The phone was on its seventh ring when Bolan heard Emma Chadwick struggling to rise from her defensive crouch.
"Somebody better get that. Just in case."
"Stay down," the warrior told her gruffly. "I'll take it."
And he moved out, cautiously, maneuvering below the windowsill and snaking over the carpet. With the rifle probing out in front of him, he made the open doorway safely, slithered through and stood up beside the phone before its long eleventh ring was finished.
Bolan lifted the receiver, brought it to his ear. Momentary silence on the other end, the hollowness of a connection open, waiting. For an instant, he imagined he could feel a cold malevolence beyond the telephone receiver, concentrated Evil focused for the moment on his own destruction.
Softly, he addressed himself to silent Evil.
"Yes?"
A windy hissing sound. It took a moment for Bolan to identify the mocking laughter, and he waited through it, holding on and swallowing his rage until it dwindled into nothingness. A neutral, monotonal voice addressed him.
"You're dead, hotshot."
Bolan waited.
"Trouble is, you're too damn dumb to know it."
Still he waited, and an edge was creeping into that voice. There was something underneath — surprise, perhaps, or anger — and the soldier knew that he had found a nerve. Bolan bit his tongue and kept the pressure on.
"Whatsa matter, asshole? Speechless?"
The enemy was reaching for sarcasm, but he stumbled over irritation, never got beyond it. And the Executioner was smiling now.
"Goddammit, boy, I'm coming after you. Tell the little woman there to keep it warm for papa."
Bolan chose his words deliberately and got it in before the vulture could continue.
"Don't bring anything you can't afford to lose," he said softly.
And he cradled the receiver.
He recognized the method, sure. The enemy was looking for a crack in the facade, attempting to insert a wedge and drive it home. The shrilling telephone could easily become a lethal weapon, if he let it.
Reaching out, the soldier looped his fingers through the cord where it connected with the wail and pulled. With a ripping sound, the cable separated from its moorings, and he left it dangling on the counter, taking up his rifle as he turned away.
At his back, the kitchen window detonated inward, spraying shattered glass across the dining table. Bolan recognized the angry hornet-hum of bullets streaming through the window, plowing into stove, refrigerator, cabinets.
In front of him, even as he hit a fighting crouch, the parlor window was imploding. Broken glass was everywhere, and once again the angry whine of incoming rounds was audible, immediately followed by the thudding into walls and furniture. Toni Chadwick screamed, a high, reflex sound of sudden panic.
They were using silencers, of course. The jungle fighter cursed beneath his breath and huddled against the kitchen counter, knees against his chest, waiting for the storm to pass. His little troop could weather this intact if everyone remained in place.
A cookie jar exploded opposite, and automatic fire was ripping unabated through the window above him. The holes were blossoming in walls and wooden cabinets, destroying cups and glasses, blasting bowls and plates to smithereens inside the cupboards.
Silencers.
There was something almost supernatural about the silent fusillade as it devoured furnishings and punctuated walls. Bolan heard the sound, dreamlike in the distance, of bedroom windows shattering into flying fragments.
You never hear the shot that kills you.
Bolan hit a prone position, snaked across the parlor carpet, crackling now with brittle shards. A foot above his head, the hostile fire was gouging furrows in the windowsill, releasing countless splinters. He could hear the women sobbing, Jason's ragged, desperate cursing, and instinctively the warrior called to them above the sounds of battle.
"Stay down! They can't get at you if you keep your places!"
On the mantelpiece, an antique clock was dancing, skittering along beneath the driving force of rifle slugs. The tv erupted as bullets found the picture tube.
Bolan reached his corner, huddled in behind the cover of the easy chair. No time to worry now about the flimsy chicken wire withstanding so much concentrated fire. The screens would hold, or they would not. Right now, a more immediate concern was living through the fusillade — and keeping watch for the assault that must inevitably follow.
