Blood Rites. Don Pendleton

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      The winding road led Bolan through Snapper Creek Park to a deserted visitor’s center. A couple of dim lights still burned inside for security’s sake. The extra cover wouldn’t hurt when he went EVA, and he was hoping the trees around the building would conceal muzzle-flashes from drivers passing by. As for the racket, he could muffle only his own guns. The rest were out of his control until he silenced them by force.

      He reached the smallish parking lot and put the Mercury Marauder through a tight bootlegger’s turn. Bolan switched off the headlights as he killed the rumbling engine, grabbed the Steyr and was out of there in seconds flat.

      “What about me?” his passenger called after him.

      “Stay there!” he snapped, and left her, merging with the night.

      It wasn’t dark for long. Two chase cars were approaching on the same road he had followed. They claimed both lanes, so no one could slip past them, high beams swallowing the darkness, but they weren’t in any hurry now. Still making decent time, but nothing risky as they came on, sniffing for an ambush.

      To the north, where Bolan could have fled the park along another looping road, a third car was approaching, headlights off, a subtle touch defeated by the widely spaced floodlights. It had been a smart move, sending in another team to cut off his retreat, but Bolan wasn’t worried yet.

      Three cars, say four men to a ride unless they packed them in like cocktail sausages. A dozen wasn’t all that many if he handled it correctly. If he blew it, on the other hand, one man was all it took to bring him down.

      Bolan tracked the two cars on his right through the Steyr’s integral telescopic sight. He put his first round through the tinted windshield of the chase car rolling down the left-hand lane, approximately where the driver’s face should be. The car lurched, started drifting toward a grassy verge, then straightened out and stopped as someone got the steering wheel under control.

      By then, Bolan had shifted to the second car and fired another muffled shot, hoping the silencer that doubled as a flash-hider would cover his position. Round two pierced the second windshield with a plink, but this car didn’t swerve or stall. Instead, it suddenly accelerated toward the parking lot where Bolan’s Mercury sat waiting. The chase car’s headlights were switching off, three doors already opening before it came to rest.

      Call that a miss, on driver number two.

      Three men had tumbled from the first car he’d fired on, and he saw four scrambling from the second now. He had a choice to make, and he made it swiftly, spinning toward the third car, still approaching with its lights turned off. He used the glint of floodlights on the windshield as his guide, firing another single shot intended for the driver.

      And scored this time, if the reaction of the vehicle was any indication. It stopped short, as if a dead weight had slipped down and landed on the brake pedal, the engine muttering to be unleashed, but for the moment stuck exactly where it sat.

      Call that two out of three.

      As men erupted from the third car, Bolan swung back toward the other two. He couldn’t trust the night to cover him forever, even with the AUG’s suppressor masking his location, but he still had time to do some damage now, before he had to move.

      The soldiers sent to kill him were the same sort he’d encountered back at Kingston House, with dreads and baggy shirts intended to evoke an Afro-Caribbean vibe. Their scruffy clothing was in sharp contrast to the bright, shiny weapons they carried, all ready to rip at the first glimpse of a target.

      Coming at them any second now.

      * * *

      THE FIRST SHOT SEEMED to come from nowhere. It cracked the windshield and ripped open Lenny Garvey’s face. The driver gave a little grunt, as if surprised, then slumped over the steering wheel, taking the vehicle off course till Gordon Crawford reached across and disentangled Lenny, gave the wheel a twist and thrust a leg between the driver’s dead ones, stamping on the brake.

      “Get out of the car!” he shouted at the backseat soldiers, leading by example as he bailed out and hit the pavement on one shoulder, gasping at the sudden pain. “Damn it!”

      Crawford kept moving, damn the pain. He hadn’t heard the shot, although his window was open, and had seen no muzzle-flash. Same story when the second chase car took a hit, but this one evidently missed the driver, since he charged on toward a parking lot some fifty yards ahead of them, and then squealed to a halt.

      The plug car, coming at them from the north, took the next hit. Crawford was up and running when it swerved and stalled. He still had no sight of the enemy, but knew the white man wasn’t firing from the car he’d abandoned in the parking lot.

      Two targets, neither of them visible as yet, and Crawford couldn’t go back to his boss if either one eluded him. Channer was hurt and raging, gone to ground by now, away from what was left of Kingston House before the pigs from Babylon rolled in.

      Crawford clutched an M4 carbine loaded with a SureFire 60-round magazine, two more stuffed into pockets in his floppy shapeless jacket, worn with sleeves rolled back over his tattooed forearms. In his belt was wedged a Beretta 92G-SD pistol, and he worried that it might pop loose while he was running.

      Crawford dropped behind a tree whose trunk was stout enough to cover him from any shooters working near the building. One armed man should be his only adversary, but he couldn’t sell the woman short, either. She had an instinct for survival, and you never knew who might be handy with a weapon, if one fell into their hands.

      Armed or not, she had to die.

      The notion of a white man bursting in to save her boggled Crawford’s mind, but he couldn’t afford to focus on that now. Survival was his one priority—which meant getting through the firefight with his skin intact and finishing the job he’d been sent to do. If he fell short, the death awaiting him at Winston Channer’s hands would make a gunshot seem like Heaven’s blessing.

      He looked around and found the other two survivors from his car still crouching near it, angling weapons toward the visitor’s center, waiting for a target to reveal itself. Beyond them, four men from the second car were circling through the shadows cast by the building, seeking the man who’d brought them under fire.

      Crawford hissed at his two lazy soldiers, then took a chance and raised his voice when they ignored him. “Move your ass!” he commanded, punctuating the order with an emphatic motion from his rifle.

      Glowering, the two of them broke cover—and a bullet instantly found Byron Taylor, spinning him around with blood spraying as he hit the road facedown. Ini Munroe, beside him, gave a yelp and sprinted toward the building where the other soldiers were engaged in tracking down the sniper.

      “You bring his head to me!” Crawford shouted after them. “And find the woman!”

      Munroe offered no acknowledgment, but kept on running with his head tucked low, ready to open fire with his Kalashnikov if threatened. Trouble was, the threat might not be recognized until another bullet struck and laid him out.

      Crawford knew he’d have to move soon. Hiding while his soldiers did the dirty work might be the normal mode of operation in some syndicates, but in the Viper Posse, leadership was understood to mean СКАЧАТЬ