Hard Passage. Don Pendleton

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      The two men stepped from the shelter of the awning and hurried carefully across the slippery street. Vehicles had been arriving infrequently to deposit their occupants outside the front door of the club. At the moment, the sidewalk was empty and they didn’t see anyone hanging around nearby. The weather and the weeknight hour seemed to have kept the majority of people indoors, leaving only the more young and daring crowd to venture into the nightlife. Carron had told Bolan that in the summer this part of town was typically packed with pedestrians and all the shops were open.

      The pair reached the door and Bolan opened it to admit Carron first. They crossed a very dark and narrow vestibule, and beyond that was another entryway, this one a dark, heavy curtain, through which the briefest flash of lights and the steady thump of electronic dance music encompassed them. Carron pushed the curtain aside and was immediately detained by a huge, bald man. Bolan didn’t understand the full exchange but he caught the gist of the conversation.

      “Hold it,” the bouncer said. “This is a private party.”

      “I was invited,” Carron replied.

      “I don’t think you were,” the door guy said, and he jabbed a finger into Carron’s shoulder.

      In the blink of an eye the man’s finger disappeared from sight, enfolded by Carron’s left hand. The bouncer’s knees bent some in a show of submission as Carron bent the finger backward to the breaking point. A second man, a bit smaller than the door guy, stepped forward to intervene, but Bolan intercepted him with the barrel of his Beretta 93-R in the guy’s ribs. He held the weapon in such a way nobody inside the club could see it.

      Bolan favored the man with a cold smile. “We’re not here for trouble, so don’t start any.”

      “What do you want?” the man asked in English.

      “We’re looking for two guys, names of Rostov and Cherenko,” Bolan replied. “We have it on good advice they may hang out here.”

      The man’s face paled. “They are not here.”

      Carron then said something to the bouncer in Russian. The man winced with the increased pressure applied to his finger and then jerked his thumb toward the back of the club. Through the smoky haze and the flashing lights Carron and Bolan could make out an older man surrounded by at least half a dozen beautiful women. Carron fired off a couple more questions, then released his hold on the bouncer. The bouncer’s eyes were filled with hatred but he made no attempt to detain them from entering the club.

      Carron leaned close to Bolan’s ear to be heard over the incessant beat of the music. “He says we should talk to the blond woman over there. Her name’s Sonya Vdovin. She’s like part of the SMJ’s entourage, or something.”

      “I didn’t know militant youth gangs had groupies,” the Executioner remarked.

      Carron shrugged. “I guess.”

      Bolan took point now with Carron watching his back. They advanced on the raised booth adjacent to the dance floor, approaching it from two directions. The man seated at the center of the booth wore a silk jacket in L.A. Lakers purple, and sunglasses. As many glittering, gaudy rings adorned his fingers as the number of women strewed sensuously across the massive booth surrounding his table. Bolan searched his mental files for a name to put to that smug face but came up empty. Apparently this one liked to keep a low profile. Bolan could only assume he was part of SMJ’s top echelon, and young as he might be, that still made him one of the enemy.

      Among the man’s little harem were mostly dark browns and auburns, with one blond seated two spots to the man’s left. Sonya Vdovin.

      A brief conversation took place in Russian between Carron and the pimp look-alike before total chaos erupted in the club. Bolan spotted the flash of strobes on metal in his peripheral vision and turned in time to see a pair of young men on approach, machine pistols held too close to their bodies to be effective in that space. Bolan reacted automatically, whipping the Beretta 93-R from shoulder leather. He drew a split-second bead on the first gunner and squeezed the trigger. The Beretta’s report couldn’t even be heard above the music but that made the shot no less effective. The 9 mm Parabellum round pounded into the man’s breastbone and pitched him into a table occupied by a man and woman a couple of booths down. The second gunman skidded to a halt and brought his SMG to bear, but Bolan already had him tagged. The Executioner fired a double-tap this time that drilled the first slug into his opponent’s chest and the second through his upper lip. The proximity of the shot flipped the guy off his feet and dumped him over the railing lining the walkway. His body smacked the dance floor and the people below began to scream and shrink away from the corpse.

      Bolan stepped back and nearly lost his footing on some steps as the man in the Lakers jacket suddenly upended the table and produced a machine pistol. The soldier managed to keep his feet but in that brief moment he could only shout a warning at Carron. The Company man had drawn his pistol in the moment during Bolan’s initial encounter, but his focus had been on the battle and he forgot to cover his flank from the table man. Even as Bolan raised the Beretta and sighted on the hood, the rattle of the Uzi submachine gun resounded above the shouting and scrambling of the club’s patrons. A flurry of red splotches peppered the front of Carron’s shirt as he triggered his own weapon reflexively and sent a .45-caliber bullet into the kneecap of a woman seated next to the SMJ gunner. The force of the blasts from the SMJ gunner then drove him into an empty table. Carron crashed to the floor amid splinters of wood, torn polyester and glass from a broken candle holder.

      The Executioner triggered four successive shots, but he knew he was too late. He drove the distraction from his mind as the SMJ gang member’s body slammed into the wall and tumbled off the seat, coming to a rest on the floor amid booze, food and blood.

      The women had already made themselves scarce in the melee, and Bolan had to search long and hard before he spotted the flash of blond hair that signaled Sonya Vdovin. Bolan went after her as she disappeared through a back exit of the club. He nearly reached the doorway when the hulking bouncer blocked his way. Bolan never lost momentum as he left his feet and closed the gap with a perfectly executed flying kick to the bouncer’s stomach. The kick drove the man back with enough force to break down the door of the rear exit. Bolan landed catlike on his feet and jumped over the bouncer’s body now sprawled unconscious across the splintered door.

      The Executioner pushed through a metal door that opened onto a back alley and looked both ways but saw nothing. He was about to turn back but then looked down and noticed a pair of tracks in the snow that could only have been made by high heels. He followed them with his eyes as they crossed the alley and then stopped at a garbage container. Bolan glanced upward just as he heard a clang from above and saw Vdovin making her way up a fire escape. Bolan thought about following, then realized she couldn’t go anywhere from there except back down the stairs of the building—assuming she could access the roof door—or down the fire escape on the opposite side.

      Bolan could easily cover either one without a whole lot of effort.

      The Executioner raced to the front of the building next to the club, then headed into the alleyway on the far side where he stepped into the shadows of the structure beyond it. His position allowed him to watch both the alley and the front of the building. Several minutes elapsed before Bolan heard the first wail of police sirens. If Vdovin didn’t make her play soon, he would have to leave to avoid the cops and that would put him back to square one—he couldn’t afford to give up his only lead.

      As predicted, the faint clang of high heels on metal reverberated in the cold, thin air and Bolan followed Sonya Vdovin’s shadowy progress СКАЧАТЬ