Plains Of Fire. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ pistol had suppressors mounted on them, and he had to make certain their mechanisms were in good condition. A quick examination confirmed that they were ready for the upcoming fight. The quiet guns would be his advantage. The AK-47’s dunking wouldn’t have proved a problem even if Bolan had swum through sewage thick enough to stand a fork in. The Desert Eagle would require a more intensive inspection, but he didn’t have time for the detail stripping necessary to restore his confidence in the massive handgun.

      He wrapped a length of cloth around his head, covering one eye to give himself as much of a cushion of uncertainty on the part of his enemy as possible. The AK hung in full view, loose on its lanyard. Bolan limped to a corner to maintain his ruse as the battered Anatoly.

      If the voices of Aflaq and Grigorei together hadn’t convinced Bolan that the two factions had reunited in the wake of the freighter’s destruction, then the sight of a jeepload of white and black men sitting side by side and armed to the teeth with assault rifles would have clinched it. Fortunately, the Executioner was fully aware that the surviving gunmen from the covert meeting had banded together. He swept the shadows in alleys, looking for the betraying signs of a jeep heading down a parallel road to flank him.

      Bolan’s hand radio hissed to life through the universal earplug he’d locked into it.

      “We see him,” came a Russian voice. Bolan was glad that when he’d looked through Anatoly’s cell phone, he’d found the emergency alternate frequency for the Russian gangsters’ communication. Sure enough, they doubted the Executioner’s identity as one of their own, because they were speaking over the channel that Anatoly had put into a memo note on his cell phone. As the jeep rolled closer, Bolan bided his time, knowing that his ruse was crumbling rapidly.

      “Is he reacting to you?” Grigorei’s voice asked. “Try to take him alive. We could get some information out of him.”

      “Right, sir,” the gangster in the jeep said.

      That was all the Executioner needed to hear. He whirled, bringing up the silenced MP-5 like a handgun, his other hand tugging his fake bandage aside, then unleathering the Beretta in his shoulder holster. Bolan’s initial salvo of suppressed slugs chugged out of the end of the blunt canister. Since the suppressor only captured the muzzle gases without retarding the velocity of the 9 mm rounds in the magazine, he had opted for extra-heavyweight, subsonic 9 mm rounds—squat, fat barrels of lead with a flat, ugly nose meant for contacting as much enemy flesh as possible, all wrapped around an overweight core of dense tungsten. The Parabellum slugs erupted out of the suppressor at a speed of 1000 feet per second, just slow enough to avoid producing a supersonic crack, but the bullets weighed in at a full 180-grains, more than sufficient to produce the kind of momentum and penetration that made up for the subsonic velocity.

      The jeep’s windshield disintegrated, shattered glass and deformed blobs of lead and tungsten vaulting into the face and chest of the African militiaman at the wheel. The broken windshield carved only minor slashes on the Thunder Lion’s face, but the quiet and deadly bullets smashed through the driver’s rib cage, shattering bone into splinters and tumbling petals of flattened lead whirling like the blades of a lawn mower to slash brutally through lung tissue. The coalition jeep lurched violently as one slug stopped cold in the thick and heavy muscle of the African’s heart, dying reflex causing him to jerk the steering wheel violently to the right. The dead man’s companions scrambled to bring up their assault rifles and return fire, but their formerly steady platform was now out of control, forcing them to pay more attention to hanging on for dear life than opening fire on the Executioner.

      Bolan had his Beretta up and firing, punching bullets into the head of the gunman in the shotgun seat. They cracked open the skull of the Russian mobster sitting beside the slain driver and burrowed through his brain to turn his central nervous system into whipped froth. The jeep rocketed along, an African militiaman in the back of the vehicle lunging wildly to grab at the steering wheel.

      No amount of turning could have saved the three men in the back as the driver’s heavy, dead foot was jammed into the gas pedal, speeding them into a confrontation with the back wall of a warehouse. The hood crumpled violently, and the Thunder Lion who had striven to reach the steering wheel was launched head-first through the remnants of the windshield, his face torn free by the jagged wrinkles of the collapsed nose of the jeep. Fortunately for the mutilated gunman, his suffering at the loss of his face was measured in nanoseconds. The top of his skull met the stone wall of the warehouse, and his vertebrae burst and collapsed. A spear of bone shoved deep into the socket of the man’s brain, killing him before his neurons could even register the pain of his nose and cheeks torn from his facial structure.

      “He’s onto us!” a voice yelled over Anatoly’s radio. Bolan heard the echo of the Russian’s voice emanating from an alley off to his right, informing him that the flanking maneuver he’d anticipated was in motion. Had they tried it against any other man, they might have had a chance, but the Executioner’s years of experience and his ability to improvise had given him a killing edge. Bolan rushed toward the crushed jeep, the two surviving gunmen crawling out of its backseat, oblivious to his presence. He spared the briefest of moments, his boot lashing out to render the survivors insensate with well-placed kicks. They were both unarmed, the force of the crash ripping the rifles out of their hands, and the onset of shock helped the remaining Russian to forget about the handgun in his hip holster. Rather than slaughter helpless opponents, Bolan put them out of commission, preferring to save his ammo for the alternate force coming up behind him.

      The strike team arrived only a second after Bolan’s estimate, which was to the warrior’s advantage. He had the drop on the enemy force, and had put the wreckage of the jeep between himself and their rifles. Firing from a position of cover and knowing his enemy’s angle of approach, Bolan had put all the cards in his favor. He gave the members of the African and Russian team time to expose themselves as they exited the alley, then triggered the MP-5 and Beretta. The suppressors on the weapons swallowed the muzzle-flash and bark, which would have betrayed the Executioner’s position, while the rear frame of the jeep provided him with a solid rest position to assist him in controlling the two weapons he fired simultaneously.

      The Russian mafiya leader screamed as a stream of bullets from the MP-5 drilled into his heart, multiple tungsten-cored slugs burrowing through the tough muscle and smashing his spine on the way out. An African militiaman to his left vomited blood as a Beretta round crushed his windpipe.

      With two of their number down in a heartbeat, the remaining quartet of smugglers and troopers panicked, their rifles spitting out wild streams, fanning the shadows. The jeep’s wreckage shook as bullets were stopped by its massive bulk, protecting the Executioner.

      “Any movement?” one of the African militiamen asked as Bolan listened on the Russians’ party line.

      “Negative,” a smuggler responded. “Step out and have a look.”

      “Fuck you,” the Thunder Lion responded. “He’d just shoot me while playing possum.”

      The Russian chuckled. “But then we’d know where he was.”

      Bolan held back a sigh that would have lamented his opponents’ lack of radio discipline. Rather, he hauled the corpse of the Russian in the shotgun seat to the ground, then triggered a burst of AK fire from the dead man’s rifle.

      That brought a salvo of concentrated autofire down on the front seat of the jeep. The corpse of the driver jerked violently under the combined storm of lead that hammered him. Bolan shouted, approximating the Russian’s voice, to stop shooting. He grabbed the dead mobster by the back of the neck and pushed his head above the jeep, using his other hand to wave the corpse’s arm.

      “It’s me!” Bolan shouted.

      “Fuck. СКАЧАТЬ