Dark Savior. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Easy does it...

      Hume waited until he had a clear view of the doorman, checked him with a glance to see if he was wearing Kevlar underneath his wilted dress shirt, then fired a six-round burst into the stranger’s chest. The Parabellum rounds slammed the guy backward as he spouted crimson from a tidy group of holes above his heart, and Hume pushed through the doorway into a small sitting room.

      The second marshal waited for him there, as Hume had expected, wielding his Glock but firing just a beat too slow, still not quite believing that he’d seen his partner killed before his eyes.

      Hume dropped to one knee, ditched the smoking box and gave the second guard two short precision bursts. The first one opened up his belly before the second caught him doubling over, tattooing his startled face.

      Two down, but there were three guards on the target. Hume went looking for the third. The back door opened with a bang, three of his team members moving in to help him sweep the place. Two more were close behind Hume, bulling through the front door he’d left open, which left six outside in various positions, covering the action from a distance, watching for police.

      O’Connor, the leader of the operation, began barking orders, and the men fanned out to check the other rooms. Each of them had the floor plan memorized: kitchen and a smallish dining room to the right, four bedrooms, one en suite, and a separate bathroom all off to Hume’s left, down a hallway. In front of him, glass sliding doors faced the desert and a backyard somebody had stripped of grass, replacing it with rocks and cacti.

      As Hume started for the hallway, Mueller and Ornelas jogged past him, not wanting to let him hog the fun. He didn’t hurry, knowing that the third watchdog would come to them after he’d heard the racket in the living room.

      Safe house, my ass, Hume thought, smiling.

      Even if number three were on the phone right now, making a panic call, the reinforcements wouldn’t come in time to save him or the target he was guarding. They were out of time, beyond salvation now.

      As if on cue, the third marshal showed himself, clearing the hallway in a rush, an AR-15 at his shoulder. He was clearly stunned to encounter the six men still in the living room, and hesitated long enough for all of them to open up at once, making him dance as bullets riddled him from neck to knees.

      “Rest in pieces,” Killer Combs advised the dead guy, as Hume moved past him down the hallway. He focused on the shared bathroom, the room nearest to him.

      He kicked the door in, checked behind the shower curtain, then turned toward the window. Funny that it didn’t have a screen to keep the bugs out. Moving closer, Hume peered through the frame and saw the screen in the flower bed below, twisted from being hammered out, dented from someone stepping on it as he cleared the window.

      Hume retreated, found the others scanning bedrooms and returning empty-handed. “Spike!” he called. “We lost him.”

      “What?”

      “See for yourself.”

      O’Connor checked the window and immediately turned the air blue with profanity. When that storm passed, he turned to Hume and asked, “How could we miss him leaving?”

      “Don’t ask me. I was with you. Sordi and Gounden had the east side covered.”

      “Shit!”

      “What now?” asked Mueller, from the bathroom doorway.

      “Now we split,” O’Connor answered. “Now I call the man and tell him we screwed up.”

      “He won’t like that,” Hume said.

      “No shit.” O’Connor scowled and hurried past him, out the door.

1

      Over the Sierra Nevadas, California

      “This is crazy,” Jack Grimaldi said. “It’s snowing like there’s no tomorrow. If I didn’t have the instruments—”

      Mack Bolan interrupted him. “There won’t be a tomorrow for the target, if we wait. The window’s small and closing fast.”

      “What window?” Jack asked. “Can you see anything down there?”

      “It doesn’t matter. We’ve been over the terrain.”

      “From photos, sure. What good is that when you can’t see the ground?”

      “None at all,” said Bolan, “unless you, or one of a half dozen pilots skilled enough to drop me on the spot, is in the cockpit. And you’re the best among them.”

      “Half a dozen?” Jack looked skeptical. “I would’ve made it three or four.”

      “Well, there you go then.”

      “All right, dammit. Flattery will get you anywhere. Almost.”

      The aircraft was a Cessna 207 Stationair, thirty-two feet long with a thirty-six foot wingspan. Its cruising speed was 136 miles per hour in decent weather, with a maximum range of 795 miles.

      Today was far from decent weather, any way you broke it down.

      They’d flown out of Modesto City–County Airport, traveling due east. The storm had been barely a whisper in Modesto, but it was kicking ass in the Sierras.

      Bolan’s chosen landing zone would be bad enough on a clear day, great fangs of granite jutting ten thousand feet or higher, bare and brutal stone on top, flanks covered with majestic pine trees and red fir. A drop directly onto any one of those could easily impale him, or he might get tangled in the rigging of his parachute and hang himself.

      In theory, the jump was possible. In practice it was rated very difficult. But in a howling blizzard—for a novice jumper, anyway—it would be tantamount to suicide.

      Bolan was not a novice jumper. He had more than his share of combat drops behind him, and had mastered new techniques as they developed, both in uniform and after he’d left military service, following his heart and gut into an endless private war. Today he’d be doing a modified HALO jump, a form of military free fall. The good news: the Cessna’s altitude meant there’d be little danger of hypoxia—oxygen starvation—or potentially fatal edema in Bolan’s brain or lungs. The bad news: with the blizzard in full cry, he could be whipped around like a mosquito in a blender, lucky if the winds only propelled him miles off course, instead of shredding his ripstop nylon canopy and leaving him to plummet like a stone.

      All that to reach the craggy ground below, where the real danger would begin.

      “We could go back and get a snowcat,” said Grimaldi. “Go in that way. Any small town up here should have one.”

      Bolan shook his head. “That means an hour’s turnaround back to Modesto, grab the four-wheel drive, and what? Pick out the nearest town—”

      “I’d land at Groveland,” Jack replied. “They’ve got an airport, they’re closer to the mountains—”

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