Ejecting the spent magazine, Bolan slipped another into the assault rifle while moving through the door, while McCarter stepped through the window frame, its edges torn ragged from the gunfire. The two men slipped into the nearest corridor, with Bolan in the lead. Searching each of the rooms, they found and took down three more of Yezhov’s guards before moving to the second floor. Bolan emerged from the stairwell. With the M-4 pressed snug against his shoulder, he crept along the wall. One of the Russian’s gunmen stepped into view, his Steyr held at waist level. The submachine gun ground out a volley of bullets. The initial burst lanced past Bolan and McCarter. The man from blood’s M-4 churned out a burst that shredded the man.
Two more guards emerged from other rooms lining the corridor. One was armed with a Steyr, the second with a SPAS shotgun. McCarter launched into action first, letting loose a hell-storm of gunfire that stitched the man from right groin to left shoulder.
Thunder pealed from the shotgun. The blast ripped into the floor several yards ahead of Bolan and McCarter. Bolan replied with a volley from the M-4 that punched through the man’s thighs. The thug screamed and fell to the floor. The shotgun slipped from his grasp and clattered across the floor.
Bolan started toward the shooter, his assault rifle’s muzzle centered on the man’s back. The big American planned to shake the guy down for some intel about Davis’s location. Kneeling next to the man, Bolan rolled the thug onto his back. Jaws clenched, face soaked with sweat, the man glared at Bolan and grabbed for a pistol strapped to his waist. Bolan poked the M-4’s barrel into the guy’s stomach and he froze. The soldier snatched the pistol from the man’s hip holster and tossed it aside.
“The woman,” Bolan said, “where is she?”
The thug hesitated. His defiant glare faded and his eyes seemed to lose focus. Bolan noticed the man’s skin growing pale quickly.
The pool of blood around them widened on the floor. The Executioner guessed one of his bullets had severed an artery and the man would bleed out quickly.
“Where is she?”
The man’s mouth opened. In the same instant, Bolan heard the click of a door latch behind him.
“Look out!” McCarter shouted.
Bolan turned at the waist in time to see a man he recognized as Yezhov step into view. The Russian was drawing a bead on Bolan. McCarter ripped off a fast burst from his own submachine gun, but Yezhov surged into the hallway, the rounds just missing him, pounding into a wall instead.
A second black-clad figure stepped into the corridor. Bolan recognized her as Yezhov’s lover. Her face a mask of determination, she was swinging the muzzle of her Uzi toward Bolan. He responded first, unloading a burst into her center mass. The look of determination drained away, replaced with wide-eyed shock. She stumbled back a couple of steps before colliding with a wall. Her knees buckled and she sank to the ground, leaving a wide, ragged crimson smear on the wall.
“No!” Yezhov shouted.
Instinctively, he took a step toward his fallen lover, halted. When he whipped his head toward Bolan and McCarter, his face was flushed with rage, eyes narrowed into slits. A primal howl burst from his lips. Vengeance blazed forth from the submachine gun he gripped.
The slugs just narrowly missed Bolan, but carved a jagged line in the wall just above his head.
Then the Russian darted through a pair of double doors. Bolan climbed to his feet. Reloading the M-4, he moved for the doorway. McCarter fell in behind him. From inside the stairwell, he could hear the thud of Yezhov’s footsteps as he descended the stairs.
“I’ll get him,” Bolan said. “You find Davis.”
McCarter nodded and Bolan headed through the doorway.
Chapter 18
The electric lights winked out in Davis’s room, plunging it into blackness. The locking bolt on her door snapped back with a thud and the door swung inward, the bolt being the only thing that had held it in place. After a couple of seconds of darkness passed, more subdued lighting blinked on. Though she couldn’t hear one, Davis assumed a backup generator had fired up somewhere in the building.
