Killing Trade

by Don Pendleton

  From the crate Bolan took Kissinger’s final gift. Unfolding the stock, he admired the businesslike lines of the chopped and tuned Ultimax 100 MK4 as he brought it to his shoulder.

  A machine gun made in Singapore, the Ultimax was a lightweight, gas-operated, select-fire weapon with a standard cyclic rate of 600 rounds per minute. A simple, robust design firing the 5.56 mm cartridge, easily fieldstripped with all pins captive, the Ultimax had a forward pistol grip mounted under a thirteen-inch barrel. A red-dot scope had been mounted on top of the receiver. Kissinger had included a shoulder strap compatible with Bolan’s 93-R rig, so he could sling the weapon under his right arm. The Ultimax was fitted with an adapter that made it compatible with standard AR-15/M-16 magazines. The armorer had also sent several impressive 100-round drum magazines, the rears of the magazines made of clear Lexan to allow for instant assessment of the rounds remaining.

  Bolan packed spare M-16 magazines and Ultimax drums in his canvas messenger bag, hanging the war bag across his body on his left side. Then he put on the duster, checking the concealment of his weapons in the full-size hotel mirror on the closet door. Satisfied, he left the room, stalking down the hotel corridors and making his way through the lobby and out the front door.

  New York foot traffic bustled past him in both directions. Joining the stream, he allowed himself to be carried along by it. He had gone perhaps two blocks when, in the reflection of the glass front of an office building, he caught sight of the tail.

  He had expected to be followed. Everything that had gone down so far indicated that NLI and Blackjack—if those were indeed the forces pulling the strings and triggers—were monitoring him and knew he was a threat. That was why they’d tried to take him out in Bryant Park. Bolan was through reacting, letting the other side dictate the terms. It was time to take the initiative and take the war to the enemy.

  The Executioner walked until he found a suitable dark alley. He ducked into it quickly, as if trying to dodge the tail, but not so quickly that he was in danger of actually losing his pursuer. Once out of sight in the shadowy, trash-filled alleyway, he ran heavily to the midpoint of the alley and threw himself to the side, taking cover in the lee of an overfilled garbage bin. Seconds later, he heard footsteps at the mouth of the alley. There were at least two people following Bolan.

  To their credit, they didn’t waste time conferring with each other or calling out to him, telling him to give it up. They just moved down the alley, presumably with guns drawn. The Executioner waited until they encroached on his position. Then he struck.

  There were three men, not two, all big, buzz-cut paramilitary types in casual civilian clothes. Bolan unclipped the combat light from his pocket as he rose, clenching the little aluminum flashlight, beam-down, in his fist. The first man had time to turn and claw for a weapon as Bolan hammer-fisted the light into the man’s temple. As he dropped, Bolan snapped a soccer kick into the ankle of the second pursuer, then drove the flashlight up under the man’s jaw.

  The third man had drawn a silenced Glock. Bolan sidestepped, playing the bright beam of the light across the gunner’s eyes to little effect. A pair of shots slapped at the concrete face of the building behind Bolan. He was already drawing the Beretta 93-R as he let the combat light fall from his grasp. A 3-shot burst spit from the custom suppressor, taking the gunner in the throat. He fell back, his head cracking on the filthy asphalt.

  Bolan snatched up his fallen light and swiveled to cover the other two pursuers. In the stark beam of the light he could see the first man was still out, his head cocked at an odd angle. The second man was holding his broken ankle with one shaking hand, while groping for something under his jacket. Bolan put the beam of light on the man’s face and covered him with his machine pistol.

  “I need you alive,” Bolan told him, “but to be honest, I only need one of you.”

  The man, his face twisted with pain, looked up at the Executioner.

  “Take your hand out of your jacket very slowly,” Bolan ordered.

  The shots, when they came, echoed in the alleyway.

  Bolan threw himself aside, seeking the shelter of the garbage bin. Full-auto fire came from a Ruger MP-9 in the hands of the first downed man, who sprayed the alleyway. His target was not Bolan, but the second man. The rounds burned through the victim and chewed into the opposite wall of the alley, igniting small, hungry fires directly in the brick and mortar.

