"The rope is treated," he told her. "Just slide down. It won't burn. I'll cover you." He kicked off and rode the rope down, but when he was only halfway to the ground two sentries came dashing around the rear of the building.
They saw Bolan.
Bolan triggered the AutoMag from his right fist as he gripped the rope with his left. He touched ground at the same instant as two dead guards.
He stepped away from the building, holstered the AutoMag and swung the AK-47 around.
Katrina lifted one shapely leg, then the other over the window ledge and started to follow Bolan down.
There came a chatter of automatic rifle fire. A line of bullet holes pockmarked the bricks near Katrina's head.
Bolan swung the AK around, looking for a human target, unable to pinpoint the source of fire.
Katrina set down on the ground at his side, unhurt.
Bolan immediately took off along the side of the building toward the front, not pausing to retrieve the pronged climbing device.
Katrina stayed right behind him.
They gained the corner of the building. He motioned Katrina to stay close.
He chanced a one-eyed peek around the corner at the scene in front of the building.
The three guards he expected to see stood just as the three at the first entrance had, their backs to the building, attention and rifles alert but in the wrong direction.
The BTR-40 sat where he had seen it on the way in, one of the two men sitting behind the steering wheel, the other visible in the swirling snow where he stood partially exposed behind the submachine gun mounted in the turret.
A security officer led nine rifle-carrying guards on the run into Building D through the main entrance.
The three posted guards and the men in the armored vehicle stayed put.
Automatic gunfire opened up from nearby. A short line of slugs geysered snow less than twelve inches from where Bolan and Katrina stood.
Katrina spotted the source of fire and swung the Beretta 93-R up into another two-handed firing posture. She unleashed a 3-shot burst that cut off the automatic fire.
A sentry toppled from the walkway along the wall just behind Building D.
"Good shooting," Bolan complimented, handing her a fresh clip for the pistol.
She smoothly palmed the magazine into the 93-R. "We'll never make it!" she said.
Bolan unhooked a grenade from his combat webbing. "Let's try."
He pulled the pin from the grenade, stepped away from the building, exposing only enough of himself necessary to take aim, and tossed the grenade in an accurate overhand pitch in the direction of the BTR-40.
He stepped back closer to the building, ramming out another lengthy burst from the AK, riding the recoil of the rifle as it spat fire, spent shell casings ejecting in a smoking stream to drop and sizzle in the snow.
The three troopers positioned at the main entrance were blown sideways off their feet and deposited willy-nilly as if tossed about by a tornado.
Then the Executioner's peripheral vision glimpsed the scene at the armored car.
The grenade plopped on target into the turret where the machine gunner saw it clank down between his feet. The guy behind the steering wheel spotted Bolan but had no time to react.
The machine gunner had enough time to scream, a cry of pure terror swallowed up by the blast of the grenade a second after Bolan put the corner of the building between himself and the vehicle.
The explosion, quieter than usual because of the density of falling snow, came as Bolan fed a fresh clip into his AK.
Snow swirled and gusted through the compound, but the creeping light of dawn improved visibility by the minute.
Two soldiers in the courtyard saw Bolan and Katrina and tracked their rifles in the direction of the combat-garbed man and the escaped prisoner.
Bolan and Katrina moved away from each other, Bolan triggering a short burst from the AK, kicking one of the soldiers back into his personal doomsday before he could fire a shot.
The second soldier squeezed off a burst that, in his excitement, went high, studding the brick above and behind Bolan.
Katrina's answering fire missed the soldier.
Bolan shifted his rifle slightly and blasted the guy, who tumbled backward to join his dead buddy in the snow.
Bolan turned to Katrina. "Stay put until I signal you to come."
She nodded, her alert, vigilant eyes panning the scene for more danger, more targets.
Bolan sprinted from the building toward the BTR-40 before the echoes of rifle fire or the blast of the grenade receded between the towering walls of Lefortovo.
Activity in the courtyard had lessened, sentries in the blockhouses and catwalks along the wall maintaining their positions, unable to do anything but listen to the gunfire, their visibility severely limited by the full-fledged snowstorm pounding the city.
Most other available manpower had already been dispatched into Building D, or to quiet prisoners throughout the prison whom Bolan could vaguely hear raising hell in every cellblock.
Attention would already be drawn to the grenade blast.
Bolan reached the BTR-40, passing the sprawled corpses of the three sentries he had taken out in front of the main entrance of Building D.
All that remained of the machine gunner who had been standing in the back of the armored car was the lower part of his torso. It was draped across the metal plating of the vehicle. The rest of him, not protected by the armor, looked as if it had been hacked away with a dull chainsaw — dark, gruesome and pulsating.
The man's head had rolled across like a bloody basketball against the first step of Building D's entrance, leaving a long red trail behind it across the snow.
The driver inside the vehicle, protected from shrapnel by the bulletproof glass, twisted the ignition key.
The BTR-40 rumbled to life.
The driver hurriedly started to slip the vehicle into gear to get away, turning a panic-stricken face on the Executioner.
Bolan leaped onto the running board and yanked the door open before the driver thought to lock it.
