Blood Vendetta

by Don Pendleton

  Davis squeezed her eyes shut and considered his words. It took only seconds to make a choice.

  * * *

  GRIMALDI’S VOICE BURST from speakers in the War Room at Stony Man Farm. Kurtzman was in his wheelchair at a bank of computers.

  “We’re almost in position,” the pilot said. “Ready to do your thing?”

  “You know I am,” Kurtzman replied.

  His fingers glided over the keyboard. He had broken through the firewalls of Yezhov’s IT system. Windows continued to pop up and disappear on his screen as he burrowed deeper. When he found what he was looking for, he grinned. With a couple of keystrokes, he could shut down the main generators of Yezhov’s stronghold, override the door locks and force them on to the weaker backup generators.

  “Now?” he asked.

  “Now,” Grimaldi replied.

  Kurtzman began punching buttons.

  * * *

  “YOU REALIZE THIS IS AN affront to decent men everywhere, don’t you?” McCarter said.

  “Just do it,” Bolan replied.

  “Bloody Americans,” the Briton said. “You have no appreciation for beauty.”

  “Do it.”

  The two men stood in the cargo area of the plane, next to three Huayra sports cars parked in a pyramid formation. Two were silver, a third was red. While McCarter had slept, Bolan had wedged C-4 explosives around the fuel tanks of the cars. He carried the detonator in his left hand.

  “They have gull-wing doors,” McCarter said.

  “Do it.”

  “Seven hundred horsepower. Put them together, it equals twenty-one hundred horsepower.”

  “Do it or I will.”

  McCarter lovingly grazed his fingertips along the surface of the red car’s roof.

  “We could keep one. Spoils of war and all that.”

  “You could ride one down, if you’d like,” Bolan suggested.

  “Fine, we dump them.”

  * * *

  THE SENTRY STATIONED outside Yezhov’s compound stared at the big cargo plane winging its way toward him. He keyed his throat microphone and told the operations center about the airplane.

  “We know about it,” the security coordinator said. “It’s one of Chernkova’s planes. They’re bringing supplies. And the boss’s cars.”

  “The Huayras?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay.”

  The sentry shook his head in disbelief. Who the hell needed a million-dollar sports car—let alone three—in the middle of the damn wilderness? The desire for a cigarette began to gnaw at him and he forgot about the airplane.

  The guard patted his pockets until he remembered he’d left his cigarettes in his room. He made an irritated noise and with the fingers of his right hand peeled back the cuff of his left sleeve, exposing his watch. Another twenty-five minutes and he’d be off duty. He’d smoke his damn brains out then.

  In the meantime, he shifted his gaze back to the plane, which had started to carve out a tight circle in the sky. This is what it all had come down to, watching a damn plane to pass the time. It was the closest thing to television they had. Any signals into and out of the facility were tightly controlled. Up here, his mobile phone was just a chunk of metal, glass, plastic and dead circuitry. It was either watch the bears or watch yet another supply plane land. If he was lucky, he might get a glimpse of one of the sports cars as they were unloaded. It was the closest he’d get to such a luxury, he thought.

  A mechanical whirring caught his attention. He looked harder at the plane and noticed that the rear cargo ramp was cracking open as the plane nosed its way over the compound walls. He turned to watch it.

  What the hell? None of the previous planes had used air drops for the supplies, that he could recall. And, knowing Yezhov’s affinity for his cars, the sentry couldn’t imagine someone convincing the Russian that parachutes and harnesses would be enough to deliver his precious toys to the ground.

  The ramp was yawning open wider. The guard’s fingers drifted toward the controls for his throat microphone. Before he could press a button, he saw a flash of motion on the ramp and a sleek shape suddenly appeared in the sky. One of the cars! The man could only stare in disbelief as the other two cars rolled from inside the plane in fast succession.

  * * *

  BOLAN STOOD AT the edge of the ramp and watched through his goggles as the cars plunged toward the ground. Both he and McCarter had strapped on parachutes. For the infiltration, the Executioner had selected an M-4 assault rifle with an M-203 grenade launcher, along with his usual handguns and other equipment.

