Serious mistake.

  He left his knife protruding from the off-road tire as it deflated and raised his L85A1. Bolan pegged the nearest soldier and stroked the rifle’s trigger once. Piercing the sternum, the round yawed and shattered at the cannelure, exploding through soft tissue in a perfect storm of shrapnel, tearing through the heart, aorta and both lungs.

  The guy was dead before he knew it, but he still took two more loping strides, forward momentum overcoming gravity until his brain blanked out and let him drop. Behind him, his companions had no time to reconsider their commitment, as the Executioner shifted his aim.

  Next up, the soldier on his left, who had his weapon leveled from the shoulder, rather than the waist, like his surviving cohort. Bolan shot him twice: once in the chest to slow him down, then in the head as he was falling, shattering his skull to fan a crimson halo out behind him, glinting from the firelight as he fell.

  The last man up tried stopping in his tracks but couldn’t manage it. His sandals slipped on grass and stole his balance from him, dumping him onto his backside with a squawk of protest. As he hit the turf, his finger jammed the trigger of his Uzi SMG, wasting a burst of Parabellum rounds on empty darkness, somewhere to his left.

  He tried correcting it, was halfway there when Bolan shot him through the forehead, one round for the easy kill, and flattened him. The sandals that had tripped him up drummed briefly on the grass, before the la
st impulses from his gutted brain misfired and slipped away.

  Bolan retrieved his knife and sheathed it, looked around for other vehicles to cripple, and had spotted one—a medium sedan—when suddenly its headlights blazed and it began to move. He couldn’t see the occupants, much less identify them in the dark, and that meant he couldn’t let them get away.

  Mental geometry kicked in, and Bolan sprinted off on a collision course.

  * * *

  “WHAT THE HELL’S wrong now?” Quarrie snarled at his driver.

  The pale, useless CIA man snapped back at him, void of the proper respect, “We’re slipping on wet grass and mud! You couldn’t spring for blacktop?”

  “Just hurry up!”

  “You want to push?”

  “I’ll push a bullet through your head, you sass me any more,” Quarrie replied, jerking the muzzle of his AK-47 in the white man’s general direction.

  Holbrook muttered something as he grappled with the gearshift, slowly backed the car up several yards, then cranked the steering wheel to drive around the spot where they’d been trapped, long gouges in the lawn. In other circumstances, Quarrie might have flared over the ruined turf, but it meant nothing to him now. His house was gone, the compound was a killing field. It held no memories he wanted to retain.

  The only thing he valued now was life itself, and getting out.

  Holbrook’s sedan was gaining traction, swerving slightly as it moved across the broad lawn toward the gates—which, Quarrie saw, were now unmanned. He grimaced, realizing one of them would have to leave the car and clear the path before they could escape. The vehicle was nothing special, far from bulletproof, but it provided more security than open air.

  Now, another problem: When they reached the gate, should he get out to open it, or leave that job to Holbrook? Could he trust the CIA man not to drive away and leave him in the dust? Conversely, if he told Holbrook to do it—even forced him from the car at gunpoint—what would stop the white man from bolting on foot as soon as he’d cracked the gate enough to slip through it?

  Decisions.

  As it happened, they never got that far. Some twenty yards from where they’d started, still a long way from the gate and freedom, Quarrie saw a stranger step into the headlights’ glare in front of them. He was a black man, not the bastard who’d been wreaking havoc on the Viper Posse during recent days, and not a Rasta, either. He was well armed, with some kind of automatic weapons slung across his back, a shotgun in his hands and aiming at their car’s windscreen.

  Holbrook blurted out, “Holy shit!” and seemed about to hit the brakes, when Quarrie punched his shoulder.

  “Don’t stop!” he ordered. “Run him down!”

  * * *

  RECKFORD HAD SEEN the car departing, gambled that the first persons to flee would be Jerome Quarrie and any aids or bodyguards he chose to take along with him. None of the Viper Posse rank and file would dare desert their leader, on pain of agonizing death if he survived the fight and caught up with them later.

  Ergo, Reckford had to stop that car, at any cost.

  It was a mad dash from his starting point to intercept the nondescript sedan, but he was aided when the car’s back wheels lost traction on a wet patch of the lawn. The driver backed it out and drove around the churned-up muck—smart move, bad luck for Reckford—but by then he’d closed the gap enough to have a prayer of catching them.

  Shoot now! he thought, but held his fire. Shotguns were tricky, and there’d been no time to swap it with the MP5A3 for greater accuracy. Buckshot started spreading the moment it left a shotgun’s muzzle, generally in a cone-shaped pattern. Penetration was another matter altogether: great on wooden doors at point-blank range, less so on speeding cars as they retreated from the gun.

  His answer: get in front of the escape car and give it everything he had within a few wild seconds, before leaping to one side. Take out the windshield, driver, front-seat passengers, maybe the radiator and the engine block if that was even possible. Reckford had four live rounds remaining in the Ithaca.

