Fatal Combat

Bolan paused at the stairwell. Beneath the noise of the apartments, both in and outside the building, he could hear something else.

Shuffling. There were men in the stairwell.

Bolan reached into the canvas war bag. He removed a flashbang grenade, popped the pin and watched the spoon spring free.

Below him, someone moved in response to the noise.

The soldier leaned over the stairwell railing and let the grenade fall.

He turned away, shielding his ears with his palms, squeezing his eyes shut. The actinic flash of the grenade was bright enough that he could see it through his eyelids. The thunder-clap of the less-lethal bomb made his teeth vibrate. He heard a scream.

No sooner had the flash faded than Bolan hoisted himself up over the railing. He dropped, colliding heavily on the landing below, absorbing the impact with his legs. Rising from his crouch, he drew the double-edged combat-survival dagger in his waistband. The trio of men in whose midst he had landed, either held or were reaching for automatic weapons. They were dressed in what Bolan recognized as expensive suits, probably tailored to hide their shoulder holsters and submachine-gun harnesses. All three continued rubbing at their eyes or holding their ears.

The nearest of the gunmen managed to fix Bolan with bloodshot eyes, fighting the involuntary tears streaming down his face. His gun came up, but Bolan stabbed him in the neck and ripped the knife forward and away. The dying man spun, spraying the wall crimson.

Bolan kicked out the knee of the second man, dropping him to the floor. The third was on his hands and knees, trying to find the micro-Uzi he had dropped. The Executioner fired a kick to his ribs and was rewarded with an audible crack as the gunman rolled over. He threw his knife arm backward, sensing the second man surging back to his feet, and rammed the double-edged blade into the hollow of the gunner’s throat. Yanking the knife out in a circular motion as he wrenched the man’s head around, the soldier levered him down to die on the stairs.

Bolan checked left, right, and then up and down the stairwell, very quickly. Then he threw himself to the floor, landing with his knee in the back of the man he had rib-kicked. Air gasped from the gunman’s lungs and he lost his grip on the Uzi again. Bolan kicked the gun away and moved to secure the man; he had plastic zip-tie cuffs in his pocket. He rolled his prisoner over so the man’s back was on the floor.

The would-be killer wasn’t down for the count. His hand snaked into his jacket and came out with a backup pistol, a tiny chromed .25ACP. He fired a single round. Bolan swatted the gun aside and plunged the blade of his knife into the most quickly lethal target. The blade penetrated the gunner’s eye and turned him off as if a switch had been thrown.

Bolan drew a breath.

He followed the path of the bullet, but it had lodged in the railing of the stairwell, taking chips from the paint. The small-caliber slug would not have been much of a threat, but the whole point of Bolan’s maneuver had been to neutralize these attackers before they started firing at close quarters. Most pistol and machine-gun rounds would pass right through an interior wall of a dwelling. They would penetrate most exterior walls, for that matter. In slums like these, gunfire would scythe through the residents as if the walls weren’t there. Bolan could not permit that to happen, which meant he had to keep moving, and quickly, to get clear of the tenement.

“Davis,” Bolan said quietly, wiping his knife clean on one of the dead men’s jackets. He sheathed the blade. “I have engaged multiple hostiles. Well dressed and heavily armed.” He began methodically stripping the gunmen’s weapons, separating slides and bolts from receivers and tossing the results in opposite directions. “See if you can get some uniforms in here, including the medical examiner. Tell them to sweep the building,” he suggested. “I don’t want to leave a lot of firearms in component parts for the neighborhood kids to play with.” He took a moment to snap pictures of the dead men and transmit them to Stony Man Farm.

Bolan took the stairs two and three at a time as he made his way back down, counting on speed and initiative to save him should there be any more shooters positioned as backup somewhere below. When he hit ground level, he made his way for the rear of the building, stepping over a homeless man sleeping in the alcove. The street person shouted curses after the soldier, who ignored them.

Bolan spotted the gunman’s car, parked exactly where Davis said it would be. There were two thugs sitting in it, one on the passenger side and one behind the wheel.

Bolan drew the Beretta 93-R and flicked the selector switch to 3-round burst.

They noticed him coming before he got more than a few steps. Bolan saw the driver bring a small handheld two-way radio to his face. He was lining up the men in the car for a shot when the first bullet hit the pavement at his feet.

There were more gunmen, hidden behind the building—a lot more. There had to be at least one other vehicle Davis hadn’t seen. The gunmen were grouped on the fire escape of the adjacent position, covering the rear entrance from elevation. No doubt they thought this afforded them the tactical advantage.

Against any man but the Executioner, it would have.

Bolan rolled into a tight ball and threw himself forward and right, behind the concrete abutment supporting the metal posts of the roof over the rear entrance. Bullets kicked up cement dust as automatic gunfire ripped through the space between the tenements. Beyond that, Bolan could hear the shouts of men and women reacting to the sudden warfare in their midst. In a neighborhood as bad as this, they would be accustomed to the occasional shot, even a short exchange among gangs or rival drug dealers. A prolonged firefight like this would be something else entirely, and cause for real concern among even the most hardened denizens of this Detroit ghetto.

