Executioner 054 - Mountain Rampage

by Pendleton, Don

  Grim memories played in Bolan's mind, of his Japanese mission where the venomous toxins of terror had also crackled at his feet, just a step away from the realization of mass poisoning on an unspeakable level. Grim memories indeed, in a war everlasting.

  Bolan sidestepped the writhing mass on the floor and moved down the corridor.

  Auto-pistol extended and ready to cough death, the invader checked each door, alternating from one side of the corridor to the other. Each room was empty except for one or two narrow cots.

  Empty except for the stench of fear and despair that clung to every wall.

  Bolan heard a sound.

  A girl's whimper.

  He went through the door as though propelled from a catapult.

  LeValle was in a partial crouch by the the bed, a hand on the leg of the seminaked girl who sat leaning back on her arms, her face a mask of terror-stricken resignation. A blood-stained T-shirt lay on the blanket beside her.

  "Half time," the Executioner announced in the hard voice of death.

  LeValle glared in mute reply. The girl gazed up at Mack Bolan. Life returned to her expression. The big warrior's face was hard, and yet it was a mask of righteous anger. This man in black was an avenging angel, not a vicious brute.

  He had come not to ravage the defenseless, but to liberate the innocent and punish the guilty.

  That is what she saw in his face.

  "Listen," LeValle began slowly. "Killing me won't solve anything."

  "It'll be a step in the right direction," Bolan said simply, aiming the Beretta at the guy's forehead.

  Footsteps rang on the floor of the corridor. Bolan turned sharply to snap a glance in the direction of the noise. He saw a lone member of the terrorist guard force at the end of the hallway. The guy was gazing at the corpse of Kurt Holbein. He spotted the Executioner as well. The guard clawed open a button-flap holster on his hip and began to draw his side arm.

  Bolan swung the Beretta in a single smooth motion and aimed with the speed and precision of one of the world's best combat shooters. The silenced 93-R hissed. A tongue of orange flame slashed out from the suppressor muzzle.

  A 125-grain hollowpoint projectile split the bridge of the guard's nose. The guy's head recoiled. The back of his skull burst open. His body fell against the wall and smeared a trail of blood and brains as it slid to the floor.

  Still on his knees, LeValle reached under the bunk for a 9mm Makarov in a gunbelt that he had removed from his thick waist before kneeling in front of the girl. It was the only move he could make that might save his corrupt life.

  The bare-breasted girl suddenly sprung up from the mattress and whipped a bare knee into LeValle's face. The unexpected blow knocked the fat man backward into the cell wall. He snarled. In rage he threw himself at the girl.

  She pivoted on one foot and launched a high sidekick. Bolan watched her long naked leg shoot out. The bottom of her foot smacked into LeValle's flabby chest and propelled the man into the wall once more.

  "Bastard!" she screamed. "Pig! Son of a bitch!"

  Bolan intended to pull her aside and get a clear shot at LeValle.

  But the girl swung another lanky leg and threw a kick at LeValle's head. This time the fat man was ready for her. His hands caught her ankle and twisted it sharply. The girl was thrown off balance and collided into the Executioner.

  Bolan caught the girl and swung her to the bunk. LeValle charged into the warrior before Bolan could use the Beretta. Both men staggered across the threshold of the cell into the corrider.

  LeValle proved to be faster and stronger than his paunchy frame suggested. The terrorist rammed Bolan's back against the wall and seized the wrist of the Executioner's gun hand with both of his flabby hands.

  Bolan slammed a knee into LeValle's gut.

  The fat man merely grunted and gave Bolan's wrist a hard twist.

  The Beretta slipped from Bolan's grasp.

  The Executioner's free hand lashed a judo chop at LeValle's neck. The edge of his hand struck the terrorist in the cheekbone. LeValle responded by driving the point of an elbow into Bolan's solar plexus. Bolan's chest felt like it had exploded as the breath was forced from his lungs.

  The girl rejoined the battle and attacked LeValle from behind, kicking him in the back of the knee. The cannibal king's leg buckled. The girl had caught him off guard before, so she no longer had that advantage. LeValle, still holding Bolan's forearm with one hand, whipped a vicious backhand to her face and knocked her back.