Heartbeats seemed to drag beneath the drumming leaden rain, and warrior Bolan saw the hurricane destruction of the living room progressing in a string of frozen, stop-action images. A magazine was lifted off the coffee table, pages fanning the air, and settled slowly to the littered floor. A vase was vaporized, the flowers standing upright for an instant, finally toppling into wilted disarray. A little cloud of mutilated stuffing hung above the sofa, artificial snowflakes sifting down, with bullets punching silent holes in their obscure formation.
The firing ended with the same dramatic suddenness that had marked its onslaught, as if someone had turned a tap to staunch the lethal flow. It left a vacuum, filled with ringing silence, in its wake.
Away to Bolan's left, beyond the open lavatory door, the contents of a shattered medicine chest were trickling out and rattling in the sink. He scanned the devastation all around him, found the lantern with his eyes and let his pent-up breath escape, relieved to find the lamp upright and intact.
Bolan kept his voice down as he sounded off the roll call.
"Jason?"
"Yes."
"Mrs. Chadwick?"
"I'm all right."
"Toni?"
Momentary silence, then, "Okay."
His little troop of soldiers had survived the first offensive, right. The second, warrior Bolan realized, could not be far behind.
17
Crouching in the darkness, Bolan felt a sudden rush of déjà vu. He had been through it all before, and he could almost smell the jungle, hear exotic night cries through the shattered window on his right. The moment passed as swiftly as it had come, and he was back inside the farmhouse, waiting with his three draftees to meet an enemy that almost certainly had them outnumbered and outgunned.
The soldier's gut was telling him insistently that they would not have long to wait.
"Heads up!" he warned the others in a gruff stage whisper. "They'll be coming anytime now."
And, as if in answer to his words, a weight collided with the screen door of the porch, ripping through it noisily. The soldier heard their pointman fumbling with the latch, releasing it. The flimsy door banged open, rattling on its hinges.
Boot heels echoed on the porch, and Bolan held his breath, attempting to divine their numbers from the shifting, restless sounds. He made it three or four, at least, and now his night eyes could pick out the moving silhouettes in dim relief beyond the shattered kitchen window.
Bolan shifted slightly in his crouch, allowed the .22's octagonal tube to rest across an arm of Jason's padded chair. If he was quick about it, he could bag a couple of them now, before they breached the inner line.
He shrugged the thought away. A killing shot was possible in theory, but Bolan knew the odds were stacked against him. With the little .22 he would require a mortal wound the first time out. If he should wing a target, even miss, he would have wasted precious ammunition and exposed himself to hostile fire for nothing.
It could wait until he had a chance to shave the odds a bit.
A heavy shoulder crashed against the kitchen door and found it firm; the human ram rebounded with a muffled curse. Another moment, and a boot heel struck the frame. Bolan heard something clatter onto the aging floorboards.
"Stupid jerk, you broke it!"
"Off my case, goddammit!"
"Off your ass. You got another doorknob in your pocket?"
"Can it, both of you. I've got a better way."
A solitary figure loomed before the broad expanse of window, stretching
out a hand to tangle fingers in the chicken wire and pull it free.
"C'mon and help me clear this shit away."
The contact was explosive, searing. In a flash of incandescence Bolan saw the pointman, rigid fingers clenched on the screen and sparking, short hair standing up on end, his body stiff and quivering. Then the light evaporated in a burst of sparks.
But even in the dark, his man was on the line and frying. Bolan heard the crackle-hum of power flowing into flesh, the drumming heels. A nauseating new odor suddenly reminded him of napalmed bodies.
"Quick, get him offa there!"
Bolan caught another silhouette in profile, piston arms that rose and fell with something long and rigid in his hands. Something — broom or rifle butt — impacted on the withered fingers, jarring them free. The Executioner heard a heavy body strike the floor.
One less number, right, but it was slender satisfaction. They were still besieged.
