Hell Night. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ the wall, trying not to move the door in case its hinges needed oiling. When he’d accomplished that feat, he stayed low, duck-walking his way past the several rows of safe-deposit boxes until he came to a stack just beyond where the two men and the woman were standing. At least he thought there were only two men—because only two men had spoken. He reminded himself that there could be more Rough Riders there, assisting in the pilfering of the boxes, who had kept quiet.

      Bolan flipped the selector switch to safety and set the M-16 on the floor. Slowly and silently he drew the sound-suppressed Beretta 93-R. If there were more than just the two men, he would take out as many as he could with the near silent Beretta. With any luck, he’d capture the man with the raspy voice alive. He hoped it went down that way at least. Dead men not only told no tales, but they also gave up no intelligence information.

      But it was not to be.

      Behind them, through the lobby and at the rear of the bank, came the roar of gunfire as Glasser’s SWAT teams entered the building and engaged the Rough Riders spread throughout the bank. The raspy voice on the other side of the stack of steel boxes said, “Okay, that’s it. We need to get out of here. Kill her, Carl, and let’s get going.”

      Bolan could wait no longer.

      Still squatting, the Executioner leaned around the corner and saw a short, stocky man with a three-day growth of beard lifting a Government Model 1911 .45 to the temple of the openly crying female bank employee. He had already made contact with the muzzle of the .45 by the time the Executioner lined up the Beretta’s sights on him and flipped the selector to semiauto as he’d done with the M-16. But his other suspicions had been accurate. Besides the man with the unfiltered cigarette voice, three more armed men in coveralls stool in the aisle in front of the boxes.

      One 9 mm round was all it would take to save the young woman, but it would have to be precisely placed, and he could control that placement better with the Beretta in semiauto mode. The shot would have to go directly into the Rough Rider’s brain stem and shut down all motor functions, lest the man called Carl pulled the trigger of the .45 in a convulsion of death.

      Taking a deep breath, the Executioner let out half of it, stopped, then gently squeezed the Beretta’s trigger. The sound suppressor coughed out the bullet. A subsonic, semijacketed hollowpoint entered the man’s brain, and he dropped the .45 as he fell to the floor.

      But the shot had drawn the attention of the other men down the aisle toward Bolan, and one of the coveralled men now raised a Heckler & Koch MP-5. With no time to switch to 3-round-burst mode, the Executioner aimed carefully again, hitting the main squarely in the nose. In his peripheral vision, he saw the raspy-voiced man he assumed was the leader take off down the aisle, away from him. But he had no chance to stop him because the second of the third men was now trying to fix the sights of a Glock on the Executioner.

      Bolan remembered the vest on the man with the mustache and again aimed high. The shot took the Rough Rider in the scalp. But it was not a kill shot. The man got off one wild 10 mm round from his large-framed Glock. Miraculously it missed both Bolan and the female bank employee. The Executioner fired again.

      And this time, his near silent 9 mm round caught the man in the right eye.

      The only man left had taken off his ski mask completely, and Bolan could see it stuffed in a side pocket of the coveralls. He fired once more, and the 9 mm slug took out the last Rough Rider’s left eye.

      All of the men who had accompanied the raspy-voiced leader into the safe-deposit room were dead.

      Bolan rushed up to the young woman, who was sniffling between sobs. “You all right?” he asked.

      She nodded. “Thank you,” she managed through the crying.

      Bolan looked past her to the end of the aisle. The leader of the Rough Riders was nowhere to be seen. The Executioner carefully searched the rest of the room, but was not surprised when the cigarette smoker didn’t turn up.

      The man had used his own troops to give him time to escape.

      Picking up his M-16 as he left the room, Bolan could still hear gunfire coming from the rear of the bank. One of the SWAT men was in the lobby, personally holding the front door open for the terrified hostages and telling each one to stay close—they’d need statements from them all.

      “Anybody in the teller’s area?” Bolan asked the man as he passed.

      The SWAT trooper shook his head. “What’s left of them is in the back. They’ve barricaded themselves in the vault.”

      Bolan stopped in his tracks. “You get a look at the vault?” he asked.

      The SWAT man nodded.

      “Can the door be opened from the inside once it’s locked?”

      The man holding the door for the hostages nodded. “I just caught a glance at it earlier when I ran by. And I’m no safe expert, but it looked like it to me.”

      Bolan hurried through the swinging door, stepping over several dead bodies in coveralls as he made his way to the back of the bank. He passed several private offices as he ran down an empty hallway. Turning a corner, he passed two more SWAT team members who lowered their AR-15s as soon as they recognized him.

      The two men appeared to have gotten Glasser’s orders that Bolan was in charge. They both saluted as he ran by.

      At the end of the hallway, Bolan found both the closed and locked vault door, and SWAT Captain Tom Glasser along with more of his men. A half dozen more dead Rough Riders, all dressed in coveralls and blue stocking caps, had been piled unceremoniously against the wall, out of the way.

      Which was fine with the Executioner. Terrorists deserved no ceremony when they were righteously killed.

      “What’s going down?” the Executioner asked the recent Stony Man Farm graduate.

      Glasser’s eyes reflected a deep confusion. “They’ve barricaded themselves in the vault, and they’ve got hostages,” he said. “It’s really no different than when they held the whole bank a few minutes ago. The playing field’s just become smaller.”

      “How many of them left?” Bolan asked.

      “The bad guys? Five, maybe six. And they’ve got three or four hostages. Can’t be certain.” He paused a second, then went on. “That raspy voice we heard on the phone?”

      “Yeah?” the Executioner said.

      “He’s one of them.”

      Bolan nodded. “Same demands?” he asked.

      Glasser nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “but at least we can probably get them to settle for a smaller helicopter this time.”

      The Executioner nodded at the attempt at dark humor on Glasser’s part. It was one of the ways cops and soldiers relieved tension.

      Then he turned and looked at the vault door.

      There would be no skylight to bust through here.

      So he would have to come up with an alternate plan, and come up with it fast.

      2

      “You СКАЧАТЬ