Crucial Intercept. Don Pendleton

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      The attacker’s eyes widened as the blade flashed into his view. Then he screamed. The Executioner brought the serrated blade down and across the man’s arm, working his way around the arm closer to his strong side. As the grip on his neck loosened, Bolan arched his back, ignoring the pain it caused. He threw the shrieking would-be killer off his chest and rolled over with the man, taking the dominant position.

      The attacker was struggling to pull a pistol, apparently forgotten until that moment, from his belt. The Executioner’s knife flashed once across the man’s neck. He died, loudly, and Bolan released the knife, snatching the gun from its position in the dead man’s belt.

      Bolan rose to a half-kneeling position, checking his immediate field of vision and also risking a quick glance behind him. His trained, experienced gaze missed nothing—a quick look was all he needed to assess the situation. Then he ejected the magazine in the pistol, checked it and slammed it home again. Press-checking the pistol showed him a 9 mm round in the chamber.

      The pistol, which Bolan had first thought to be a SIG, was in reality a PC-9. He needed no reference book to call up what he knew of the handgun. Battlefield experience had made him a walking encyclopedia of firearms data. The weapon was an unlicensed, unauthorized copy of the SIG-Sauer P-226—and it was manufactured in Iran.

      His own guns were somewhere on the pavement, but there was no time to look for them. Figures were moving through the pall of black smoke cast by the twisted, burning wreckage of the first van. Bolan detected police sirens in the distance. The clock had run out. He was out of time, his targets slipping that much farther out of his reach, and this fight wasn’t over.

      Again employing his gliding, half-crouching fighting gait, the Executioner moved through the smoke to the opposite side of the remaining van. A man holding an assault rifle saw him and drew down on him. Bolan put a single 9 mm round between his eyes.

      As he closed on the van and on the shooter’s position, Bolan caught movement from the corner of his eye. He turned in time to intercept a rush of men rounding the passenger side of the van’s grille. He fired quickly in a two-handed grip, first one, then another, and another. The first man fell with a bullet through his brain. The second was clawing at his throat where Bolan’s 9 mm bullet had pierced his neck; the light was already fading from his eyes as he fell to his knees, gurgling and trying to scream. The third man took a slug directly through his heart. He was dead before he finished falling over.

      There were still shooters beyond the van, the last of the armed resistance. They fired at Bolan, but the angle was wrong. Both the soldier and his enemies were using the van as the only available cover between them, which meant the gunners had to be content with chewing away from the flanks. Asphalt and paint chips filled the air, ripping past with a noise like tearing cloth, while empty brass littered the street and curb. Those were not the sounds that worried Bolan most.

      The police sirens were growing louder; the local authorities would be on the scene in moments. The Executioner did not dare let that happen. Deadly experience, always his guide, told him that the first thing the Farsi-speaking shooters would do, if confronted by police cars, would be to turn their automatic weapons on the law-enforcement officers. Though perhaps well-trained and well-equipped, the cops would not be prepared to roll straight into a barrage of automatic gunfire. Even a S.W.A.T. team would have a hard time coping with so sudden a burst of violence, and the new arrivals were likely road patrol responding to numerous calls of shots fired.

      The Executioner had cut a bloody swath through the ranks of the criminal underworld and the international terrorism scene during his endless war for justice. Regardless of the side of the law on which he operated—and he’d spent plenty of time exacting a righteous toll on society’s predators on the “wrong” side of law and government, whenever that had been necessary to get the job done—he had done so while always respecting one rule above all else. He would not take innocent life, and he would not take the life of a law-enforcement officer who was simply doing his or her duty.

      Given that, Bolan would no sooner allow those law-enforcement officers to stumble blindly into a killing field that was partly of his own making. It would be like herding cattle through the gates of an abattoir.

      Bolan scooped up a fallen assault rifle and snatched two magazines from the belt of the dead man who had wielded the weapon.

      The weapon was one he knew, but which he had not encountered often. It was a Khaybar KH 2002, a bullpup weapon based internally on the M-16 A-1 that looked like an ungainly cross between a Steyr AUG and a French FAMAS. He checked the rounds in the magazines by simple eye—this rifle fired the same 5.56 mm round as did the rifles that had inspired its design.

      The Executioner took only a second to verify that the weapon was chambered and ready. Then, holding the rifle close to his body, he threw himself prone and rolled across the pavement, his head pointing toward the enemy.

      The enemy gunners saw him but had been waiting for a target at waist level. Their fire went high and, before they could compensate, Bolan unleashed a series of tightly controlled bursts from the muzzle of the futuristic-looking rifle.

      The 5.56 mm rounds tore through the knot of men, splaying them in every direction. One of them screamed; the others died silently. The screamer managed to clench the pistol grip of a small submachine gun as he left this world. The rounds it discharged caused Bolan to flinch from a fresh spray of sharp asphalt shards that drew blood from his cheek.

      The gunfire echoed away at last. Bolan got to his feet, the Khaybar stock tight against his shoulder. He moved quickly and cautiously forward and around the vehicle, checking every direction with fast glances side-to-side and behind him. There was no more movement from among the gunmen. He had killed them all.

      The first of the police cars reached him, LED light bars strobing, sirens howling. Immediately, officers threw open their doors and leveled their pistols at Bolan, shouting for him to drop his weapon and make no sudden moves.

      The Executioner held the rifle up over his head in both hands. The shouting continued.

      “I am an agent of the United States Justice Department,” he said very deliberately, emphasizing each syllable so they could hear him over their sirens. “I have engaged these men to—”

      “Shut up!” one of the officers ordered. Two more came up on either side, all of them keeping a prudent distance from the soldier. “Place your weapon very slowly on the pavement!”

      Bolan did so. “I am an agent of the United States Justice Department,” he repeated patiently. This was nothing he had not endured before. “I have credentials and identification on my person.”

      “Hands behind your head!” the officer shouted again. “Interlace your fingers! Do it now!”

      Bolan did as instructed. He was seized, cuffed none too gently and then patted down. The frisk was halted abruptly when the officer realized just how many pouches and pockets the blacksuit had, and how many of these had something lethal in them. His war bag, still slung over his shoulder, was brimming with things that would give an ATF agent apoplexy. Bolan could only imagine how the police would react when they got to that.

      “Holy shit,” one of the cops muttered. “This guy is loaded.” He called for the other two officers, the ones who had braced Bolan. The soldier was half pulled, half dragged upright and escorted to a police cruiser. There, his war bag was placed heavily on the trunk as the officer resumed the frisk. The two backup men held their weapons on Bolan the entire time.

      The sat phone Bolan carried, which was now on the СКАЧАТЬ