  Bolan's arm broke free of LeValle's grip. His fist smashed into the side of the terrorist's jaw. The same fist opened and slashed a cross-body judo chop to LeValle's mouth. The blow split the fat man's lip and cracked the philtrum bone of his upper jaw. Bolan snap-kicked him in the crotch. LeValle's bloodied lips formed a compact oval as he convulsed in agony, spittle dripping from his mouth.

  Bolan leaped at the dazed man, just as the girl launched another kick of her own, bringing her foot up under the guy's flapping arm. His radial bone snapped. LeValle opened his mouth to scream, but Bolan had seized his fleshy throat with his right hand in a "tiger mouth" grip that made speech impossible. His thumb and index finger pinched off LeValle's carotid arteries while the bent knuckle of his middle finger dug into the terrorist's windpipe.

  LeValle struggled helplessly. Bolan immobilised the guy's left arm with a hammer-lock and continued to throttle him. LeValle's eyes bulged. His tongue dangled from its gaping mouth.

  A damp stain appeared at the crotch of LeValle's trousers. Bolan smelled the stink of urine and fear. He felt the man's body convulse in wave after wave of muscle spasms.

  Finally LeValle quit moving. Bolan released him. The terrorist slumped to the floor, a lifeless lump of putrid flesh.

  "Thank God you showed up," the girl gasped breathlessly. "Whoever you are."

  "John Phoenix," Bolan replied. "What's your name?"

  "Kathy," the girl said.

  Bolan retrieved his Beretta 93-R and strode out to the body of the guard he had shot. Bolan found the dead man's gun, a Czech M1950. The small 7.65mm pistol was an inferior combat piece. Bolan ignored it and frisked the corpse. He found nothing save a wallet, keys and a walkie-talkie hooked to the guy's gun-belt.

  Kathy joined the Executioner. She had found her torn T-shirt and held LeValle's Markarov pistol in her fist. Bolan nodded at the gun.

  "You know how to use that?" he asked. "A little," she admitted. "Not much."

  "Then don't use it at all unless you absolutely have to," he told her. "And keep the safety on until you intend to shoot."

  "Okay," Kathy said. "But how do we get past the guards outside?"

  "We have to convince them to look the other way," Bolan replied.

  16

  THE EXECUTIONER AND KATHY moved from the cell to a shabby nearby office. A lamp on a battered metal desk supplied the only light. Bolan peered out of the window at the burning remnants of the motor pool. Terrorists darted across the parade field. The enemy was armed to the teeth.

  "Now they know for sure that the compound has been penetrated," Bolan said with chill sarcasm.

  "Then we're trapped," the girl groaned.

  "You started fighting back tonight," the Executioner told her. "Don't stop now."

  "Okay," Kathy managed a weak smile. "You don't need a quitter on your hands."

  "A quitter is the only real loser in life," the big warrior stated. "And we are going to win."

  "Muller!" a voice crackled from the floor of the cell block corridor. "Come in, Muller. Over."

  The girl gasped, but Bolan gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, firm yet gentle. He stepped into the corridor and knelt by the dead guard. The Executioner unhooked the guy's walkie-talkie from its belt.

  "Muller?" the voice squawked from the transceiver. "Do you read me? Over. Muller?" the caller insisted.

  Bolan pressed the transmit button. "Muller here," he grunted, scratching the mouthpiece with a thumbnail to simulate static and to distort
his voice. "My talkie is on the fritz. Tried to contact you a minute ago. Over."

  "Well, you've got me now," the voice replied. "Is everything okay over there? Need assistance? Over."

  "Negative," Bolan said. "LeValle was pissed because I interrupted his fun. Can't believe that guy. Over."

  "Didn't he even let you cop a feel?" the voice chuckled.

  "Negative," the Executioner repeated. "But LeValle wants to know what the hell's gone wrong with our defenses."

  "We'd like to know the same thing," growled the terrorist lieutenant. "But don't tell LeValle that."

  "He's worried about the lab," Bolan told his "commander." "He called Lavinia Vitalli and got no answer. He wants a large unit of men to check the lab building immediately. Search top to bottom. We don't want a midnight shoplifter to get his hands on our wonder drugs. Over."

  "I'll send a team pronto," the voice promised. "Already sent you some reinforcements just in case. Should be there any second. Over."

