Battle Cry

by Don Pendleton

  Buck up, she silently chastised herself, and get it done.

  Beacher had volunteered for this, against her better judgment, and she obviously couldn’t change her mind this late in the game. The stakes were nothing less than personal survival.

  The gunman showed himself again, maybe believing she’d retreated or pushed on to breach the house. Whatever he was thinking, cautious as he was, he gave Beacher a shot.

  She took it without hesitation. Three rounds from a range of forty feet, and she saw two of them strike home. Twin puffs of crimson burst from the target’s upper chest before he toppled over backward in a boneless sprawl.

  Two down, that she was sure of, and the rattle of Cooper’s assault rifle told her that he’d found another target. One more down, she guessed, from having seen the big American work, but had more crept out of Macauley’s house in the meantime? Were they circling around to come at her from some new direction, out of the darkness while her eyes were dazzled by firelight?

  “Ready?”

  The question came from Beacher’s left, Cooper suddenly beside her, nearly making her jump. She scanned the driveway and the grounds that she could see for other living threats, then nodded.

  “When you are,” she said.

  “This way.”

  They were off and running, then, to find the laird and Gibson, with however many men they still had left. Hopefully they’d succeed before police arrived and Beacher had to tell the story she’d been working on in private, since she first closed ranks with Cooper.

  Would anyone believe it?

  Would she even live to try it on for size?

  BLITZING THE MOTOR POOL had only been part one of Bolan’s battle plan. Leaving his enemies without a means to flee, except on foot, was only beneficial if he found the targets he was seeking.

  Alastair Macauley. Fergus Gibson. Jurgen Dengler.

  Taking out the Nazi fugitive would be a bonus, but it wasn’t central to the job at hand. In realistic terms, he wouldn’t live much longer, and he’d never mount another expedition to retrieve the stolen loot of Europe from Loch Ness. That ship had sailed—or, rather, sunk—before Dengler could salvage any remnant of his Fourth Reich fantasy.

  The Tartan Independence Front, however, still remained a clear and present danger. Bolan had an opportunity to nail its founder and its financier in one sweep, if he didn’t get distracted by their pawns and let the big fish slip away.

  A rifleman was waiting for them as they neared the house, jogging through smoke and dappled firelight toward a door that likely opened on the kitchen or a service area. The watchman missed his first shot, being hasty, and the bullet cracked concrete a foot or so to Bolan’s left. It was warning enough to make him duck and dodge, while Beacher took her own evasive steps behind him.

  Muzzle-flashes marked the next burst, winking from what Bolan took to be a kitchen window. Bullets whispered past him in the smoky night, as he hit a shoulder roll and scrabbled toward the cover of a tree that loomed between the house and what was left of the garage. Once there, he took stock of the situation, judging angles and his distance from the enemy.

  Not easy, but he thought it might be possible.

  Beacher had reached the tree a heartbeat after Bolan, cursing at a near miss from the sniper. Bolan verified that she was still uninjured, while he palmed his final frag grenade and pulled its pin.

  She caught the move and said, “From here?”

  “It’s worth a try,” he told her. “Cover me, on three.”

  She nodded, and he started counting. “One…two…”

  And on three she ducked around the far side of the tree trunk, blazing with the Spectre M-4 toward the window where their adversary stood. A storm of Parabellum slugs gave Bolan time to step out, make his pitch and duck back under cover as the lethal egg flew toward its mark.

  Four seconds later, smoke and shattered masonry spewed from the kitchen window, smothering a human squeal. Bolan was off and running for the door at once, with Beacher close behind him, both their weapons covering the window sniper’s nest. No further challenge from that quarter, as Bolan gave the door a flying kick and lunged across the threshold.

  Shrapnel hadn’t killed the shooter outright, but he was a bloody mess when Bolan found him, stitched from chin to shins and bleeding from at least a hundred wounds. Even in that extremity, the Scotsman tried to reach the automatic rifle that had fallen from his hands as he went down.

  He never made it.

  Bolan put a single round between the sniper’s glassy eyes and left him trembling in his death throes, moving on to find Macauley, Gibson and Dengler in the rambling house. They had to be somewhere close at hand, since there was no way for them to escape.

  Or was there?

  Had he missed something?

  “What is it?” Beacher asked him, frowning at the look on Bolan’s face.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Let’s get it done.”

  Chapter 16

  Liam Abercrombie was late. He’d been chasing a couple of young drunks from Dores who were going wild on Jet Skis, and it had taken him some time to run them down. Then, in the midst of writing their citations, came the phone call from the constable in Fort Augustus, claiming someone had reported explosions in the neighborhood of Alastair Macauley’s dock.

  Abercrombie had been looking forward to his supper, with a pint or two, but it seemed he had another job to handle. As he motored southward on the loch, he thought about the sort of things that might produce such a report.

  Some kind of accident aboard the DeepScan, possibly, resulting in explosion of its fuel. Or something in the boathouse, where Macauley kept a speedboat and the weird little submersible he’d bought to search the bottom of the loch. The sub ran on electric power, but the speedboat burned gasoline, and there were likely spare drums waiting to refill its tanks.

