Serpent's Lair

MACK BOLAN HAD ESCAPED from the van with a relatively soft landing. His back hurt, but his shirt had protected him from most of the slashing, stabbing chunks of gravel in the road, and the thick, heavily toned muscles surrounding his shoulders and spine kept his bones from shattering as he somersaulted. It was not the most graceful of landings, but any one that you could walk away from, as his friend Jack Grimaldi once told him, was a great one.

The Executioner had only just come out of his roll, when he was looking at the front grille of a car bearing down on him. He had a gun with a dud round under the striker, was trying to recover his balance and heard the sound of brakes being applied behind him. Angry shouts from Rhode Hogan filled his ears.

The car screeched to a halt, the driver acting on instinct, gravel spitting from under the wheels. That was Mack Bolan’s only chance, a break in the onward advance that would have crushed him. He kicked with both legs, launching himself hard out of the path of the vehicle.

More tires screeched, and there was the sound of bumpers hammering each other. Bolan didn’t see the collision. He was rolling once more, this time through thick foliage at the roadside. Pliant green stalks snapped at his bare forearms and face as momentum carried him through. His shoulder felt as if it were on fire. Stinging pain and wet stickiness told him that his flesh had opened, and the enemy hadn’t even fired a shot.

He tucked onto one side and used both hands on the Glock in his fist.

At least the first round in each of the magazines had healthy looking primers. He racked the slide and ejected the dead, dud round, the next shot coming up and ready to go with one pull of the six-pound trigger. There were no safety catches or levers to be flicked into position to get the gun up and running.

The firearm was perfect for Matt Cooper, FBI agent, the smoke screen to get Mack Bolan within striking range of Yakuza daimyo Botan Okudaira.

Bolan considered his situation. This wasn’t about a hostage negotiation. This wasn’t about arresting someone. This was about the Executioner on the hunt for a criminal mastermind and stopping him before his organization grew strong enough to cause a turf war between Chinese and Japanese criminals—a turf war that would leave innocents dead in the cross fire and governments sweating the fallout.

The air was chilly without his jacket or a long-sleeved shirt, but it was starting to heat up as bursts of exploratory fire pumped out of the back of Hogan’s van, silenced automatic fire slicing into the brush. Bolan stayed low and crabwalked toward the tree line, not afraid of getting the Glock covered in mud or dirt. The plastic-framed pistol was nearly as reliable as his Beretta in resisting mud and the elements.

Bolan moved swiftly and was far enough away that all he could make out was Hogan shouting orders, the words suppressed by distance and gunfire.

The odds didn’t look good, not that Bolan was going to poke his head above the top of the foliage to expose himself. He just kept moving, walking on all fours, crouching low. His foot hit some tangled, muddy weeds and slipped. He fell to his knees and one elbow. He suppressed a grunt, but the foliage around him shook.

Bolan didn’t wait for the enemy to spot and react to the sudden movement. With all his strength and speed, he launched from the foliage into the woods, ducking behind a tree just as a blast of high-velocity bullets smashed into the trunk. The Executioner swung around and contemplated returning fire, but instead held it.

Thirty-nine shots wasn’t going to cut it, no matter how good a marksman he was. Not against automatic weapons with twice to three times the range of his pistol, and not against weapons in the hands of professionals who knew how to make use of every ounce of the superior shootability of a long-barreled rifle, or even a submachine gun. Bolan decided firing off even a short, discouraging burst would only attract attention and bring down the hammer of concentrated fury on him.

Instead, Bolan stayed behind the cover of a tree trunk about two feet in diameter. He was fifteen feet in from the tree line, watching for anyone starting for the woods. He watched as four men, wearing body armor and carrying big, black weapons, moved away from Hogan’s convoy.

The vehicles were starting up, disappearing up the road to continue to their rendezvous with the Yakuza.

Between Bolan and the rendezvous were four heavily armed killers, better equipped and better protected than he was, and several miles of road. He looked over his hurt shoulder and saw his shirt was torn. Gravel had scraped a layer of dermis away, leaving him raw and bloodied, but the wound was superficial. His shirt flapped open at the back, and a cold wind washed over him. The weather was in the fifties, and while he knew that wouldn’t be too bad for the short term, spending a whole day exposed to the cool could make him lapse into hypothermia. It happened to hikers all the time, people underdressing for the weather, thinking a spring day or a cool fall day couldn’t possibly threaten their health.

Bolan gave the Glock’s grip a reassuring squeeze, and waited for the enemy gunmen to draw closer. He had cover, and he was scouting out their angles of approach.

No good, he thought. Even if he could tag one, maybe two of the mercs, the others would nail him in a cross fire. They were too well spread out, yet able to give even the farthest of their partners cover fire. If Bolan exposed himself to take down one, three more would spring into action and cut him apart.

The men stopped well before the tree line.

“Come on out, Cooper!” one of them called. “We don’t want to shoot you.”

Bolan checked his watch. Its surface was gouged and scratched, but the hands underneath were undisturbed. He could still make the rendezvous by cutting across country.