  The Executioner sucked air through his teeth. He hit the transmit button. "Can't hurt, I guess," he told the guy. "Thanks. Over."

  "Stay on your toes, Muller," the commander urged. "Over and out."

  Bolan dropped the walkie-talkie. It bounced off the chest of its deceased owner. He turned to Kathy.

  "Get behind the desk and stay down," he ordered, unsheathing his Beretta 93-R. "Company coming."

  Seconds later, the barracks door burst opened and three young terrorists entered. They were not expecting trouble. Their weapons were still slung on their shoulders. One guy had put a cigarette in his mouth and was firing it with a plastic lighter. Another raised a walkie-talkie to his lips.

  "Kassam here," the team leader spoke into the transceiver. "We're in position. Over."

  "Dig in, Kassam!" the voice from the radio ordered. "We're at the lab. Lavinia is dead! The shit has hit the fan! Over!"

  "I read you, Comrade. . . " Kassam said.

  "You fucking well better! Over and out!"

  Kassam growled a crude remark in his native tongue and attached the walkie-talkie to his belt. He turned to the two men under his command.

  "Well, you guys heard—"

  One of the flunkies snapped back his head as if about to nod vigorously. A mist of pink and gray brains gushed from behind his cranium and his body tilted back to crash to the floor.

  Kassam heard the metallic burp of a silenced pistol and the grunt of pain and surprise from his other underling. A bullet had punched through the guy's left temple and sliced through his brain to pop out the right side of his head.

  Bolan appeared from the mouth of the cell block, his Beretta held in a two-handed combat grip. To some observers, the sound-suppressor made the pistol look like a sci-fi laser blaster.

  Kassam was one of those. His eyes bugged from their sockets. He seized the pistol grips of the Soviet PPSh 41 machine gun that hung from its shoulder strap by his right hip.

  The Executioner drilled him between the eyes with a 9mm slug.

  "It's over," Bolan announced.

  Kathy raised her head and peered over the top of the desk. "It's sure over for them," she whispered.

  The Executioner moved to the window and eyeballed the laboratory building. Every light in the place was on. Figures of terrorist goons passed by windows as they searched the lab and its connected rooms. A jeep, probably the only vehicle that had not been destroyed when the motor pool blew up, was parked in the center of the parade field.

  Three men rushed from the Land Rover to the door of the lab center where two terrorists waited for them. One guy held a walkie-talkie. Bolan wondered if he was the same guy he had spoken to a few minutes before.

  The cannibals had congregated in a temple of evil to find their high priestess dead.

  It was time for them to join her.

  Bolan removed the remote-control detonator from his pocket and triggered the second button. The exploding plastique sounded like a large firecracker from Bolan's position. Then the blast ignited the chemicals in the lab. Potassium chlorate, magnesium sulfate, phosphoric acid and God knows what else, all erupted like a volcano within the lab.

  Windows burst. Walls cracked open. Mangled, charred corpses hurtled from openings. Flames rose like skeletal fingers.

  The terrorists in the doorway were hit by a blast of rolling fire. Clothing and hair ignited, skin charred to the bone. One ghastly figure staggered across the parade field. Enshrouded in flames, the hideous apparition stumbled several yards before it collapsed in a smouldering heap.

  Disciples of destruction had become un-human torches. Mack Bolan was purifying the evil in the laboratory with death itself. the roar of the death sentence and the crackle of its execution still filled their ears as they gazed out the window.

  "My God!" Kathy exclaimed. "What was all that?"

  "You'll see," Bolan replied.

  He returned the Beretta 93-R to leather and gathered up the dead team leader's PPS sub-gun. One of the best of the Soviet-bloc small arms, the PPSh 41 is compact and dependable, weighing less than nine pounds, yet its banana magazine holds 35 rounds. The Russian SMG featured a sliding wire stock instead of the original solid one. The Ivans would not admit it, but they had gotten that innovation from the Chinese K-50M. The Chicoms, in turn, had copied the slide stock of a French MAT-49.

  Bolan pulled back the bolt and made certain there was a round in the chamber of the PPS. Then he crept to the door, alone. The jeep was still intact. The Executioner and Kathy would ride out of the compound in style.