  Once he’d stopped the car—or slowed it down, at least—he could ditch the shotgun and bring up the Heckler & Koch SMG. Hit the car and its occupants with thirty Parabellum rounds in less than three seconds, raking the passenger seats. He might have time to reload, if they weren’t firing back. Otherwise, pull the Browning Hi-Power and give them his last fourteen shots, counting the one he kept in the chamber.

  But first, he had to stop the car. And that, as far as he could see, meant getting out in front of it.

  Death wish, Reckford thought, but found an ounce of extra speed somewhere, lungs straining, heart pounding against his ribs, and leaped into the vehicle’s path, stopping short on rubbery legs. Gasping for breath, he aimed the Ithaca, no warning on his lips—he couldn’t speak, and had no jurisdiction anyway—as headlights blinded him.

  He squeezed the shotgun’s trigger, thirty feet and closing, aiming more or less directly at a startled face behind the steering wheel.

  White face, he thought, before the car plowed into him and everything turned upside-down.

  * * *

  BOLAN SAW THE CAR strike, heard it crunch into the sergeant’s body, scooping him up and across its hood. After a jarring impact with the windshield Reckford’s buckshot had already perforated, he bounced and rolled across the car’s roof, dropping onto the sod behind it.

  While the car began to slow and veer off course, losing momentum.

  Bolan sprinted after it, dropping a nearly empty STANAG magazine, snapping a fresh one into the receiver on the run. He didn’t need to cock his rifle, since it had a live round in the chamber, and the rest would feed from there.

  The car had nearly stopped now, and he’d have no problem catching it unless the stunned or wounded driver came around and got his act together in the next few seconds. Far from that, however, Bolan saw the driver’s door pop open, dome light flaring, as a front-seat passenger reached over from his side and grappled with the driver’s slack form, trying to expel it from the car. He didn’t recognize the driver, white beneath a mask of blood, but he saw Quarrie’s face under the dome light.

  That was all he needed.

  Drawing closer, Bolan slowed his pace and kept his rifle shouldered, covering the vehicle. Quarrie glanced up and noticed him, blinked once and said, “Damn!”

  Bolan approached him, walking now, aware of his surroundings and the lack of any other gangsters in proximity. “Ride’s over,” he told Quarrie.

  “Who says so?”

  “That would be me.”

  “And now you’re gonna kill me? Why? For who?”

  “Who’s your worst enemy?” Bolan replied.

  “Is that a riddle? How in hell do I know?”

  “Check the mirror,” Bolan said, and plugged him through the forehead, one round at a range of fifteen feet or less. Quarrie collapsed across the bloodstained driver’s seat, facedown, arms dangling from the open door in front of him.

  Bolan retreated, kneeling next to Clancy Reckford on the grass. The cop was fading in and out, clearly beyond first aid, his rib cage crushed, his face lopsided from an obvious skull fracture. When his eyes opened, only the left one seemed to focus, locking on to Bolan’s face.

  “Quarrie?” he gasped.

  “All done.”

  Weak smile, with crimsoned lips and teeth. “He’s only part of it, you know.”

  “I figured.”

  “Too bad all the others get away.”

  “Not all of them,” Bolan replied. But he was talking to himself.

  Epilogue

  Ministry of National Security,

  Oxford Road, Kingston

  The day was ending badly, but it could have been much worse. Jerome Quarrie was dead, along with many of his men—the body count still rising as reports came in from Portmore—which was both a problem and, perhaps, a blessing in disguise.

  For Perry Campbell, Quarrie’s death was problematic because it stopped the flow of Vipe
r Posse bribes to greedy, grasping hands within the JCF and Kingston’s government bureaucracy. That was a temporary problem, though. The other posses would expand, absorb the rackets Quarrie had controlled, and they would pay well for the privilege of gobbling up his leftovers.

  Conversely, Quarrie’s death was providential, since he’d drawn so much adverse publicity in recent days. His survival, if permitted, would have jeopardized the decent men of sterling reputation who allowed him to function on the fringes of society. Without those decent and respected men—himself included—no crime syndicate could function, much less thrive. Of course, the felons were required to pay their dues, in cash and in the other services that made them useful over time.

  All things considered, Campbell thought of Quarrie as a blowfly that had buzzed around the feast, alighting here and there to nibble scraps, potentially infecting anything and anyone he touched with the diseases he carried from his roots in Trench Town and Tivoli Gardens. He’d been useful, but he had outlived his usefulness. Now he was gone.

  Good riddance.

  Campbell thought of Clancy Reckford, frowning for a moment. But again, the news was mostly good. An officer suspended for impeding JCF investigation of a murder spree had cracked, gone on a killing rampage of his own and died as a result. The story could be spun in several ways, all beneficial to the ministry.

  Had Reckford been the vigilante killer running wild in Kingston recently?

  Was he, in fact, a covert member of the Viper Posse, seeking payback on his boss after his personal corruption was revealed?

  Whichever way the story played out in the media, Campbell emerged spotless and smelling like a rose. He was the man who’d removed Reckford from the force, pending investigation and a probable indictment. Reckford’s crimes—who knew how many there might be, before the case was closed?—absolved his fellow officers of any taint. He was a lone bad apple in the barrel, the accused who could not speak up in his own defense.