Bolan rolled to his right, triggering the Desert Eagle while he was on his back, the second round plowing up under the bearded jaw of a second AHC charger. The hollowpoint round struck bone and spread wide open like a blossom of copper and lead. Velocity pushed it through flesh, creating a grisly tunnel of death out the top of the man’s head. Death yanked the second guy on a short leash, hurling him backward and into the path of another gunman behind him.
An AHC warrior with a shotgun leaped to the side, tromboning the slide of his weapon to spray the ground with 12-gauge devastation.
Bolan was rolling in earnest now, ignoring the digs and stabs that the rocky ground was inflicting on him. He twisted hard, keeping ahead of the line of shotgun blasts. He hated wasting ammunition, but he triggered a salvo of slugs at the shotgunner. Bellows of rage and pain filled the air, the 12-gauge blasts stopping as the gunner tumbled to the ground with shattered knees and shins.
He looked up at Bolan, as the Executioner’s form loomed over him.
“Cut me down, a thousand believers will take my place! Heaven shall be victorious!” the wounded man snarled.
Bolan shook his head, aiming the Desert Eagle at the man. “You’re right. Heaven will be victorious. But you’re not invited to the celebration.”
The Magnum pistol thundered and the Executioner moved on. The doomsday numbers were tumbling hard and fast now as the countdown to Harpy’s arrival loomed. Bolan didn’t want to get caught between two hardforces, especially one containing Adonis and Dark.
The window in one trailer smashed out moments before a shotgun blast filled the air. The sound of breaking glass was the Executioner’s cue to take cover, and he spun, racing back toward the dead shotgunners. Taking a moment to scoop up the two shotguns, he quickly darted left and skidded to a halt under the protection of one of the automobiles that had chased him and Burton. Bolan checked the two scatterguns and shouldered the one that contained the most ammunition. He’d reload the other from shells stored on a sidesaddle holder.
Buckshot hammered against the windows on the far side of the car, metal popping as double-caught pellets tore into it. Bolan swung around and sighted on the enemy gunner’s vantage point. A wave of nine slugs erupted with a single tug of the trigger, and the Executioner was jacking the slide to feed another round into the breech, nine more missiles launched right on the heels of the first. Glass panes tinkled and aluminum rattled as the salvo struck the side of the trailer.
No return fire answered from that window anymore, but Bolan wasn’t taking chances. He shifted position from the back of the sedan to the front hood. He kept low, his head barely visible, yet painfully vulnerable should the enemy sniper decide to rouse himself and begin to shoot again. With a clearer vantage point, though, Bolan noticed the head and arm of the shotgunner hanging over the windowsill.
He did a quick mental count of the dead.
Nine down.
No guarantee that there weren’t others still in lurking, so the Executioner quickly stuffed fresh shells into his shotgun and emptied the second weapon completely. He put replacement shotshells in the sidesaddle holder on his gun, and everything that was still loose was stuffed into a pocket of his blacksuit. In the dark, Bolan couldn’t be sure, but he figured all he had was buckshot loaded in the weapons. He’d have preferred the option of rifled slugs to allow for distance combat.
He pulled his cell phone and hit the speed dial.
“Brandon?” she answered.
“Fight’s about over here, but it’ll get hectic again. Head back to the airport and wait with Jack. I’ll do what I can here,” Bolan told her.
“They’re still coming for you,” Burton countered.
Bolan sighed. “What else is new? Get moving.”
The Executioner shut the phone, slung his shotgun and went to the explosives shack. He had an ambush to set up.
“STILL NO ANSWER from Cole and the boys,” Lee told Harpy, folding his phone away in disgust.
Harpy sneered as she rode in the shotgun seat. Across her lap was a Heckler & Koch MP-5, and in a shoulder satchel resting against her hip was a collection of spare magazines. She also had her 9 mm USP pistol in a thigh holster. All in all, she figured she had three hundred rounds for her automatic weapon and another seventy-five for the pistol. If she couldn’t put Stone to his eternal rest at the bottom of the granite quarry, she didn’t deserve to be a part of the RING’s core command.