  Bolan turned his machine pistol on the first man.

  The gunman brought the Ruger MP-9 up under his own chin and pulled the trigger. The blast sprayed the top of his head across the alleyway in a rain of DU ammunition that broke up the wall behind him.

  Bolan, 93-R in hand, scanned the alleyway behind him. When he saw no other threats, he bent quickly to search the corpses. He found nothing but spare magazines for the firearms used. There was no identification on any of the bodies.

  “Down here!” someone called out. Bolan glanced toward the mouth of the alley. The gunfire had been heard by someone, and curious onlookers were milling about. He moved quickly in the opposite direction, putting distance between himself and the carnage. He had too much to do and could not afford to get embroiled in yet another analysis of his actions. The New York authorities were already strained to the breaking point where it came to the mysterious government operative, Matt Cooper. He couldn’t take the chance that they’d let him go on about his business after finding yet more bodies in his wake.

  As he walked briskly out of the alley and joined the stream of foot traffic moving down the block, Bolan considered the situation. He knew that hired guns, most likely NLI Blackjack operatives, were tailing him personally. The hit on Luis Caqueta could have been a coincidence and still could be; clearly Caqueta had information that the DU ammunition’s suppliers had wanted concealed at any cost. It was unlikely that Bolan and Burnett had been specifically targeted at Jonathan West’s apartment, but the timing of Basil Price’s break-in was suspect. West had been killed some time previously, apparently to keep him silent. He either talked before he died, or he left behind equivalent information, but the men who’d murdered him had deemed Bolan a sufficient threat to them that they’d bothered to come after him in force.

  Bolan briefly wondered if perhaps more than one group was in play, but that didn’t feel right. Reynolds and Price—one a much younger American former soldier, the other a hard-bitten British career mercenary—had nothing in common, at first glance, except for their skills. Both men were precisely the sort of employees likely to be hired by a security contractor like Blackjack Group. The Executioner would continue to assume that Blackjack and NLI were behind the scores of professional boots on the ground in New York. There was no overt legal action Brognola or his Justice Department could take in the meantime—not without proof. The Executioner didn’t need to meet the same standards of evidence before he could take action, but a direct assault on NLI’s assets, or on Blackjack Group, would have to wait.

  If those working to cover up the DU ammunition source had decided to move on Bolan directly, he figured it was likely they’d target Burnett, as well.

  The Executioner flagged down the first available taxi. The cabdriver nodded when Bolan gave him the hospital name, pulling smoothly into the never-ending stream of Manhattan traffic. Bolan leaned to the side until, through his window, he could see the taxi’s passenger-side mirror. He watched for a time until he was satisfied that he was not being followed.

  Fifteen minutes later, Bolan was walking down the corridor to Burnett’s room. He had almost reached the detective when he heard loud voices. Then he heard a man scream.

  The soldier broke into a sprint. His combat boots left black streaks on the waxed floor as he rounded the corner, the Beretta 93-R in his hand.

  A body lay half in and half out of the doorway to Burnett’s room. Bolan noted the expensive tactical boots on the prone form’s feet. As he neared the doorway, a shot rang out. Bolan threw himself to the side of the door.

&n
bsp; “Burnett!” he called.

  “Cooper?”

  “Cooper. Hold your fire!” Bolan shouted.

  He waited for a moment before chancing a one-eyed look around the edge of the doorway. Burnett, wearing only a hospital gown, sat up in his bed, one foot on the floor. He held a stainless-steel Smith & Wesson .38 snubnose revolver in one hand, aimed at the door.

  “Don’t shoot, I’m coming in,” Bolan warned.

  “Please do,” Burnett said.

  Bolan stepped over the fallen man in the doorway, who looked to be dead. He was wearing a white medical smock and lying in a spreading pool of blood. The handle of what could only be a fork protruded from his neck.

  “Hospital food,” Burnett said as Bolan shot him a quizzical look. “You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”

  Bolan took in the tableau before him. On the floor near the bed, a tray and a broken plate were overturned in a puddle of soup. The wall and floor were sprayed with blood. Burnett had hit the artery. Near the corpse was a syringe, still loaded with an unknown liquid.