The vehicle popped into gear and jerked forward in the direction of the incline, moving toward the closed iron gate.
Bolan gripped the frame of the truck with one arm for support. The jarring movement of the vehicle almost tumbled him to the snow. He reached inside with his other hand before the vehicle had rolled a dozen meters, grasping the driver behind his collar, tossing him out of the vehicle.
Bolan slid in behind the wheel in one smooth movement, regaining control of the slow-moving truck with his left hand on the wheel. With his right fist, he aimed the AK-47 across his chest and out the open, flapping door of the vehicle at the driver. He had landed on his back in the snow and was struggling to his feet, grasping for a holstered side arm. Bolan let loose a stinger that drilled the man through the heart.
The Executioner braked the vehicle, angling the truck's nose against the stone wall seven or eight meters short ot the gate in such a way that the truck halted with its armored plating blocking Bolan from view and, more importantly, from the line of fire of most of the courtyard and those at the nearest blockhouse. He rushed to the door of the guardhouse.
The sentries inside were trying to twist their machine guns, mounted behind bulletproof glass, in Bolan's direction, but he was too close to them as he pressed himself flush against the wall.
One of the sentries let loose a burst, but all it did was send a stream of bullets singing off the armor plating of the BTR-40.
Bolan reached the door to the guardhouse and found it locked. He stayed against the wall, aimed his AK and fired a short burst that blew the locked door off its hinges. Then he plucked another grenade from his webbing.
Shouts and rifle fire erupted in his direction from inside the guardhouse built into the wall, but he was positioned at such an angle that the hail of slugs pouring out of the doorway came nowhere near him. Without exposing himself to those trapped inside, he lo
bbed the grenade and pressed himself against the wall away from the door.
Katrina stood where he had left her, trading shots with two prison guards who had come out of the main entrance of Building D in response to the action in front. She dropped one of the men, then ran out of ammunition, and while she reloaded a few more prison guards snaked their way out of the entrance to cautiously advance in her direction, though she had ducked out of their sight.
Bolan squeezed off leaden death across the distance, pinning three of the men to the wall before they collapsed into the snow, while the others made a quick withdrawal.
The grenade detonated inside the guardhouse, and the bulletproof glass became opaque with globs of blood and billowing smoke.
Bolan signaled with his arm for Katrina to leave her position and join him.
She left the cover of her corner of the building, jogging as fast as she could across the distance separating her from Bolan.
Machine-gun fire opened up from the blockhouse nearest Bolan. Slugs geysered more snow in a path toward Katrina.
She saw it coming and tried to dodge sideways. She tripped face first into the snow, the line of gunfire rapidly closing in on her.
Bolan stepped out from the wall alongside the guardhouse. His AK stammered a mean burst at the blockhouse.
The firing from up there ceased abruptly.
He dodged back into cover of the stone arches of the gateway as the gunner up there opened fire vainly on Bolan. Bolan pumped his last clip into the AK-47, watching with relief as Katrina pushed herself to her feet from the ground and zigzagged the rest of the way while he drew fire from the blockhouse, slugs spanging harmlessly off the BTR-40.
Gutsy Katrina even plugged off a couple of 3-shot bursts from the Beretta at the blockhouse before she reached Bolan's side.
"Into the truck," he told her. "Keep down!"
She did as Bolan ordered, and he darted inside the guardhouse. Through the mess of exploded bodies and drifting smoke he saw what was left of the console beneath the window. He quickly spotted the lever designated as the one that operated the gate. He threw the handle and ran back out to the truck.
The prison courtyard roared with violence, every bit of it aimed at the BTR-40, guards advancing on it from all over the compound, firing as they ran.
Bolan paused only long enough to empty the AK's last clip at several soldiers running in his direction from Building D. He did not wait to see how many fell. He tossed away the useless weapon.
The gate whirred open.
The Executioner threw himself behind the steering wheel of the BTR-40, seeing Katrina crouched low, as he had told her, though she held the Beretta ready.
As hundreds of bullets poured at and bounced off the armored vehicle, Bolan backed away from the wall, slammed into gear, catapulted the BTR-40 out through the open gate and two-wheeled into the snowy street in the new light of day.
The Executioner gunned the vehicle down the street at full speed away from Lefortovo.
12
0630 hours.
Katrina sat wrapped in a blanket in the front passenger seat of the Volvo, watching through the windshield as Mack Bolan, inside a telephone kiosk, spoke to someone after dialing the number Katrina had recited to him.
The falling snow had ceased. The city, blanketed in while, sparkled glaringly beneath a sunlit, cloudless blue sky, while passersby, their breath clouded before their faces in the brittle chill, bustled around the Volvo.
Katrina pulled the blanket tighter about herself, checking to make sure none of her prison uniform showed through the folds of the blanket. No one passing the car paid her the slightest bit of attention.
Trollies, automotive sounds, the audible crunching of hundreds of feet on the snowy sidewalk and occasional snatches of people's conversations from outside the car window filled her head, completing the reviving process from the nearly delirious state of captivity.