Bolan was pinned down. He could not retreat through the building at his back; that would invite the gunmen into the tenement, too, which was the problem he had just worked to avoid. He could not break right or left; that would give the shooters a clear shot. They would pick him off easily before he got the chance to shoot them all.

His only way out was directly across the alley, into the space beneath the shooters, where the fire escape itself would foul their aim. He braced himself, coiling his body like a spring, and prepared to make a dash for it.

Breaking for it, Bolan threw himself into the alleyway.

The parked car wasn’t parked anymore. It was moving at speed—and coming right for him.

4

The Crown Victoria barreled down the narrow alleyway from the opposite direction. The gunmen in the Chevy saw it coming and tried to swerve, only to sheer bricks from the tenement on the driver’s side. Davis pushed the car’s engine to the red line. The vehicles collided with a scream of metal on metal and roaring 8-cylinder power plants. With his foot apparently still pushed all the way to the floor, Davis leaned out of his open window, extended his Glock and pumped its entire magazine into the windshield of the gunmen’s car.

Bolan couldn’t afford to admire Davis’s handiwork. The shooters on the fire escape did their best to track him and gun him down, but he was moving too fast, his rush under their guns had been just unexpected enough to work. When he was directly below them, he flattened himself against the building, raised the Beretta skyward in a two-handed grip and started firing.

To the men on the fire escape, the world erupted in flying, burning metal. Bolan’s rounds punched through from below, ricocheting from the metal grates of the upper landing, turning the metal basket in which they stood into a blood-soaked nightmare. One of the men above managed to trigger a blast that went wide, digging a furrow near Bolan’s heels, before he went down.

Footsteps sounded at one end of the alley mouth.

“Cooper!” Davis yelled as he reloaded his Glock. “More coming!”

Bolan ran for the passenger side of the car, ripped open the door and jumped in, pulling the door shut against damaged hinges. Davis slammed the gearshift into Reverse and stepped on it, sending the car skidding back the way it had come.

“Where to?” Davis asked.

“Get us back onto the street,” Bolan said, reloading the Beretta. He racked the slide. “You know this area. Where can we go where there are fewer people?”

“Two blocks over,” Davis said without hesitation. “There’s a strip of old commercial and residential structures targeted for urban renewal. Most of it’s boarded up. There are some homeless camped there, but not too many during the day. It’s more or less deserted right now.”

“Perfect. Don’t spare the gas.”

Davis pushed them through sparse traffic. A vehicle appeared to be following them—Bolan assumed it was the car Davis hadn’t seen, the one that had to have been nearby to transport the assassins—and where there was one, there might be more. Despite Davis’s skilled driving, the pursuit car began to gain on them.

Bolan drew the Desert Eagle from its Kydex holster.

“How did they find us?” Davis asked.

“They had to know where we would be,” Bolan said.

“Somebody in the department,” Davis said, frowning. “Somebody with access to my files. The list of addresses.”

Bolan said nothing for a moment. He was watching the hostiles’ car come up on their passenger-side flank. “Give us a burst of speed and then put us into a side street,” he said. “Get ready to bail out. Follow my lead.”

“Right,” Davis said.

The chase car drew alongside their vehicle, and the Executioner was waiting. The armed men inside the car, dressed in cheap suits like they were refugees from a business meeting, began to shift into place, going for weapons held below the level of their windows.

Bolan rolled down his own window and thrust the triangular snout of the Desert Eagle into the wind. He triggered a single shot. The .44 Magnum hollowpoint round blew apart the driver’s-side front tire.

Davis was no slouch behind the wheel. He jammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel hard to the right, ramming the nose of their vehicle into the rear flank of the chase car. The gunmen spun out, the maneuver that much more violent thanks to the wreckage of the front tire. Spikes flew in a tight arc as the rim cut through what was left of the steel-belted radial.

Davis continued his push and shot past the rear end of the chase car. He cut over again, pacing the front of the row of boarded buildings, until he found an enclosure that might have been a carport or an abandoned loading dock. Plywood splintered and flew apart as the grille of the Crown Victoria rammed past makeshift barriers.

“Out, out, out,” Bolan ordered. Davis bailed out of the car with him. Bolan pointed. “Take the back. I’ll take the front.” The other side of the narrow, crumbling city block was only a few sheets of plywood or molding drywall away; if Davis could not find an exit ready-made on the other side, he could easily make one. Bolan drew the Beretta 93-R left-handed and, with a weapon in each hand, headed for the ragged, gaping hole the car had made with its passing.

An almost eerie sense of déjà vu hit him as his enemies converged. The gunmen, looking for all the world like stereotypical mafiosi, were armed with a mismatched assortment of handguns, shotguns and automatic small arms. They were coming around both sides of the crippled chase car when one of them spotted Bolan emerging from the carport.

The soldier was a combat shooter borne of both training and long experience. He knew the mistakes men made in armed battle, and he knew how to exploit these mistakes. In a half crouch, walking smoothly and quickly with a gliding, heel-to-toe gait, he came at them, his weapons extended, his wrists canted at very slight angles to bolster the stability of each shooting wrist and maximize the visibility of his sights. The Executioner bore down on them, irresistible force and immovable object in one battle-ready vessel.