Hell Night. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ and the dead Rough Rider who had fallen to her rear. To his right was a popcorn machine designed and built to look like the type found in old-fashioned movie theaters. Such fake antique popcorn machines seemed, for some reason, to be standard fare in modern banks. They were made out of thin metal and glass, and offered concealment but not cover.

      Bolan pivoted on the balls of his feet, turning toward the cashiers’ windows. The first thing he saw were the hostages. Roughly a dozen people who looked like customers lay on their faces on the floor, their hands clasped behind their heads. Next to them, at least twice as many bank employees—both males and females wearing tan slacks and maroon polo shirts sporting the bank’s logo—lay in the same position.

      The Executioner’s sudden descent through the skylight had come as a complete surprise to the bank robbers. Like the pair he had already encountered, they also wore green coveralls and blue ski masks. But Bolan noted one major difference.

      The masks of these men had been rolled up into simple blue stocking caps. This aided their vision, but it told the Executioner something else, as well.

      These Rough Riders weren’t worried about the customers or bank employees seeing their faces, which meant they intended to kill all the hostages.

      A Rough Rider with a wide handlebar mustache was the first to recover from the shock of Bolan’s aerial entry. He lifted the Uzi in his hands toward the Executioner.

      But Bolan was a fraction of a second faster. The Executioner’s first 3-round burst hit the mustachioed Rough Rider squarely in the chest. Above the explosions of the rounds Bolan heard a high-pitched ringing sound. He immediately realized that Coleman, the uniformed cop outside, wasn’t the only one wearing a Kevlar vest with a steel insert. At least some of the Rough Riders had them, too.

      While the trio of rounds from the Executioner’s assault rifle had driven the man with the mustache several paces backward into a desk, they hadn’t stopped him. The Rough Rider began to raise his Uzi again, and more rounds from another direction whizzed past the Executioner’s ears, sounding like angry bees.

      Bolan’s next triburst was aimed at his target’s head. The first slug took off the upper right half of his face and blew brains, blood and fragments of skull out the back of his head. The second and third rounds disappeared somewhere in the gore before the Rough Rider slumped to the tile floor in front of the desk.

      The Executioner ducked behind the popcorn machine as more rounds from behind the tellers’ windows zipped past him. As he hit the floor, a barrage of fire from a variety of weapons shattered the glass of the popcorn machine and tore through the thin red metal stand.

      Suddenly, the First Fidelity Bank lobby appeared to be snowing popcorn and glass, both raining over Bolan where he lay on his side. The unusual combined odor of exploding gunpowder, popcorn and butter filled the Executioner’s nostrils.

      Several of the rounds that had ripped through the red metal stand had missed Bolan by millimeters. And the bank robbers knew that sooner or later, if they simply kept peppering the popcorn machine with fire, some of their rounds would find vital organs.

      The Executioner knew that, too. Slinging the M-16 over his shoulder, he suddenly dived from behind the machine into the open. Hitting the floor on his right shoulder, he rolled under several bursts of fire just inches above him. The shoulder roll took him all the way to the desk where the man with the mustache lay in death, and the Executioner squeezed in between the dead man and the desk, using them both for cover now. He saw a flash of blue as one of the Rough Riders raised his head to fire through a teller’s window.

      Bolan triggered his M-16. The blue stocking cap blew off the top of the man’s head. So did half of the head itself.

      Two men in coveralls suddenly emerged through a formerly closed door next to the tellers’ windows. Behind them, Bolan could see a private office. An employee wearing the same maroon polo shirt lay on the floor, bloody and battered but breathing.

      Both of the men coming out the door carried Uzis, and both were well over six feet and broad shouldered. They made the mistake of trying to exit the office at the same time, and for a split second wedged themselves together in the doorway in a scene worthy of The Three Stooges. But the Uzis kept all humor out of the Executioner’s brain as he flipped the M-16’s selector switch to semiauto, then put one 5.56 mm bullet between each man’s eyes.

      They fell to the floor, dead.

      For a moment, the gunfire died down and Bolan heard the sounds of running footsteps outside the building. He smiled grimly to himself. Glasser and his men were on the way. Their arrival was confirmed by the sounds of window glass breaking and side exit doors being rammed open.

      Quickly, Bolan assessed the situation. The fact that the gunfire had died down meant there were a limited number of men who could see him. Which, in turn, meant the Rough Riders had to be scattered throughout the bank. The breaking glass and doors being rammed meant Glasser’s SWAT teams were entering the bank at various positions. They would take care of the offices, vault area and other rooms behind the tellers’ windows. But there was still one place just off the lobby that needed attention. The safe-deposit box room. And the Executioner was the most likely candidate to cover it.

      Bolan could see the barred door was on the other side of the lobby, across from him.

      And the barred door was open.

      The Executioner squeezed out from between the desk and the dead man with the mustache, the M-16 aimed toward the tellers’ windows. There was always a chance that he’d been wrong in his assessment as to the cease-fire, and one or more Rough Riders might be hidden back there, just waiting for an opportunity such as Bolan was now giving him.

      But such was not the case. Making his way silently toward the safe-deposit box door, trying to avoid the broken glass, shreds of metal, popcorn and anything else that might make a sound and alert the men in the safe-deposit box room that he was coming.

      When he reached the door, the Executioner dropped to one knee and peered inside. Row upon row of safe-deposit boxes were stacked to a height of seven feet or so, and they prevented him from seeing anyone in the room.

      But they didn’t prevent his hearing the conversation.

      “I can’t open them,” a young female voice pleaded between sobs. “It takes both our key and the customers’.”

      “Then you’d better find some other way of getting into them,” said the same cigarette-smoking voice Bolan had heard over Glasser’s cell phone. “Because if I have to shoot the damn things open, and any jewelry or other valuables get damaged, my next shot is going right between those pretty little tits of yours.”

      The sobs increased in volume.

      A moment later, a lone shot was fired, but Bolan continued to hear the young woman cry. So the round had gone into one of the boxes rather than her chest.

      But it was only a matter of time before the raspy voice grew impatient, realized they were already under attack and killed her in order to concentrate his efforts on escape.

      Because by now the Rough Riders could be pretty sure that neither a helicopter nor an airplane was in their immediate future.

      “Find anything, Carl?” the raspy voice asked.

      “Nah,” said a new voice. “Nothing we can use anyway.”

      “Then shoot the next one.”

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