Lethal Payload

The driver jerked backward as the burst walked up his chest and neck and punched in the visor of his helmet. The scream of the gunner was lost as the motorcycle went up on its rear wheel and drove out from under the riders. Gunner and driver hit the road in a seventy-five-mile-per-hour pinwheel of breaking bones. The other three motorcycles swerved wildly to avoid the rolling carnage.

Behind them the pickup continued to close in.

Bolan steadied himself and aimed his weapon. The three rifles facing him ripped into life.

The only defense was offense. Bolan stood and shot.

A second motorcycle spun out of control as the soldier printed three 9 mm hollowpoints into the driver’s chest. Men and motorcycle rolled in an orgy of twisting metal and rending flesh. The other two gunmen continued to fire.

Bolan’s jaw slammed against the roof of the Volvo, and he nearly lost his weapon as one of the rear tires exploded with a lucky hit. He was nearly flung from the sunroof as Kiraly violently overcorrected to keep the car on the road. Bolan held on to the luggage rack for dear life, but the aluminum strut ripped free in his hand. Only his legs scissored around the headrest kept Bolan connected to the car as the vehicle fishtailed.

The Executioner squeezed his knees together with all of his strength as he took the Beretta in both hands. Kiraly could barely keep the car on the road. Bolan fired burst after burst trying to compensate for the slewing vehicle. The motorcycles came on with both rifles blazing. Bullets chewed into the rear bumper. The remains of the rear tire shredded away, and the Volvo dipped sickeningly to one side. Metal screamed as the wheel bit into the roadway. The roof of the car tore in a line beside Bolan’s elbow, and a whip cracked by Bolan’s ear as a bullet missed his head by inches.

The Beretta recoiled in Bolan’s hand and locked back on empty as he fired off his last burst. The driver of the closest motorcycle jerked as a bullet took him in the shoulder, and the gunner behind him rubbernecked as the second bullet of the burst took him in the face. The gunner fell off the back motorcycle with his rifle still firing.

The burst from his dead hand climbed up the back of his driver.

The motorcycle veered sharply as the driver collapsed and fell into the path of his wingman. Breaking humans and breaking motorcycles bounced and rolled in their death throes across the pavement.

The pickup came on, hitting a body and rolling right over it. Armed men stood in the truck bed clinging to the roll bar. Bolan recognized the shape of an RPG-7 rocket launcher. The truck was closing to within range.

Bolan dropped the Beretta and shoved himself backward to secure his footing in the car. He reached for the flopping remains of the luggage rack and pulled off the bungee cords that held his package.

The Executioner ripped the canvas cover off the M-60 general-purpose machine gun.

He racked the action of the M-60 and pulled open the legs of the bipod. He crouched in the sunroof and leaned into the machine gun’s shoulder stock. The lurching of the stricken Volvo made aimed fire almost impossible. Bolan squeezed the trigger and began walking the smoking lines of tracers into the pickup.

The front of the truck sparked with bullet strikes. The Volvo bounced as it hit a bump in the road, and the rest of Bolan’s burst went high. There was almost no way to keep the weapon steady. The soldier paused to align his weapon again and fired another burst. The passenger side of the windshield went opaque with bullet strikes before Bolan’s burst climbed off aim again.

Flame blossomed around the roof of the truck as the antitank rocket roared out of its launch tube in answer.

Bolan’s voice thundered at parade ground decibels. “Right! Right! Right!”

Kiraly yanked the wheel. The football-size warhead of the rocket-propelled grenade flew past the car on a column of black smoke and detonated in the rainforest beyond.

“Brakes!”

Kiraly stood on the brakes, and the car spun screaming into the guardrail. Bolan bounced inside the frame of the sunroof with bone-cracking force. The Volvo careened into a smoking stop. Bolan slammed the M-60 back down across the roof and lined up his sights as the pickup approached.

Bolan squeezed the machine gun’s trigger. Tracers walked up the pavement in a line for the front of the truck. The smoking Volvo was finally motionless, and the Executioner had a stable platform from which to use his sights. He leaned into his weapon and held down the trigger. Sparks flew off the grille as he got hits. Sparks flew and bits of metal pinged away from the front. The missile man in the back was desperately ramming a fresh rocket into his launch tube. The hood of the truck flew up as its catch smashed apart. Smoke and flames were whipped by the wind. Bolan paused as the truck closed to one hundred yards, and raised his aim.

The Executioner put his front sight on the driver’s side of the windshield and burned the rest of his belt. The popped hood ripped away, and the rest of the windshield collapsed inward. The nose of the dying truck swerved one way and then the other as if someone were wrestling with the wheel, and then spun as if someone had violently won the fight.