  The wind roared past his ears, making it impossible to hear anything other than wind, plane engines and the doomsday numbers counting down in his head.

  Three, two, one.

  With his thumb, he flicked the switch on the detonator. A trio of orange fireballs blossomed below, a small, sudden serving of hell for Yezhov and his people. He advanced down the cargo ramp, the wind fiercely pushing back against his every step. When he ran out of ramp, he plunged into the nothingness, McCarter a couple of steps behind.

  * * *

  YEZHOV HEARD THE MUFFLED thumps through the fortified walls. Cursing, he pulled back the tip of the knife blade, which had hovered an inch or so from Davis’s eye. He slipped the knife back into the spring-loaded holster strapped around his left forearm. When it clicked into place, he pulled his sleeve down over the weapon.

  He gave her one last look. He drank in the swollen eye, the blood trickling from her bottom lip, the one he’d split open with his knuckles. The same blow had broken a tooth.

  “I wish I could stay,” he said. “Regretfully, I can’t.”

  “Bite me,” she said.

  “Later, perhaps,” he replied. By then, pandemonium had broken loose outside the room. Through the door, Davis could hear footsteps pounding and people shouting.

  Yezhov followed his captive’s gaze for a second, quickly whipped his face back toward her and pinned her with narrow eyes.

  “If you brought all this on me,” he said, “I’ll do much worse.”

  He turned to the other Russian, the one who she was told had killed Young. Apparently the information Davis was feeding them wasn’t enough for them to keep their word. They killed her friend anyway. Then they had showed her a picture of Young shot in the head—for their own amusement, she supposed.

  The man’s pale green eyes had monitored Davis’s interrogation with freakish intensity, as though the process interested him a great deal more than her actual answers. He likely had been the one to question Young, too. His had been the last face the poor woman saw before she’d died. Just the thought caused a sick feeling to wash over Davis.

  “Take our guest back to her room,” Yezhov said.

  Mikoyan nodded and turned his gaze toward her. Something flickered in the man’s eyes and a chill raced through Davis. Apparently, Yezhov sensed something, too.

  “I said, put her in her room,” he said. “Grab a gun and fight.”

  Mikoyan nodded sullenly. His boss wheeled around and marched out the door.

  The pasty-faced Russian moved up on Davis. His hand reached out. Her breath caught in her throat and she felt her body tense. Plunging his fingers into her hair, he grabbed a handful of it, twisted violently and pulled up. A yelp of pain and surprise escaped her lips before she could stop it.

  She had no choice but to come to her feet. The movement ignited a searing pain in her right rib cage that stole her breath. It emanated from a spot where Yezhov had driven a fist into her ribs during the interrogation. She ground her teeth together to keep from crying out in pain a second time. She wouldn’t give Mikoyan the satisfaction of seeing her suffer.

  Mikoyan didn’t release her hair, but instead used it to guide Davis to the door, like a do
g on a leash. His grip was so tight she couldn’t move her head even slightly without igniting the sensation of dozens of needles jabbing into her skull simultaneously.

  They moved into the hallway and he guided her back to her room, walking her at an excruciatingly slow pace. Armed men rushed past them in the halls.

  When he reached the door, he punched a numeric code into a keypad fixed to the wall. The bolt slid aside and the door swung open. He shoved her inside. By the time she caught her footing and spun toward the door, it was closing.

  “I’ll be back for you,” he said before he slammed the door shut.

  Chapter 17

  Bolan, the M-4/M-203 grenade launcher held at the ready, advanced over the cracked pavement of the long-neglected parking lot, and made his way toward Yezhov’s stronghold.

  Minutes earlier, he and McCarter had landed inside the compound’s multiple security walls, where they’d shed their parachutes and began their attack.