  Two terrorists suddenly materialized from the shadows. They spotted Bolan's head and swung their Kalashnikov rifles at the invader. The Executioner was faster. He fired the PPS from the hip. A stream of 7.62mm rounds ripped into the pair before they could trigger their weapons. They performed an uncoordinated death dance before they fell dead to the ground.

  A volley of full-auto projectiles chewed at the corner of the barracks near Bolan. He glimpsed four figures on the parade field as he ducked behind the building. What he had seen in that instant spelled big trouble.

  Two of the terrorists were armed with AK-47s. The others were crouched by the jeep with grenades in their fists, about to pull the pins.

  "Hold your fire!" Bolan yelled. "I surrender!"

  The terrorists did not reply. They did not lob the grenades either. Bolan had bought a few seconds.

  "I'm going to throw out my gun," Bolan called out. "Just don't shoot me!"

  He turned to Kathy, who stood trembling in the doorway. He pointed at the corpses Trawled on the office floor.

  "Take one of those guns and throw it through the window," he instructed. "Fast!"

  The girl stripped an assault rifle from a dead man's shoulder and hurled it at the window. Glass and the wooden framework shattered. The AK-47 fell to the ground in full view of the men by the jeep.

  If the tactic worked, the terrorists would be distracted, their attention drawn away from Bolan's position. If it had not worked, the Executioner would find out soon enough.

  He leaped from the cover of the barracks and dropped to one knee, training the PPS on the four confused savages. The Russian SMG snarled as Bolan swept the weapon in a steady left-to-right motion to spray the terrorists with 7.62mm destruction.

  Bodies hopped and jerked from the impact of multiple bullets crashing into flesh. One of the goons yanked the pin from his grenade as he fell against the jeep. The hand-bomb exploded. Bolan dived for cover as the blast battered the Land Rover and shredded the terrorists with shrapnel.

  Two long shapely legs appeared above the Executioner's head as he lay prone on the ground. Kathy helped him to his feet and asked if he was hurt.

  "I'm okay," Bolan assured her. "But our ride was cancelled. We'll have to hoof it."

  They moved through the compound, running behind the cover of billets buildings. The fires in the motor pool and lab continued to burn. Flickering yellow light flooded the installation. The only sounds were the crackle of flames an
d their own racing heart beats. No voices cried out. No shots were fired.

  Had Bolan wiped out the terrorist vermin?

  The answer appeared abruptly. An enemy gunman darted from the corner of a billets, a Skorpion machine pistol in his fists. The Czech mini-blaster spat a volley of 7.65mm rounds at him and Kathy.

  Bolan hit the dirt, pulling the girl down as he dropped to the ground. Bullets sizzled overhead like a swarm of metallic hornets. Bolan returned fire, shooting with one hand from a prone stance, the wire stock of the PPS jammed against his shoulder.

  He emptied the banana clip into the terrorist. The man's body seemed to leap from view as if yanked backward by invisible wires.

  The report of pistol shots cracked behind Bolan. He rolled quickly, discarding the empty PPS to claw at the AutoMag on his hip.

  Kathy held the Markarov in her fists, and she was repeatedly pulling the trigger.

  The girl pumped round after round into the thrashing figure of a terrorist gunman who had appeared from the opposite end of the billets.

  The enemy had tried to get them in a crossfire ambush. The tactic may have succeeded if Kathy had not checked behind them as Bolan was taking care of the first assailant.

  Kathy fired the last 9mm from the Markarov and the slide locked open on the empty chamber. She dropped the gun and stared at the pulverized corpse of the man she had shot to pieces. Bolan took her hand.

  "You didn't take his life," the Executioner told her. "You saved ours."

  He moved to the man he had blasted with the PPS. A stray bullet had damaged the breech of the Skorpion machine pistol. The weapon was unreliable, so Bolan left it. He found two Russian F-1 hand grenades hooked to the dead man's webbing. The F-1 resembled the old Mark 11A1 "pineapple," with a metal stem jutting from the serrated body. Bolan had handled such grenades back in Nam. He took the blasters and returned to Kathy.

  "One more lap to go," he told her.

  They jogged to the last billets, less than ten yards from the main gate. Bolan scanned the area for enemy forces.

  He yanked the pin from an F-1 and tossed the grenade at the gate. It exploded. The gate trembled violently and dangled on broken hinges. Bolan lobbed the other Russian pineapple. The second blast sent the gate crashing to the ground.