When the door cracked open Davis had been sitting on her cot, gingerly touching her ribs to determine the extent of her injuries. Even the slightest pressure ignited white-hot needles of pain that caused her to draw in air sharply and grind her teeth—no doubt at least one of her ribs was broken, if not more. While her head throbbed from a punch to the side of the head from Yezhov that had opened a gash that was still trickling blood. And even though she’d spit blood onto the floor twice, its coppery taste still filmed her tongue.
When the door first parted from the frame, she tensed, expecting Mikoyan to enter. The man had promised to come back and God only knew what he had planned. She raised herself from the bed, hands curled into fists. The room had been stripped of any blunt objects she could use as weapons, but she still planned to fight, broken ribs, bloody head and all.
Seconds passed and no one entered the room.
With tentative steps, she moved toward the door. Grabbing the edge of it, she swung the door aside. The muffled rattle of gunfire was audible from the upper levels of the building. A smile twitched at her lips. Cooper’s here, she thought. It had to be him. She had no idea how he’d found her, but she was grateful he was here.
If she had any sense, she told herself, she’d stay put and wait until he found her. But what if he didn’t make it? It only took one well-placed bullet to put a man down. She could find herself facing Yezhov and Mikoyan again if she didn’t take action.
Screw it, she told herself, it’s time to move.
She peered around the door frame, but saw the corridor outside was empty. She stepped through the door. The movement caused bolts of pain to emanate from her ribs, but she ignored it as best she could. She edged along the wall and headed for the nearest stairwell.
Out in the hallway, unarmed, she felt exposed. The small hairs on the back of her neck prickled and her mouth felt hot and dry. An urge to go hide overtook her. This is crazy, a voice chided her. She thought of Maxine Young, thought of her hopping on a plane and crossing the Atlantic to lend a hand. She thought of Cooper coming to her aid, and the dozens of others who’d had her back over the past several years, and kept moving ahead, unwilling to fold.
She climbed the stairs slowly. When she reached the first-floor landing, the gunfire was louder, but still sounded like it was deeper in the building. Slowly, she pushed down on the door’s release bar until it gave no more. She pushed the door open, peered through the crack. She saw several bodies littering the floor. She went through the door and closed it slowly behind her.
A man dressed in jeans and a black turtleneck lay on his back several yards from her. Groaning, he held both hands over his midsection, apparently trying to keep pressure on his wound. Blood seeped through the spaces between his fingers.
Closer to her, a pump shotgun outfitted with a pistol grip lay on the floor. Its former owner, his midsection ripped apart by bullets, lay on his side, completely still.
She crept toward the weapon. When it lay just a few feet out of her reach, motion ahead of her caught her attention. A burly man dressed in olive-green coveralls, body wrapped in military web gear, stepped from one of the rooms. He held a black pistol in one hand. Her stomach plummeted and she froze in midstride.
He appeared not to notice her. Perhaps he was more worried about helping his injured friend? With his back turned toward her, she started moving again, but kept an eye on the hardman.
As she closed the distance between her and the shotgun, she saw the man in green raise the pistol and point the muzzle at the fallen guard.
He muttered something sharp in Russian and the gun cracked once. The injured man’s body jerked once as the bullet tunneled into his torso. The sudden and unexpected savagery of killing one of his own shocked Davis, who long ago assumed s
he’d lost the capacity for such a naive emotion. She gasped and the gunner who stood before her heard the noise. He whirled in her direction and snapped off a quick shot from his pistol.
Davis thrust herself forward. Her hands stabbed out and she grabbed hold of the shotgun, its grip sticky with blood. She swung the shotgun’s barrel at her opponent. By this time, the man was tracking her with his pistol. As his finger tightened on the trigger, Davis unleashed a blast from her weapon that ripped into the man’s chest. The onslaught from the shotgun shoved him off his feet and he smacked to the ground, dead.