The survivors had removed themselves from Bolan's field of vision now. He heard them moving, talking back and forth in nervous whispers. The sudden rush of static from a walkie-talkie overrode the other sounds. The advance men were in touch, for sure, and someone out there in the dark was giving orders.
Sounds of movement in the yard came from the direction of the barn. The troops were shifting — some of them, at any rate. Backlit by the light on the power pole, one of them cast a giant shadow on the parlor wall above the mantelpiece.
Bolan felt the sudden urge to take his shot and make the most of it while they were in the open, and again he let it slide away. He might have chanced it with a .30-.30, but the little .22 was short on knockdown power, and the moving targets made it too much of a gamble.
So he waited. They would have to come for him, and when they did...
An automatic weapon stuttered in the yard, a whisper audible despite the silencer, and then another joined the deadly chorus. Bolan ducked instinctively, but there were no incoming rounds; their target lay elsewhere.
With a crash of glass the barnyard light disintegrated, dropping a sudden cloak of darkness over house and barn. Severed at their junction by the bullets, power cables slithered down into the yard like dying serpents.
"We're open!" Bolan snapped. "Be ready!"
Even as he spoke, a radio was squawking on the Chadwick porch. At once a body struck the kitchen door, again; a muffled curse was lost as bullets started chewing up the doorframe. The lock was blown away, and strays were rattling around the kitchen, several of them reaching into the parlor.
In the final seconds left to him, the jungle fighter found his target, held the slender rifle steady on its padded rest. His index finger curled around the narrow trigger, and he found the hammer with his thumb, retracted it and locked it into readiness.
Another driving kick impacted on the kitchen door and drove it inward, slammed it back against the wall. A pair of hulking shapes were on the threshold, edging through with obvious reluctance. Even in the dark he saw that both of them were armed with stubby chatterguns, their muzzles lengthened, weighted by the silencers.
The two of them were his, and he could take them now. He would have taken them, if he had been a gambling man, but instead he kept his eye locked firmly on the white adhesive cross. His view was momentarily obstructed by a pair of tree-trunk legs, and then he had it back, the human secondary targets flanking his incendiary package. They were moving forward slowly.
Bolan stroked the trigger slightly, knew the shot was sour even as he worked the slide to prune another round. The matching muzzles of those deadly stutterguns were winking into life, the bullets coming high and working downward when he fired again.
The blasting cap and plastic charge erupted into heavy metal thunder, rattling the walls and ceiling overhead. A churning ball of flame enveloped Bolan's opposition, turned them into shrieking carbon-copy torches. Both of them discarded useless weapons as they blundered through a grisly dance of death.
Sergeant Mercy chose his moment, pumped a mercy round into the nearest dancer's face. The guy went down, and Bolan's .22 was tracking in a narrow arc, acquiring target number two an instant later. With the Winchester, recoil was nonexistent, but the spastic target spoiled his aim a fraction, and the tiny bullet burrowed into jawbone, knocking the gunner sprawling.
Bolan stood and crossed the twenty feet of open floor. The .22 pump in his right hand was balanced by the fire extinguisher he carried in his left.
The kitchen was a fiery shambles, with a dozen secondary flares ignited by the flying kerosene. Methodically, he hosed the bodies, then moved around, dousing fires. Ninety seconds saw it done, but the extinguisher was empty by the time he moved to crouch between the blackened bodies.
Number one was dead as hell, his face and body crisped, a drooling wound beneath an eye the evidence of Bolan's deadly marksmanship.
But number two was something else again. The guy was fried, all right, and Bolan's bullet had performed some sloppy orthodontics on the in-and-out, but he was hanging on to life with grim tenacity. The eyes, devoid of lids and lashes, fixed on Bolan's face; the swollen doughnut lips were moving soundlessly.
Bolan heard the silent plea, or else imagined it, and either way it was the same. He could not leave the guy this way, no more than he could waste a precious bullet to relieve his dying agony.