But first, that meant getting past the enemy.

REBECCA ANTHONY HATED her name. She’d chosen Viscious Honey as her Goth name. Her hair was the same dark golden color of honey, and nearly as slick and fluid looking. Her green eyes stared out of heavily shadowed eyelids framed with thick black.

Honey leaned against the window and sighed. She tried to remember the day before. There’d been a rave at the club, maybe just a little too much Ecstasy and then she’d been stuffed into the back of the car. A pillow case had been thrown over her head and she’d struggled, but not hard enough.

She hadn’t had a chance to shower, and she had deliberately let her hair go for a while, letting natural oils and sweat darken her otherwise light and fluffy hair. Copious amounts of gel and hair spray made it glossy and heavy, spiking out and curling down in wild arcs from the center of her head. She’d colored it with grape Kool-Aid to make streaks of purple.

Her father hated her look, and that’s just what she’d wanted. She didn’t want to be the daughter of a millionaire who got his money from the spilled blood of the helpless, a man who helped design guidance systems for the bombs responsible for depriving people of power and water and sanitation utilities in two Gulf wars.

Honey always said she would rather be dead than living off her father’s money.

She was horrified at the idea of being traded for some of that blood-spattered cash.

Honey trembled, shuddering as she realized that, because of her, the Yakuza would get hold of the kind of high-tech weaponry that would allow them to rain death on their enemies and slaughter hundreds at the touch of a button. All because she got careless and was yanked into the back of the wrong car by a group of muscle-bound Japanese thugs looking to make some extra money.

She glared at Machida.

“What was I worth to my father?” Honey asked.

“We’ll learn that soon,” Machida answered.

2

Back against the wall, outgunned and outnumbered was not a new situation for the Executioner. In fact, being outgunned and outnumbered with his back against a tree trunk wasn’t even out of the ordinary. But, Bolan thought, at least he couldn’t grow complacent. Not with a supersonic round smashing into the bark sending splinters of wood stinging into his biceps. He dived out of the way before a sweeping scythe of automatic weapons fire cut across the tree at chest level.

Twisting, he landed with the Glock 23’s muzzle aiming at the gunman who’d taken the shot at him. Bolan pulled the trigger and there was nothing but a click. The striker had either snicked home on an empty primer, or the firing pin was malfunctioning. Or both.

Four armed men and a malfunctioning pistol would be enough to make any man give up the ghost.

But Bolan wasn’t just any man.

He rolled out of the way as the machine gunner, spotting the movement on the ground, compensated. Bullets slammed into the earth where he had been only moments before. With a surge of speed, Bolan plunged himself deeper into the woods.

Bullet strikes kicked up leaves at his heels and the Executioner grimaced at the thought of having to run from a fight. He grabbed a tree trunk and swung himself around, cutting away at a hard right angle, leaping over a log and finding himself in a clot of bushes.

He could see the men in the woods following his trail. They hadn’t counted on him breaking the course so quickly. Still, each was watching the other, eyes sweeping the backs of their partners as they advanced. It was a slow leapfrog. They weren’t keeping to the same pace as their prey.

Professional soldiers, to a man, and the Executioner was unarmed except for his wits, a folding knife in his pocket and the steel slide of his Glock. Wrapping his fingers around the barrel, his thumb through the trigger guard, he had a good hunk of square, exposed steel with which to smash the heavy dome of a skull, provided he had enough stealth to sneak up on these men, and had enough strength and speed to take out one man while his partner was preoccupied with advancing. The folding Applegate-Fairbairn combat knife would be his backup, four inches of deadly double-bladed steel that might be able to punch through the heavy Kevlar vests the mercs wore.

Rising silently, the Executioner advanced through the woods, circling back. He closed in on the last man in line.

Bolan sidestepped, knowing that if he missed, he was going to raise a racket. The folding dagger opened soundlessly, but locked securely. Steel in each hand, he was going to make his move, and his legs coiled up tight.

It was only four long strides, two and a leap if he timed it right, to take down the tail gunner. He took a deep, slow, silent breath, let out half and then lunged.

Gun metal struck bone head-on with a crunch, and the enemy mercenary was stunned by the unexpected impact.

Bolan dropped the knife and held on to the man, keeping him from tumbling to the ground. He was hoping the others hadn’t noticed the commotion when he felt the first impacts of the 9 mm rounds strike the man that Bolan suddenly used as shield.

“He’s got Tom!” came the cry, followed by a second burst.

Bolan held the back of Tom’s armor. The fingers on his right hand ached from holding both the Glock and the collar of the protective vest, but his grip on the man’s belt was much firmer.

A third burst hit Tom, and the multiple shocks shook the body so much that the weakened and sliced web belt came apart. The mercenary fell dead from Bolan’s hands, but the Executioner still had his hands on whatever gear the gunman had on his belt.

Bullets tore through the air, and Bolan was in retreat again. He had a handgun and spare clips on the belt in his fist, and at least a mile to cross overland.