Her return to her senses had been sparked when she had seen Mack Bolan step into the interrogation room in Building D to rescue her from the cruelties of Zuyenko and Kulik.
She had recognized Bolan instantly, even though he had worn the latex mask and mustache. From the moment the fighting American had appeared in the doorway of the room and had handed her his Beretta, Katrina had felt herself rejuvenated with a vengeance that had spurred her during their escape from Lefortovo.
Bolan had driven the hijacked armored car to within less than a block of the prison walls, far enough away to be out of sight of the prison, and as daylight had etched the Moscow skyline and the snowstorm had cleared, the Executioner and Katrina had raced into the waiting Volvo, and Bolan had driven them away from there.
At first he had driven them through the streets with no particular destination in mind, merely putting distance between the Volvo and the prison, detouring up this street and that, in one direction and then the other.
She and Bolan had not exchanged words during that time, and she had felt herself almost succumbing to the aftershock of what had happened, not only of her capture but of the terrifying escape when she had been forced to take human lives... to witness so much.
Bolan, driving the Volvo, his eyes constantly shifting between the rearview and side mirrors and everything on the busy streets around them, had brought her back from the edge of shock and hysteria with the calm sureness of his firm voice.
"Katrina, you'll have to tell me where you want to go. I have to leave you. I have other work. It can't wait."
She had known she was all right again when she had felt herself smiling at what he had said.
We have to stop meeting this way," she had chuckled. "Is that not a cliché of your American love stories?"
The icy eyes behind the wheel had softened. "That's the cliché, all right. And yeah, Katrina, let's meet some other time. Some better circumstances."
Before she knew it, she had asked, "Soon?"
"Yes. Soon. But right now..."
"I have friends in the movement," she had told him. "They live nearby. It would not be safe for us to go to their home, but they will come get me."
"That will have to do," he had growled. "Your people must be holding their breath to find out what's happened to you. And to me."
She had given him the phone number of her friends, and he appeared to be speaking to them now from inside the kiosk as she watched him from the Volvo.
He had rapidly donned Russian-cut civilian clothes in the car immediately after abandoning the armored car used in their escape. As far as she could tell, no one appeared to be paying any attention to the big, broadshouldered man making the phone call, nor to the blanket-bundled woman in the car waiting for him to finish. And in a city with one or more KGB agents posted on practically every street corner, no one was safe, least of all two people who had just escaped from a maximum security prison, slaying scores of prison guards and Soviet soldiers in the process!
A police car appeared from behind, slowly cruising through the early-morning rush hour traffic of the thoroughfare. She noted that Bolan saw the police car, but he continued talking into the phone.
She gripped the Beretta in her right hand more tightly beneath the blanket, staring straight ahead but watching the police cruiser pass, her palm and index finger sweaty around the butt and trigger of the Beretta despite the chill of the air. If they noticed her at all, she hoped, perhaps they would think that she was wrapped in a blanket because the car heater had broken down. Unless they had a description of her.
The police cruiser continued past without slowing and disappeared into the forward flow of traffic. Katrina looked back at the phone kiosk. She saw Bolan replace the receiver and approach the Volvo. He got in behind the steering wheel.
"Your friends say they'll be here within three minutes. They'll pull up beside us and you can slip from this car into theirs. I doubt it will attract attention if we work it right."
She returned the Beretta to him when they were sure that no passersby would notice.
&nbs
p; "I wish to thank you for all you have done — for bringing me to this neighborhood and for making that phone call... for everything."
He took the Beretta and holstered it beneath his jacket. "You did more than your part, Katrina. Will you be safe now?"
"No one who carries thoughts of their own is safe in Russia," she replied. She slipped a folded piece of paper into his hand. "This is the address of where I will be today, all day, until it is night when they will smuggle me out of the city."
He accepted the piece of paper, glanced at it and folded it again. He struck a match, held the piece of paper and burned it, dropping it into the dashboard tray where it became ash.
"I've memorized it. I may not survive what comes next."
"Please don't say that..."
"If I'm taken prisoner, or if they search my body, I don't want a piece of paper to lead them to you."
"What does come next?" she asked. "For you, I mean?"
"I can't tell you that. I'm sorry."
"I understand," she said, nodding. "It's just that I feel such relief at this moment, at being here alone with you this close. I feel relief to have escaped, of course. Now I shall have to leave Russia to fight them from the outside. They will not rest until they have found me, and if I stay they will be sure to find me sooner or later. There is no escape in my country. But I feel relief to know you are alive, Mack. The world needs you so. I had feared you were slain at Sokolniki Park. I thank God you made it out of there alive. And the woman, Zara?"
"She didn't make it."
"I'm sorry."
He appeared to be aware of everything outside around the Volvo while he gave his attention to her at the same time, but he broke eye contact with her when a vehicle glided to a stop in the parking space next to them.
The big man was like a jungle animal ready to respond to danger, and she realized that she always thought of this man in terms of lean, sinewy, dangerous animal instinct and awareness. The attraction that crackled between them was inescapable, and for the first time she knew that she wanted this man on the most primitive level that existed between man and woman, a realization that for some reason surprised, shocked and strangely pleased her.
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