  “What tipped you off?” Bolan asked, checking the corridor with a backward glance.

  “The boots,” Burnett said. “That, and the fact that he was too polite. They don’t waste any time on bedside manner around here. He brought my dinner and then fumbled the needle. I didn’t give him another chance to stick me.”

  “How’s the eye?” Bolan asked.

  “Going to be okay.” Burnett gestured to his right eye, which was covered by a circular bandage and some gauze. “I won’t be using it for several days, though. The brick fragments scratched the cornea.” Burnett’s other eye was very red but apparently not injured as badly. The detective paused to snap open the cylinder of his .38, extract the spent round by hand and load a replacement from a speed strip on the bed next to him. “I’m going to stop keeping my gun under my pillow and start sleeping with it on me.”

  “You’d better get dressed,” Bolan warned. “There may be more of them waiting to see if this one makes it out of the hospital to report.” He bent over the corpse and took a shot with his phone camera. He’d transmit it to the Farm later. His guess was that little useful information would be turned up. NLI and Blackjack seemed to have deep pockets when it came to personnel—personnel with plausible deniability, at that.

  “I have a car in the parking garage below the hospital,” Burnett told him as they left the room and made for the stairs. Burnett had tried first to head for the elevators, but Bolan had stopped him. There was no need to trap themselves; Blackjack’s operatives, assuming that’s who they were, had no need of gift-wrapped targets. They were dangerous enough operating on an even playing field.

  They made the garage without incident and took Burnett’s Crown Victoria to the detention center. There, they were stopped in the screening area, where a uniformed officer checked Burnett’s revolver and the Glock he’d retrieved from a lockbox in the trunk of his unmarked car. Bolan flashed the Justice credentials Brognola had provided him.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Cooper,” the blond officer told him, gesturing to the tray connecting the foyer of the screening room to her booth, “but you’re going to have to check your weapons. Firearms are not permitted past this point.” Bolan hesitated. There were plenty of times he had relinquished his weapons when the need arose, but given the bold and ruthless tactics Blackjack had employed to this point, he didn’t think it wise to give up his guns.

  Burnett sensed the soldier’s hesitation, though Bolan didn’t know just how much hardware the detective realized Bolan was carrying. “Listen,” he told the Executioner, his uncovered eye blinking rapidly as he squinted in the bright lighting of the foyer, “let me go in and speak to Ruiz. Maybe I can get something. Maybe I won’t. You said yourself on the way here you didn’t think he’d cooperate. Hang out for a bit and if I think you can get more, or if I need help, I’ll call for you.”

  Bolan nodded. He’d seen the cop work and knew he was no amateur. It was a reasonable proposition. “You feel up to it?” he asked.

  “I don’t need both eyes to talk to this joker.” Burnett smiled. “Though I think I’ll keep my fingers away from his mouth. He’s got a real rabid dog look to him.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Burnett said. He waited while the young female officer buzzed him through, stepped through the security doors and disappeared down the hallway.

  Waiting in the foyer, Bolan took a seat on one of the benches provided, his duster spilling over it and concealing the Ultimax and his other gear. His messenger bag thumped heavily on the wooden bench, but there was no one to notice. Except for the officer in her booth, Bolan was alone, save perhaps for the surveillance cameras that would be monitoring anyone sitting in the little room.

  The soldier took a moment to key on his secure phone and transmit the photo of the hospital killer. Almost immediately, the phone began to vibrate with an incoming call.

  “Cooper,” he said, holding the phone to his ear.

  “It’s me,” Barbara Price said.

  The Executioner could picture the Farm’s stunning mission controller seated at her desk. “What have you got?” he asked.

  “Akira’s turned up a lead on that hard drive,” Price told him. “He’s still working on it to see what else we can mine. Indications are that there’s a lot of data someone tried to delete. That would be easy to recover if not for the damage to the drive itself.”

  “I figured,” Bolan said, nodding, even though she could not see him.

