Resurgence

Closer, this time. Somewhere ahead.

When she had covered half the hallway’s length, one of the doors opened downrange. A gunman stepped into the corridor, didn’t seem to notice her at first, as he was more focused on the man who followed close behind him.

Lorik Cako.

He cursed someone in the room, still out of sight from where Volkova stood, and reached back as if to drag the person through the doorway. Then his gunner saw the Russian and brought all movement to a halt.

“Look out, boss!”

But Cako couldn’t look out. It was too late for that.

Too late for anything.

Volkova cut them down, kept firing even as they fell and after they were on the floor, dead meat twitching from bullet strikes. She caught herself in time to ditch the AKSU’s empty magazine and slip a fresh one into the receiver, then advanced to peer around the doorjamb.

Panicked faces stared back at her, shaded by a stark light overhead. Volkova didn’t bother counting. Didn’t have the time to spare, and couldn’t say how many captives Cako was supposed to have, for starters.

“Come with me,” she said, not knowing if they spoke English or not. She tried Albanian and then Russian before she ran out of languages.

One of them worked, apparently. Huddled together, weeping softly, the women filed out to follow her.

FURIOUS AND frightened at the same time, Arben Kurti lapsed from English back into his native language, raging at the soldiers who surrounded him.

“A diçka!” he demanded, but the broad command to “do something” provided no direction. Failing that, he cursed them, while they hunched their shoulders, hung their heads and took it like submissive children, long inured to rigid discipline.

And, somehow, it actually helped.

Not them, of course. But Kurti suddenly felt better after venting his accumulated anger and frustration. Now, if only he could get his hands on Lorik Cako’s throat and squeeze until the little bastard’s eyes popped out, he would be almost happy once again.

Except for one small detail.

He was in the line of fire from enemies whom he couldn’t identify, and it appeared that they were closing in.

“It’s time to go,” he informed his men but telling them that hardly ensured that they could actually leave the house alive.

If there were enemies outside…

Kurti moved to the nearest window, crouching there, and peered into the pale morning. He saw no gunmen waiting there, from either side, but the three Lexus SUVs that had delivered Kurti and his team to Cako’s hideaway were burning, spewing oily smoke across the landscape.

Never mind.

The nearest of the limousines was still intact. If they could reach that car and get it started, they could still escape. Let Cako deal with the attackers. It was his place, after all, and he’d been after Kurti for the past two years, begging for more authority.

Would there be keys in the limos?

Kurti grabbed his nearest soldier by one arm and ordered him to check the car for keys. “Signal if you can start it, and we’ll join you.”

The young man bobbed his head, muttered, “Yes, sir,” and made a beeline for the nearest exit.

Seconds later, Kurti saw him jogging toward the limousines, looking around in all directions as he moved, squinting against the smoke. He reached the nearest vehicle, opened the driver’s door and leaned inside. A moment later, he was facing toward the house, thumb raised above a clenched fist in the universal sign of victory.

“Come on!” Kurti snapped at the rest. “We’re leaving this cursed place to the rats.”

And it did seem to be cursed. Kurti had heard the grim Pine Barrens legends. Surely, it had been bad luck for those he’d executed there, as an example to the rest of his subordinates. Now, somehow, it was coming back to haunt him.

But Kurti had found his escape hatch.

He would beat the curse, yet.

One of his soldiers led the way outside, the others taking up positions that would shield their chief from incoming fire as they moved toward the limo. They were halfway there, his point man urging them to hurry, when it happened.

Suddenly, with just an unobtrusive popping sound for warning, a grenade lofted above and past them, detonating as it struck the long black limousine dead-on. One second, Kurti’s rifleman was waiting for them by the vehicle; the next, he was a flaming scarecrow, dancing in a lake of fire.

Kurti cursed, and his soldiers turned to face their enemy. It startled him to find a single man confronting them, and hope sparked in his chest before the stranger’s automatic rifle started spitting death among them, toppling Arben Kurti’s human shields.

At last he was alone, with nothing left to do but close his eyes and wait for death.

The house he’d fled seemed strangely silent now.

A heartbeat later, darkness swallowed him.

BOLAN HEARD female voices coming up behind him, turned to face them with his finger on the M-4’s trigger, then relaxed. Volkova, trailed by thirteen women clad in terry robes and rubber flip-flops, focused on the bodies strewed across the parking area.

“So Kurti made the party,” she remarked.

“I think it disappointed him,” Bolan replied.

“Cako’s inside,” the Russian said. “He didn’t want to let these go, but I persuaded him.”

“The buyers?” Bolan asked.

“No sign of them. I hoped you might have found them. I suppose we’ll have to go back in.”

“No need for that,” Bolan said, as he broke the Milkor’s cylinder and started to remove spent cartridges, dropping them at his feet. “I brought some party favors for the housewarming.”

He filled the empty chambers with alternating HE rounds and pyrotechnic cartridges, closed the cylinder and stepped aside to give himself a clear shot past the huddled, frightened women. All of them stood watching as he raised the grenade launcher and started firing, putting hot rounds through the windows of the house where they had been confined most recently.

Ear-spanking HE blasts covered the pop and hiss of his incendiary rounds inside the house, but flames quickly took hold. He waited until smoke was billowing from the shattered windows, half expecting some of Cako’s customers to break for daylight, but they didn’t show.

So be it.

“Do you think they found some way out through the back?” Volkova asked.

“It’s fifty-fifty,” Bolan said. “If they’re out wandering around the barrens, we can leave them to the state police. If they’re inside…”

He didn’t need to finish it and didn’t plan to wait around for stragglers. Even in the barrens, the smoke signals raised by Cako’s burning house and cars would draw attention. Bolan planned to call it in himself, once they were on the road. Fire-fighters should be on the scene in time to save the woods.

But not any survivors hiding in the house.