Without a moment's hesitation, Bolan set the rifle down and used both hands to raise the spent extinguisher above his head. The gunner saw it coming, turned his blistered face away, and Bolan drove the metal cylinder with all his strength against the hairless skull.
The tortured form went slack, relaxing into death. Bolan retrieved his .22 and scooped up the submachine guns before returning to his corner to check them over.
"Anybody hit?" he asked the empty air.
And one by one the negative responses reassured him, letting him know that — physically, at least — they all were still intact.
"Stay on your toes," he cautioned, whispering again. "We've mauled them, but it isn't over yet."
A murmur of assent, and he was already working on the stutterguns, examining them both for load and damage. One of them was an Uzi with a folding stock, the other piece a squarish Ingram MAC-10.
Their magazines were incompatible, but the guns were thankfully both chambered in 9mm parabellum. Bullets taken out of one would fit the other if it came to that, and Bolan was encouraged by the uniformity of ammunition.
There was hope that he could capture other weapons, other ammo, make the enemy's artillery an instrument of his own destruction.
Bolan pulled the magazines and cursed beneath his breath. Between the two of them, he had eleven rounds, enough for one second of full-automatic fire from either weapon at the going cyclic rate.
And it was damn sure not enough to see them through.
He started calculating. If he loaded up the Uzi, with its capability of semiautomatic fire...
Bolan emptied out the Ingram's magazine and started wedging cartridges into the Uzi's staggered box. He snapped the clip in place and primed the weapon, set the safety switch. Almost as an afterthought, he ditched the heavy silencer.
When they came in to get him, Bolan wanted fire and thunder on his side.
Tonight, for sure, he needed every edge available.
18
"They still don't answer."
"Damn."
The Cowboy keyed the walkie-talkie, held it close against his lips.
"All right, what's going on in there?"
"No way to tell. There was a flash, some kind of fire and then some shooting.''
"A shotgun?"
"Negative. It sounded like a .22. No bigger than a .25, for sure."
So they were armed with something other than the scattergun in there. A .22, most likely, and he had to take for granted that the spearhead team had bungled, died in their initial attack. It followed that his quarry would be armed with automatic weapons now, and one of them, at least, knew how to use the military hardware.<
br />
It changed the equation dramatically, right, but the Cowboy was far from defeated. On the contrary it was time to push ahead full tilt.
The Cowboy had a feeling for his quarry now. He had received it on the telephone when he had called in to shake them up, a jarring revelation that had shaken him instead. Not the words alone; he had expected some defiance, a facade of courage in the face of certain death. It was the tone of voice, like an echo from the tomb.
A stone-cold killer's voice, for sure. The Cowboy knew it well enough; the voice was not unlike his own.
And the warnings handed down by his superiors had greater meaning for him now. Forget about the farmer, anybody else inside the house. His troops were up against a true professional, and he had taken out a pair of them — no, make it five — already. No concessions could be won from such a man, and they would have to blast him out of there, remove him from the smoking ashes piece by piece if necessary.
It would take a full assault to rout him, and every moment wasted gave the enemy an opportunity to strengthen his defenses.
The Cowboy raised the radio and keyed the mike.
"Roll in Team B," he snapped, "and have that backup ready if we need it.''
Momentary hesitation as the order was digested by his pointman in the darkness.
"Roger that."
The hunter let the walkie-talkie drop and leaned against the Lincoln's dusty fender. Half a mile away, across the darkened field, his troops were in position, primed and ready to assault the farmhouse for a second time. Their lives — his life — was riding on the fate of that assault. And if it fell apart...
He had the backup team, prepared to plug the gaps as they appeared. If worse should come to worst, the Cowboy would step in and take a hand himself. If necessary.
Suddenly, he hoped that would not be necessary.
Something in the distant, disembodied voice had put him off, disturbed him in a way that nothing had for years. The Cowboy could not deny it.
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