  As Bolan had planned, mayhem heralded their arrival. The burning, twisted wreckages of expensive Italian sports cars had speared through the roofs of buildings. The explosions from the C-4 had unleashed a storm of burning tires, jagged glass and razor-sharp metal fragments. At least a dozen hardmen, either injured or dead, were strewn about the grounds before he or McCarter ever squeezed off a shot. Yezhov’s soldiers poured from the main building, the former resort. A handful carried fire extinguishers while most were loaded down with Steyr AUG and old Soviet Union AKR submachine guns.

  The soldier’s plan was simple—break into the main building, burn down as many of Yezhov’s people as possible and take out the big Russian himself. But Bolan’s primary goal was to extricate Davis, even if he didn’t make it out himself. He owed the woman that much.

  Gunfire rattle emanated from Bolan’s right. He turned his head toward the sound and glimpsed McCarter burning down a pair of Yezhov’s shooters in a hail of gunfire.

  A trio of gunmen advanced from Bolan’s right. The soldier spun, fired a round from the launcher. The round struck the ground behind them and exploded. A maelstrom of metal fragments chewed into the men. The onslaught elicited a series of agonized screams as their mangled forms folded to the ground. Before the soldier could reload, the whine of an engine from his right caught his attention. He wheeled toward the sound. A handful of guards parted and a motorcycle burst through the space between them. A helmeted figure drove it, while a second rode on the back, the flames and smoke spitting from the muzzle of the pistol clutched in his hand.

  Bolan held his ground and maneuvered the rattling M-4 in a figure eight. A ragged line of bullet wounds sprang open across the chest of the oncoming motorcyclist. Dead fingers released the grips of the handlebars. The front wheel cranked into a hard left angle, and the rear wheel fishtailed. Pulled down by the weight of two bodies, the bike tipped and fell into a sideways slide and skidded along the ground toward Bolan. The corpse of the gun-wielding rider was flung from the bike along the way.

  The soldier thrust himself to the side, rolled when he hit the ground and came up on one knee, ice-blue eyes sweeping the terrain for more threats. A short volley from the M-4 took down two more of the hardmen.

  As he rose to standing, Bolan loaded an HE round into the grenade launcher. He set his sights on a single-story building that stood a distance from him. The structure was made of concrete blocks, painted white. One of the cars had crashed through the top of the building, taking half the roof with it. The undulating glow of flames was visible inside the structure through the single-pane windows. A pair of bay doors that made up half of the building’s front exterior were buckling from the onslaught of the flames. A circular drive populated by a pair of white Humvees lay in front of the garage.

  A handful of Yezhov’s soldiers who had been trying to hose down the structure abandoned the work when they saw Bolan, and began grabbing for pistols, assault rifles and submachine guns.

  Another man was climbing frantically into the cab of a tanker truck with a mirrorlike finish. Judging by the man’s urgency, Bolan guessed the truck wasn’t filled with corn syrup.

  He leveled the launcher and fired.

  The HE round hissed forth from the launcher and drilled into the tanker. Thunder pealed. The tanker’s skin swelled, then buckled before it burst outward. The explosion’s force shoved the ass end of the tanker skyward and doused those closest to it with flaming liquid. One person, body engulfed in flames, burst into a run. Bolan brought the M-4 to his shoulder and punched a mercy round into the flaming figure’s skull, ending his suffering.

  Bolan turned on his heel and headed for the main building.

  “Bloody hell,” McCarter said. “Before you crack open hell’s gate, a warning might be nice.”

  “My bad,” Bolan said. “Give me a sitrep.”

  “I’ve taken down at least a dozen of these bastards,” McCarter said. “I’d say we have a clear path to our Russian friend.” He paused. “At least until we get inside the building. Then we can start this whole bloody dance over again.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Bolan replied.

  * * *

  “WHAT DO WE DO?” Tatania Sizova asked.

  “We fight,” Yezhov said. He forced the words through clenched teeth. “Damn it, we fight.”

  Yezhov didn’t look at his lover when he spoke. Peering through the window of their second-floor suite, his gaze was fixed on the carnage below. He saw two men—only two men—shooting their way across the landscape. He assumed one was this man Cooper. Both were slicing through his people with deadly efficiency.