Working the shotgun’s slide, she chambered another round and rose up in a crouch. She didn’t bother to wipe away the blood that smeared the shotgun’s grip or her right palm. Her right hand gripping the weapon, she rested the slide on her knee, and with her free hand she patted down the corpse that lay next to her. She found a handful of shotgun shells in one of his pockets, and she slipped them into one of the side pockets on her jeans. Unclipping a holstered Browning Hi-Power from his hip, she attached it to the waistband of her jeans, and pocketed two magazines. Once she came to her feet, she fed a couple of fresh shells into the shotgun. A radio attached to his belt squawked. She considered taking that, too, but decided against. The voices emanating from it spoke Russian, a language she didn’t understand. The noise likely would be more of a distraction than anything else, she decided.
The blood-splattered walls and rent flesh surrounding her began to seep into her consciousness. At the same time, her ribs continued to ache. She shoved all that aside and thought fleetingly of Young, her face marred by a bullet. Then Davis thought of her twin sister and her husband, their bodies charred and mangled in the train explosion. A niece she’d never hold.
Rage welled up inside her, sparking a surge of adrenaline that anesthetized the ache in her ribs, the throbbing in her skull. She still felt it on some level, the pain, the disgust, but she also felt separated from it, as though it were happening to someone else.
Giving the rooms a cursory look, she found them all empty. She quit the first floor and took the stairs to the second level, the shotgun angled upward. She found the door that led into the second floor held open by another corpse. The dead man lay in a pool of blood on his back, legs spread into a narrow V, the door pushing against one hip.
Elbowing the door open, she pushed it aside and moved through the door. The hinges groaned, setting her teeth on edge. A man was standing several yards away, speaking into a handheld radio. The sound of the door caught his attention. He spun toward Davis and made a play for a pistol fixed to his right hip.
Before he could clear leather, Davis’s shotgun roared once. The maelstrom unleashed from the weapon shredded the man’s torso and thrust him off his feet. Even as the echoes of the blast died away, a second shooter appeared around a doorjamb a few yards away. He squeezed off a quick shot with his pistol. The bullet sizzled past Davis’s ear. The shotgun she cradled thundered again.
The gun’s fire shredded the man’s face and his exposed arm. Mangled fingers let go of the gun and the hardman collapsed to the ground.
She worked the shotgun’s slide again as she continued down the corridor.
The adrenaline coursed through her, dulling any pain or stiffness in her body. However, the roar from the shotgun had left an incessant ringing in her ears. She tried as best as possible to ignore it and keep going. She wanted to find Mikoyan.
She had taken maybe a half-dozen steps when the small hairs on the back of her neck prickled. The shotgun leading the way, she wheeled around. Before she’d turned even a quarter of the way, though, someone grabbed the gun’s barrel and shoved it aside. The unexpected thrust knocked Davis off balance slightly.
She became aware of Mikoyan standing there, his hand gripping the pump-action shotgun’s barrel with one hand to keep control of it. Before Davis could react, his other hand, fingers extended, lashed out. The back of his hand connected with her cheek. This time she rolled with it, like she had been taught to do. His knuckles brushed against her cheek. The blow stung. Then he miscalculated. Using just one hand, he tried to yank the shotgun from her grip, underestimating her strength. When the gun didn’t give, he paused, only for less than a heartbeat. Long enough for Davis to reverse the barrel a few inches, directing the shotgun’s snout toward his torso.
She squeezed the weapon’s trigger. Jagged flames and buckshot exploded from the barrel. The blast ripped into his torso and he screamed, surrendered his grip on the shotgun and spun away.
Davis chambered another round and maneuvered the barrel toward Mikoyan again. The weapon roared, and with less than two feet between them, the rounds ripped open Mikoyan’s midsection, and thrust him back a couple of feet before his body, the upper and lower halves nearly separated by the punishing blast, slammed to the floor. Mikoyan’s blood had splattered onto Davis, staining her hands, her face and her clothes.
