Hell Night

Bolan looked down at his wrist. He had a little under ten minutes before the hostages started dying. Switching on the microphone mounted to his shoulder, Bolan realized he had no call letters or numbers of his own, and he didn’t know what Tom Glasser’s were, either. So he said simply, “Cooper to Glasser. Cooper to Glasser. Come in, Glasser.”

“SWAT 1,” Glasser’s voice came back. “This is Glasser, Cooper. You got a call name?”

The Executioner lowered his voice until he suspected it could barely be heard on the other end of the line. “I go by Striker, SWAT 1. And I’m on the roof,” he whispered. “Have you had any more contact with the subjects inside?”

“Negative, Striker,” Glasser came back. He was whispering, too. “But we’ve got the funny money on the way here, compliments of the Secret Service.”

“How about the chopper?” Bolan asked.

“We’re trying to find one big enough. And that’s not easy if you don’t go to the military.”

Bolan immediately understood the reason behind the SWAT captain’s words. The regular military was forbidden from taking action in police matters inside the U.S., and most of the time that was a good thing—it ensured that America would not become a military state ruled by its armed forces. But there were exceptions to that rule, when the use of the armed forces seemed like the only logical answer.

This was one of them.

“See if you can go through the state’s National Guard,” the Executioner said. “If they don’t have a chopper big enough on hand, they ought to be able to get one from the regular army.” He paused and felt his eyebrows furrow as he thought further. “And use this as an excuse to stall some more. Call into the bank on your cell phone and explain the problem with the chopper. See if you can buy some more time.”

“Affirmative, Striker,” Glasser said. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Negative, SWAT 1,” Bolan said as he made his way carefully across the shingled roof one shaky step at a time. “And the fact that I’m up top is for your ears only. We can’t expect fifty men—no matter how good they are—to keep from glancing up and being seen by the bad guys.”

“Roger, Striker,” Glasser said. “That intel stays in-house.”

Bolan finally made it off the carport roofs and onto the flat tar roof of the bank proper. His eyes skirted the building, seeing ventilation shafts, heat and air-conditioning equipment, and a variety of other pipes and housings sticking up out of the dirty black surface. He walked slowly around the perimeter of the building, staying just far enough from the edge that his head couldn’t be seen by the police officers on the ground.

He had meant what he’d told Glasser. All it would take would be for one of the Rough Riders below him to see one cop straining his eyes toward the roof to know someone was above them. Then the element of surprise would be gone.

The Executioner had hoped to find a return air shaft or some similar means to enter the building below, but he had no such luck. Banks were built with the hope of keeping people out after business hours, and the rough roof of First Fidelity was no exception. There were holes leading down into the building, all right. But the Executioner would have had to have been the size of a house cat to get through them.

With one exception.

Near the street side of the building, above what Bolan assumed would be the bank’s front lobby, was a large skylight. Slowly, he crept toward it, formulating his plan of attack as he went. If the skylight was plastic, he’d be out of luck here, too. He’d have to shoot enough holes through the plastic with the M-16 A-2 to create an opening large enough to drop through. And by the time that had been accomplished, the Rough Riders would have had time to kill the bank employees and other hostages several times over.

But if it was glass…

When he’d drawn near enough that he feared he might be seen be someone looking upward, Bolan dropped to his belly and used his elbows to pull himself the rest of the way to the skylight. Then, slowly—almost ceremoniously—he reached out with his left hand and tapped the clear surface in front of him.

Both the sound, and the feel, brought a smile to his face.

The skylight was made of glass. It would shatter just as quickly, and as surely, as the picture window next to the front door had.

Crawling back a few yards, the Executioner rose to his feet again and activated the mike on his shoulder. “Striker to SWAT 1,” he said. “Come in, SWAT 1.”

“I hear you Striker,” came back into his ear.

Bolan looked at his watch. He had a little over a minute before the twenty-minute deadline. “You buy us any extra time with the National Guard story?” he asked Glasser.

“Negative,” said the SWAT commander. “The guy just laughed, told me he knew a stall job when he heard one, then repeated his threat to start killing one hostage for each minute we were late.”

“Okay,” Bolan said. “Then it’s Plan B time.” He glanced at his watch once more.

Forty-five seconds remained.

He was about to speak to Glasser again when he saw another man in green coveralls and a blue ski mask shove a middle-aged woman directly under the skylight. The late-afternoon sun was at an angle that gave him an almost perfect view through the glass and, he suspected, would block or at least distort what could be seen by anyone looking up through the skylight.

But at this stage of the game he was taking no chances. Bolan took another step back until only the tops of the man’s and woman’s heads were visible. He had already seen all he needed to see.

The man in the coveralls had wrapped his left forearm around the woman’s throat. The short, stubby muzzle of an Ingram MAC-11 submachine gun was pressed against her nape. The watch on his wrist was clearly visible, and Bolan could see the Rough Rider staring at it, counting off the final seconds just as the Executioner was doing above, on the roof.

Bolan glanced at the MAC-11 again. Those submachine guns cycled at a phenomenally fast rate of fire. Unless the man firing the weapon was extremely experienced with it, he could empty the entire 30-round magazine before he let up on the trigger. All of which made the Ingrams less suitable for combat than for assassinations.

But an outright murder was exactly what was going to happen in less than thirty seconds unless the Executioner acted swiftly. The woman’s head would be almost completely gone before the Rough Rider even had time to let up on the trigger.

Bolan looked at his wrist. Twenty-eight seconds.

“Listen and listen fast, SWAT 1,” he whispered into the mike. “Fifteen seconds from the time I stop talking I’m coming down through the skylight. You should hear a few shots from me up top here, then glass breaking. Tell your men that’s their cue—when they hear the gunfire and then the crash it’s time to charge the building.”

“You’ve got it,” Glasser said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Bolan said. “Make sure that your men know that once they’re inside the bank, they’re to take orders from me.”

“I’ll make sure they understand it,” Glasser said. “When do we begin the countdown?”

“Fifteen seconds from…now,” Bolan said.

He took a deep breath and squinted through the glass. From where he stood, he had a good angle at the head of the man in the green coveralls. He switched the M-16 to 3-round burst mode, then lined up the sights on the back of the man’s head. The holes he was about to drill through the glass would weaken it and make it shatter even easier.

The Executioner took a final glance at his watch, then returned his eyes to the sights. Slowly, he squeezed the trigger and watched the back of the Rough Rider’s head blow off as three tiny holes appeared in the skylight.

A second after that, he leaped onto the glass in a sitting position and crashed through the skylight into the First Fidelity Bank.

THE EXECUTIONER STRAIGHTENED his legs as he fell through the glass, thankful that the blacksuit was made out of cut-resistant material. Still, he felt a few shreds of glass scrape his hands and face, and by the time his feet hit the floor of the bank’s lobby he could feel tiny drops of blood running down his cheeks.

They mattered little in the grand scheme of things.

The Executioner landed on his feet, right behind the screaming woman 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.