  The worst scenario would be if he discovered that Macauley had been dropping charges in the loch, as part of his bizarre attempt to find the beastie. That would land the old man in hot water, laird or not, and fines might not be good enough to cover it.

  That said, arresting Macauley would require conclusive evidence, not idle speculation or the say-so of disgruntled neighbors. Abercrombie knew that if he moved against the laird, he’d have to make it stick.

  Or else he’d be out of a job.

  As he approached Macauley’s dock and boathouse, Abercrombie saw the DeepScan listing mightily to starboard, with its wheelhouse almost horizontal. Nothing but its mooring lines had kept the research boat from going down. The water bailiff swept his spotlight’s beam along the vessel’s length and found no damage visible, but when he shifted to the boathouse there were several fresh-looking holes along the waterline.

  Before he had the chance to take a closer look, he was distracted by a popping sound like fireworks overhead. Frowning, the bailiff craned his neck to get a long view of Macauley’s mansion on the hilltop.

  What in hell was going on? Some kind of celebration?

  No.

  A fair outdoorsman in his own right, Abercrombie recognized the fireworks as reports from several different weapons. Suddenly, as he stood listening, there came the rattle of an automatic firearm high above him.

  Christ! Machine guns?

  And the damage to the DeepScan wouldn’t be an accident. Somehow, for reasons Abercrombie could not fathom, Macauley’s great house on the hill had come under attack. The fight was in full swing, and there was nothing that an unarmed water bailiff could do to stop it.

  Nothing but ringing up the police, if they hadn’t heard the news already. One young constable on duty for the evening, and what could he do, if it came to that? Nothing, most likely, but alert his headquarters in Inverness.

  And what could they do in a hurry,
he wondered, sitting sixty-three miles away to the north? Even at top speed on the narrow lochside roads, they’d need the best part of an hour to arrive. How many people would be dead or maimed by then?

  How many were already dead?

  Heartsick and feeling helpless, Abercrombie made the call and settled down to wait.

  BOLAN CLEARED the kitchen, moving onward to a formal dining room. Places had been set for two—a puzzler; why not three, at least?—but nothing had been served.

  The Executioner had spoiled Macauley’s appetite.

  There would be no last supper for the laird.

  Bolan took one side of the table, and Beacher the other, as they cleared the dining room. Somewhere in front of them, above them, or around them in adjacent rooms, there had to be men with guns—Macauley, certainly; his crony Gibson and the aged fascist, Dengler. Add in bodyguards, likely a team of TIF guerrillas, ready to defend their leader and his moneymen.

  But where were they?

  It would take time to search a house so large, and they could wind up playing hide-and-seek like characters in some demented bedroom farce until police rolled up with sirens whooping.

  Unacceptable.

  A wise exterminator didn’t waste time chasing rats around inside a maze. He smoked them out.

  But where to start?

  Right here.

  The dining room was heated by a large stone fireplace set into the north wall. Someone on Macauley’s staff had laid a fire and lit it, but had not returned to tend it. It was guttering when Bolan dragged the fireplace screen aside and used a poker to revive the flames.

  “What are you doing?” Beacher asked, from the doorway to another room.

  “Housewarming,” Bolan answered, as the flames leaped higher, burning bright.

  He took the poker with him to the dining table, yanked its tablecloth free with a crash and clatter of china, and wound it around the poker’s pronged tip to make a crude torch. Returning to the fireplace, Bolan lit it and began to move around the large room, setting fire to drapes and tapestries.

  In seconds, flames were climbing up the polished wooden walls and he was moving toward Beacher with blazing torch in hand, its heat strong on his face. She stepped aside to let him pass, the shrinking tablecloth trailing sparks on the carpet.

  “You’ll roast us all at this rate,” she advised him.

  “Rats first,” Bolan told her. “When they get a whiff of smoke, they’ll start to run.”

  “And if they don’t?” she asked.

  “Their choice,” Bolan replied. “Come out and play, or sit and burn.”

  He didn’t check the look she gave him, had no time to think about her sensibilities. Their time was short, and Bolan didn’t plan to leave his enemies alive.

  Degüello, right.

  No quarter asked or offered, to the bloody end.

  “THAT’S SMOKE,” Macauley said. “Do you smell it?”

  Gibson sniffed the air, smelled something, but he wasn’t sure. “I couldn’t say,” he answered finally.

  “It’s definitely smoke,” Macauley said. “There’s something badly wrong.”

  “Don’t panic, eh?” Gibson advised him. “We’re good here.”

  Here being Macauley’s study on the second floor, behind a stout door bolted shut. Gibson was sitting on a corner of Macauley’s massive teakwood desk, with an M-4 carbine propped across his knee. A shorter version of the M-16 assault rifle, it had the same firepower as its parent weapon but weighed two pounds less with a loaded 30-round magazine.

  Macauley had initially resisted picking out a weapon for himself, but finally chose a Benelli M-4 Super 90 shotgun from the hidden rack, loaded with double-00 buckshot rounds. It lay across the desk, its muzzle pointed in the general direction of the bolted door, while Macauley sat in his high-backed throne of a chair with his hands in his lap.