By now, Adonis and Dark would have gotten the clue that something was wrong when Harpy disappeared with two cars, seven men and enough submachine guns and ammunition to start a small war. It wasn’t that she didn’t respect Adonis and Dark for their abilities, but each member of the RING’s leadership was him- or herself one of the deadliest people on the planet. Each had survived countless attempts on their lives, and the average body count of the membership was in the high forties, low fifties. That didn’t take into account operations they engaged in, or the people they directed to engage in slaughter.
Her two partners, even if they did guess what she was up to, would be smart enough to stay at the mill and prepare a defense against Stone in the event that she failed.
Not that Harpy intended to.
“Slow down,” Harpy cautioned. “We’ll stop about seventy-five yards from the front gate and take the rest of the way on foot.”
She nodded to the guy with the cell phone and he quickly rang the other car. He gave her a thumbs-up that the message was conveyed. Harpy gave the grip of her MP-5 a solid squeeze and looked ahead through the windshield.
“Time to pay, Colonel.”
DARK SHOOK HIS HEAD in disbelief as he realized the ramifications of Harpy’s disappearance.
“Stone is in the area, and the silly bird’s gone to get her piece,” he announced.
Adonis was back to his old, unflappable self, the rage of battle long since passed. “Which means that whoever brought him is probably at Sparta Municipal. It’s the only way to explain how he got here so quick.”
Dark looked at Adonis. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yup, Brain. But if nobody cares, then why exactly did they write a song about Jimmy cracking corn?” Adonis asked deadpan.
Dark chuckled. “You’re the better pilot. Take the Black Hawk to Sparta and drop in to get a little insurance against our man in black.”
Adonis gave Dark a half salute. “Up, up and—”
“Just get moving,” Dark snapped.
The big blonde grinned and headed for the recently repaired helicopter.
Dark turned, plans for mobilizing against Stone whirling through his head.
STALKING THROUGH the darkness, Harpy kept her weapon up, sweeping the midnight forest. The lights were still on in the quarry, but it was quiet except for the rumbling of a running engine. She noted mentally to censure whoever was wasting gas that way when she realized that the driver could well be dead. Reaching the edge of the trees, she knelt, the rest of her crew following suit.
“Lord,” one of them breathed as they surveyed the carnage spread across the terrain, bloodied bodies strewed and dumped in unnatural poses.
Harpy saw the car that was still running, its door half open. A man with his hand still wrapped around the stock of a shotgun sat in the front seat, his face caked with blood and gore.
So much for her disciplining the guy.
“Anyone else speaks out of turn, you’ll catch a bullet in the head. The man we’re going after is dangerous, stealthy and skilled,” Harpy whispered. She got up, and Corbin, one of her AHC men, took the lead. He was a former Ranger, and a point man for when his unit took to the field. She let the man do his job since he had years of experience at it, from Ethiopia to the Gulf. She didn’t have much respect for most of the people that the RING was uniting under its hate-binding banner of destroying world governments, but Corbin at least carried himself as a professional and did his job with efficiency. That scored big points with Harpy.
Corbin stopped, raising
his fist. Harpy and the AHC militiamen all came to a halt at the signal. The ex-Ranger had spotted something. She kept her eye on him, knowing that he would tell her what threats lay ahead.
SLOUCHED IN THE FRONT SEAT of the Crown Victoria, Mack Bolan felt the blood congealing on his face. He kept his eyes open, mouth slacked, and he could taste droplets trickling down from his upper lip. Movement in the trees just to the side of the entrance to the quarry caught his peripheral vision, but he didn’t move or react to it.
In his left hand, the stock of the shotgun he’d borrowed was gripped to the point that the stippling on the handle was grating into his palm. In his right hand, hidden by his thigh and the shadows of the dashboard, lay a radio detonator. It was a frantic few minutes, getting det cord and explosives from the shack. Industrial-grade C-4 wasn’t the kind of stuff the Executioner usually used, but it was free, there was plenty of it, and he wanted to make some big impressions. He used his usual stash of quarter-pound cubes with radio-activated fuses to prime the stuff.