The truck veered across the road, hit the guardrail and somersaulted off the highway. The men in the back went flying.

Bolan’s spare belt of ammo for the M-60 had miraculously stayed attached to the canvas tied to the roof. He laid the belt into the feed ramp and clacked it shut. “Go, get us away from the scene and then pull off the road, we’ll—”

“We’ve got problems,” Kiraly said.

Bolan glanced around. It was only a two-lane highway. A few hundred yards ahead a pair of military-style jeeps blocked the road in a V formation. There was nowhere to run, and the Volvo was in no shape for a chase, anyway. Bolan racked the M-60’s action. “Floor it.”

Metal screamed as the remaining rear tire clawed for traction and the side panels sparked themselves free of the guardrail. A man stood beside each jeep carefully aiming a rifle across the hood. Bolan slid back down into the car.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

Kiraly flinched at the deafening blast as Bolan shot out the windshield. He pulled up his knee and kicked out the sagging glass panel and then shoved the M-60 forward onto the hood.

The Volvo limped up to forty miles per hour. Kiraly shook her head in horror at the apocalyptic game of chicken. The riflemen ahead began firing.

“Don’t stop,” Bolan said as he began triggering bursts from first at one jeep and then the other. The bipod slid on the hood, and Bolan’s shots were all over the map. Aimed fire began hitting the front of the Volvo. Bullets tore into the grille. Bolan’s side mirror was shot away, and Kiraly flinched and screamed as a bit of the headrest by her ear disappeared. Steam spewed from bullet holes in the hood. Kiraly kept her foot on the gas, and the dying Volvo lurched on like a Swedish kamikaze.

Bolan fired burst after burst and suddenly the two jeeps were right in front of them. The two riflemen hurled themselves away from the impending carnage. Bolan yanked the red-hot machine gun back into the car and clasped it across his chest.

The Volvo hit the roadblock at forty-seven miles per hour.

The jeeps spun away in opposite directions as the front of the Volvo folded like an accordion. Front and side air bags blew forth from the safety panels and violently expanded to obscure Bolan’s world as the Volvo sailed on. The car burst through the guardrail and came to a halt against a forty-foot ironwood tree.

Bolan ignored the stars in his vision and the coppery taste of blood in his mouth. He ripped free the knife on his belt and gutted the air bags pressing against him. He yanked the door handle but nothing happened as the air bags deflated around him. The soldier threw his shoulder once, twice and the third time his door burst open. He fell to the mud and gravel, clutching the M-60. He lurched up and slammed the weapon across the roof of the vehicle.

A gunshot rang out instantly, and something plucked at the collar of Bolan’s shirt.

He clamped down his trigger and sprayed an arc of bullets before him. He caught sight of the two riflemen crouched beside one of the mangled jeeps. The Executioner kept his trigger down and forced them under cover with sheer firepower.

Kiraly’s .45-caliber Glock pistol began barking on rapid semiauto from the driver’s-side window. Bolan maintained fire and riddled the jeep into smoking ruin. He let off the trigger and glared down his sights. Brass shell casings rolled across the pavement. There were no other sounds except the ticking, hissing, dripping and steaming sounds of dead and dying automobiles.

The soldier kept his hand on the trigger as he slid the M-60’s sling over his shoulder. He crouched and came around the Volvo with the machine gun in the hip-assault position. He looked both ways, but nothing moved. Save for the jungle itself, there was no cover to be had except for the destroyed automobiles. Bolan crossed the road covering the jeep. He stepped around and found what he had been expecting.

Broken glass, spent shell casings and blood.

The Executioner walked to the edge of the highway and swung a leg over the guardrail. There was a bloody handprint on the curved metal. Bolan took a deep breath and scanned ahead. Six feet away the jungle was a solid wall. He looked down into the mud beside the highway. There were boot prints.

Two sets of them.

They were clearly two different sizes, but both sets of prints had the exact same pattern of tread marks. The smaller set of prints faltered and smeared twice on the right hand side. The larger set grew deeper. Bolan nodded. One of the men was definitely wounded. He memorized the pattern of the treads for a future sketch and walked back to the road. He picked up a couple of his opponent’s spent shell casings and pocketed them and then returned to the car.

Kiraly lay back like a wet rag in the driver’s seat. Her nose was broken and so was her left hand. Her spent Glock lay in her lap with the action racked back on an empty chamber. She gave Bolan a bruised smile and reached up to pat the cracked dashboard.

“Volvo. Safest car on the road today.”

5

Hotel Cayenne, French Guiana

“What do you think?”

Kurtzman responded over the videophone link. “Nice piece of work there.”

Bolan glanced at the sketch he had made of the tread patterns he had seen in the mud by the highway. “So what did you make of them?”