  Sniffing the air like a hound on the hunt, mustache bristling, the laird said again, “There’s no question. That’s smoke.”

  Before Gibson could answer, one of his men standing by said, “I smell it too, Fergus.”

  “All right, so you smell it,” he said. “That doesn’t mean—”

  A hammering against the study door cut short his answer. Yet another of his men, this one outside, clamored, “The house is burnin’! Ever’body out!”

  Macauley bolted to his feet, saying, “I knew it!” He was halfway to the door before remembering his weapon, doubled back and grabbed the shotgun from his desk. He glared at Gibson and demanded, “Are you coming?”

  “Coming where, exactly?” Gibson asked.

  “To get the hell away from here,” Macauley said.

  “You might’ve noticed that the cars are blown to shite,” Gibson replied. “Unless you want to hike out past whoever’s shooting up the place, we need to think this through.”

  “I’ve thought it through,” Macauley said. “And we’re not hiking anywhere.”

  “What, then?”

  “The speedboat,” Macauley said. “We can be away before these bastards know it.”

  Gibson followed, with his two men trailing, picking up the third outside. It meant going downstairs, but he could definitely smell the smoke by this point and didn’t feel like being roasted if there was another option.

  Once he’d got it in his head to move, Macauley wasted no time charging down the stairs and back along a corridor that ran the full width of the house. When they were almost to the exit, someone shouted out Macauley’s name behind them, a male voice that Gibson didn’t recognize. He turned to see two figures—Christ, was one of them a woman?—at the far end of the hallway, following.

  “Stay here and finish ’em,” he told two of his soldiers, solid Dillon Bryce and Georgie Souter. “Catch up when you’re done.” Not bothering to see if they were happy with the order, as he turned and ran after Macauley, out into the night.

  The chairlift was too slow. They took the stairs, moving as fast as possible without risking a headlong tumble to the dock and water below. Gibson saw an unexpected boat drawn up beside the DeepScan, someone standing in it, watching them descend. He didn’t recognize the local water bailiff, but a glimpse of the man’s badge was all he needed.

  Firing from the hip, Gibson put half a dozen rounds into the stranger, dumped him over backward from his boat and down into the loch.

  THE REAR-GUARD SHOOTERS did their best, which wasn’t much. They fired all right, but high and wide in haste, with shaky hands. Their slugs chewed up Macauley’s paneled walls and ceiling, while Bolan and Beacher fired back on point and put them down.

  Which left three others out the door and in the wind.

  “I recognized Macauley,” Beacher said. “And Gibson with him, plus some character I’ve never seen before.”

  “Their cover,” Bolan said, already moving toward the door that his vanished prey had left wide open on the night. It caused a draft and drew smoke from the burning house along behind them as they ran.

  A moment’s cautious hesitation on the threshold, then Bolan was out and clear, sweeping the open ground before him with the Steyr’s muzzle. Still no sign of the three men on the run, and he was forced to give Macauley credit for agility, despite his age. It had to have helped that he was running for his life.

  “Where would they go without the cars?” Beacher asked at his elbow.

  Bolan thought about it, knew there was a chance Macauley and his two companions might flee aimlessly into the woods and try to scale the fence wherever they encountered it—but then, what? They would be on foot and carrying illegal weapons, when they had to know police were on the way.

  “We’re missing something,” Bolan said. He turned to scan the broad lawn, saw a wink of flame downrange and felt a bullet sizzle past his ear. />
  They hit the deck together, seeking cover that was nowhere to be found without retreating to the house. Instead of bolting, Bolan lined up on the muzzle-flashes with his rifle’s telescopic sight, held steady under fire and triggered half a dozen 5.56 mm rounds from fifty yards.

  A kind of yelp reached Bolan’s ears, presumably a hit. He waited several seconds more, then took a chance and rose to draw the sniper out if he was still alive.

  Nothing.

  “What’s over there?” Beacher asked, as she scrambled to her feet.

  “The loch,” Bolan replied. “Macauley’s chairlift and the stairs.”

  “But why run to the water?” she inquired. “You sank the DeepScan and their submarine.”

  An automatic weapons stuttered in reply to Beacher’s question, but the shots weren’t meant for them. They were well away beyond their line of sight, in fact. And as they moved in that direction, cautiously, an engine growled, its rumbling rising up to greet them from the loch below.

  “I missed a boat,” Bolan said, as he reached the brink and saw a speedboat leave the boathouse, veering sharply to the north. Below, an unfamiliar craft was nosed against the listing DeepScan, with a body sprawled across its deck.

  “The water bailiff,” Beacher said. “They’ve shot him.”

  Bolan started down the stairs, passing another body on the way—the sniper, their would-be murderer, another failure in the laird’s service.

  “Let’s hope they didn’t hit the engine,” Bolan called back to Beacher. “We still aren’t finished here.”

  THE SPENCER RUNABOUT was small by lairdly standards, but it boasted twin 450-horsepower Crusader engines with a top speed of sixty knots—approaching seventy miles per hour. When he took it out, say once a month in spring and summer when he had the time to spare, Macauley enjoyed the rush of wind in his face and the snarl of the motors behind him, carving their wake on a mythical monster’s domain.