He wished that he knew exactly what kind of force Harpy had brought with her. If it was Dark and Adonis, the amount of explosives used wouldn’t be overkill.
Even if not, Bolan was still targeting a member of the RING.
And it wasn’t as if he was using up his own explosives anyway.
CORBIN ADVANCED SLOWLY as his two partners held open the chain link fence. Once he was on the other side, he reached back and held the flexible barrier at bay so the others could squeeze through. Once the trio was in, he continued down, the barrel of his Colt Commando leading the way.
The two soldiers of the Army of the Hand of Christ followed silently, betraying nothing with their movements. It was a good, tight formation. They were spread apart far enough that they wouldn’t all get hit in a single burst of autofire, but close enough to be able to communicate by hand signals and to cover each other in the case of a firefight.
Corbin motioned for his men to stop and, pressing himself tight to the trailer, slowly rounded the corner. He peered through the Aimpoint Scope atop his rifle and focused in to its full four times magnification, looking at the running car. The last Corbin remembered, there were no men on duty at the quarry who were left-handed, and none of the men in the cars were armed with shotguns. It could have been a driver who grabbed a shotgun and tried to make a getaway, but if that was the case, how could he get such a gory head wound on the right side of his skull through an undamaged windshield?
The point man’s instincts were jangling on full alert.
He spied the alleged corpse in the driver’s seat and saw the face of the man sitting there. One eye moved, almost imperceptibly, staring right back at him through the scope.
“Gotcha,” Corbin snarled.
A soft beep distracted him in the instant before he pulled the trigger on the Colt Commando. A fraction of a heartbeat later, Corbin and his two partners were atomized as the trailer evaporated in a ground-shaking explosion.
HARPY FELT THE EXPLOSION through the soles of her feet a moment before she saw the sky lit up by several pounds of high explosives.
“Corbin’s down!” she shouted. Her group split into two teams and they raced to cover either side of the quarry entrance. The men racing across in the open received the benefit of a wave of automatic fire lead by Harpy herself as she pressed tight to the hillside.
The quarry itself was a massive cloud of backlit dust as the lamp poles spilled light through the raining debris. One set of lights was on the ground, sputtering as if striving to stay alive after being upended. She saw only the vague, hulking outline of an automobile still parked in the entrance, where Corbin had been suspicious of the body. With two-thirds of a 30-round magazine left in her weapon, she aimed and hosed the car.
Bullets sparked all over it as other gunmen took the cue. The rattle of autofire was deafening and the car visibly shook under waves of impacts. Harpy reloaded three times, emptying her gun into the parked vehicle. She didn’t even bother to count the hail of lead thrown at the Crown Victoria by the other guys.
“All right! Enough!” she shouted.
By now, the fallen lamppost had died, its lights giving one last flicker. The cloud dimmed, lit by only one pole now. The frame of the automobile stood, but the windows were gone and it was resting on chewed-up rims, tires shredded to mere ribbons. The roof of the car was half caved in, as well.
If anyone had stuck around inside that deathtrap, he’d be the makings for stew meat.
Harpy took a tentative step forward, her men following suit. The MP-5 rested against her hip, ready to spring up to sweep the darkness.
“Wait. The cloud hasn’t dissipated enough yet,” she warned.
“You think he survived that?” one of her men asked.
“No. But you’ve seen those movies. ‘Nobody could have survived that!’ Ten seconds later, they’re gagging as the nobody they just shot at gets up and is strangling them with their own intestines,” Harpy snapped. “We wait until my signal.”
“That is the guy who killed off the team that went with Adonis and Dark to get the truck,” another spoke up.
Harpy smirked. “We’re taking no chances.”
“No, ma’am!” they said in unison.
The AHC men were as good as their word. They were quiet, eyes searching the spill of light for signs of movement as the dust cloud continued to settle to the point where they could see details through holes.