  He turned to Tatania. Her face was taut, pale, but he saw determination in her eyes. He knew she wouldn’t fold; she’d go down fighting. She already had donned a loose-fitting black jumpsuit with black leather boots that reached halfway up her calf. A pistol belt was wrapped around her slim waist. Yezhov had donned similar garb. A pair of Steyr AUG subguns were laid out on the bed.

  She closed the distance between them. Wrapping her arms around him, she pressed her body against his, leaned her head against his chest and sighed. Knowing they might find themselves in a fight, she’d ceased wearing makeup or perfume. But he still caught a faint whiff of her floral-scented soap.

  She said, “And once we win, we’ll have to run again.”

  “Yes, but not far,” he replied. “The Russian government will protect us. We did this for them. They have no choice but to protect us.”

  “You believe this?”

  “I know it.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Tatania asked.

  “I kept excellent notes,” he said, a faint smile on his lips. “I have videos, telephone transcripts, duplicate files. I spied on the spies. If the Russian government doesn’t cooperate, their secrets will be mailed to the White House and other world capitals.”

  “And the satellite codes?”

  “I have them on a flash drive. If extortion doesn’t buy the Russians’ help, surely the codes will.”

  She looked up at him and gave a tight smile. “I never should have doubted you.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have,” he said.

  “You believe we can do this?”

  “There are only two of them.”

  “They’ve gotten far,” she said, “for just two.”

  “That means they’re only that much closer to their luck running out,” Yezhov replied.

  * * *

  CLOSING IN ON THE MAIN entrance, Bolan studied it. Though weathered, the pair of wooden doors that sealed the building from the outside looked formidable. If bolted from the inside, he guessed they wouldn’t open without the help of explosives.

  That there were no guards stationed outside them also bothered the warrior. He couldn’t imagine Yezhov leaving the front unguarded. If Bolan and McCarter had eliminated Yezhov’s security team, leavin
g no one else to guard the place, fine. But Bolan wasn’t ready to jump to that conclusion, yet.

  McCarter rejoined him and they walked about ten yards apart from one another as they closed in on the building.

  McCarter’s voice buzzed in Bolan’s earpiece again. “Apparently, we’ve won.”

  “Apparently,” Bolan replied.

  “But without the parade.”

  “Right.”

  A driveway stretched in front of the building. A brick porch rose up about a foot from the ground and stood in front of the door. Bolan reached the edge of the porch, started to raise his foot, but checked himself.

  “What’s the matter?” McCarter asked.

  “Just playing a hunch,” Bolan said. “Stay away from the door and use a window.”

  “Roger that.”

  Bolan backtracked a dozen steps to a row of tall, single-pane windows that looked into a massive open room. The Executioner advanced on the window, the M-4 chattering in his hands. The 5.56 mm slugs punched through the glass and showered the ground with shards. Passing through the now-empty window frame, Bolan moved into what he assumed once had been a lounge area. The carpet closest to the windows was faded from sunlight and occasionally spotted by water leaks. A massive fireplace made up of gray stones rose up in the middle of the room. Graffiti—most of it in Russian, though he spotted occasional flourishes of English profanity—marred the walls and ceilings. It looked faded and Bolan assumed it predated Yezhov’s decision to fortify the place.

  Suddenly gunfire erupted elsewhere in the building. Bolan surged toward the sound of the shooting.

  Exiting the lounge area, he followed a short corridor that led into a smaller room that Bolan assumed had served as a receiving area for guests. A glance at the front door confirmed his earlier suspicion that it had been wired to explode once it was opened. A check-in counter ran parallel to the rear wall of the room.

  When he reached the exit door, he paused and peered through the door. A pair of Yezhov’s thugs were firing at a target Bolan couldn’t see. Judging by the bullet holes suddenly opening in the wall, someone was returning fire. Gun smoke clouded the air as the spent brass fell to the ground. The Executioner fired the M-4 and took down the man closest to him with a hail of bullets. The second shooter, now suddenly under attack from another direction, started to swivel in Bolan’s direction. Before he could finish the move, the soldier’s M-4 chewed open the man’s chest.