Face Of Terror. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ meant the men driving and riding in them had stolen them from somewhere close to this area. And they had to have stolen them recently. No reports of missing vehicles had gone out over the police-band radio mounted in the Hummer. That could only mean one of two things: either the rightful owners hadn’t discovered their property missing yet or they were dead.

      Considering the fact that his snitch had told him it was radical Islamic terrorists who had sold the coke to the Mafia, Jessup’s money was on the latter possibility.

      The DEA man watched the vehicles ahead of them slow, then stop as they reached a lone grove of trees in the middle of the pasture. Just above the treetops, he could barely make out the whirling blades of a helicopter.

      “So that’s their plan,” Bolan said from behind the wheel. The words came out sounding hard and stark after the silence that had reigned over the Hummer for the past several minutes.

      “They’ll just abandon the pickups and Jeep. My guess is they were stolen anyway,” Jessup said.

      Bolan nodded, then turned briefly toward Jessup. “Take the wheel,” he said.

      Jessup reached over and grasped the steering wheel.

      The Hummer slowed momentarily as Bolan took his foot off the accelerator and thrust himself backward over the seat into the rear passenger area of the Hummer. But it was done so quickly and smoothly—obviously a much-practiced move—that Jessup was able to slide behind the wheel and take control immediately.

      A second later, Bolan had climbed back into the front, now in the passenger’s seat where Jessup had been a second before. Reaching down to the floorboard, the big man lifted his Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun.

      Jessup got the Hummer back up to speed as Bolan strapped his leg down with the seat belt. A moment later, he was more out of the window than in, and firing 3-round bursts from the H&K subgun.

      Through the windshield, Jessup could see tiny figures loading what looked like briefcases from the pickups onto the helicopter. He also saw the small grass and dust storms erupt as his partner’s 9 mm slugs fell a few feet in front of the men.

      Out of the corner of his eye, Jessup watched Bolan raise his point of aim slightly. As more subgun explosions sounded from the other side of the Hummer, he looked out of the windshield again and saw two holes appear in the side of the chopper.

      But they were still too far away for the submachine gun to be relied on for accuracy. It was a short-range weapon, and trying to force it to become a sniper’s rifle was like using a screwdriver for a hammer.

      Bolan tossed the MP-5 over his shoulder into the backseat and lifted the AR-15 that Jessup had used only minutes before on the Mafia men. He leaned out of the window again, and Jessup could see that the assault rifle was angled more horizontally this time. The 5.56 mm NATO rounds should reach the chopper more efficiently.

      Bolan pulled the AR-15’s trigger three times in a row, and a trio of rounds sailed across the grassland and pocked the side of the helicopter—just to the side of the open side door. But they did so as the last of the briefcases was loaded, and the last man in cammies reached up, took the hand of another terrorist and allowed himself to be jerked up into the chopper as it began to rise.

      Bolan pulled the trigger several more times as the Hummer raced closer. But they were still too far away for his rounds to be effective, and to complicate things further, his target was moving as well as distant.

      Jessup drove on. When the helicopter was perhaps a hundred feet in the air, the pilot turned its nose directly at the oncoming Hummer. Jessup watched as a man in green camouflage, secured to the helicopter by a ballistic nylon strap, leaned out of the same sliding side door through which the men had boarded.

      Resting on his shoulder was an OD-green bazooka.

      “Twist the wheel!” Bolan yelled. And even as he spoke, he dropped the AR-15 and reached across the Hummer with both hands.

      The bazooka’s charge exploded out of the mammoth barrel even as the back blast flew past the rear of the helicopter. Together, Bolan and Jessup turned the wheel as if their very lives depended on it.

      The explosion ten feet to one side of their vehicle created a crater in the prairie ground roughly the same size that a hand grenade buried beneath the surface would have made. Bolan looked back up at the sky and saw the man with the bazooka disappear back into the helicopter. Then the chopper rose higher into the air, turned and flew away.

      Jessup turned the Hummer back toward the helicopter as it grew smaller in the distance. Both he and Bolan stepped out of the yellow vehicle and watched.

      “Any idea where they might be going?” Jessup asked.

      Bolan shook his head. “Even on ground this flat, they’ll be completely out of sight in another minute or so. Especially if they stay as close to the ground as they were. They could keep going, turn right or left, or even fly a few miles one way or another and then double back past us.”

      “They might figure we’ll wait here and see,” Jessup suggested.

      “They might,” Bolan said. “But it’s not likely. They can spot this yellow Hummer a long time before we see them in the air. Come on.” He got back behind the wheel of the big vehicle as Jessup jumped into the passenger’s side. They drove only slightly slower as they returned to where the three Toyota pickups lay in ruins.

      “It’s gonna take a while to get all that coke rounded up, inventoried and loaded,” Jessup said as they neared the overturned truck. “Want me to radio in for some assistance?” He started to reach for the microphone mounted on the dashboard.

      Bolan shook his head and Jessup’s arm froze in midair.

      “I’ve got a faster and much more efficient way of handling things,” the big man said as he pulled up next to the overturned truck. Quickly dropping down from the Hummer, the Executioner walked to the back of the Hummer and grabbed a five-gallon can of gasoline. Then, walking from truck to truck, he dribbled a trail of gas in his wake, removing the cap to each pickup’s gas tank when he reached it.

      Finally, Bolan dripped gas in his tracks as he walked backward to the Hummer once more. Punching the cigarette lighter into the dash, he turned to Jessup as the DEA man got in on the other side. “You don’t smoke, do you?” he asked.

      “No,” Jessup said.

      Bolan nodded. Pulling the cigarette lighter out of the Hummer’s dash, he glanced for a second at the glowing orange disk inside it, then dropped it out of the window.

      The gasoline-soaked prairie grass next to the Hummer immediately started to burn, and the flame worked its way down the individual trails that led to the Toyotas, cocaine and dead men.

      Throwing the Hummer into gear, Bolan tore up more grass and dirt as he floored the accelerator and raced back to the county road. He had driven through broken barbed-wire fence and traversed the bar ditch to the road when the explosions began.

      2

      Bolan watched the flames leaping in the rearview mirror as he drove the Hummer back toward the highway. Next to him, Jessup had turned sideways in his seat and watched as the three exploded pickups, the dead mafiosi and a half-million dollars of cocaine burned. “Well, Cooper,” СКАЧАТЬ