Glass shattered, bulbs popped and the quarry was suddenly thrown into complete darkness.
“Fuck!” Harpy growled, triggering a long burst from her weapon. The AHC gunners followed suit. Having no target this time, they simply swept, taking huge slices of terrain and pouring bullets out. Harpy stopped after one magazine, as did the others.
They were down to half the ammo they’d brought with them, and all they had to show for it were lots of casings on the ground, a wrecked Crown Victoria and empty, mocking shadows all about them. Harpy looked to her team.
“We’re withdrawing. Enough of this bullshit,” she snarled. “We’re not taking the fight to him.”
She waved her team back to her side of the entrance. They complied quickly, crouching low as they dashed across the road. No gunfire chased them, but that was probably because their enemy didn’t have the kind of firepower necessary to engage her team.
Harpy kept telling herself that.
It was her and four men, and she hadn’t been able to do shit against Stone. Now he was dictating the course of battle, and leaving her a choice of attacking a well-scouted, defended position, and possibly encountering more high explosives, or retreating.
She chose discretion over valor.
Adonis and Dark would handle this screwhead. That’s what they got paid the big money for, and she would apologize for trying to take matters into her own hands.
Harpy turned and started forward when she glimpsed her group out of the corner of her eye. She remembered she had four men left.
So what were five bodies doing following her?
“Scatter!” Harpy shouted, bringing the MP-5 around, bullets spitting from the muzzle.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Harpy wasn’t as good a soldier as she was a pilot, but Mack Bolan couldn’t fault her on that. He was still off balance from the blast that had taken out her scouts. Only by a mad dash had he been able to disappear into the choking cloud of smoke and flying dust before she and her team rained a hell of a thousand bullets against him. His heart was still hammering from the near-death experience of setting off the trailer so close to ground zero, and then being chased by enemy fire, but when he realized that the AHC team was focusing on the only thing they could see, he clambered up the hill on the far side of the quarry entrance.
Crouching there, he took several deep breaths, resisting the urge to hack up the tickling dust cloying in his throat. They stopped shredding the Crown Vic about the time he finished wiping his eyes clear of the dust that had accumulated in them. Vision no longer irri
tated by grit, he could see that Harpy was left with four armed killers, and she seemed to have enough extra magazines to make life very difficult for him.
Five enemies.
Too bad, he thought, as he dropped the shotgun in the mad dash to get out of the way of enemy gunfire. The Executioner still had his handguns and plenty of ammunition for them, though. He heard some discussion.
He’d thoroughly unsettled the five people below him, and they were trying to figure out whether it was safe to go snooping around a half-lit quarry with a skilled killer and an unknown amount of explosives planted in their path. It reminded him of the old days when he’d walk brazenly among organized crime leaders and soldiers who were talking in wide-eyed disbelief about the unstoppable Bastard in Black, never realizing who was sitting just in earshot. It was an old thrill, Bolan regretfully admitted as he recovered his strength, but it was the simple things in life that kept him going.
He leveled the silenced Beretta at the remaining lamppost and with a 3-round burst, knocked the entire quarry into darkness.
Once more, the militiamen and their boss opened fire, but this time they controlled their ammunition expenditure to just one magazine. Bolan knew they wouldn’t waste any more than they had to. They probably had used up half their war load on the Ford while the dust was still flying.
That was all right.
They were scared out of their wits.
Prey for the Executioner.
He slipped down behind the group as Harpy announced their retreat, and padded gently up to them, slipping among their numbers. Bolan was a shadow amongst shadows.
And once again, Harpy came aware of the Executioner’s presence.
“Scatter!” the pilot screeched like her namesake. The weapon in her hand was barking, and the Executioner dodged behind one of the AHC soldiers. Bolan extended the barrel of his Beretta until it was a contact shot on one of the slower men, stroking the trigger to blast a combined mess of bullet and brains out the back of his skull. Cored, the militiaman died without a sound, but he didn’t fall.
Season of Slaughter Page 16