  “What we’ve got may help, though. Akira turned up a fragment of a spreadsheet program that includes payments made through a private mailbox at one of those shipping storefronts. We traced the shipper’s records—Bear tells me their security wasn’t terribly impressive—and the box is owned by a nonexistent limited liability corporation registered out of state. Some more digging turned up an address for the corporation, tied to yet another drop box, tied in turn to an address in Swedesboro, New Jersey.”

  “That’s pretty thin,” Bolan commented.

  “It’s all we’ve got so far,” Price said.

  “Send me the file. I’ll visit as time allows. How far is Swedesboro from here?”

  “You should be able to make it in a couple of hours, give or take. Why don’t you let us send a team of blacksuits to check it? It will save you time.”

  “All right,” Bolan said. He paused. “You gave my message to Hal?”

  “Yes, and he’s still buried, doing damage control. What the hell is going on there, Striker?”

  “Things have gotten hotter than even I thought they would,” Bolan said. “I came expecting drug gangs and I’ve spent most of my time fighting trained paramilitary troops. They don’t care who gets in the way and they’re highly motivated to stay out of our hands. They’re audacious, ruthless and armed with the DU ammunition.”

  “We’re untangling the bulletins and the complaints on this end, routing through and back to Hal’s office,” Price informed him. “Striker, if it gets much worse the governor’s going to call out the National Guard. The mayor is burning up the phone lines between New York and Washington. Hal even got a phone call from the vice president about half an hour ago.”

  “I can’t say I’m surprised,” Bolan said grimly. “I’m not going to have much fighting room left. What about Justice intervention?”

  “Hal is working the NLI front,” Price said, “but they’re stonewalling. Blackjack’s reps won’t speak with anyone. They’ve pulled up the drawbridges. Unless we can get some leverage on them, there’s little to be done.”

  “I’ll deal with them in turn, then,” Bolan promised.

  “Good hunting, Striker.”

  “Thanks, Barb.” Bolan hung up.

  As he secured his phone in a pocket of his blacksuit under his duster, three men entered the detention-center foyer. One, a slight man with thinning hair and round-framed spectacles, wearing a three-piece suit and carrying a briefcase, was obviously a la
wyer. The second was a thickset Hispanic man wearing wraparound shades and a sport jacket that didn’t hide the bulge of the gun under his left arm. He was obviously hired muscle, probably a bodyguard. Between the lawyer and the larger man was someone Bolan recognized from the intelligence files the Farm had transmitted.

  Carlos “Eye” Almarone, Luis Caqueta’s half brother, had been Caqueta’s most brutal enforcer in Colombia. His record, Bolan knew from studying the intel, was no less distinguished. Multiple murders of men, women and even children were speculatively associated with him. Almarone was particularly fond, said the files, of the Colombian Necktie, cutting his victims’ throats and leaving their tongues to hang from the slit. Almarone had a lazy eye, the obvious source of his nickname.

  Almarone bristled when he saw Bolan. He was a head shorter than the Executioner, slim and tanned, wearing a beige, double-breasted designer suit. His craggy face was outlined by a thin jawline beard and carefully trimmed mustache. His dark eyes flashed behind half-tinted glasses as he glared at the soldier.

  “You, cabron,” he said. “I know you. You are as Razor described you.”

  “And I know you, Almarone,” Bolan told him.

  “I should kill you right here, pendejo,” Almarone said, taking a step forward. The Executioner looked down at him, relaxed but ready.

  “Make your play, Almarone,” he said without emotion.

  There was a tense moment as Almarone almost took the bait. Then he backed off, slapping the back of his hand against his bodyguard’s large chest. “This little puto, he thinks to goad me,” he said as if sharing a private joke with the man. The bodyguard stared at Bolan, face frozen, clearly not amused. Almarone forced a laugh and pushed his lawyer forward into Bolan’s path. “Here, pendejo,” he said. “My lawyer, he will fight my battles this day. We are here for Razor Ruiz. You will give him to us.”

  “That’s not likely,” Bolan told him.

  “I’m afraid we don’t have a choice,” Burnett said as the officer in the booth buzzed him through the secure doors. He brought Bolan a stack of paperwork. “These were faxed over half an hour ago. Ruiz had them. He’s being released, charges dropped. Lack of evidence.”