Seeing his corpse on the floor, she felt the steel in her own body drain away, replaced by light-headedness and rubbery knees. She stepped away from him until her back collided with a wall. She slid down the surface, bending at the knees, until her butt touched the floor. Whereas the first time she’d killed, she’d cried and felt as though she’d lost something precious, something she’d never regain, this time she only felt hollow and distant. It was as though she had watched the whole thing happen without participating in it herself.
Sure, she’d secured some measure of justice for Young. But the killing left her with no joy, no guilt, no anguish.
She felt nothing, as though her actions had no more significance than washing her hands.
Davis realized then that much of the shooting had subsided. She continued sitting on the floor, but began feeding more shells into the shotgun. When she finished, she set the shotgun on the floor next to her. She reached into her pants pocket with her thumb and index finger, felt around until she found the cell phone the Russians had given her, and drew it from her pocket. Using her thumb, she pressed a couple of buttons until she found the picture Mikoyan had taken of Young, stared at it for several agonizing seconds. Tears stung the corners of her eyes. Grief and anger constricted her throat. She swallowed hard and tossed the phone at the Russian’s corpse. It landed in the space where his stomach once had been.
She then rose to her feet and started to walk away from Mikoyan’s remains, without giving him a second glance.
“Burn, fucker,” she muttered.
Chapter 19
Yezhov surged into the pool room.
He looked the place over, hunting for somewhere to hide. The walls were smeared with graffiti. Overturned tables and chairs were arrayed around the room, having remained undisturbed since vandals had knocked them over. Water had seeped through the skylights and several inches of it had collected in a dark brown mixture at the pool’s deep end. The air reeked of mildew.
A small tool shed stood in one corner of the room. Yezhov jogged to it and hid behind it. Reaching into the hip pocket of his pants, he withdrew two more shells and loaded them into the shotgun. He came around from behind the shed, the weapon held at the ready at hip level.
Two shadows moved through the door. He tensed until he recognized both as members of his private army. Walking along the edge of the pool, the three men met at its midpoint.
“Where are they?” Yezhov asked.
“Two are still pinned down on the second level,” one of the men said.
“The American?”
“You mean the big guy with the black hair? Don’t know.” The guard shook his head to emphasize the point. “Maybe someone took him down.”
Yezhov shook his head. “He’s coming.”
He scanned the room again. When his eyes lighted on the balcony, he paused and an idea formed in his mind. Yezhov turned back to the other two hardmen and held out his shotgun. “Trade me,” he said.
&
nbsp; The senior guard handed over his Kalashnikov and took away the shotgun. He then handed over two spare clips for the assault rifle.
Yezhov took them and slipped them into his jacket. The Russian boss checked the load on the rifle and gestured with a nod at the balcony. “I’m going up there. If someone comes through the door, let them. We catch them from above and behind.”
The two men, their expressions neutral, nodded their understanding.
Minutes later, Yezhov was on the balcony. More discarded furniture littered the platform. He moved one of the tables to the edge of the balcony, setting it on its side, and crouched down behind the overturned furniture.
The tabletop likely wouldn’t provide much protection if bullets flew in his direction, he realized. He just needed something to hide behind when his quarry arrived.
He glanced down at the lower level. A silhouette glided through the doorway. As the figure emerged from the shadows, Yezhov confirmed it was the American. He raised the rifle to his shoulder, lined his shot and curled the finger around the trigger.
* * *
BOLAN SLIPPED THROUGH the door and edged along the wall of the brief corridor leading into the pool area.
The soldier carried the M-4 at waist level, set in full-auto. Even as he stepped into the once-beautiful chamber, his combat senses began buzzing. Having learned long ago to listen to this built-in warning signal, the soldier slowed his gait and strained his other sense.
The place smelled bad—mildew. Otherwise, he detected nothing out of the ordinary—no traces of cologne, no stench of body odor or clothes that reeked of cigarette smoke. He heard water dripping somewhere in the chamber, slapping hard as though it fell several feet before striking a puddle.
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